A Romanian tech blog has an amazing youtube vid of people sketching objects (crazy looking art-person furniture), and having a machine create their sketches as real objects.

Who else would make elaborate weapons?

Bit Tech has a story about AA batteries that charge from a USB port. The usage cases section of the official USBCell site has them shown inside all kinds of computer peripherals. I guess they would be perfect in an environment where you’ve got USB ports aplenty.

TV In Japan has a Youtube video of the schoolgirl from Polysics’ “I My Me Mine” PV pop-locking on live TV in Japan. All I gathered from the video is that she’s called “Strong Machine 2gou”.

Here’s her dancing with her father, who I guess is called Strong Machine. ..which is awesome.

TV In Japan looks like a pretty remarkable blog, with a theme like that you’re sure to always have lots of content. Check the videos out while you still can…

A thread made on 4chan’s /b/ board in September has made it onto national American news channels and websites. The thread, screenshotted to the right, details a plan to detonate “dirty bombs” in 7 NFL stadiums around the US on Sunday, Oct. 22. It’s fairly well written, and almost looks legit, save the fact it was posted on /b/. Now is the time to panic! The hotdog and beer sales that fuel the American economy are in danger! This is where things get interesting.

One of the staples of /b/ culture is copying something somebody has done, and pasting it again and again ad nauseam. Long story short, the ‘threat’ was cross-posted to a bunch of different places. In one way or another, a repost of the threat makes it onto the desk of a law-enforcement official and shit hits the fan. Next thing you know, the story is on CBS, ABC and CNN, and the original poster, 19 year old Jake Brahm of Wisconsin, faces 5 years in prison — for a post he made in /b/. In the defense of the news networks and police, they saw a repost and without 4chan in your address bar, a post like this might start to look pretty serious.

A guy my age faces 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted, for a joke post he made on a comedy message board. Turns out maybe the internet really is serious business.

Youtube videos:
CBS – “over and over again”, the dangers of copypasta. It mentions the fact that it was a “hoax”, and shows the 4chan front page, but doesn’t make it clear that /b/ is the internet equivalent of infants screaming at each other on a jungle gym. Spawned the meme “DON’T MESS WITH FOOTBALL”

CNN – This one is hilarious. “The site that this particular message was posted on is… not one that’s been used for Jihadist threats before” This guy obviously hasn’t been to /b/ before. He does thankfully say it’s not a “credible source”. Never before have I felt so much like a news story about a hoax wants me to go crazy and panic-panic-panic.

I recently had to print out a map of Antigua to settle a bet. The PC and printer I had to work with were terrible at best, and I decided to have some mercy and print it off in greyscale. The PC had no image editing software to speak of (besides mspaint of course), so I turned to the web to do my image editing. I remembered the existence of a website called snipshot.com, which lets you do lots of common tasks like cropping, rotating, nondestructive resizing, tweaking levels etc. all in your browser with no program to download. It lets you export to a variety of formats, including the ability to import straight from any website and export straight to your flickr.

Needless to say I cropped the image and made it greyscale, and saved the poor pre-war computer a lot of trouble by doing all of the processing serverside.

Jesse Dangerously, Nova Scotia’s own nerdcore hiphop sweetheart has posted a remarkably long LJ post about Weird Al’s new single. update! That last sentence was lies!! See the comments section; I guess he was blogging to us through some kind of helpful proxy-person. For those of you situated squarely beneath a rock, the video is all over Youtube, and you have no excuse. It sounds to me like Mr. Dangerously is a bit threatened that our treasured underground phenomenon is seeping into the mainstream like when your pancake syrup gets onto your hashbrowns. As long as your ‘browns don’t get soggy, it’s kind of a neat thing. Maybe they’ll taste a bit better for us nerds? I was afraid that analogy was going to be pure garbage but it turned out kind of apt; as long as your ‘browns don’t get soggy. Meanwhile, it’s no secret that Weird Al’s appeal has spiraled downward since Off the Deep End (or thereabouts), it depends on your age. I say that because I think we all listened to his stuff as kids and loved it, and we half-expected his music to mature with us. Now we’re all a bit sad that he’s stayed the course while our tastes have changed. I thought “All About the Pentiums” and “White and Nerdy” were really clever. “The Saga Begins” was excellent too, while we’re on the topic of geeky Weird Al songs. 2003’s “Poodle Hat” was completely forgettable, but what if I was eight years old again? Would I have liked it? There’s no way to tell.

I hope this doesn’t come off looking like I’m attacking Jesse Dangerously or anything, he seems like an awesome dude and I would not hesitate to get a pizza with him. The bottom line is Weird Al hasn’t changed his formula enough to keep his original fans… but how could he? Comedy and parody songs is a tough genre to re-shape…

The SunbeltBLOG, a security- and privacy-related blog maintained by the guys who develop Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall, has posted a pair of entries that I found interesting. Apparently the creator of a Windows Live Messenger add-on called “Messenger Plus!” was recently given MVP status by Microsoft. For those of you unfamiliar with Messenger Plus, it’s a patch for Messenger that adds lots of functionality to the MS Messenger client. I haven’t used Plus or the MS client in years, but much of the functionality is standard in other messengers like AIM if I remember right. I digress, but the point is the Plus! installer had the option to also install a “sponsor” app, which was blatantly adware. Live Messenger is very popular where I live, and it seems like everyone who has it has also downloaded the Plus! add-on. I haven’t heard much about it recently, but I remember a time when EVERYONE I knew had the adware thanks to the Messenger Plus installer. Without missing a beat, Sunbelt published “Is this freshly minted Microsoft MVP actually an adware pusher?“. Their article has fun screenshots of the effects of the sponsor application, as well as a link to a VitalSecurity article in the same vein. Apparently other recipients of the MVP honor were none too thrilled that Plus’ creator, who goes by “Patchou”, has been given MVP status while pushing adware on users.
It didn’t take long before a second entry appeared at SunbeltBLOG; “Patchou no longer an MVP“. I chuckled when I read the headline. Poor guy, though. No matter how massively popular your free add-on is, you don’t see a dime unless you take some steps to turn your software development into a money-making endeavor. We all know that, but we all know as well that distributing adware is not the done thing.

An Icelandic TV network had Daft Punk on to chat about their new movie, Electroma. A bit of a disappointment to fans of the group, they didn’t appear wearing their trademark awesome robot helmets. In fact they showed up sporting black bags over their head like some kind of scary beheading thing. (They comment on why they don’t show their faces in the interview.) The short interview was thankfully conducted in English, so check it out.
[IMDb link: Electroma]

I’ve been back at school for a few weeks, moving between multiple workstations here in the lab as well as my PC at home, and I’ve been using some free applications to make the experience more efficient and comfortable.

FolderShare
Microsoft’s FolderShare is a freeware folder synchronization program that makes up a very handy part of their Live catalog (speaking of Live, FolderShare is currently in public beta). Foldershare uses compression and 128-bit encryption, and sends through a sattelite server, allowing you to synch your /Projects folder with your home PC from behind a school firewall (where a VPN would be impossible). I’m already using it with some classmates to share repositories and e-books. You can synch automatically or per-file “on demand”, and with as many computers as you want.

Clipdiary
I used a program called ClipX last year, but it had some bugs and the developer seems to have disappeared. Enter: Clipdiary, a free windows clipboard manager that stores copied text/images in a database for recall later. I guess I could describe it as a sort of global Office clipboard. If you do any kind of programming, a tool like this is VITAL. (hotkey, say ctrl+shift+v for example pops up a dialog, select the item to paste.) It can save its database across Windows sessions if you want, and hold thousands of entries. ClipX could store paths of copied files and folders, Clipdiary doesn’t have this functionality, but it’s an all-around better app.

Google Notebook / Google Calendar / Google Bookmarks
A few of Google’s more useful services I began using in the past year.

Notebook allows you to select part of a website and publish it to a Notebook (public or private). This is excellent for research, and very handy when you move between multiple computers because it’s stored on Google’s servers. I also use the notebook to remind myself of things I’d like to post in my blog. Google offers a first-party Firefox extension for quick access.

Google Calendar is incredibly well designed, and the fact that Google hosts it (rather than offering it as an offline app) makes it useful for the same reasons as Notebook. Again, you can make your calendars public as an iCal feed if you choose. Perhaps you could work on a central project due-dates authority with your peers? There are some tricks available, but I’m still waiting for better support in Rainlendar.

Google Bookmarks
A third-party firefox extension called GMarks lets you keep a second set of bookmarks. It behaves very similar to the way your local bookmarks do, and even offers import/export functions.

Writely
A browser-based collaborative word processor that lets you export your work as DOC (OOo and Word flavors), PDF, RTF or HTML. Anyone who’s used a rich-text input in a browser before knows that it’s buggy and at times, mega-hurtin’. Try to look past this and try out the Writely beta if you need an online word processor (again, I use it to make my documents available from anywhere).