For years I’ve used Tinyurl.com to take a long ugly url and make it sendable through email. Long emails tend to get cut in two which needs a bit of cutting and pasting to restore.
Now though someone has come up with an alternative, though more I suspect because it’s search engine friendly. Just paste the link, add a title which is then transmogrified into a friendly URL. Quite neat.
For example I was at The Science Museum in London yesterday. The Google maps link to this location is http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=
science+museum&sll=54.162434,-3.647461&sspn=17.369149,28.78418&ie=UTF8&
ll=51.497262,-0.174247&spn=0.002248,0.003514&t=h&z=18&om=1
While the decenturl.com version is http://decenturl.com/maps.google/science-museum-on-google-maps
Of course if you want a bit of fun, why not try hugeurl.com!!!
Popularity: 6% [?]
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!
Popularity: 7% [?]
It’s not often that I see something completely original but this I think qualifies although the name is not strictly accurate- Glass Cisterns might be better, albeit less imaginative. Totally glass toilets- not a good idea I guess there are some things that man is not meant to see.
I could see these catching on they look great. I bet somebody would even keep goldfish in them (would need a filter to prevent “Bob” being sent on a one way journey!). And it’s a decent set of accessories as well. Only problem I can see is that unless you’re a man (and even then, not always…), most of the time you wouldn’t actually be looking at the cistern!
Popularity: 8% [?]
It’s easier usually, camouflaging people or vehicles to blend in the background. These photos though show an entire aircraft factory (Lockheed Burbank) being camouflaged by building false fields to make it look as if it was plain country.
Obviously from the ground this probably wouldn’t fool the eye but from a mile above, which is where you would expect Japanese aircraft to attack it should easily confuse them. Clever stuff. There are 9 photos in all.
Popularity: 19% [?]
Anyone into sci fi will be aware of both these series (never mind Babylon 5, Deep Space 9 and others) and it’s fun in a way to compare the two main ones to see how they vary in technologies, size, number of planets, political systems etc.
This is an almost academical in its scope but much more interesting reading than most academic papers. It makes a point of sticking to the canonical (ie most representative) sources such as the film and TV series whereas some other sites might cite fan fiction or non main stream sources. The ST v SW debate has been ongoing in one shape or another (via Usenet to start with) for over 20 years and this site is a welcome addition.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Peer to Peer (P2P) technology is what drives the internet. There are many who say that downloading is evil and theft and in some cases it is true, but not only does it have many legitimate uses (e.g. Linux Distributions- distros are often provided in this way) because by its very nature, it takes a significant load off servers, but the Jury is out as to whether it deprives producers of money (from not selling their content) or helps them sell more because it makes it easier for people to try it out.
It’s said that between 1/3rd and 2/3rds of all internet traffic is P2P, specifically BitTorrent. Some people find it a bit hard to use and to provide download information you have to create a torrent seed. There has been a bit of a campaign by organisations like the MPAA against sites which host seeds. They won’t I imagine like Tribler!
Tribler is a software package fom Harvard University’s school of Engineering and Applied Sciences that simplifies using Bittorrent and lets you find other Tribler users without having a central server. The name Tribler (according to Wikipedia) stems from the word Tribe, refering to the usage of social networks in this P2P client.
Tribler’s purpose is a step in bringing internet TV closer to being an everyday occurrence, not only making it easier to find content but also quicker to download. There are versions for Windows, Linux and Mac.
Popularity: 9% [?]
There are a number of reasons why you may need to access a website indirectly via a proxy, rather than directly and many of those reasons are legitimate not criminal- ie you may be whistle blowing and don’t want a direct trace back to you. The main way to do this is via an external proxy. You go to it, enter the web address and the address in the target’s web log is the proxy not you.
There are paid services that let you do this- anonymizer.com being the best known. There are also plenty of free services though they tend to be popular and hence slow or they are not concerned about security and pass on identifying information. This one is free, seems fast (for now!) and lets you control what is passed on.
Note: Using this does not let you access a website from work without work having a log, but it may let you access a website that is blocked from work (until they spot it and block access to the proxy).
Popularity: 6% [?]
The link takes you to a page of maps, click the World Map link on that page to see the overall map. Each map also lets you see some statistics about the highlighted sites, including numbers of reactors and types.
I don’t think its going provide much extra information to terrorists though but interesting all the same! Just in case you do anything naughty at one of the listed sites, they do keep information about which pages you visited and your IP address so expect a visit by the Feds if you’re bad!
Popularity: 8% [?]
It has never really been easy to show just how devastating a nuclear weapon is, in film. The TV series Heroes in episode three uses the approaching clouds of dust (also used in Battlestar Galactica), a popular method I think, since footage of the Twin Towers collapse on 9/11. Understandably, there are few survivors to the close up of a real nuke blast!
The Nuclear Weapon Archive is a very detailed look at Nuclear Weapons with statistics, list of arsenals, articles with photos and comment. I didn’t appreciate for instance that 130,000 weapons have been built since 1945. No technical specifications of weapon designs are found on this site. All information is from public sources, or based on reasonable inference or speculation from public information.
A google search of the site reveals 331 pages. My only complaint about the site is the poor navigation. Like many sites that are labours of love, it has evolved and is in my opinion, in need of a good redesign! But the content can not be flawed. Excellent stuff.
Popularity: 6% [?]
As a Kid I used to love electronics- I had one of those kits with loads of resistors, capacitors and transistors etc. Sometimes the things I built actually worked! (Not always though). I was an avid reader of Everyday Electronics as Electronics Today.
This site is a comprehensive e-book about circuits in 17 chapters. It starts with basic electricity plus a chapter about Ohms law. Electrical safety isn’t neglected either. Having once had a little jolt of 240 V AC, I can testify to that. After that it gets onto into much more complex stuff. It’s at the level I’d guess of first or second year university electronics degree. E.G. Do you know the difference between Kirchoff’s Current Law and Voltage Law?
There is a lot here. Don’t be fooled by the 17 chapters - that’s just Volume I- DC. There are 6 volumes and Volume VI is possibly the most interest if you can’t be bothered learning all the theory- it’s on Experiments.
There is probably several books worth of material here - highly recommended.
Popularity: 4% [?]
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.
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…
Popularity: 5% [?]
This is really clever and of course scary. For the last couple of years, mobile phone manufacturers have built in the capability of tracking mobile phones. Ostensibly it is to locate people in car accidents or who are lost, but of course it can also be used to watch the location of anyone. Now this website has licenced the technology and made it available to try. Don’t abuse it or it might be withdrawn.
The best way to test it is to put in your own number. I was gobsmacked with the amount of detail that it showed me. Scary enough…
Popularity: 4% [?]
Watching a solid chunk of metal being carved by a machine into a high precision engine block is just amazing. When you realise that the accuracy of the carving is fractions of a millimetre, the precision of the carving robot is a wonder.
This 10 minute video shows the block, from start to finished block. An incredible testimony to modern engineering.
Popularity: 14% [?]
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.
Popularity: 12% [?]