The truth behind human sized hamster balls

***CAUTION*** The downright stupidity of this post might cause you permanent mind alterations or death.

Today I tried to verify a voice that I had heard somewhere. That would be that Googling for "human sized hamster ball" does not return any result... Well, in case you had heard the same voice yourself but a shadow of pride prevented you from looking for yourselves, i looked for you (don't worry for me, I have lost the last bits of reputation long ago).

For a start, as it was easy to predict, it is false that no result appears, results abund. What is true instead is that no result (in the first pages at least) is useful for anything more than acuing that shameful sense of desire for one of these marvels of plastic elegance.
You cannot have the simplest solution of all, that would be just a plexiglass sphere (perhaps with some hole for entering and ventilation), this seems absent altogether. On the contrary ther are a couple of inflatable options... read "quick to go flat, wrap around you and suffocate you", which would be nothing but the deserved ending for having even tought of using one. Sounds fair and perhaps cheap but no thanks. There is also a super hi tech human sized trackball mouse that could turn up as the funkyest way to frag after those spooky mind-reading controllers, but even if it really was for sale it is not what we are looking for right now (but let's keep the link warm for a later time).

Anyway, for the brave among you, here is the link of a company who makes such devices of doom... unfortunately I could not find any pricing on their products, and this could mean that the things are not only ridiculous and potentially murderous, but also blooddraining expensive... Too bad, I still want one, possibly a plexiglass one, but I fear that the only way to have it remains the good old acquire-on-sight ;)

The big brother... in pills.

Some time ago the world was amazed and a little unsettled by the calims of some government (any one said US? Because I didn't, no sir) to be able to intercept, record and analize for threats all the communications in the world... the Echelon hype however did eventually fade, partly because perhaps it was never as powerful as it was depicted, and partly because the public opinion can get accustomed to far worse atrocities after the press has hammered their hears beyoind a certain threshold.

There is however another form of monitoring and censorship, one carried out by private companies, little bits of limited abuse at the service of this or that marketing campaign. That is seemingly less concerning but if we look better it just lacks even the weak excuse of the sovereignity of the State who tries, at least in rethorics, to defend his citizens (the wrong way, but still perhaps with good will...).

I do not want to be mistaken for one of those who always hammer on the same nail but let me just cite some random episode.

- Recently Microsoft has declared that their old music selling portal will be closed in favor of a new one. The problem is that all the musig bought trough the old site is infested with a nasty DRM, every time you (the owner of the music you paid for) want to copy or move it to another device, you have to register a code on the Microsoft website... no more website no more copies, so the music (that you own and that you paid for) will live only as long as you keep the hardware or as long as it survives... it's strange because I'd bet that the money you paid Microsoft at the time will still be valid by then.

- Only some month ago I've read several blog posts pointing out how the Xbox Live platform did not allow the users to have nicknames referring to the Free Software community... Exactly, you could not frag at Halo with a nickname like "LiNuXrUlEz", any reference to the competition was filtered as "inappropriate content" like racial offenses and child porn! Does Xbox Live filter racism and child porn? If some user is on the listen, could you please check and let me know?

-It is of these days the news that Windows Messenger does not allow to talk of YouTube, probably because they would prefer the users to talk about the newborn MessengerTV.

These three examples are from Microsoft because, in the WWII Navy slang, it is the most juicy among LSTs (Large Slow Targets), but we could apply the same criteria to most present day corporations to discover the same flaws. Be it Yahoo! indexing Google as a malware site, Apple intentionally bricking your iPhone which you have paid and thus you should be entitled to do whatever in the hell you please with it...
Let me spend a couple more words on this one: by definition property is ius tum utendi TUM ABUTENDI, quatenus iure civili permittitur, quite literally you can use and abuse of something you own. The police can say you exaggerated, not a corporation, not even the seller and not even if you subscribed an agreement when you bought the product. In fact In theory a contract can be subscribed by anyone but to impose the enforcement of it must remain a privilege of the authorities: would you find normal that if you buy a fridge or a dishwasher and tamper with it, the guy at the mall breaks into your house at night and takes it away? I bet not. Unfortunately examples of this kind are instead just ordinary in consumer electronics.

All these events have in common the leverage on technical and legal possibilities to limit the freedom of choice and influence people seen as nothing but a mass of consumers, thus highly prized in economical terms but spoiled of any further value. It is in fact perfectly legal to sell a communication service and then limiting what can be said trough it, but there is (should be) a difference between what the law doesen't (perhaps cannot and should not) detail and what is right doing.

In this 2.0 society entangled among the caveats of politically correct, legal property issues and mere speculation, we are letting ourselves be subdued in small steps, convinced that some compromises are perfectly acceptable. Who cares if the chat program decides what I can or cannot say to my friends? Who cares if I cannot use my new toy as I please after I have paid half a grand for it? It is so shiny... sooooooo shiny... After all the corporations need those restrictions, they do it for our own good, to give us toys always more shining, because they love us and they want to play with us, forever... and ever... and ever... and ever...

Photoshop 2.0? Not yet, but damn close!

I know, I know... the current photoshop version is 10.something or so, i was referring to the web 2.0 remote computing style applied to photo editing. This is a solution that never convinced me too much but this morning I eventually stumbled on something interesting.

It is a web service called Splashup. Basically it is a web based photo editing application accessible trough a browser, much like Photoshop Express but with an interface more reminiscent of the classical desktop based Photoshop look.


The program allows to upload a photo from the computer, import it from a photo sharing service such as PicasaWeb or Flickr, or from just any web source trough an ordinary link. Once you have it there you can edit it applying a fairly standard set of tools (selections, crop, brushes and such), and effects (from the basic hue/saturation and brightness/contrast to some more advanced blur and glow).
What in my opinion puts Splashup head and shoulders above Photoshop Express is that, as opposed to a more amateurish "Picasa style" from Adobe, Splashup handles multiple pictures at once (thus copy-pasting from one to another and such), it has layers (yep, layers!) and allows different modes for them (such as multiply, screen, overlay and such).


The only thing really missing is a levels/curves panel, and I realize that some quick fix offered by Photoshop Express such as red-eye removal might be handy if you do not know how or do not want to do it yourself, but yet these are not big showstoppers for me.

One more thing, on my office computer (a crappy productivity oriented windows machine who has been around for more than I am) The GIMP runs really slow, and I was very disappointed to see that even Photoshop Express frequently freezes the whole box (that's right, not just the browser). On the contrary Splashup performances are snappy even on my prehistoric box, so now I will not have to loose an entire afternoon if I Just have to crop and adjust a couple of workshop machinery shots to send a warranty claim or the likes... That's it, at home I'm sticking with The GIMP (even if I plan to give Pixel a try one of these days, I know it is not free nor open... but I'm curious none the less) because I remain of the idea that local based solutions are still better, but as far as web based solutions go, I have finally found something that does not entirely disappoints me :-P

Something useful from Microsoft?!

Ok, I should not flame... Perhaps they had a couple other useful toughts in the past as well and maybe we are just pissed off because they had tose ideas first and now they over-capitalize on them.

Anyway, one annoying thing I always found in the mouse (perhaps the only real annoyance of what i think is very close to the perfect human interface device since it was invented) is that while you are typing on the keyboard, having to move your hand and grab the mouse kinda breaks the rithm... ok, I know, I am building a case out of nothing but I am one of those who type looking at the keyboard rather than the screen so, I have to move the hand, look for the mouse, rise the eyes from the keyboard, look for the pointer... it's a lot of little steps so any solution which removes one is more than welcome.



Uncle Bill just adressed step one and two: "moving your hand away" and "looking for the mouse". The idea illustrated below basically involves a "mouse" which is always strapped to the hand and does not interfere with regular typing, but when the fist is closed some accelerometers are engaged actually turning on the pointing device.

It sounds nice, the only thing that does not convince me is the position of the "left and right mouse buttons" which are the 114and 116 in the diagram and although they are meant to be engaged by the thumb are very close and very ill placed, just try to touch your index finger knuckle with your tumb to get an idea, and then think of doing it n times per day with enough precision to hit two different buttons (or three buttons, i do not understand what 120 is, the scroll perhaps?).

Anyway, I do believe that accelerometers will soon or later show up in day to day pointing devices and it will be for good, but I do not believe that the good old mouse will be sent to retirement too soon.

Under forced vacuum

"Men are so simple and so obedient to the needs of the present, that the one who preys them will always find those who let themselves be fooled".
Nanni Moretti, Il caimano Nicolò Machiavelli, The Prince

This post is a little off topic, as it is meant for those of my readers that are going to share with me the long winter which is already knocking at the door of my country. I would call it an inside joke... but unfortunately it is no joke at all. I will write in English none the less, but the topic is a very italian one. As it became suddenly clear yesterday evening my people eventually again got the government they deserve. The "ox people" (sorry, I don't know of a proper translation for "popolo bue") decided that in charge of the economy shall be a thief, in charge of the law shall be a criminal, in charge of the honour shall be a clown... and since we are (were?) a democracy, the will of the people is holy, so be it.

Personally the perspective of having comedy and drama all in one TV program (we used to call them News, back when we were free) is a very little consolation in front of all the grim and creepy anticipation on the economy, the foreign relations, the social justice and whatever else you can think of a country that could fuck up. And it will, I know because we have seen it all already, then the people will return crying to politicians more wise and guess what? They won't like the cure, so they will revert to the crappy governors once more... morons, morons ho deserve to chose their leaders but morons none the less.
So I am packing, well not literally, not yet, but mentally I prepare my nuke-bunker where I will try to survive this political holocaust. There is a tune that came to my mind this evening while I was in the shower. You can enjoy the original here while below I try to translate it in a way that saves both metrics and message.

Under forced vacuum I will envelope this moment when I'm feeling...light-headed
Leaving solid nerves and a smile without my teeth for when it matters... for real.
Sure that I can use it in the future I adorn it with the best of.. my patience
I wanna put away another pair and to be certain not to run ever... without them.

We will need we will really need them all, when the god of all the fools
will want to force on me his worship and his rules.
We will need we will really need them all, when I'll have in front of me
just one cry and just one banner, one belief and just one king.

I have to remember just a pinch of salty wisdom and a gesture... of joy,
close with care the bags and put a mark on when I feel more... alive.
Not just for the pleasure of collecting like some photos every moment... I'm happy,
day will come the day when I will feel washed away without my breath nor... my voice.

We will need we will really need them all, when the god of all the fools
will want to force on me his worship and his rules.
We will need we will really need them all, when the enemy will have in his shotgun just one more round and in his aim...
What a surprise! Facing the hatred, to find some laughter, to feel so happy
What a surprise! Facing the hatred, to find me naked, so happy and playful

I really wanna keep with me the moment when the breathing of the things from crowd and chaos resurfaces to life,
not for pleasure of collecting moments but for when I'll have to throw it up without a hold

We will need we will really need them all, when the god of all the fools
will want to force on me his worship and his rules.
We will need we will really need them all, when the enemy will have in his shotgun just one more round and in his aim...
What a surprise! Facing the hatred, to find some laughter, to feel so happy
What a surprise! Facing the hatred, to find me naked, so happy and playful
We will need we will really need them all, when the god of all the fools
will want to force on me his worship and his rules.
We will need we will really need them all, when the enemy will have in his shotgun just one more round and in his aim no one but me.
...in his aim no one but me.
...in his aim no one but me.
...in his aim no one but me.
...in his aim no one but me :(

Porto Flamingo, Sotto Vuoto Spinto

Ok, now I have to get some sleep before tomorrow because among other things I have fucked up pretty bad as a scrutiny officer as well so tomorrow morning I'll have to enjoy a little trip to the electoral district some 100 Km away to give some explanations (I did nothing anti-democratic, just inverted the worthless contents of two worthless envelopes... bureaucracy but yet...).

'Night folks, and remember:

Virtue against furor
will take arms; and short fight it will make,
since the ancient valour
in the italic hearts yet is not dead.

Machiavelli, again.

Scientology Dead Sea Scrolls Unveiled

Forenote: I am deeply convinced that Scientology is evil, this point will not be elaborated because it is not functional to the topic of this post, nor can be discussed under point four of the home rules (see the the side column). Details on my personal point of view are however available upon request.

Ever heard of Wikileaks? It is a very original website tailored for anyone who has some "hot stuff" to show the world but fears the repression of his state, the mafia... or the Church of Scientology as it is the case (I'd no doubt prefer the mafia). Wikileaks offers to the deep throats all over the world two fundamental services yet very difficult to conciliate: anonimity and visibility.

Today I read trough the blogsphere that an anonimous contributor (obviously ^_^') published nothing less than the Collected Operating Tethans of the Church of Scientology, the secret bible written by the founder Ron Hubbard himself the sci-fi writer, who invented the biggest mind-wiping money siphon religious corporation ever. This document shall not, in the policies of the church, be released for any reason, beacuse if made public anyone could see how dork they are access some gnostic knowledge which is better kept among the cultists hierarchy.

I am not sure but perhaps the unhearting of the sacred tome could even endanger some criminal plan enlightenment effort of theirs. After all if I had unraveled some deep mystery of the Cosmos, the very meaning of existence perhaps, why would I keep it away from mankind, why would I not spread it properly... oh yes, I forgot the starting assumption that tey are evil, so enlightenment for members only and of course you pay for the privilege.

Scientology already proceeded to sue Wikileaks (aka "yes,it's the true thing" and "yes, we feel uncomfortable seeing it around"). Wikileaks in turn already proceeded to tell them (politely) where they can settle their lawsuit. Unfortunately the Scientologists have both nightmare lawyers from hell and very little sense of humor so the outcome of a lawsuit is uncertain and I would not be surprised if the document would end up removed from the website.
Right now anyway, there is one thing we all can do in order to twart anything the lawyers from hell could achieve: the forbidden tome is now out, so please, visit Wikileaks and download it, then share it as you please (edonkey, torrent, limewire, Direct Connect, anything will do). Tey cannot track down and create problems to individual users. The goal is to assure that what was made of public domain remains of public domain, it is a matter of freedom. I don't want to live in a world were a few individuals of dubious morality can decide what I am or I am not entitled to know.

Today is a bunch of moronic religious fiction, tomorrow it could be something I do care about.

Edit. I have glimpsed trough the document in my lunch break and, aside from a couple of really creepy things, I have noticed a little poem in the incipit which is worth mentioning:

I will not always be here on guard.
The stars twinkle in the Milky Way
And the wind sighs for songs
Across the empty fields of a planet
A Galaxy away.

You won’t always be here.
But before you go,
Whisper this to your sons
And their sons —
“The work was free.
Keep it so.”

It is from Mr. Hubbard himself (like the rest as it seems). Taken out of their context these are really nice words. I've always tought that if one could ignore all the religious poppycocks, Hubbard would be a sci-fi writer worth reading.

Edit2: cool, adsense suggest a Scientology ad at the end of the post... cool, it says "think with your head, get the facts", well I guess downloading their hidden tome from Wikileaks IS thinking with our heads and getting the facts, so they practically support my campaign, now THAT's cool! Anyway I don't recall asking for an ad in that position (but I might have tampered without noticing), and I have already provided to inform the adsense bot that Scientology shall be filtered, I hope it works and they don't kick me for clicking of one of my ads ;)

OOXML ISO standard... No, it's april 3rd

Of all the sadistic April fools I have read this one is the one I really hoped to be a prank (on the contrary I was really looking forward to the Virgin-Google Joint venture for Mars colonization).

Instead it was not an innocent prank (I still hope that everything I read around is just a colossal April 1st leftover but I have a terrible feeling about this), OOXML is now an acknowledged ISO standard.


I don't want to delve in the tortuous technical arguments that have already been pointed out to demonstrate how this is a very bad news for the users but there is a single piece of reasoning that I'd like to share with my 3 readers (2 of them are actually indexing bots but I love them nonetheless).

What, in the name of everything is good and transparent, leads a major company (thus we will assume that they are not entirely stupid) to fight to the point of telling lies and bribing judges, to impose another standard format when there is already a fully functional, open and widely used one?



Let me make an example with something different: it is like if I invented another format for, say, television images. Now we have PAL and SECAM, both perfectly working, and widely used (honestly I don't know if HDTV is a different standard or just a different use of the old ones, but it does not matter for the example). One day my quasi-monopolistic TV making company decides that in order to consolidate my endangered monopoly offer a better service I want another standard that is open enough for people to use it but closed enough for me to be the only one to truly capitalize on its potential. What happens? Nobody will accept my "standard"... unless I make it worth their while wink wink. OK, now that the pesky bureaucrats are settled here is what the TV market will look like:

-thanks to my mastery of the new "standard" I can have good performance with it (or at least enough to offer to the marketing guys some leverage)

- thanks to my gargantuan and overfed marketing department The new "standard" sells well and all the more or less independent 3^rd party makers have to support it if they want to sell their products (alas, would you REALLY buy a TV that does not even support $new_useless_standard?! How do you think you can impress your friends if it doesn't???)

- for some mysterious reason my TVs have better images, not that my competitors do not work, they are just fine but you know... there's something, a shining my TVs have, but this is certainly due to some insider knowledge I have not disclosed about how to use my standard my superior and perfectly clean expertise at making better TVs.

This is what is happening with document standards, I know I am not the first to say this but we have a standard, the ODF, which is just fine, it does its job and it does it well. Microsoft could have embraced the open standard and spared a lot of money (we are talking of the yearly income of some African nation and perhaps also some Asian one here) to offer the users a perfectly compatible and powerful tool, instead they preferred to spend their cash for developing an alternate one, marketing it as a free and useful one, bribing the ISO board to approve it... and they have not finished yet because now that it is ready it still has to be implemented. Who do you think will pay for this? The fairy fucking godmother? Us.

Ultimately I can se no "clean" reason for them not to just open to ODF or better stick to their proprietary de facto standard... Instead they chose the expensive and cloudy way, I cannot help but thinking that they have some evil intent up their sleeve, call me negative.

There is even darker news... although with the wisdom of the grave it was not difficult to foresee: OOXML is not compatible with the General Public License. If a bell is not ringing in your head yet, this means that no free software can use it without having licensing problems. What? I thought it was an OPEN standard... like in Office OPEN XML, this means that no free software can use it and that those who decide to support OOXML will be under the constant risk of a lawsuit from Microsoft unbeatable_lawyers_from_hell shoud they decide that your project poses too much of a threat to their monopoly (but it will not because their mastery of the "standard" will always be unsurpassed due to insider knowledge).

The European Union has opened an investigation on the matter but I really doubt it will lead somewhere... for now the best I can do is to stay the hell away from Office and OOXML (which is kinda difficult as I work in a windows environment, but go tell my boss...).

Spread the word guys, because OpenOffice.org is there and it scares The Beast to the point of causing this shit, perhaps we should use it more just to prove that they are soooo right to be scared ;)

The enemy gets PWND

Sorry for the poor headline... actually I was reluctant to post about this story because of some sense of dignity preventing me from dancing on the ashes of the enemy... but in the end the joy was too much to contain. Wandering what the Hell I'm babblig about? but of the outcome of the Pwn2Own contest! What else?

A few notes for those who are not familiar with the contest, it is pretty straightforward actually.
There are 3 shiny laptops with default software and latest patches available: one with Mac OS (a MacBook Air, no less), one with Windows Vista and one with Ubuntu Linux.
The contenders have four days to try their best to hack the laptops, take control of them, and violate the file containing the instructions to claim the price... obviously the hackers have no phisical access to the machine except some very basic instructions they can give to a dummy user such as "visit this site" or "open this mail".
The first one who manages to find a vulnerability and put it to good use wins the glory, the laptop, 10k $ and an NDA to sign.


Everything is done in the name of better security (the vulnerabilities discovered are patched before they can used by crackers in the real world), and it goes without saying that this is at the same time a contest for the hackers (who enters first) and for the operating systems (who stands longer), and here we get to the reason of my joy. This is the outcome of the 2008 edition:

OS X, pwnd on day 2 trough a bug in the Safari web browser
Windows Vista, pwnd on day 4 thanks to a vulnerability in Adobe Flash player
Ubuntu Linux standing still, nobody managed to hack it

This is not only a proof of how Linux is secure, it really overthrows some common opinions about operating systems security in general. I used to be the first one thinking Macs to be more secure than Windows pcs.
Even more, some utter moron still goes around saying that just because a software is free (as in speech AND as in beer) it cannot be safer than a closed one... WRONG! Actually in this contest the closest of all was the first to fail, Windows itself was violated due to a hole in a third party software rather than a Microsoft component, while the little underdeveloped african child (that wouls be Ubuntu) stood still.

Bottom line, you can have a very secure computer for free... or you can always have a quite secure one and pay for the privilege ;)

Linux for the human chimp?

Lately I have become a full time dweller (ok, "addict" is the correct word) of Ubuntu brainstorm, the praiseworthy feedback website that lets Ubuntu users share their hints and points of view about what the operating system should be. I have already spent words of praise for this initiative in the past, and I am everyday more enthusiast of such involvment, but reading some brainstorm posts I have known an aspect of the linux crowd that I did not believe could exist and that at times scares me a bit. I'd call it the idiot-obsession (IdOb, from now on).

For what I can observe and infer from their posts, the typical traits of an IdOb user are the following:

- He is a tech-savy user, enough to understand at least in general the underlying problems of certain complex aspects of the system (such as network administration).

- He is not an hardcore Linux nutter (another archetypal type of Linux mental). The IdOb does acknowledge that some people might want to use Linux without understanding it all, just as they did with Windows and Mac, and they might be driven towards Linux for other reasons than the pure hacker spirit (all hail the hacker spirit, but this is not the point right now). Especially, he acknowledges the issues of a user migrating from Windows or Mac in front of the little shortcomings (often reclassified as "freedom features") of the Linux world.

- Most important of all, he thinks that the less computer-savy people will not be able to do anything if the programmers don't present it in the dumbest way possible. He is so concerned about foolproofness that he will likely sacrifice everything else (power, versatility, ultimately freedom). This goes well beyoind the most common command line phobia (actually I am all for graphic interfaces myself), it represents a general approach to the user experience which affects all the subsequent reasonings before actual choices even come into play.

The IdOb approach is in my opinion very dangerous because, under the cover of sometimes plausible reasonings, it misleads the whole point of Ubuntu as a distribution for "human beings"... which sort of involves the ability to reason and learn. I am seriously concerned that a too much "for dummies" approach to a variety of issues would waste the growing potential i see in this Linux distribution.
As far as I see it, having more graphical tools, having them organized better and more friendly is always a good point, and perhaps a priority (I have just recently tried to set up a network bridge and I just plain failed, so there is room for dummy-oriented improvement), but basing the whole process on the assumption that the user is dumb seems a bit excessive. After all it was Linus himself who said that if you give people a system for dummies you will just grow a generation of dummies (which is what happened, btw).
In my opinion, rather than preventing the user from tweaking something just because it is "too confusing for him" (read "give it up without even trying"), a correct approach should tend to develop better graphical interfaces showing all the options the user might have, and organizing them in a way that he can understand what he is doing, achieve his goal, and ultimately learn how it all worked. It is difficult, but it is the only healthy way I see to face the problem.

Is it easyer to just decide a priori what the user is capable of doing? Why not setting everything up in a transparent way so the user is unaware of anything and can sleep quiet (let us just hope that everything "just works" otherwise he is screwed)? If he does not even know that something exists it will not be tempted of tweaking or customizing it, won't he? Hell yes, it leads to a far more polished and neat result...
Wrong! If the user wanted that, he would buy a Mac, and he would be happy to pay for the privilege. Even Windows users who decide to swich to Linux generally do so because they are sick of an environment that treats them as drones until everything works fine just to abandon them altogether when the slightest issue arise. Either I am too optimist about mankind or IdObs fail to see this elementary truth... we shall wait and see.

Slashdot It!

More electroshock games

In a previous post I presented you the delights of the video game pain simulator. Today via Ubergizmo I learn of a way more simple, yet perhaps even more spectacular implementation of pain technology to trivial issues.

Once, when we were kids, to decide who should go fetching the ball trown behind the hedge or who shall have the last candy we made some silly carol count, or to paly some other childish game... not today, today's kids are tough, they are bad guys laughing in front of danger... for such small choices they use electroshock!
The game is pretty simple, you unpocket it and unfold the scissors-like hinge, then every contender (up to four) takes an end and, upon a signal hits the button... the slowest one gets electrocuted (AND goes fetching that damn ball). Simple and sadistic as it is, it is also kid-affordable at mere 11,99 $. Rumors are of a crank powered version on the way for developing countries kids.

The iSpaceship

Game of the day: find a popular portable media player in the photo below (hi-res version here) :



I wander if the Space Shuttle has a proper dock port or the astronauts have to use one of those pesky cassette adaptors :P

How to conjure 1.000.000 Dollars out of thin air

Sounds cool, eh? It is not even that difficult... at least in theory, it just involves some really basic origami skill and another talent we sould all be blessed with.



This is a Psi wheel, the folks at badkungfu.net have some cool video detailing theory and practice of it. Basically all you have to do is fabricate the wheel and make it spin with the only force of your Chi power as in the videos.

A detailed how to can be found on instructables.com, explaining the Chi-power theory, some scientifical explanation and proposing an ultimate test to see if you really have superpowers or it is just luck... and here come the bucks, if you do have superpowers, you might want to try your luck at the James Randi contest, the one that promises 1.000.000 Dollars to the guy who can demonstrate some real paranormal power. Needless to say that the big bucks are still safely in the pockets of the James Randi Foundation but don't let this discourage you. After all you might be the one ;)

Go there and try your luck or simply amaze your friends with the trick, it might not be supernatural but it works for real after all.

The yellow super-battery... revolutions never smelled so fishy

Vie Engadget I read this interesting piece of news. For those of you who are too lazy to hit the link, let me summarize it for you:

A Chinese company is offering a windows-mobile-LIKE smatphone, nothing new. What is new is that they state a stand by battery life of one year (!) or 3-5 days of calling (!!), what is even more astounding is that the device does not seem to feature any cutting-edge power saving workarounds. In a very chinese and very straightforward approach, the problem is solved brute force with a 16.800 mAh battery (!!!), and for mere 145$ (!!!!). Ah, no, the pun about the chinese "yellow" battery is not a pun at all, it IS yellow.


Now this news might be true or might be an hoax: let's do some maths. My BL-5B Nokia battery has 820 mAh and powes a nothing-but-calls-and-sms phone for a week stand by, 10 days tops.

820 mAh : 10 days = 16.800 mAh : x days

x= (16.800 x 10)/820 = 204,88

Two conclusions appear evident:

a) either this smatphone is far more energy efficent than my dumbphone (a Nokia 6021), or their claims are worng (or I am an ass and I made the wrong calculations, of course)

b) 205 days of stand-by are still a heck of a lot! (or I am an ass and I made the wrong calculations)

Now the problem is another one. They can manufacture that monster battery and sell it together with a cheap smatphone for under 150$, while top notch devices which cost almost ten times more offer a mere fraction of that battery life (two weeks tops). Let us put aside all the quality issues and all the bells and whistles that top-brand devices have, I have no doubt that there would be a market for a device with so much juice. If I decide to spend a grand in a super-phone, would I not add up to 150 $ more (which is the cost of the entire chinese phone) in order to get all that battery life? Are all the other manufacturers just dumb?
Maybe... but I still would like to know how likely the yellow super battery is to catch fire, explode, damage the device or just plain fail to live up the expectations... because if it is safe consider me already tinkering and soldering to fit one on every device I have!

Battery life is one of the biggest showstoppers of modern consumer electronics, always producing more elaborate, functional, convergent and power thirsty toys. It is nice to see some improvement, even if they violate some phisics law or merely common sense.
Personally I am waiting for this other project, which seems more elegant and less toxic... albeit it is the nanoscale implementation of an even more brute-force approach.

Slashdot It!

Games that shock!

I remember reading an article on Wired speculating on the fact that with the violence level we see in the videogames, the only reason why teenagers are not a mass of bloody murderers is that those same videogames made them also too fat and lazy to lift a real gun. Fortunately Nintendo found the workaround assuring that the joung would-be killers is WiiFit for the task.

A last bastion stood still between our sane of mind world and the gamers uprising: anyone who has ever had a controller in his hands knows that hitting the enemy is only half of the task. Most balltes are won just because our little Master Chief can be shot in the nuts again and again before fainting, the teenager doesn't. He doesn't have composite plating (not to speak of energy shields) and he is not a battle hardened supersoldier à la John Rambo.

Composite plating and energy shields have yet to be properly implemented but, as far as pain adaptation goes, the modern industry has now found the workaround.

This spooky device is as simple as it can get: plug it in, plug yourself in, and when you get hit it discharges a joyfull electroshock for the pleasure of all the realism freaks out there. Good if you want to be the first taser-immune gamer in the world... personally, I was fine with the little suffering portraits of ye good olde Doom.

Via Engadget.

Slashdot It!

Gtalk secrets ;P

If you ask any tenage (especially girls, but there's a fair share of boys as well) about what is missing in gtalk and why do they prefer MSN Messenger (I guess it's called Windows Live now but the $brown_dejection remains the same), they will 90% of the times reply something like: "Awww, but MSN is soooo cuuuute!".
It is true indeed, if you can live whit it bricking your pc and preventing you to do anything else unless you run it on a cray II, if you can live with the incapacity to read what your friends are saying among the crowd of animations, pictures and utter nonsense, if you can live with viruses and malware disguising themselves as wannabe new hot parthners... if you can live with this and a ton of other downsides, MSN actually IS cute.

For all those who have enough commonsense to stay the hell away from MSN Messenger but still enjoy a moderate and wise use of the animoticons (because they DO are funny) rejoice!
Gtalk supports some basic animoticon and this is nothing new, what few people know instead is that there are many more combinations which are not as obvious as, say, ;) or :P, but are also much more funny... and even more so because your friends do not expect them.

Ok, enough small talk... enjoy the list:

Pig :(:)
Broken Hearth Kiss :-x, :*
Moustache :{
Love <3
Monkey :(|)
Get down!. \m/
In shock :-o
Smile :D, :-D, =D
Sad :(, =(, :-(
Angry x-(
Cool B-)
Tear :’(
Wink ;), ;-)
Face :-|
Happy :-), :)
Lopsided :-/, =/
Tongue :P, :-P, =P
Bell +/’\
Crab V.v.V
Devil }:-)
Wince >.<

Try them out, and let me know if you discover new ones!

Slashdot It!

ASCII Wars

I have just come across a full ascii version of Star Wars Episode IV... Man, there do are geniuses out there! And this is yet another proof that geniuses with little to do tend to become dangerous.

To enjoy just open a terminal (if you run Windows MS-DOS prompt should do the same but I am not so sure, so please swich to Linux to avoid problems) and copy/paste:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

And don't forget the pop corn!


Slashdot It!

The Democratic Development Revolution

No, I'm not going to talk about any obscure coding strategy to optimize programming among ubergeeks scattered around the world. I'm talking about what I consider a rel welcome revolution in the relation between the coders, who ultimately decide what we can and cannot do with our computers, ad we: the small people who can use a computer but cannot "do it ourselves" when it comes to adding a feature we need or removing something which pisses us off.

It all started with Dell, well I don't think they have been the first ones but it has been the moment when I have first met the phenomenon. If you visit this area of the Dell website you will find a sort of forum, where customers and would-be-customers alike can share their views, suggest their ideas and vote the ideas posted by everybody else. It is both useful for the company, which gets the feedback to improve his products in the right direction (aka make more money, we are not talking of philanthropy here), and for the users that have products more complying with what they really want instead of passively "suffering" the policies of the computer maker.
To get an idea of what this can do in the real world, consider that the idea of Ubuntu equipped Dell PCs came from IdeaStorm, and a year later all mayor PC makers are offering or planning Linux based machines and Linux boxes at wall-mart are sold out.

My second sighting of this approach was with The GIMP, the popular free image manipulation program which aims to challenge Photoshop (only aims for now, albeit I learned to love it as well as the costly Adobe counterpart). This site provides an analogue brainstorm idea, with the variant of the "picture submissions" that both emphasizes the commitment to the user community: even if the picture does not have to be made with GIMP this form of submission privileges photographers and graphic designers (that is users or potential users) keeping everybody else at bay. I have posted a submission myself, but was rejected because "not too clear" - and they were right, I'll elaborate better one of these days.

Finally today I have spent some time on the Ubuntu brainstorm, which was launched by Canonical, the company patronizing this Linux distribution. Like the Dell service, Ubuntu brainstorm implements a voting system so everybody can review the proposals of the others and concur to outline the ones which the community desires most.

I hope that more and more companies and developers will adopt this way of thinking, involving the base and hearing their needs instead of "bullet marketing" them trying to create needs they don't have (really, why would you strip a laptop of each and every useful feature just to slip it in an envelope! Btw there are envelope-fitting, full featured alternatives even if you have to pay for the difference).

I look forward to the next Windows brainstorm, I have a couple of visions to share with them ;)

That's steampunk... and I guess it steams pretty bad too!

I always tought of myself as a steampunk freak but never in my weirdest dreams I could have conceived the heat-driven-self-actuated-CPU-cooling-fan!

Via Engadget (they also have a fancy video!)

Slashdot It!

We got reviewed "Very good"!

Blogged is a very nice service, simple and straightforward. It works this way: you submit your blog indicating the category(es) and a short foreword. The blog is then inserted into a listing site visible to everybody and open to user reviews (requires log-in). Seems nice? It gets better: one initial review by the editors is assured! Well, mine scored an inital 7.2 out of 10, which for a start is not bad at all.

-_-' Obviously if you want to stop by and rise further that score you have my blessing.

Let's morph!

There's a little of buzz over the net lately about this "morph" concept device advertised by Nokia, some sort of massive nanotech applied to consumer electronics. I think i's little more than a joke for now, but I admit that the video below was a nice distraction... and I do envy those who are paid big bucks to come out with such ideas ;)



Slashdot It!

Encyclopedia Of Life, Genesis 7,2-3

A while ago I looked at the interesting mockup of a website collecting the catalogue of all living species: Encyclopedia of Life, a sort of Noha's Ark of the biological knowledge for both scientists and normal people. The project is ambitus but the underlying promise is amazing... well I was amazed at least, I even sent them a resume (No answer but I wasn't really expecting one ^_^).
I remember myself roaming the few demonstrative pages available at the time and thinking every moment "damn, why that link is still inactive!". Aside the scientifical value in fact (the project is intended also as a "bible of biological knowledge" for the scientific community), the whole thing is real fun! It was a while since I last saw such a nice divulgative resource. The kid in me was like mad, like wandering in the biggest zoo ever, always looking for the next animal led on by sheer curiosity.



Today that project is finally alive, I have read about it from a blog and I immediately hit the link, and... And I was not the only one. The site is down for excess of requests and I was redirected to the old mockup pages -_-'. Too bad but I will check later... And tomorrow... And the next week. If the real thing is one half of what I expect it will be worth the while. Check it yourselves!

Slashdot It!

All hail the Clockboard

You tought that after the Optimus Maximus and Optimus Tactus keyboards the folks at Art Lebedev could not revolutionize again the concept of "Top design"? You were wrong!

Have a look at this extraordinary concept, the very idea of time table won't be the same any more.
You crave this thing, don't you? Think it will never be yours? Wrong again, you can get one for a mere 200$... you still there?! Go getting one before it is sells out!

As far as I am concerned I'm not going to have one... I'll wait for the wirst version ;)

Via Ubergizmo.

Slashdot It!

Five reasons against the Thin Client revolution

I have read a popular Itlaian blog this morning which theorized a serious problem for the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, that would be the incapacity to comply with the growing shift towards the web of more and more applications which would shortly make local computing obsolete in favor of "Thin clients" devolving all the dirty job to super powerful remote servers.

... O_o' ...

The topic is seriously interesting, although I really fail to see how this would be a problem of a specific operating system, even more a specific distribution of it. I am a proud Ubuntu user and I really don't see the problem. If anything, from a user point of view, it seems to me that the web 2.0 integration is one of the fields where linux does shine! But let me put aside the polemics, this is not the point of my post.

The fact is that my inner man 1.0 completely disagrees with this vision in general for a variety of different reasons:

1. The mainframe-terminal architecture reminds me of '80 sci-fi movies à là Tron, but was overcome by the revolution of the personal computer, since then we have seen more and more powerful personal computers (alas, my handheld is orders of magnitude better than the computer that sent 3 men on the moon).

2. As pointed out by someone in the comments to the blog I have read, the network computer never broke out because a lot of tasks are just better accomplished on a local basis. The network shift is partly for tasks that are better accomplished over the web (for mobility, accessibility, sharing or whatever other advantage), and partly as a sort of "exploration". Being an entirely new field it is useful to test the web version of whatever comes to the developer's mind. Wether most of these services will still be there in five years I really don't know... perhaps many will have disappeared and others will be born that we cannot even think of today.

3. Personal computing demand grows faster than the web based services: five years ago I had a laptop with 5Gb of storage and it seemed a lot, now both my personal music collection and my photo folder, each exceed by far that limit (let us not speak of videos). Today an on line storage services offering 5Gb of space is considered just right, an it is, because it replies to very different needs than local storage (again mobility, social use, remote backup). The same discourse applies to more "processing dependent" uses, I am all in favour of Google Docs, which I use quite frequently, but I still need OpenOffice and I cannot see this situation changing too soon, same for The GIMP and any game I can think of (hehe, untill they will not come out with the falsh version of Urban Terror ^_^').

4. What about security? All hail the network, but the best way to sleep comfortable at night is always be to keep our little scary secrets offline!

5. A last tought from what I can remember of economics at the university: there is a growing cost for adding each unit of "processing power" to a machine, I guess it's called marginal cost. So If I can build a machine with power suitable for one user, a machine with enough power for two users would not cost the double but something more... and so on. Scale economies and technical progress can overturn this rule for a while, creating an exception, but I think that in the long run there is a limit to what even a 2.0 man needs and want, and the general rule will apply again.

That's it, and it is not a complete list... of course I might be wrong, but if I should bet my wage on thin clients with minimal local OSs or small powerhouses with the power of current supercomputers I'd surely go for the latter (after all I have recently read of some guys who built a TERAFLOP super computer just stacking some Playstation 3 and running Linux!).

Slashdot It!

One car to pollute them all

Things that can make me laugh so early in the morning are always welcome. Today I opened my feed reader and guess what? The car of my boss has been elected "meanest car of America" (by the environmental point of view of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy).
You know, during a working day it is never difficult to find an argument to balme your boss, but having it served before he even enters the office is something to celebrate!

Slashdot It!

Roots of social networking

My friends know that I am not exactly a big fan of hard-core social networking but this one is funny, weird and perhaps a bit scary.

the guys at Botanicalls have published a DIY guide to wire your apartment plants so that they can post their status and opinions about you on Twitter -_-'.

I said scary because I know that, if my plants were given the possibility to speak about me, I would probably be arrested for mistreatments. Whatch out fellows without any green thumb... the revenge of the plants is near!

P.S. On second tought this sets the apartment plants head and shoulder above many people I know when it comes to computers ;)

Slashdot It!

Prius inter pares?

I was watching a nice podcast saturday morning, a clip from National Geografic Podcast (which by the way I reccommend to anyone as they are very short clips but full of neat stimuli). Among other things it showed an Arizona guy who modded his Toyota Prius into a plug-in hybrid, that is a car that runs both on conventional fuel and electricity AND can be recharged plugging it to the grid. The guy in the video stated that he could pass from 45 miles per gallon (that is about 20 Km/l) to 100 miles per gallon (about 50 km/l), so the first thing i tought was "neat!"... but then I actually did some math and a bit of my admiration for the Prius wore off.

Let's not be rush, I am still all in favour of hybrid cars and if I had a lot of bucks I'd surely get a Prius and perhaps I'd hack it to plug-in. What made me wonder is that 45 miles per gallon is already the fuel consumption of my current car, a very ordinary Fiat Punto with a little-yet-brilliant 1.3 turbocharged diesel engine. So what's the point of paying 26.000 Euros (that's almost 40k dollars!) and lugging around a load of chemicals which I seriously doubt are all that environmet-friendly?
Well, it must be said that the two cars I am talking about sit in very different categories (high-end sedan vs. mid-level compact), so I'm not going to pull further my comparison, but still I can't help thinking that all the benefit of the hybrid drive is merely wasted to carry around the extra weight, plus for my dayly commute and the occasional little trip the Punto is already too big: why drive in a 4 passengers car when I never have more than one passenger? Yet for some reason 2 seat cars are all either super sporty cars or however they cost and drink as much as four seaters (somebody said Smart?).

I have stated at the beginning of the post that I am still in favour of such cars and I'd still buy one if I could, I've got a series of reasons for that:

• I think that reseach will lead to significant achievements in this directions, but in order to do this the market has to support the effort showing that the demand for "green" cars do exist and is profitable for the manufacturers (Listen up GM!). The DIY plug-in hacks in the garages of many amateurs and the plans for version featuring a solar panel are clear signs to me.
  
• Driving a Prius would broadcast a positive message to everybody in town, it is the best andidote I can tink to the spreading SUV epidemy: "look, I'm cool, I care for the environment and I don't need to drive a truck to demonstrate that I can please my lady" (no offense meant for those who drive real trucks, my grandpa did it and I have a great respect for the category).
• It still is a high end sedan with the fuel consumptions of a tiny economy car, and I like the design (though I must say I'm the only among my friends who does).

This said, I have to report that the same Smart website I already quoted above, is now showing an intersting picture of a Smart with "micro hybrid drive". Is it the answer to my prayers? I'll check it in my next coffee-break and we'll see.

Edit. As I feared the Hybrid Smart is a nice commercial move: The "Micro Hybrid Drive" is not hybrid at all, instead it just turn on and off the conventional internal combustion engine to optimize the engine use. It is a welcome move, and surely a nice idea, but to call it hybrid is just false. Moreover, even with this misleadingly named trick all the models available from the website but one (the 33 kW diesel common rail, which achieves the admirable goal of 3o Km/l) consume more than my current Fiat Punto, which is twice as big and heavy. So not only the revolution has not arrived yet, but I would also question the good faith of the manufacturer's commercial strategy. Too bad :(

Slashdot It!

Tech Magic

I want to devote my first (real) post to the very reason of my blogging. My next posts will be far less philosophical than this one, like in a tale I'm just giving the "falvour" of the setting. WARNING: long post, VERY long post. As the neat quote below the blog title says there are very strong points of contact between what magic and technology are. This is not a matter of how things work (obviously), but rather a matter of how things are percieved and related one to the other.

Why Leonardo? Read on...

Anyone who has ever rolled a dice at D&D or the likes perhaps can already figure out what I am talking about, and this is a problem. It is a problem because the parallelism between magic and tech is involving instead of evolving. At the beginning of western civilization pre-scientific and magic knowledge were one like in alchemy, then, slowly but unerringly, their paths forked in a curious way. Magic was mainly discarded, freeing mankind from the burden of superstition but tossing away also part of what good was in those beliefs. The eve of a golden age of illuminated consciousness for all? Only partly. As the scientifical knowledge became broader and broader more and more commonners started to understand the mechanics of the universe around them and most important of all, they started to care about it and to struggle for knowledge wether for the goods it brought or for knowledge shake alone. It was the gilded age of Robinson Crusoe, the westener bourgeous man who knew enough of everything and knew how to use it to bend nature at his wills. But the dream of omniscience was just a short illusion. Soon the broadening and deepening of scientifical kowledge was so vast to prevent anybody from handling but a small discipline in his life, leaving him totally unaware of the rest. After all it was Leonardo da Vinci himself to say that "Intensive Knowledge can be attempted by humans but Extensive Knowledge is God's prerogative"... kind of weird from the man whose interests spaced from politics to aerodinamics to anathomy, or was it just the senile wisdom of a man forced to part from all his unfinished works? The end of the story? You wish! There was an even sadder consequence in this story, perhaps the saddest of all: people slowly stopped caring about it all. They started to have all they needed without any encouragement to think to what lays behind it. Today people takes for granted whatever is thrown at them in a shiny package and tech has slowly filled the gap that superstition left open and that nothing could really fill, not the consumerism alone, nor comunism, nor religion which is perhaps the most eminent victim of this process (no judgement intended, I'm merely stating what I see). This is what I mean when I say that contemporary parallelisms between magic and technology has more to do with cheap fantasy visions (God bless cheap fantasy, but this is not the point) than with late '700 illuminated mystic theories to explain everything and reach a new level of enlightenment for mankind. This is grim. If you are not tyred of all my babbling, let me split the thing to better explain myself. Think of the clichet cheap fantasy setting (if none comes to your mind you are a blessed one but you don't know what you are missing). Now follow me trough some basic assumption about magic in this fictionary world and then about tech in our world and see if the two things make sense or not.

Magic is powerful, magic can do almost anything or at least this is what commoners think about it. Thech is powerful, with tech you can do almost anything or at least this is what commoners think about it, if you cannot do it now perhaps you will be able to do it in the futures, or your sons will.

Magic is difficult, you have to devote your entire life to it to master one aspect of its powers. Tech is difficult, you have to study your entire life to master one disicpline and keep up to date.

Magic is for few initiates organized in guilds, an elitarian organization of people who tend to influence the rest of the world with their powers and to keep closely the secret tomes of knowledge. Tech is understood by a few engineers hired by corporations, an elitarian organization of people who tend to influence the world with their products and defends his achievements with copiright and lawyers.

Magic in his highest form consumes the soul of the mage as it overthrows the very foundations of the natural world. Tech at its highest level poses serious moral dilemmas as it breaks the boundaries of what is right to do and what is possible to do.

Shall I go on? Mmm, better not, my point should be clear by now. Ok folks, thanks for your patience reading until now. That's it, I am not an engineer (nor a mage) so this blog will be about tech, geekeries, free software, toys and stuff like that... but with a pronounced man 1.0 flavour. Enjoy!


Slashdot It!

Test Post

Goodday Folks,

This is my first post. I't just a random babbling, just to see how it turns out and such.
Stay tuned for some actual content.

Keep in touch.