Just saw this lovely machine on TV. It is a Wireless enabled rabbit with rather good speech.
You can send messages to the rabbit or ask it questions. It will connect to different services. It also has the ability to interact through a couple of lamps and by moving its ears.
Wonderful!
Link.
David Pogue of NY Times visited a tech support center. They gave him a CD with funny customer calls.
On one call, the caller seemed to be taking an inordinately long time to complete each instruction she was given.
Agent: Ma’am, I can’t help noticing that every time I give you an instruction, it takes a really long time before you get back to me. Is your computer that slow?
Caller: Oh, no, it’s just the stupid, stupid design of this computer. Every time I want to click something, I have to unplug the keyboard to plug in the mouse. And then every time I want to use the keyboard again, I have to unplug the mouse. Because there’s only one jack.
Agent: Ma’am, you do realize that there’s a jack on the keyboard itself? You’re supposed to plug the mouse into the keyboard, and the keyboard into the computer.
Caller: Are YOU KIDDING ME!? Oh, wait a minute—yes, I see it now! Oh, holy cow. That’s going to be so much easier!
Agent: Just out of curiosity, how long have you been using your computer that way?
Caller: Six weeks!
Link (via Boing Boing)
Boing Boing presents a couple of nice optical color illusions that you just should see:
Note that square A and square B have the same color.
Here’s a similar illusion with colored squares. The “blue” tiles on the top face of the left cube are the same color as the “yellow” tiles in the top of the right cube.
Don’t take my word for it. Use an image editing program with a eyedropper to see for yourself. I used Photoshop’s eyedropper tool to take 5×5 samples and found that both the “yellow” and the “blue” tiles are C:50 M:40 Y:40 K:5.
The color tile illusion is one of many excellent illusions created by R. Beau Lotto.
Link.
Great video. Someone singing a song reverse. Try to get the name of the song before the middle of the video.
Here is a fine bloke who did what I have been dreaming of ever since I got my new Dell D830: he upgraded his Windows Vista installation to Windows XP.
Although my own Vista installation runs a lot better than his, I do see a lot of familiar problems he seems to have fixed with his upgrade.
In addition, numerous tasks that take a long time on Vista have been greatly speeded up. File copies are snappy and responsive, and pressing the Cancel button halfway through actually cancels the copy almost immediately, as opposed to having it lock up, and sometimes lock up the PC. In addition, a lot of work has gone into making deletes far more efficient, it appears that no more does the operating system scan every file to be deleted prior to wiping it, and instead just wipes out the NTFS trees involved, a far quicker operation. On my Vista machine I would often see a dialog box from some of my video codec’s pop up when deleting, moving or copying videos. No more, now all that is involved is a byte transfer or NTFS operation.
Automatic Updates has also gone through a performance facelift in that it no longer hogs your bandwidth when you’re surfing, a nice touch.
Link.