Archive for March 2006
This timelapse video of the Airbus A380 construction is really extraordinary. You see the tail plane fit into the fuselage like a model paper plane that you put together. Very well edited and its well worth watch the whole thing.
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See Also:
This extraordinary video (skip past the text if you don’t speak Spanish) featuing a number of Boeing 777 Test Pilots landing in ridiculous looking crosswinds.
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Earlier today on digg, the following appeared: link
I must admit I just ignored it as one of the many things on Digg that are not of interest to me personally. But we have since found out, through Digg again, the real story.
The power of Digg’s self-regulating community is shown as this message has come up, I presume without any external interference but simply from users reporting it.
I think that this does illustrate the weakness of Digg though, the article linked to by the first headline was factually accurate, it was mostly just quoting the developers who did not say they wanted their game pirated, simply that they did not want to protect it with DRM. Unfortunately in the competition to be promoted to the front page, submitters tend to make their posts as sensationalist as possible and often misrepresent the items they link to.
The other thing that annoys me about digg is the rudeness of its commenters, I think that it is because people are able to express their approval of an article by (silently) digging, whereas to show their disagreement they have to make a comment (or report it). It is impressive that the correction made it to the front-page in less than an hour and a half though, and it will not stop me from visiting regularly.
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BoingBoing points to this great exchange of letters between a theist and an atheist. Very good natured and interesting arguments on both sides.
Prospect Magazine March 2006 issue 120
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Google has acquired the AJAX word processor Writely. Anybody else feeling Google is getting a bit too Microsoftish?
Via digg, via Gigaom
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Waxy points to The Aural Times, which has one of the best taglines I’ve ever seen:
We Sing the News so You Don’t Have To
It really sums up the site which simply features random musical versions of the current headlines.
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See also: The bizarre Dictionarioke
Popular songs sung by a speaking dictionary pronunciation guide
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You may not know that phpFunctions can be made to open in the Firefox sidebar like this:
To set up your computer like this, drag the following link: phpFunctions to your Bookmarks toolbar (or your main Bookmarks).
Right click on the created bookmark, click Properties and check the “open in sidebar” box:
Now you have easy on demand access to the service whenever your browser is open!
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I came across this and thought the information was rather interesting.
Up and to the Left
Indicates: Visually Constructed Images (Vc)
If you asked someone to “Imagine a purple buffalo”, this would be the direction their eyes moved in while thinking about the question as they “Visually Constructed” a purple buffalo in their mind.
From Eye Movement and Lying – How to detect lies – which features a direction for all sorts of things, smell, sound, memory…
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Relatedly I’ve heard that people look one way when doing Maths problems in their heads and the other when doing anagrams. Unfortunately I have no-one to test it on at the moment, and I’ve forgotten which is left and which is right!
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On Digg today I came across a great blog entry which lists a lot of good games now available for free. It includes pone of my favourite games of all time, the revived Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure.
There are lots of others on the page including GTA 1 and 2.
Plasma Pong
Also games related, I love Plasma Pong, a version of the classic game in which you shoot plasma to affect the ball. It is probably the most beautiful looking game I’ve ever seen, looking rather like a Really Slick Screensaver.
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Google Blogoscoped has a competition to recreate Google from memory here is my attempt (paint washed out the blue link colors a bit). Its amazing what you can and can’t remember!
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Ask got rid of the only thing that brought me to their site when they scrapped Jeeves, now they just might have won me back. Their new maps service in my opinion looks nicer than Google Maps, and is certainly better than Yahoo which only supports America. Unfortunately it is currently much slower that either of those, due I suspect to the digg effect.
But in my opinion the best thing about this new tool is that it breaks from the norm of big American Internet companies releasing things starting in the US only. Google has extended its maps to the UK now, so I am happy, but millions of other Europeans whose countries aren’t mapped are not. Ask seems to map most of Western Europe which is a major plus. Unfortunately the addresses and postcodes did not seem to work well in the UK when I tried. The AJAX interface has nice right-click support.
Western Europe:
[Via digg]
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Google Sitemaps: find more statistics about how Google searches your site
No comments · Posted by Splasho in Uncategorized
Google have updated Sitemaps in order, I imageine, to make it more attractive to webmasters. You can now, whether or not you have a sitemap, view statistics about what search terms your site is ranked highly on and what you get clicks from. All you have to do is to add an empty file with a certain name to your webserver to prove you have access. If you want you can also set up a proper XML sitemap, there is a WordPress plugin to do this which I am now using.
It also gives you statistics on PageRank, robots.txt, common terms used in links to you and common words used on your website. I strongly recommend at least viewing the statistics!
[Via Google Blogoscoped]
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