Friday, February 29, 2008

A JuVCé DooVDé player ready for HooD

This video is hilarious:



Source

Portal: I'm still alive (live)

WARNING: For those of you who don't know what Portal is (OMG!!) or haven't reached the end of the game yet, please ignore this post (spoilers).

If you continued reading the post because the warning doesn't apply to you (and you are a fan of Portal), then you know how this next video is really special.

This is the final score of the Portal game, "I'm still alive", played live by its creator , Jonathan Coulton, and a bunch of well-known Internet faces: Veronica Belmont (from Mahalo Daily), Leo Laporte and Merlin Mann (from 43Folders).

Now the twist is that this was played on Rock Band. And yes, there is cake in the end :-)

Enjoy the video:



Source: Vimeo

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

"More infinite" GMail addresses

Remember when I posted about having infinite GMail addresses? Well, now you can have even more :-)

Apparently, if you have a GMail e-mail address such as example@gmail.com, then the e-mail example@googlemail.com will also be sent to you.

This can be used to have separate e-mail addresses: for example, one for business, which you only provide to colleagues and business clients; and another one for personal use and/or registration in suspicious websites (but for this last one, maybe you should use the '+' tip I gave before).

Source: Digital Inspiration

Friday, February 22, 2008

A different kind of "Guitar" Hero

I know we're way past Christmas time, but this is to compensate those of you who didn't receive the Guitar Hero game for Christmas.



Hand Bell Hero is 4 key-based music game (like Guitar Hero) where you have to keep up with the bells and play Christmas tunes. Check it out and have fun!

How to obfuscate an "Hello World" program


#include

main(){
int x=0,y[14],*z=&y;*(z++)=0x48;*(z++)=y[x++]+0x1D;
*(z++)=y[x++]+0x07;*(z++)=y[x++]+0x00;*(z++)=y[x++]+0x03;
*(z++)=y[x++]-0x43;*(z++)=y[x++]-0x0C;*(z++)=y[x++]+0x57;
*(z++)=y[x++]-0x08;*(z++)=y[x++]+0x03;*(z++)=y[x++]-0x06;
*(z++)=y[x++]-0x08;*(z++)=y[x++]-0x43;*(z++)=y[x]-0x21;
x=*(--z);while(y[x]!=NULL)putchar(y[x++]);
}


Are you wondering about what this code outputs?
This is a simple Hello World application, coded (in the C programming Language) in a very complicated way :-)

And to imagine that there are people who do this as a hobby :-)

Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD: the was is over!

For those of you who didn't follow the news on the High-definition battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, here's an animated GIF that sums it all up (click on it):



Source

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

How to remove a bunch of people from a photo of a landmark with photoshop

One of the most annoying things when you are visiting an interesting city or country is when you are trying to take a picture of a landmark and there are always people passing by. And no matter how long you wait, it's impossible to take that one picture that will show only the landmark and no people.

Well, by using a set of different photos (to collect enough information) and this neat Photoshop trick, you'll be able to turn photos like these:



into this:


You can find some interesting and free Photoshop tutorials here.

iCrap: the worst accessories for your iPod

The iPod is in fact the gadget that revolutionized the MP3 generation. Due to that status, the iPod mania has generated a whole wave of accessories that you can use to "improve" your usage of the iPod. However, not all of those accessories ended up being good ideas:

Source: PodcastingNews

3 degrees of porn

I couldn't believe this story when I read it, but it seems that an on-campus police officer for a Florida middle school is facing a criminal investigation over his MySpace account, because a person linked to one of his friends on MySpace has a link to a porn site on his profile. In other words, it is possible for you to navigate from this police officer's MySpace profile to a porn site in just 3 clicks.

Now my question is: is everyone insane??? Why is this police officer responsible for links that other people (that are not even connected directly to him...and even if they were) put on their profile?

This kind of reminds me of the "small-word networks" phenomenon, a theory that states that in general a person is connected to any other person in the world by just six-degrees of separation.

It makes me wonder if the same phenomenom applies to the Internet. In fact, it is my conviction that everyone that has a MySpace, Hi5, Facebook or any other social network account is somehow linked to a porn site in just a few clicks.

So, in solidarity to this police officer that is being wrongfully accused of linking to a porn site, take the challenge and shout out to the world your degrees of separation to a porn site.

I did take the challenge and these are the results:

  • On this blog there are some Google ads. I clicked on the following one:
  • From that ad I went to this site, which had the following banner
  • Thinking that this banner may lead me to somewhere interesting, I go to this page where I can find images such as this one:
This is definitely some questionable content to be "linked" to my site, but it is not explicit enough to be considered porn, so I'll let it sly. But now I know that my blog has only 3-degrees of separation to some nude pictures...cool :-)

In another test, you can go from my blog to here and then to here, where you can find this video:



Or this one:



There's definitely some nude action there, but should I be blamed? I don't think so.

And what about this one that you can access from my blog, and where you can find pictures like this one, this one, this one or this one?

These are just some examples of what you can get by clicking on your mouse 3 times starting from my blog. Imagine what happens if you decide to click 4, 5, 6 or more times? And should I be responsible for what you can access starting from my blog? Nope, and neither should this guy.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Stuff's predictions for 2008

Engadget posted on the new gadget from Sony Ericsson that is supposed to run PSP games. They did this based on a scan from the Portuguese version of the Stuff magazine. What they didn't know was that this was a part of a "predictions" article for the new year from Stuff (on the January 2008 issue). Which basically means that the gadgets presented on the article are not real. Instead these are merely wild guests from Stuff's editors based on the evolution of gadget's market. They even used the expression "probability of existence" to denote the probability of these gadgets ever seeing the light of day.

So, being a Stuff subscriber, I decided to read the article again and present here some of those interesting gadgets that Stuff thinks will come up on 2008 (the given percentage is the probability of existence):

  • Asus EcoBook - a wood-based (bambu) laptop from Asus (95%)
  • iPhone 3G - the 3G version of the Apple touch phone (60%)
  • Sony Play TV - Tivo-like service for the PS3 (87%)
  • Multi-mouse Apple - mighty mouse with multi-touch technology (62%)
  • Casio Hi-Speed - a digital camera capable of capturing 60 (6 Megapixel) pictures per second (84%)
  • GPS 3D - GPS devices with 3D satellite/airplane photo maps (100% - a Portuguese company already released a product with this technology)
  • Your music follows you - a small robot that follows you around the house playing your music (which is accessed from your PC through WiFi) (89%)
  • GPS cameras - digital cameras equipped with a GPS sensor to help geo-tag your photos (66%)
  • Apple Macbook Nano - A (iPhone-like) multi-touch tablet MacBook with a Blu-Ray recorder (64%)
And for more, check out Stuff magazine :-)