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Daily Links

November 21, 2008 Daily Links
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Top 10 IT disasters of all time – Starting with an early warning system on the blink in September, 1983 (just a couple of months before the Able Archer incident), and running through such classics mix ups as the Millennium Bug and the Dell laptop battery inferno, this site lists some of biggest disasters in IT history (though omitting those which caused loss of life).

Auction Bloopers – Find some ebay bargains by looking for common misspellings of items.

Sensible Units – Afraid of the onslaught of metric? Then measure length in albatross wingspans or weigh in terms of female lions or CRT monitors with this fun little website.

Enigma – If you’ve an interest in cryptography, this little website allows you to use your very own Enigma cipher, and provides an inkling into just how complicated the mechanism can really be.

Daily Links

May 25, 2008 Books / Daily Links / Games / Music
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De Radio 4 Top 400 – The favourite classical pieces as voted for by Dutch radio listeners. Certainly a handsome proportion of religious works in the list. (PDF)

100 Best Last Lines from Novels – How great can a last line be? I’ve read some of the works on the list and can’t say any are particularly memorable, but here’s an arbitrary list of the top 100 anyway. (PDF)

The World’s Spookiest Weapons – Starting with the A-bomb and working through mind control, crowd control and animal manipulation, this little list illustrates some of the craziest weapons designed or researched in the years since the last war.

Boxhead 2play – While away some moments (hours!) with this mad flash-based zombie fest. Can also be played cooperatively or in deathmatch mode from the same machine.

Daily Links

May 18, 2008 Daily Links
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If it’s good enough for Shatner – Old school computer advertising, as dug out of the back issues of vintage computer magazines. William Shatner, Roger Moore, and the cast of M*A*S*H all offered their images to promote various relics of the golden era of computing.

Is black the new green? – Do websites with black backgrounds use less energy than bright ones? The team from Dialogue Box tackle the issue of green web design and attempt to explode the myths surrounding energy usage and website colours.

Smaller than mp3 – Not content with shrinking music down to mp3 size, researchers at the University of Rochester have formulated a solution to recreate sounds through recreation of the physical attributes of an instrument and its player to store the sounds in files 1,000 times smaller than current mp3 standards.

Ten stupid ideas that earned a million – From pixel advertising to vegetarian wishbones, through HIV-positive dating and glasses for dogs, here’s a list of some of the most stupid ideas to have earned a fortune for their creators. (Russian)

Daily Links

May 6, 2008 Daily Links
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Plugoo – Talk with your site visitors through your favourite instant messenger with this blog plugin. The idea’s a nice one, though there would appear to be plenty of potential for abuse.

Spheers – Fancy downloading your brain? Alright, that’s not quite the idea, but spheers.com, currently in beta, seems to be offering a way of keeping tabs on all that digital information which passes our eyes so we can come back to it later.

Super Cook – A site which offers almost exactly what I wrote about in this post. A few features they could yet implement, but overall a pretty decent site for checking recipes and getting new ideas.

TypeRacer – Nice little game to improve your typing skills. Practice on your own or go head-to-head in a race with other players.

Daily Links

April 9, 2008 Daily Links / Music / Science
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Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 “Eroica” – A wonderful website devoted to one of the most important pieces in Beethoven’s career, and the history of the symphony. Courtesy of Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the website also features works by Copland, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky.

Flash Earth – View the Earth using Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo! Maps and more, and switch between them. The site claims to be experimental and works without official consent, so will not necessarily be around for long.

Tenth Dimension – Confused by string theory? Watch this simple and fascinating video explaining the ten dimensions—but be prepared to have forgotten it all inside of two minutes!

Zamzar – Convert between a good variety of audio, video, image, document and storage file types online for free. This includes videos available on a number of popular websites (e.g. YouTube, Metacafe and the like). The paid for version offers a number of improved features, but even the basic free version allows files of up to 100Mb to be converted, plenty adequate for most file types, though the result is emailed to an address of your choice, which could prove problematic for certain inboxes.

Daily Links

February 9, 2008 Biology / Daily Links
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Book Glutton – Another social internet site, this time designed around the premise that it’s good to read together. The site offers members a chance to form and join reading groups, enabling them to discuss and annotate the book while they read.

ControlC – This website provides a way to save a copy of everything its users ‘copy’ on their own machines, as a way of safeguarding against losing links and information they accidentally overwrite. Not sure how this works with files rather than text being copied, but it claims to be compatible with most major operating systems.

Visible Body – A fascinating look at human anatomy. Free 3d model illustrating the various systems of the body. Sadly currently only works with Internet Explorer.

What Should I Read Next? – Rather limited in scope, it simply does what it says on the tin, suggesting further reading to entered titles. It offers little more than you might get being an Amazon customer, and since this website relies on a small selection of registered users to provide its suggestions, it’s hard to imagine its current database of around 50,000 titles growing too considerably.