Curt’s Basement

The latter half of the talk is actually paraphrased from his second book: More Information Than You Require.

The Sandpit from Sam O’Hare on Vimeo.

Want to feel small?

Some people ask me “Why bother to collect old newspapers? If I want to read dry, boring history, I can just get a history book.” My answer to this is that even the best of history books leave out some mighty interesting aspects of historical events. The only way they can be re-discovered, is through reading original newspapers published during the time of the event. The assassination of president James Garfield in 1881 is a prime example of this.

Read the rest at HistoryBuff.com

Brian Ashcraft, from Kotaku, wrote this interesting piece for Wired about the process he went through to have his cellphone blessed by a Shinto priest.

I’ve come to the 1,270-year-old Kanda Shrine in Tokyo to purify and bless something very near and dear to me: my cell phone. I’ve had hellish luck with mobiles over the past year. I left one on a ride at Universal Studios Japan. Its successor suddenly—and mysteriously—died. The next one accompanied my pants into the washing machine, and its replacement went AWOL in less than a week. Divine intervention was needed, and pronto.

via Gadget Blessings: Shinto Priest Protects Electronics From Bad Mojo

This man is a God!

via Publick Nuisance – Score One for the Home Team.

Now this is cool. It’s a bookmarklet or extension (whichever you prefer) that takes paginated web pages and combines them into one big page.

PageZipper – Life’s too short to spend clicking “Next”

Well, I’m thoroughly creeped out now.

You’ll never convince me to use IE8, but this ad still made me chuckle a bit.

via Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

We need an impartial jury of peers. My brother and I are fighting over which console to get. Xbox 360 elite or the PS3 at the same price, $399. In your experience which ones have you found to be the superior system. We are looking at a couple of key issues with each system.

1. Most Xbox games can be purchased for the PC
2. We are both fans of the Classic RPG genre of game (Not the evolved PC 3rd person)
3. We would probably look into Modding
4. The Xbox 360 library is larger
5. PS3 has God of War 3 and Little Big Planet and MGS4 

Help is required, please post your own experiences. Which you tend to play more, which you have considered a better purchase. Thank you.

What better way to test security than to have hackers try to break it?

During a contest at the CanSecWest event, security researchers competed to exploit vulnerabilities in web browsers. Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer were all successfully compromised, but Chrome was able to withstand the first day of the competition.

I think what’s most interesting is that Safari went down first, in 10 seconds. Sure, it might be fast and pretty, but wow.

Now I just need Chrome to have AdBlock and maybe Firebug and I’ll be golden.

via Ars Technica.

This is so awesome, I’ve gotta try it out!

This gave me a good chuckle. It’s a bunch of the more creative 404 error pages from the Intertubes. I found a really good one awhile ago that I actually saved a copy of, I’ll need to dig it up sometime or see if I can find it online. Regardless, you can check these out here.

Two big communications satellites collided in the first-ever crash of two intact spacecraft in orbit, shooting out a pair of massive debris clouds and posing a slight risk to the international space station.

NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the crash, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday.

“We knew this was going to happen eventually,” said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA believes any risk to the space station and its three astronauts is low. It orbits about 270 miles below the collision course. There also should be no danger to the space shuttle set to launch with seven astronauts on Feb. 22, officials said, but that will be re-evaluated in the coming days.

The collision involved an Iridium commercial satellite, which was launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be nonfunctioning. The Russian satellite was out of control, Matney said.

The Iridium craft weighed 1,235 pounds, and the Russian craft nearly a ton.

via Yahoo! News

No batteries required! Amazing! Can you imagine how well this works?

I’m suddenly reminded of the following video.

via Neatorama

I’m not a big fan of F1 racing, despite being a racing fan; but this video is seriously cool. Especially the 3d animation while they explain it all.

And before you ask, no it’s not compatible with regular Lego.

Earlier this year Lego and Digital Blue announced combined efforts that would yield a variety of Lego-centric electronics aimed at kids. Slated to be released by this Summer, the announcement included details on a digital camera, a walkie talkie and an MP3 player – nothing too crazy. These functional toys would appear as though they had been built from lego bricks and would all fall into an affordable $20 – $60 price range. Cool. An anonymous tipster may have just shined some light on a yet-to-be-announced element of this partnership however, that might bump the endeavor’s interest-factor from a 1.1 to an even 2. As you can see from the image above, Alcatel is apparently jumping into the mix and the trio is planning to make their best effort at putting cell phones in the hands of children at an even more inappropriately young age. Woo! From the looks of things, the Lego phone will consist of a base structure containing the body and display of the handset, while a series of modular attachments can be snapped on – likely just for color variation as opposed to changing the functionality of the handset to some extent.

via Boy Genius Report

This is too cool to describe. It may be alot of technobable for some, but I think it’s still worth a look just the same.

The 1997 book Predicting the Future looked at past and contemporary predictions of the future and assessed their accuracy. A 1995 prediction by Bill Gates about “the internet as a self-publishing medium” was met with great skepticism due to the lack of editors and, believe it or not, a Dewey decimal system on the web.

via Paleo-Future

Believe me, it’s not at all what you think.

In what is probably the coolest conference-talk attention grab I’ve ever heard of, Bill Gates apparently just released a swarm of mosquitoes into the crowd at TED, the geniuses-only mind meld. Holy shit.

“Not only poor people should experience this,” the Tweetosphere has Gates saying as he released the swarm into the audience. Malaria is a cause that Bill and Melinda have been hitting hard with their philanthropy, and this is certainly a way to drive that point home.

No word yet on the size of said swarm, or confirmation that they weren’t actually infected with malaria for that matter, but as far as stunts go, this is prit-tay fucking awesome. We would know.

via Gizmodo