Stumble upon is the social bookmarking tool that I use the most. This title used to be held by digg and reddit, but I only visit those sites on occasion now. I find that stumble upon delivers higher quality pages, and the content is better targeted to whatever category I am stumbling in.
The one gripe I have with stumble upon is the quality of its comments. They are always pretty useless, and never offer much insight. A comment is rarely longer than one line. Stumble upon comments are not just bad; they are the worst on the web. I think that it is a community that hasn’t yet learned the etiquette of commenting.
The comment page’s location isn’t immediately evident, and I suspect that a lot of stumble upon users don’t even view the comments page.
I have had a few of my posts ’stumbled’. Here are some highlights from the worst of the comments that I received.
Observations of a guy who makes up statistics and implies a relationship in an attempt to be funny: Adrian Corscadden - RRamsey118
The first one is another rip-off of Stephen Roberts, and the second is just untrue. Not everyone believes in God until they are 7. What kind of crap is that? - Viperine
When I stumble humor section, I expect to laugh… Now you show me the humor in this… - Stariuss
All I want to know is, if Jesus was a carpenter how come he never build a damn thing in the bible? Hell, he didn’t even complain about that half-assed cross. - Riff-Randell
Riff-Randell doesn’t even make any sense. How does this have anything to do with the post?
I have previously blogged about a really neat substance d3o. It is flexible at rest, but hardens instantaneously on impact. It has been used in ski racing suits, soccer shin pads, gloves and toques.
I still think that the best application for d3o is in laptop sleeves. I have googled extensively for such a product, but my searches have turned up nothing. Buying a roll of d3o myself and making my own is an option, but d3o labs doesn’t sell sheets of the stuff.
I have come across a few interesting videos of a guy called Max Cornelisse. Google hasn’t indexed much on him except for his youtube channel.
Even if these videos are fake, they are still pretty impressive. On several occasions, he hacks into public computer systems and displays content of his choice. In the last video below, he claims to use cell broadcasting to deliver SMS messages to all people in his immediate vicinity. After reading the wikipedia entry on cell broadcasting, it does appear that the infrastructure for this kind of hack is there; it might be possible.
I really hope that these videos are real, but I have a feeling that they are not.
Check out a few of his videos below, or his youtube channel.
I seem to be using more and more google products. My life has become googleized. I am generally happy with their products, which is why I use them. There is a need for one small addition.
The header on the google homepage should be customizable. My two most used google products are gmail and reader. Reader is mysteriously absent from the default header.
I recently came across a really neat concept for a bike: the swing bike. It has a pivot in the frame, providing another way to turn. This idea has the potential to be really fun on a mountain bike.
I searched around the internet for these, and found that they do actually exist outside the realm of homemade prototypes. Although now discontinued, they were produced for several years in the ’70s.
Over the last few years, there has been quite a bit of news about electronic voting machines. Almost all of the press seems to be negative. The media usually highlights security problems.
I am not an experienced programmer by any means, but I am capable of writing code that could perform the task of a voting machine. I realize that this isn’t the big issue, but I still don’t understand what can go wrong.
First of all, I am not talking about internet voting, which does have obvious security flaws that would be impossible to eliminate. I am primarily questioning direct-recording electronic voting machines. These are voting machines that electronically get user input and store the vote in computer memory. There is no paper involved. Activists and security experts claim voting fraud can occur if a third party modifies the software. Obviously this can happen, but the risk is no greater than with paper voting.
I think the bigger problem here is that people are still scared of technology and don’t trust it. No matter what kind of voting system is used, there are always going to be methods of modifying the results.
So, do you think that electronic voting machines are safe????
Besides giving Hockey Canada a wake-up call, the Turino Olympics was also the public debut for a promising technology. The substance, d3o, is similar to silly puddy at rest, but instantly hardens on impact, thus creating flexible body armour. This material was incorporated into the ski suits of Canadian and American racers. It is created by the British based d3o labs.
There was a lot of hype about this product during the last Olympics, but news has died down. The wikipedia entry is lacking and is still considered a stub. I am guessing that this is because the product is still under heavy development and d3o labs does not want to release details until all of their patents are secured.
The best application of d3o that I can think of is a flexible laptop sleeve that hardens on impact (patent pending). It would be awesome!
d30 labs, where is my d3o laptop sleeve?????
Here is a video demonstrating the awesomeness of d30:
I have blogged about the Livescribe Smartpen previously, naming it my most anticipated product of 2008. It is a newcomer to the smartpen market, and boasts several features not available on competing products. Along with some new product demos, Livescribe has recently released detailed stats for their newly dubbed Pulse Smartpen.
There are 2 different models:
1GB $149
2BG $199
The ship date has been pushed back to march and pre-ordering is still only available to US citizens.
Adrian Corscadden in Internet, Technology
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