Friday: January 29, 2010
- PETA calls for replacement of Punxsutawney Phil in favor of animatronic version.
According to legend, if Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow, six more weeks of winter weather will follow. If he doesn't, expect an early spring. But PETA has had enough of the tradition that dates back to 1886, and believes robotic technology could be the solution.
Tuesday: March 9, 2010
- Your rechargeable batteries may come with a free Trojan horse virus.
The battery maker said it does not know how the Trojan got into the software. 'Energizer has discontinued sale of this product and has removed the site to download the software,' the statement said.
Friday: March 5, 2010
- Turns out that Microsoft has a secret phone waiting for use with Verizon's network.
The phone is dubbed as 'Project Pink' (but may just end up being called 'Pink') and runs the brand new Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system. Verizon is most likely the exclusive carrier.
- YouTube now has captioning for millions of videos thanks to new technology.
So how did they do it? Each video now uses speech recognition technology to pick up potential spoken words from the audio track. It not may be a perfect solution but it's a great start. The technology only works on videos that contain English audio at present time.
Thursday: March 4, 2010
- Daily Grind: Crazed
Name: Vin (aka robot on the rampage)
Occupation: Webmaster / Procrastinator / Dad
How Vin feels today: Crazed @ 2:57:12 PM
What Vin really wants today: To note disappointment in lame attempt to get back on track with consistent daily grind posts. No sleep and no sleep makes Vincent something something.Music Stuck in Head: Cheap Utah Blues / God Street Wine
This absolutely made my day yesterday. I discovered a page on archive.org that had rare and unreleased tracks from one my favorite (and for the most part generally unknown) bands. Here is a link to said tracks for those who care.Stuff to do today:
- Research more methods on how to obtain sleep whilst parenting a child that does not like to sleep
- Commit to aggresive napping during strategic parts of the day
- Strategy is dumb and may lead to eventual work dismissal
- Continue researching new methods of data capture via strategically placed web tracking bus
- Translation: reverse engineer Google Analytics code snippet for fun
- More sleep is required to pull this one off
- Animal cyborgs created through the cybergenic eye of Photoshop.
Whoever created the attached thumbnail should call up Cartoon Network and see if they need a new logo for one of their shows that involves stop-animation and action figures. Ten points and a cookie to anyone who can guess which show I am obviously referring to here.
Monday: March 1, 2010
- Facebook's recently awarded news-feed patent could spell trouble for other social sites.
Twitter is effectively one giant news feed, to the extent that it clearly has influenced some of the changes that Facebook made to its own feed technology. That reaction could be alarmist. And yet prominent figures elsewhere in the social-media world don't seem thrilled.
Thursday: February 25, 2010
- Forbes covers fifteen kooky inventions you may not have previously known about.
Yes, someone actually holds a patent for a device that allows the user of said to device to swiftly kick themselves in the buttocks. This would undoubtedly make for a lovely addition to any home or office (most likely the latter).
- Behold the world's greenest skyscraper recently constructed over in China.
These types of buildings even have their very own acronym, ZEB, which stands for zero-energy building. This particular building is 58% more energy efficient than your run-of-the-mill conventional skyscraper.
Wednesday: February 24, 2010
- What do you want written on your wireless tombstone? PLACE DEVICE HERE.
Objecs announced today that it has developed 'enhanced memorial products' that add Near Field Communications tags to cemetery markers, which allow text and photos to be 'embedded' in a headstone and retrieved whenever a cell phone is touched against its surface.
Friday: February 19, 2010
- Turns out that Steve Jobs is not a big fan of Flash. Who knew?
...a source of 'security holes.' He also referred to Flash as dying technology, likening not supporting Flash on the iPad to Apple dropping support for floppy drives, ditching legacy data ports, and replacing CCFL backlighting with LEDs.
