Entries Tagged 'Techy' ↓

Just made a page to record my fav Firefox Hacks. Will be useful for times like this week when my Firefox profile just decided to uninstall itself and all my lovingly cultured extensions and hacks. Grrrr!!!

This proud fellow is called Mr Lee and he is sporting a very nifty device. If you ever wanted to know what your cat gets up to, wonder no more! For just US$45 and quite a few weeks of waiting, you can have your own very cool catcam that attaches to your cat’s collar and takes random photos like this one:

But there is a safety note to consider:

Please consider that a collar on a neck of a cat is a potential safety risk. Because a cat wanders and crawls more or less in any place and can catch or trap itself with the collar on an object such as gate rods or tree branches. This may lead to dead of your pet. In the USA are collars common which provide a safety release if a certain amount of force is applied. Everything mounted to the collar will be lost in such a case. Please decide what is more important: The life of your pet or the device on the collar.

According to the ads at YouTube, you can now “record from your webcam directly to YouTube! No upload needed!”. Yay! That’s all we need, YouTube making it even easier for people to upload their crappy webcam videos.

This, on the other hand, is a quality video. Don’t know what reminded me of it. The title is a mashup of one of my favourite trashy films, 10 Things I Hate About You (which itself was a retelling of Kiss Me Kate/The Taming of the Shrew) and one of those family Easter Biblical Epic standbys The Ten Commandments (was I the only one who felt sorry for the Pharaoh? Oppressive dictators can have their soft side too…). Anyway, it is a hilarious “comedy 3,000 years in the making…”

One of my favourite webcomics, xkcd (see below) always has little comments attached to each comic (at the xkcd site, not on my cut and pastes), you get to see them when you mouse over the comic image, but they truncate due to some firefox irregularity. Anyway, here’s the post on fixing it, and the Long Titles Firefox extension to download.

The technology now exists for you to have your own face on characters that you play in games. I blogged about it briefly on Andrew’s blog. It’s a new frontier in technology, but also a new frontier in the effect on gamers’ psyches. It’s all a bit scary, but too cool. I hate that with technology, things you could only dream about are starting to become real possibilities and actualities which rocks but they also come with lots of new ethical dilemmas which really sucks. Ah the tradeoffs, I feel for those beetles.

If you’re looking for some good cheap hosting for your website, DreamHost is a definite recommendation. For around $10/month you can host unlimited domains and get 2TB of monthly transfer which is HUGE and it increases at 16GB/week which is much more than many hosts will give for a month. Why am I writing this? Because they also send round the loveliest monthly newsletters, I just got one today and I feel all warm and fuzzy. They’ve also got a birthday special with $99.95 off any 1-2 year prepayment (code 9999) so you can get a year’s worth of hosting for about $20 which is damn good. Only warning is that you might need a little bit of internet nouse to navigate their control panel though, it’s not that good looking and there’s not much in the way of self installers. If you need something prettier/simpler, micfo.com is also really good and is what this website currently resides in.

Screaming mobiles to deter thieves - Phones & PDAs - Gadgets - Technology

A UK firm is hoping a mobile security system it has developed which sets off a high pitch scream, permanently locks the handset and wipes all data if stolen, will halt the spiraling rise in phone theft.

I’ve wondered how long this would take. I’ve always thought that car alarms would be more effective if they were a little bit more human. They could scream or maybe actually say something, like “excuse me, I think someone is trying to steal me, if you can’t see anyone in my near proximity then please accept my apologies, but if there is, they are no doubt up to no good so could you kindly shoo them away or call the police.”

It will be interesting to see if this UK system does get picked up anywhere. There have been a few stories about how Australian mobile providers/sellers do nothing to prevent theft even though they already quite a few means at their disposal.

There’s like one for every passenger. Apparently, there’s also a mixer so you can be a DJ while you drive.
 
I just want to know what the hell is that light bulb-y looking thing next to the row of the ipod row. [Edit: I’ve since been told that it is a gear stick. Hmmm…then why does it look like a light bulb? Anyway, it’s a concept car so it doesn’t actually have to drive…]

Diana Eng*, Emily Albinski and Audrey Roy won the top Yahoo Hack Day prize with a project called Blogging In Motion which “combined a camera, a handbag, a pedometer and the Flickr API to create a device that takes a picture after every few steps and then automatically blogs those pictures.” The most amazing thing is that they haven’t got some stupid team name and they haven’t made a glamour calendar (yet). Wow, women can be involved with computers and still be relatively normal!

*I think she was a contestant on Heidi Klum’s Project Runway (a reality show where fashion designers vie for some fashion design prize, it was pretty funny).

Here is my odio.us Custom Web 2.0 Business Plan

Disruptive social-networking-aware remixable blog desktop app that leverages the long tail.

To get your own, download the app, or click on the up/down arrows until you find one that you like!