Month: June 2006

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Dots What I’m Talking About

Having always been a big fan of cool scientific and mathematical things that make you go, “Whoa”, I have been enjoying Getting a feel for big numbers.

Start by taking a look at what 10,000 dots looks like.

Next, take a gander at what it looks like when you have one dot for every second of the day.

Feeling overwhelmed? Wait until you see what one million dots looks like. That puts in perspective exactly how big one million really is.

So what about a billion? Billions and Billions puts this impressive number in perspective:

“To visit every web page on the internet would require a page a second for thirty two years with no time to eat or sleep(1).”

“A billion dollar bills laid end to end would circle the globe at the equator four times.”

“A trillion dollar bills laid end to end would stretch from the Earth to the Sun.”

Wow.

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Fun With Google

Google never ceases to amaze me. I am now a GCal addict, having organized my life for the next 55 years, WITH text messages being sent to my phone to remind me of upcoming events. I have been smitten with Google Adsense, I am a big fan of GMail, and I cannot get enough of Google Earth.

So maybe Google really is trying to take over the universe, but doggone it, I am OK with that as long as they keep the steady supply of geek toys flowing. And if they offer me a job some day.

While revelling in my little Google stupor, I discovered a cool, free PDF called 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, which to my amazement, introduced me to 55 entirely new reasons why Google rules. If you care anything about the next hour of your life, you will read this PDF.

The book is offered by 55fun.com and can be purchased in print from their site.

And for those of you who still can’t find something on Google, come tell me about it.

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Two New Sites Launch

I have finally put the finishing touches on Dumpworthy.com. If you want to help me write magazine reviews, contact me now and I will set you up a login. I can offer no money right now for your help, but if it works out, we may start getting offers for free magazines.

Additionally, I have been working on another site in my free time for a while, and I am pleased to announce The Best of YouTube, a site where I will be selecting and reviewing some of the better videos available from YouTube. After trying to dig my way through tons of uninteresting video clips, I decided it might be useful to have a site where the cruft is filtered out for you, and you get only the good stuff.

If you’d like to help me write for either of these sites, give me a holler. It’s easy and it makes you look cool.

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The Death Star

“It would take 10^21 United States-worth of generators–as in a billion trillion Americas–to generate the same amount of energy that the Death Star superlaser released in one second.”

That’s insane. Some guy decided to figure out how much energy it would take to blow up a planet in a similar fashion to how the Death Star blew up Alderan in Star Wars Episode IV. As it turns out, it would be much easier to liquify an entire planet than to disinegrate it. Read the whole article

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Gnarls Barkley

I don’t know if it’s because I don’t have MTV, or I don’t have my ear to the streets of current top-40 music, but for some reason I have never heard of Gnarls Barkley. But now that I have witnessed the following video, I have gained a deep respect for him/her/it/them. Check it out:

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Powers of 10

I remember seeing this movie first in a middle school science class. I saw it again in my Math for Liberal Arts course when attending Warren Wilson College. I’m glad to see it has surfaced on the internet, and is free to view.

The film is a 10 minute journey that boggles the mind. I’d love for someone to make an updated version that reflects discoveries made since the original was made. Still, this is totally worth your next 10 minutes of life.

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I want a ____ to ____

Need some free software to get something done? Check out I want a freeware utility to… where the list of over 400 applications keeps growing. Many of these I use often.

Now you can double your pleasure with “I want a Firefox extension to…”. A great way to learn why the world’s best web browser keeps getting better.

With many of the applications and extensions on those two sites you can then carry your life on a thumb drive or ipod, which is always cool.

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Links For You

An update for Firefox was released today, bringing it to version 1.5.0.4. I suggest you go get it if you don’t use Firefox, or use the auto-update feature (Help > Check For Updates) in Firefox if you do.

Harvest is a really frigging cool web-based time tracking application. I have been toying with the free demo account and am going to set up a full account when I am done writing this. If you do any sort of freelancing you should check it out.

Today I launched a site I have been working on for a publisher called Enlightened Ink. Glad to see it get out of the starting gate.

After seeing my golf balls slice off to the right every time I hit them last week, I started wondering about The Perfect Swing: Reality or Myth?. Check out all the links to tips at the bottom of the page.

Former AFCCC co-worker Jason seems to have latched onto the wonderful world of blogging quite nicely, putting together a great site for his family.

For you web developers, Vitamin seems to be coming along quite nicely, with great articles from some of the web’s leading minds. And it looks cool too.

Dell has started shipping their higher resolution laptops using a default 120dpi setting for the display. While this helps the readability of text on these systems, it makes an awful bug in Internet Explorer 6 rear its head. What happens is that IE tries to upscale gif images in addition to fonts, thus rendering them very pixellated and jagged. This frustrated me for about a week recently, until I learned the reasoning. If you want to remain at 120dpi but not have the problem, there is a registry hack you can use.

Man, oh man, I want one of these USB turntables so I can finally convert my record collection to digital format. Actually, just to be able to hear some of my old records on a nice system would be great in and of itself.

Adios.

clicky