I know that the ‘dedicated’ web surfers among you are already scoffing at how late I’ve found these latest viral videos, but the reason I decided to post them was because I was thinking of a comment that a comedian made about how the Internet is important: “there are people dying to see videos of Mentos mints turning Coke bottles into volcanoes.”
So these guys (EepyBird.com) took the whole Mentos in Diet Coke thing and ran with it. Very far. To the point of entertainment, 3 minutes at a time. They actually have quite a few videos of them conducting ‘experiments’ with Coke and Mentos mints. And while their source materials are free, courtesy of their manufacturers, the exposure they (both) gain is tremendous (wonder what kind of $ they make…).
So onto the important stuff, the videos! They’ve got more than this, but I liked the ones where they did a whole Bellagio water fountain thing and then a cascading dominoes show.
In case you noticed that I posted a new article over at my Yahoo Groups mailing list, and then didn’t see anything since, it’s because I’ve completely moved over to my blog at kjh.com. If you know anything about RSS, subscribe to my feed!
For those of you used to seeing e-mails, you can do 1 of 2 things: you can enter your e-mail address into the box at the top right-hand corner of my blog, and you’ll get updates whenever I post something. OR… you can do the cool, new elegant thing and use an RSS reader to subscribe to my (and other people’s) blogs. BTW, not only blogs have RSS feeds. Oh yes, I guess I should describe what RSS is. But… I won’t reinvent the wheel. Hereareafewdefinitions that you can chew on.
I’ll point out 3 Web-based RSS readers and how you can use them for free to access my feed, but there are many others. There are software-based RSS readers as well, but the cool thing about Web-based ones is that you can jump onto any computer, sign in, and there are all of your feeds.
Particularly good for drivers, Magellan is due to release a new GPS navigation device that ‘understands’ some basic voice commands like “go home”, “nearest bank”, etc. It is about time, given how long voice activated devices have been around. Granted that its ‘vocabulary’ is limited, that’s ok; it’s for a focused activity device.
The Masetro 4050 should be available in May for about $700. A little pricey, but hey, you’ll get to order your electronics around for a change.
Here’s another reason to be thankful I don’t live in a country with limited freedoms. While it’s not an outright ban, China recently moved to put discourage teenage online gamers from spending too much time online. ISPs and online Internet gaming companies need to install new software that would cut a player’s virtual points in half once they get to the 3 hour mark. After 5 hours of playing, they wouldn’t get any [points]. It’s not clear whether this is a per day/per week or other time window limitation.
Dang, how could we ever have played those all night Starcraft sessions? Granted, those were just for ladder rankings, and I wasn’t trying to build up enough loot to sell anything for real cash, but still. Isn’t game addiction among kids like anything else? Ever notice how no one talks about kids watching too much TV any more?
If you haven’t seen the IT Crowd yet, do yourself a favor and fire up a browser (preferrably Firefox) and start hitting these links. They’ve only produced 6 episodes to date, but all classic stuff. This sitcom is about a bunch of stereotypical IT geeks and their non-techie manager. Luckily, they’re producing new episodes as we speak and some opportunistic Hollywood types are seeing potential $$$ and also producing an American version hoping that it’ll catch on like The Office.
To get a taste of the show, check out this compilation of clips:
April 9, 2007 at 9:15 PM · Filed under Cool, Internet
I love Rhapsody. I don’t know why I didn’t sign up for this the second it was available. If you don’t know anything about online music services, let me give you the nutshell version of why I now can not live without Rhapsody. BTW, Rhapsody is Real Networks entry into the online music biz, following iTunes, and Napster. Full history if you’re interested.
For $10/month, I can listen to almost all of the music they’ve got, and it’s pretty extensive (over 3 million tracks) due to their contracts with all of the major record labels. I can organize these tracks however I want (playlists, etc.), and seconds after selecting a track, it starts playing and the quality is surprisingly good. Their built-in “Music Guide” lets me read up on the artists, find similar artists, play albums in their entirety, or select tracks or add them to my library. They’ve got an interesting feature that plays a ‘radio station’ of an artist’s genre of music. It’s not perfect, but it helps you to find stuff that’s similar in nature.
Of course, I could buy these tracks as well, but I haven’t dug deeply enough into their DRM rules to figure out if I would be hosed if I lost or moved my data. For an additional $5/mo, I can get the “to go” plan which lets me put the music onto my portable MP3 player. I haven’t decided to try that out yet. Word of warning on that though - it doesn’t work with iPods due to DRM issues.
All in all, if you like music only just a little bit and have a high speed Internet connection, get Rhapsody!
I was prompted finally pushed to write about this after running across a couple of articles on specific hardware that you could use as your main data storage. The question of how best to store data at home has become a growing one in the past few years as more people have broadband Net connections and have been filling their hard drives up with downloads (mainly videos and music). Having 500GB of capacity in a household is not a surprising thing any more. I’m already starting to think that the 1.5TB array that I chose in Dec for my new rig isn’t going to be enough.
Onto our products… Last year, one of my friends (who knew I was spec’ing out a new box) asked me if I knew any good external RAID enclosures, but I was lazy and didn’t go looking. Recently, Jeremy [LiveDigitally] blogged about his next choice of storage - a ReadyNas NV+ from Infrant. This is a device that you stick on your network (it’s not directly connected to a single computer), and while they have multiple models, this one holds 4 SATA drives and uses RAID to ensure data redundancy. Infrant even has something unique they call X-RAID that claims to let you dynamically add disks as you need them.
Next up is the Drobo [via Gizmodo] which is connected to a single machine via USB 2.0. Watch the demo video - it’s pretty impressive. It automatically handles data redundancy (they don’t say how), and you can hot swap in any sized disks into any of the 4 slots. Drobo also monitors your drives for issues and moves data around automatically. At $700, it’s a little more pricey than just a RAID enclosure, but could be well worth it for the convenience factor. I’ll be really interested when they produce a networked version of this box.
I know that the ‘dedicated’ web surfers among you are already scoffing at how late I’ve found these latest viral videos, but the reason I decided to post them was because I was thinking of a comment that a comedian made about how the Internet is important: “there are people dying to see videos of Mentos mints turning Coke bottles into volcanoes.”
Particularly good for drivers, Magellan is 
If you haven’t seen the IT Crowd yet, do yourself a favor and fire up a browser (preferrably 
