NORAD has rebooted their tracking systems this year again for Santa!
Don’t ask…just visit NORAD Tracks Santa
A little more from Mark….
NORAD has been tracking Santa for more than 50 years now. It all started when a department store set up a hotline for kids to call and talk to Santa. ( I forget the store, and I saw this on TV last week…..) The number of NORAD’s emergency phone was one digit off from the department store. So one one kid accidentally called NORAD, the operator played along. He “saw” Santa on the radar. And it’s continued ever since. The website is pretty good. There’s a map that updates worldwide, and last time I viewed it, last year, they bring in some “real” computer renderings of Santa captured “from Radar”, so you can even actually watch him flying for a minute or two of his route.
So you know about Dell’s wonderful XPS Line. I like em…especially since their shiny. Though, I would rather build it myself with self bought parts…sometimes, the slick design and integration is quite nice.
Dell apparently has a nice gift waiting for us. Black Ice. (no..not the paranoid firewall…)
The image they have for Black Ice makes me very very curious. For once, I really like dell’s enigmatic description of
The Cold Front is Moving In
Interesting….possibly a revolutionary cooling tech to allow super overclocking? (I perked up when i read that…i like cooling tech….hehe)
When I get info…it’ll be here. Shiny…dell….Black ice! Yay!
The Compact Muon Solenoid CMS particle detector is being constructed at CERN in Geneva. The thing is HUGE! What its going to do, is have the Large Hadron Collider accelerator hit a particle inside the CMS. It will (should) (better…) show us what the universe may have looked like instants after the big bang and allow us to track and find fun particles. Mainly, the Higgs-Boson. 
We shall see….it will be turned on around Christmas 2007. A nice present for those crazy physicists. Yay! Science Daily
So, this isn’t a definitive list, nor was it meant to do so. However, i think…bendable concrete..is fun. 
So is PRAM is very nice….i look forward to a comp with pram in it
Printed solar panels sound VERY useful
passport hacking…makes us sad.
Read the whole list from popular mechanics
and yes, i have desisted from the “this” link anchor, when I realized that the anchor word “this”…sucks. Sorry!
Yes, it has been created and released. The official line rider has 3 different lines. Blue (normal), red (accelerating) and green (scenery)
It has a pencil tool, a PEN tool! eraser, maginfying glass, checkmarks for marking (lol). Its a good update, and its running on the “official” site. Linerider
Now, lets add a bit of news. Linerider…is coming to consoles! inXile bought the rights for Linerider, and their going to bring it to the Wii and DS in Spring next year. Amazing….
Flash drives are now officially an accessory. These cases are made with platinum, white gold or stainless steel, each having a portion of it encrusted with diamonds. The company uses also Sandisk memory. Obviously the prices are rediculous, but these are interesting to look at nonetheless. They remind me very much of the diamond covered refrigerator
take a look
Yes, so Dan introduced me to Jumper, which, i gotta admit, is fun and addicting, but its FREAKING hard. For some reason, I do better on the redux campaign, which is harder, than the normal campaign. I played that for a good chunk of time today.
The rest of the time, I played Jedi Trainer and read Terry Pratchet.
Jedi trainer…is absolutely addicting. I dont know why…but it is. I mean, all you do, is wave a lightsaber and hope to kill a floating ball. But…its kind of odd. Because, sometimes, you can hit the ball, and kill it. Most of the time, you hit it, and it flies off in some direction, and starts shooting you with it. Oddly, you can hit the thing as much as you want, and it just wont die. Then…it dies. Its really random. But…see how high you can get! I got 12594 SOMEHOW. Play it here
Yes, the title of this post is Cd-eating fungus. No, you don’t need to panic, it exists under certain conditions, very very few of which are found withing the continental US.
The fungus attacks and consumes the plastic and aluminum found on and in most cd’s, although it only grows in places with high humidity and high temperature. So if you’re really worried, keep you’re cd’s in a cool dry place. Just don’t let them get damp or humid and hot for long periods of time.
Although this may seem bad at first, computer and technology waste is becoming more and more of an issue. We throw away many precious resources, and much of our tech waste is toxic. Sometime in the future, we may well WANT fugus that can eat cds and other tech waste. We’ve all ready got bacteria that eat styrofoam
( we blogged about it here http://www.flashladybug.com/wordpress/archives/363)
Here’s the link to the cd-eating fungus.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1402533.stm
Okay, FF3 is now availible in Alpha. Final release is the final release, with bugs fixed, and kinks worked out. Beta is sort of a mass test, where you see how a program reacts in the real world, on computers more vastly different than the developers could ever hope to simulate in a lab. Alpha is when a program is barely ready to be called a complete program. So, don’t get your hopes up yet, unless you’re a serious developer or web page scripter.
FF3 looks like it’s got some good changes : A possible bookmark re-vamp that got cut from FF2, a new download manager that can pause downloads and resume them across different sessions, and some better extension handling that might minimize some compatibility issues. FF3 has also passed the Acid 2 Test, a rigorous test designed to use every aspect of a browsers scripting capabilities, to see how well it reads and handles various types of scripts and graphics.
To read more about FF3 (not my extremely shortened summary)
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061212-8409.html
Yes, there are some pretty bad websites out there….but this one…definately goes to the top of the list. Best viewed in IE, it loads flash, animated gifs, bright colors, horrendous banners, java, music background, and badly chosen colors, this….is just scary. See it here (we warned you)
Atleast…the url has /old/ in it…