A good summary of (some of) the most important photographs of the last century.

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This tool from Google is fascinating to play with. Watch the internet explode!

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Wow, look at these beards.

[Via redit]

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I have accounts with hundreds of websites. I don’t know how many, most of them I’ve completely forgotten. A huge security problem in my life, but one which I’m too lazy to address, is that the majority of these passwords are the same. All it takes is one bad person with access to one of these site’s databases, to compromise my identity on all of them.

But there is a new solution and I think I’m going to use it. This tool uses MD5 encryption to combine your ‘master password’ with the name of the site for which you are creating a password. The result? You have a unique password for every website but you only have to remember one. There is a bookmarklet which when pressed prompts you for your master password and then automatically populates password fields using the website’s URL.

One piece of advice: decide whether you want to start now with the version above or wait until this shorter base64 version has a bookmarklet.

[Via reddit]

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Someone with a sense of humour put this car on eBay.

I can confirm that this car has not been tested on animals.

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I recently lent $25 to a shop in Honduras with Kiva. My $25 was part of $500 which the owner received. Since then she has repaid $70 and so I have $3.50 back to donate to other businesses. She has also left 2 comments about the state of the business on her journal. With luck over time I will get my whole $25 back but if not I think it is money well spent charitably.

Update:As Fiona Ramsey, Kiva’s Community Relations manager quickly pointed out, I will in fact not be able to donate my $3.50 until the entire $25 has been repaid. Its nice to see organisations monitoring blogs and correcting errors even if the errors are not to their detriment. Thanks!

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The Sheep Market shows 10,000 drawings of sheep, for each of which the artist was paid $0.02, using MTurk. There are also some interesting statistics on the site.

[Via Waxy]

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This Thursday is Towel Day. On which you can celebrate the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by carrying a towel with you all day.

Should I really carry a towel all day? It might be embarrassing!

Yes, you should really carry a towel with you all day. You might get teased or looked at weird, but then you can just hide behind your towel until the offensive people go away. (These people are mindboggingly stupid animals, they assume that if you can’t see them, they can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous)

[Via Google Blogoscoped]

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Dear NSA is a funny website featuring hypothetical emails to the NSA, omniscient from its data mining.

Q: I am Miss Clancy James, a 24yrs old girl from Moravia Liberia in West Africa, I am the only daughter of late Dr Akin James, the personal adviser to the former head of state president Charles Taylor, who is now detained under the United National War Crime Custody, his rebels men�s attacked our house one early morning killing my mother and my father, It was only me that is alive in the family now, and i managed to make my way to near by country where i am staying as a refugee now. The main reason why i am contacting you now is to seek your assistance in the area of my future investment and also to help me to transfer the money that he deposited in finance firm, over to your possession.

A: As per previous correspondence, our records indicate that funds in the amount of 2.5 million dollars (US) were successfully transferred to accounts held by Charles Taylor, and that these funds were subsequently transferred to accounts held by Dr. Akin James. I’ll run another transfer trace investigation. BTW, do you happen to speak Pashtun?

[Via /pd]

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Super Happy Dev House have had a rather cunning idea – hold a contest to find the best web money making machine – and keep most of the money it makes.

The idea is, I guess, that people will come up with ideas like the Million Dollar Homepage

But fortunately for the organisers:

Judging will be via PayPal; all transactions to be judged must go through the official PayPal IPN that we will be providing. This enables us to have a realtime scoreboard showing which team is ahead.

At the end of the competition, the first place team will get to keep all but 10% of their earnings, the second place team will get to keep all but 30% of their earnings, and the third place team will get to keep 50% of their earnings. All other earnings will be credited to DHX. After the competition, you are free to retain 100% of ongoing earnings from your project.

So if it’s a fairly close competition, the organisers will make one lot of money. I’d imagine that, by the time the month is up and people are making their own money, the hype will have died down and anyone not in the first few positions will receive very few hits.

[Via Waxy]

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I’m liking the Bon Echo Alpha. In particularly the unobtrusive spell checker and integrated auto predicting searches. There are as ever the problems with outdated extensions, etc. but there are few real compatibility problems: it’s mostly the browser protecting you.

These tools may be of assistance in that regard.

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According to this NY Times article which sights seemingly conclusive evidence.

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