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NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) are developing the Hyperwall-2, a 23 by 10 foot liquid display wall, 128 screens, 128 GPUs, 1024 cores, 74 teraflop processing power, and half a petabyte of storage.
Impressing, though, to be completely honest…i don’t fully comprehend the true use of such a gigantic display…as long as the supercomputer crunches it, it should be easily seen on normal screens, its not like the zoom function doesn’t exist.
But heh, if NASA wants to make a giant screen with ridiculous backend, I won’t say no…heck, let me at it
Thanks NASA for all the fun

Kind of out of the range of this blog, but then again, nothing is out of range! *plans a post on the complex math behind string theory*
but, anyways…apparently, a lot of fans can turn both counterclockwise and clockwise. And furthermore…theres a difference between the two settings
Since its summer, Simple Dollar recommends that you use counterclockwise in the summer. The way to verify that it IS right, other than staring at the fan of course, is to stand underneath it and feel if a breeze appears immediately after you turn it on. This makes the most sense during the summer of course. In the winter however, you spin it clockwise. The angle of the fins pushes air upwards, which will allow the cold air to circulate with the warmer air up by the ceiling. Of course, weigh the cost savings of having the fan turned on vs the heating benefit.

“Google Germany spokesperson Stefan Keuchel told The Local via email on
Monday that the change from www.gmail.com is a result of a trademark
lawsuit with German businessman Daniel Giersch, who owns the German
trademark for an email service called “G-mail…und die Post geht richtig ab” for his paid email service.

According to Keuchel, Google’s action stems from a German court
decision in July 2007, which ruled that Google could no longer use
“Gmail” for its email services based on Giersch’s trademark.”

(from http://www.thelocal.de/12667/20080623/)

Okay, I’m no German speaker, but Google Translation yeilded “and the Post is right from” when I entered “und die Post geht richtig ab, ” so I’m guessing that the german mail service is basically “G-Mail - the mails always right,” or some other positive phrase about the good quality of the companies mail service. I don’t have the exact translation, but I get the point. Its still a catchy advertising slogan, no matter what language its in. I’d actually be really interested to know how long Mr. Giersch has held the German trademark for “G-Mail.” For once, I’m actally tempted to argue that he’s got it, and that Google should simply continue calling their service “Google Mail.” Much as I like a good deal of what Google does, just because their bigger doesn’t mean they automatically get international trademarks because they want them.

“Phil Bridge, 21, of Sheffield Hallam
University, said the bike was strong enough for a rider weighing up to 12
stones and would not go soft in the rain, although it has a life expectancy
of only about six months.”

One one hand, I want to really applaud this design for being very affordable, and I could easily see this as a means of transportation for people who don’t have the resources to afford standard metal bikes, but need a means of getting around other then walking. I’m thinking along the lines of One Laptop per Child, or the person-powered water pump we blogged about a few months ago. I mean, whats better then a bike thats made of cardboard, could be easily shipped and stored, or carried on a bus, boat, by hand through non-bikeable conditions? And its cardboard. Who’d really want to steal it? Its not like you could sell it for scrap.

On the other hand, I’m ready to say that this is just another embodiment of our use-for-a-while-and-throw-away society. I mean, who buys a bike they know will last them only 6 months? Granted, it IS only cardboard, so it will decompose in landfills, and the metal parts are supposed to be recyclable.

What I think would be a really interesting design would be to make metal parts as well as cardboard parts - this way, people in poor countries could buy the cardboard bike to get around, and buy the rest of the bike in metal form piece by piece - you could litterall buy it wheel by wheel, then get a real metal frame, a real seat, real handlebars, and then you’ve worked your way up to a real bike. It couldn’t be that hard to break the design down into four or five individual parts that places could stock in metal.

Read the rest of the article here
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4221806.ece

Funny…Comcast High Speed internet is slowly throttling their bandwidth, cutting off their customers slowly, have crappy customer service, and what do they do?

Lets install a super high def video demo at our HQ of 10 million pixels and let the 1 person who walks in marvel at our awesomness

But, enough with that, Comcast installed this “screen” of 10 million LEDS at their headquarters and demonstrates super HD video quality.

It includes an automated video room that handles the 27 terabytes of video that is required to fully use the thing.
Check it out at DVICE

I’m not sure if I should be saying, “great idea” or “you….are wierd” to the inventors of Blood soap dispenser.
Its a dispenser of liquid soap that looks like blood. When you try and wash it off, it looks like your desperately washing off blood
I can see how this can come in very handy during Halloween or the like, but imagine going to some public restroom and have people come in while your washing your hands….From a contributor to Makezine

FF3 has a large number of improvements to FF2, but a few of them have been auto disabled because of performance hits. Firstly is the improved color management system which, if turned on will make a performance hit of ~10%. Then again…if your on a modern computer with relatively good cpu and ram, I doubt you can see a difference. However…if you are like me and regularly open high res images that are enormous…proceed with caution.
Type about:config into the address bar.
Convince FF3 that you will be careful
type gfx.color_management.enabled into the filter field and change it to True.
Restart FF3, and you’ll get much better looking images.

Do-it-Yourself Magic Sand.
You know the magic sand that used to be on TV ads, its dry sand that you can make underwater sculptures from, and when you take it out of the water, it’s still dry!
Well…..its rather easy to make apparently.
Just take some normal sand from a beach. Clean it abit so its contaminated
Stick in oven and dry for an hour to make sure its perfectly dry.
Take Scotch Guard Spray and spray liberally, mix, spray again. Let dry, then….spray again. Once its dry again, try it out!
Thank to Bewerten at Google Video