Archive for Strange
Man tattoos Blue Screen of Death onto arm
July 28th, 2007 • Life, Strange, Technology
Wait until you see the OSX kernel panic his arse…
Broadband for $3300 a month
July 28th, 2007 • Business, Strange
Wonderful (or not so wonderful) report on the cost of internet connectivity in Kazkhstan. Oh, and the 1.5Mb pipe comes without the required modem…
Hook up through state-owned Kazakhtelecom, a company not concerned with competitive pricing for its services. An unlimited dial-up plan costs about €82 ($111) in a country where the average monthly wage is €292 ($399). As for DSL, an unlimited 1.5Mbps connection costs €2,458 ($3,355) a month
The Internet in Kazakhstan: welcome to the land of $3,355 per month DSL
Stay digital, even after death
July 26th, 2007 • Life, Strange
YouDeparted.com - Welcome! Prepare for the unexpected
What a great idea. YouDeparted offers 5GB of space for you to leave your digital legacy - kick your clogs, and family and friends can log on to see your hand-picked collection of photos, videos etc.
It could be morbid, but isn’t. My history is now in measured in gigs and pixels. My iPhoto library is a pretty accurate record of my life - same with the family videos. Given my family history, it’s unlikely my grandchildren will see me in the flesh, so how will they remember me, especially when hard copy is becoming rarer?
Stop typing searches - start singing
July 25th, 2007 • Search, Strange
‘Flickin’ through a little book of sex tips…’. Screen refreshes, and there are the Arctics, awaiting the next instruction - ‘download’. Yep, you’ll soon hum a little toon to your PC, and it will find the track. This will of course work for most of the human race, but I won’t hold my breath.
Australian computer scientist Dr Sandra Uitdenbogerd from RMIT University says retrieving music by singing will be possible with one of the next generation of search programs. Uitdenbogerd, who outlined developments at a recent Human Communication Science Network forum at Macquarie University, says although there are many issues still to resolve, the field is gaining momentum.
“I think because there is a lot of interest out there and there are some commercial companies trying to solve the problem,” she says.”In the next three or four years it should be on the computer of everyone who is a music fanatic.”
News in Science - Sing to computer to download song - 25/07/2007
The world’s worst website?
July 24th, 2007 • Best sites, Strange
My thanks to Web Pages That Suck for a delightful 20 mins. They’ve just announced The Worst Web Sites of 2007 (sic), and while all of them are high in odour, you can’t help but enjoy the irony of UsabilityNet.
Had a look? Great, isn’t it. Now go back and do some reading. You’ll see that it’s supported by the EU, and they - from what I can see - give grants (using their money of course, not ours).
Now, I’m following their guidelines - ensure that your navigation is almost illegible, and use buttons with minute fonts against dark grey backgrounds. Are you writing all of this down? Now go for a home page structure that has no discernible hierarchy. Now add some hardcore web-speak, just in case the poor novice reading your usability site risks understanding more than two words of it. Wonderful.
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