Portent

This one is for the programmers of the world. It’s easy to understand. If you work with databases, particularly on windows then for the last ten or so years since ADO first appeared you’ll be familiar with the concept of a connection string; a way of specifying a connection along with parameters in data, ie not always hard coded.

This site provides many examples of connection strings. most but not all for databases. A nice resource.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

The image pictured is called a Filigram and was invented by programmer Simon Tatham. He was playing around with code trying to come up something vaguely fractal and came up with this.

There are several examples on the page and if you know which end of a C compiler you pour the code in, you can download the source code and try these out for yourself.
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Popularity: 14% [?]

I like this. What happens if you enter a phrase in English then have it translated into foreign languages then back to English. That what this site does, using the Babelfish translation service.

For instance the phrase “This website is called Portent and it’s about interesting, new and fun stuff on the web.” when run through this ends up with “This site of the Web is called the false prognoses and is extreme messages and of the safeguard the end to interest in the Web the substance.” which sounds about right! or what about

“Humpty Dumpty, of that one in a wall, Humpty Dumpty one was company/signature, had a great case, all the horses of the king and all the men of the king, could thus immovable not he Humpty in in course.“. You can probably figure out the original!

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Popularity: 9% [?]

Something a little different. You are shown image after image and have to rate them for life likeness, on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is most like a face like and 0 isn’t anything like a face.

I suspect this is some variation of a genetic algorithm. This is a way of trying to solve a problem that doesn’t lend itself to normal computation by using a process akin to genetic selection. Interesting.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

This is interesting. A research project to try and work out jokes that match your sense of humour. As they say “Jester uses a collaborative filtering algorithm called Eigentaste to recommend jokes to you based on your ratings of previous jokes.”

Of course I’m not sure quite how they classify humour or rate a joke for a match but the jokes provided I found above average so they must be doing something right.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

The links go to a youtube video of the fan in action. Unless it was a fridge I doubt you’d find anything er cooler! There are 42 LEDs and through careful timing, you can program all sorts of animated graphical effects. I suspect that you need to be half decent at programming it- it comes with 5MB of storage and you need a serial port. Also, it costs $389 from here.

If that is beyond your budget they also sell a cheaper ($5.00) hand held fan that can have up to 6 messages.
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Popularity: 10% [?]

Can you believe it, some computer scientists at the University of Alberta have worked out how to always win at Checkers (known in the UK as Draughts). To prove it they have created a Java applet which can play you and will always win.

Checkers has a search space of 5×10^20 (ie 5 followed by 20 0s) i.e. 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible moves. Compared to chess of course that is miniscule but it is a million times larger than Connect four.

This was a project that started in 1989 and an earlier version of the program won the World Checkers competition in 1994. Though it is a fairly trivial task- the research itself will have many uses. Other games that may get ’solved’ in the future will include Othello (also known as Reversi) and Poker.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

With the prevalence of Wifi, and cheap programmable devices, Chumby comes out very soon. It reminds me a little of a Gp2X though that was a games console and Chumby is different.

A Chumby is an always connected (if you have Wifi), battery backed but mains operated compact device (little bigger than a mug) that displays useful and entertaining information from the web: news, photos, music, celebrity gossip, weather, box scores, blogs etc.

It’s Open, running Linux and programmable. It can’t quite do video but that may happen. It has a touch screen so no keyboard needed. Feature wise it has 32 MB of RAM, 2W Speakers, a 320 x 240 Screen, 2xUSB ports, ambient light sensor, headphones socket and Wifi Connectivity. Looks interesting…

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Popularity: 5% [?]

This is quite clever. In all CPUs there are circuits for doing arithmetic. One is an adder. It er adds numbers. It works in binary (all ones and zeroes). If you add 1 to 1 you 10 (in binary- the equivalent of 2 in decimal). You can read more about adders on wikipedia.

Matthias Wandell is into making things in wood. So he has implemented an adder in wood using marbles. In fact he does a lot of stuff in wood, and his site is an excellent tribute to one of the oldest materials and its uses! Theres a video of the adder in operation on this page as well. It’s very ingenious and not a bad way to demonstrate binary addition.

If you don’t like wood he also has a Lego version and other lego machines on this page.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

Remember the portent story about a programming language for artists and designers called processing? This uses that and a 3rd party library to create a simulation of cloth physics and how it behaves when you pull it etc. It is very well done- just grab a point in the cloth, pull and release.

You can pin points by pulling a point, then hit the space bar as you release the mouse button. The pinned cloth then acts as a real cloth would if it were so pinned.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

Dual and even triple screen computers are fairly common place now and single screen wall papers just don’t cut the mustard. On Flickr.com, you can find a very nice selection of wide screen images, including the one pictured above at 5128 x 1604.

I suspect you may need to be a paid up member (I am!) to download the bigger images!

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Ever see a font you liked but had no clue as to what it was? What The Font is a free Font Matcher. Save a screen dump of the font (the bigger- the better) and upload it, or pass them a link. The words ‘A test’ are in Frutiger 65 and I uploaded this image to them. It correctly identified every letter and had five guesses, of which the first three were all Frutiger 65. Clever Stuff!

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Popularity: 16% [?]

Macromedia, now Adobe Flash is now ten years old. Almost as old as the Web itself. Flash is one of those technologies that has shaped our Web experience, from animated adverts through games and an era of skippable (and sometimes non skippable) website intros. Adobe have recognised the impact that Flash has had and is not letting it past unnoticed.

Over the next few days you can vote for what you think is the most influential Flash site from each year- this is a rolling vote with 1998’s winner chosen (Nrg’s Loops and Sound effects- shown), and it’s now on 1999 so if you’re feeling a bit retro…

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Popularity: 4% [?]

Visit any computer shop and the console games you’ll see on sale are just for the PSP and Nintendo consoles. Yet there is a stylish and powerful games console costing just £125.00 that runs Linux out of the box and has loads of free software available. You don’t need to hack it to run your own software like you do with the Sony PSP. Most manufacturers lose money on the hardware and make it with software so they don’t want you messing with it.

GP2X is at heart a games machine. It has two 200mhz CPU’s with 64meg of RAM, custom graphics hardware and decoding chips and takes SD cards.The display is 320 x 240 pixels which is slightly better than my old Commodore 64. By comparison the more expoensive PSP has a resolution of 480 x 272, and the Nintendo DS display is 256 x192. Films though can be viewed at resolutions up to 720 x 480 through the built in custom hardware and if you plug the GP2X into a TV or monitor you get a whopping 1048 x 720 display.

I’ve been burnt by buying a game console before. Remember the ill fated Gizmondo which had $100 million spent on promoting it and had very little software available. Well the GP2X has outsold it without any budget for promotion. The firm behind GP2X have already sold an earlier console the GP32 and have been around for at least five years.

The biggest difference is the sheer volume of free software available now for the GP2X and their open attitude to development. GP2X have taken the Nokia path, giving away software development kits to encouraging game development rather than the Nintendo/Sony/Gizmondo way where only ‘approved’ devleopment companies can produce games for it. Even if you don’t want to learn game programming, as a games console there are so many games available now- for instance over 1,100 alone with MAME, SNES games with a SNES emulator and ports of Doom, Quake 1 and 2, Duke3d, Neogeo, Hexen and many more.

The link takes you to a detailed review of the software available and you can see many of the games listed in a 11Mb WMV video download.

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Popularity: 4% [?]