My birthday present from my girlfriend – a commissioned painting by an artist we both like (http://kirstentjie.deviantart.com) painted to the inspiration of “Orbital – Halcyon On and On”
(the paint was still a bit wet when this picture was taken, it looks even better in real life :D)
People only have 140 characters to say what they want to say – someone’s day was bad, that’s probably as much as you’ll hear about it. Someone did something cool, you’ll probably hear what they did without the life-story of where they went, how they got there, who they bumped into, etc. Short and to the point.
Where else can you send a wish/request/complaint into the world and get a response back within 24 hours:
@hypn wishes there was a cheaper way to ship stuff from HongKong to ZA – already tried HongKong Post, DHL and UPS. Any other suggestions? :| 11:20 PM Apr 19th via web
@FedExEmily @hypn Good Morning. Would you like for a representative to contact you on rates from Hong Kong to ZA? about 20 hours ago via web
As it turns out I no longer need to ship stuff from Hong Kong to South Africa, but think about that for a second… a company picked up on a need I had “tweeted” – even though it didn’t mention them – and contacted me to find me a solution. That’s brilliant marketing if you ask me.
There was also an incident recently where I downloaded Nokia OVI Maps, which is meant to be “free” , which kept telling me that my license had expired. I send out a “tweet” to @Nokia complaining about this, and they got a local PR consultant to contact me to resolve the issue.
No phone calls, no being on hold, not menu prompts to try and get through to get to an operator, no have to explain your problem over and over again… you tweet, and (good) companies respond. Now if only my bank had a @Rbjacobs (from FNB) doing what he does… I’m opening an account with FNB in the next month or two. Customer service has evolved, has your business’s?
Why bother paging through your morning paper, or having to scroll through pages of ads and useless information to find the day’s news, when you could just get it through Twitter – often the news breaks there before it’s picked up by the major news sites (granted, it might be a bit inaccurate if not completely false). A lot of the bigger news sites even post the headlines on Twitter, eg: BBC’s Breaking News.
There’s also “trending topics“, a great way to find out what people are talking about around the world. When 9/11 happened a friend of mine was in an “IRC channel” (chat room) with someone in the military or something, who was relaying information to them as stuff was happening. I’d imagine if Twitter had been around then, people would’ve been “tweeting” from inside the buildings – far more information than a reporter would ever be able to get – and who knows how valuable that information could be in saving people or knowing what risks still exist.
By searching for a few keywords you can easily find like minded people, or even people stuck in a situation – for example, at the time of writing this the volcano in Iceland has tourists around the world stranded… Twitter’s advanced search page lets you limit search results to a certain distance from you, so you could (in theory) quite easily find people stranded at your nearest airport, in need of accommodation… and hopefully help them out :)
There’s a Facebook app called “Selective Tweets” which is able to read in your “tweets” on Twitter that have a keyword (default is “#fb”) and set them as your Facebook status. There is also an official (I believe) Twitter app for Facebook that “tweets” your Facebook statuses… personally I prefer to have Twitter update to Facebook. There’s also Google Buzz, which I don’t really use *cough* twitter clone *cough, that’s able to “buzz”(?) your “tweets” from Twitter – though it tends to be somewhat delayed. Just one post to update 3 “social networks” – doesn’t get much easier than that :)
You gotta love technology, especially when it goes wrong in public.
First up we have a travel advertisement board, with Avast anti virus (or is it anti spyware?) reporting a trojan. Makes you wonder who installed it (the path is in “Program Files”), or what this computer’s doing with an internet connection:
@hexxeh put together a 1gb USB flash drive image of Chrome OS. You can find out more about it here: http://carbon.hexxeh.net/chromiumos
The catch is it’s a raw disk image intended to be written to, and booted from, a flash drive… making it a little tricky to use in VirtualBox as it doesn’t support booting from USB drives. So here’s a VirtualBox disk image of hexxeh’s Chrome Os Diet… just download, unzip (well, “unrar” technically) and start it up :)
Thanks for your work hexxeh!
(The default username and password are both “facepunch” – speaking of which, check out http://www.facepunch.com which I believe hexxeh is involved with)
My download mirror: ChromeOS-Diet.tar.gz (290mb)
Download the VirtualBox image here: ChromiumOSvdi.rar (290mb – extracts to 800mb)
Hypn’s Plants VS Zombies Trainer v1.00
Features:
* start each level with 9999 sun
* get 9999 sun from each sun
* build for free (must have enough sun to build the plant though)
* instant cool-down after building a plant
* invincible plants (don’t take damage)
* all plants start cooled-down at the beginning of a level
* one shot kills zombies (cone/helmet/etc zombies take 2 shots)
* start a level even if you haven’t filled your plant slots
Hacks can be enabled/disabled individually, or all at once.
Download: Hypn’s Plants VS Zombies Trainer.zip (4kb)
Plants VS Zombies official site
I’ve been using FileZilla 2 for ages, but changed to FileZilla 3 yesterday (previously version 3 didn’t allow you to edit a file by double clicking on it ?!?!?! which it finally does). I hadn’t been using it for very long when I found some two things that REALLY annoyed me (specifically version 3.2.3.1):
I just read about a program called “CleanMem” on gHacks.net, it’s a little program (36kb) that reduces the amount of memory that running programs use. There are lots of programs out there that claim to do the same thing that work by filling your memory, forcing stuff to be moved out and into a file on your hard drive. This program’s different, because (from what I can tell) it tells Windows to reduce the amount of total memory a program’s using… so it literally changes the amount of memory a program uses, not where a program’s memory is currently stored.
I’ve tried it, and it seems to work great, so I’d definitely recomment it :) did I mention that it’s freeware? Download it here: http://www.pcwintech.com/node/145
So Google have released their own browser, called “Chrome” – am I the only one who thinks it’s logo looks like a Pokeball (from Pokemon)?
You can download it from here: http://www.google.com/chrome
I spent the morning sorting out all the stuff on my computer – I wrote close 20 DVDs, and now have 43 GB more disk space free, but what a mission.
I’m in the process of ripping all of the DVDs I own to “.avi” so I can just watch them off my hard drive, but it turns out I own 30 DVDs… I thought it was closer to 10 – who knew I was that rich. Anyway, I’m having second thoughts about ripping them because of the disk space, and time, it would take. On the other hand, it saves having to look for the DVD I want to watch (and frees up my DVD drive, if I need to use DVDs/CDs while watching).
I haven’t ripped the last few music CDs I’ve bought to MP3 either, so I spent some time doing that – I own something like 40 CDs… which is quite frightening. Once they’re ripped I normalize them – so it’s a fairly lengthy process in all. What’s ironic is that I’m going to be backing up all my MP3s to DVD (despite having the original CDs), so that I wont need to rip them all again should anything happen to my hard drive – so I guess I’m really just backing up the time it took to rip them.
I still have another 10 DVDs or so to write, possible more – not to mention the DVDs I need to write for other people. I’m considering hiring a DVD-writing-slave to do all this, and all my backing up, for me.
Stupid computers, life would be so much simpler without them. So much to listen to, so much to watch, so much to read, so much to backup.
Okay, that’s the end of my rant. At least I’m (mostly) harddrive-crash-safe, and have more disk space. The weather outside is awesome, I should’ve spent the day at the beach.
I didn’t think much of these videos by their titles, but they’re insane.
The first shows they’re able to easily cut objects out of a video – as if they were filmed on a blue/green screen – without having to cut out the object in every frame. It’s called the “Interactive Video Cutout“.
The second shows how videos can be enhanced by using photos. Basically photos are higher quality, and thus more detailed, than video footage. By combining the two, they’re able to “upgrade” the video quality. This is the really insane one, personally it seems too amazing to be true, but anyway: “Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene” (more info here).
Now if only that software was available for download… I would spend hours playing with it.
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