This is just plain crazy. 1500 hours of work.
(via Mark)
Category Archives: Cool Stuff
Interesting and cool stuff I find out on the web
12:34:56 7/8/9
This post was published at exactly 12:34:56 on 7/8/9 local time. Cool, huh? 🙂
EDIT: Hmm, scheduled posting seems to be broken on my blog. This post didn’t appear on time like it should have.
“Cyanide & Happiness” Via E-Mail
Cyanide & Happiness is one of my favorite webcomics, but I can never remember to read them as I have Penny-Arcade as my homepage.
So my plan was to write a little script to parse Explosm.net’s HTML to fetch the URL to the latest comic, output it as a RSS feed, and then enable the e-mail subscription feature at FeedBurner. So, I spent 15 minutes or so writing the PHP script and when I went to go republish it via FeedBurner, I discovered someone had already beat me to it. However they don’t have the e-mail subscription feature on, so my problem wasn’t 100% solved. So, I cloned their feed, setup e-mail subscriptions, and here we are — now Cyanide & Happiness can be delivered directly to my inbox every day.
If you’d like the same, use this form:
Hopefully someone else gets some use outta it. 🙂
The Most Awesome Picture Ever?
Description from National Geographic:
May 6, 2008—After 9,000 years of silence, Chile’s Chaitén volcano (pictured on May 3) is erupting with lava, ash—and lightning.
Since the volcano awoke on May 2, it has continued erupting intermittently, blanketing the area in ash and forcing more than 4,000 people to flee.
The mingling of lightning and ash seen above may be a “dirty thunderstorm.”
The little-understood storms may be sparked when rock fragments, ash, and ice particles in the plume collide to produce static charges—just as ice particles collide to create charge in regular thunderstorms.
Found via DD32’s blog.
SuperGenPass
Back in the day, I used to just use the same password (well, a couple really, but still) on all sites I had to register on. This made it easy to remember, but the problem is that if one of my accounts was compromised, that password could be used to get into all of my other accounts.
So, for a while, I used a random password generator extension for Firefox, but it was slow and relied on Firefox remembering all my passwords (what happens if my hard drive died?).
Enter the ingenious SuperGenPass. It combines the two solutions I used previously. From the FAQ:
A bookmarklet is a chunk of JavaScript code stored in your Web browser as a bookmark or favorite. There’s no software to install, so you can use SuperGenPass across all platforms and in any modern Web browser. It also makes it easy to use on public computers where access rights may be restricted.
How it works
SuperGenPass uses your master password and the domain name of the Web site you are visiting as the “seed” for a one-way hash algorithm. The output of this algorithm is your generated password. If either your master password or the domain name of the Web site changes, even by one character, the generated password will be drastically different.
For example, let’s say that your master password is “cornflakes”. If you use SuperGenPass at yahoo.com, your generated password will be “r9AQeOhBgU”. If you use SuperGenPass at amazon.com, your generated password will be “zcbEm1t32B”. SuperGenPass doesn’t need to remember this or store it anywhere, because it’s just a (very complex) math problem: the result is the same every time. And because SuperGenPass uses a one-way hash function, no one will be able to reverse-engineer your master password from your generated passwords.
Simply put, you come up with one password and SuperGenPass will generate a unique, re-creatable password for any domain name you visit. It even fills in the password fields for you. I’ve dragged it up onto my top toolbar in Firefox, so I just click it and bam, I’m done.
No more having to remember more than one password or worry about your password being stolen and used on multiple sites.
Google Transit
Google has a cool new beta feature for their Google Maps called Google Transit. It allows you to plan a trip just like you would on Google Maps except that it uses the public transportation system rather than your car.
It’s only available in 6 cities so far (mine included of course — we are the leading city in public transportation in the US after all), but more will be added soon apparently. 🙂
More F1 Engine Songs
lol, I’m starting to think these guys have too much free time on their hands…
(Here is the previous post and video if you missed it of a F1 car playing “God Save The Queen”)
F1 Car Playing “God Save The Queen”
Haha, how cool is this? (Actual song starts about half way through the video)
A video used to be embedded here but the service that it was hosted on has shut down.Thanks go to my forum for the link. 🙂
Google Trends
Google released Google Trends today. It’s a pretty cool tool that’ll show you the trends of search phrases and also allows you to compare multiple search phrases. More information about it can be found on the Google Trends “About” page.
Crazy 1980’s Izuzu Gemini Advertisement
Holy crap, check out this crazy advertisement from the 80’s! (larger version)
A video used to be embedded here but the service that it was hosted on has shut down.There’s also a similar (but not nearly as good) one from Saab, also from the 1980’s: (larger version)
A video used to be embedded here but the service that it was hosted on has shut down.Thanks to all those that posted and pointed out the above videos to me on my FinalGear.com Forums. 🙂