Whats your ISP like?

Post the speeds you get from your ISP. Feel free to link images from speedtest or an image host.

Heres mine. Not that fast :(

P.s I'm going on holiday soon and wont be able to post for a bit.

The all new Apple MacBook Air

Apple have just announced the new MackBook Air. This bad boy is in essence a cross between the old Macbook Air and the iPad, taking the best of both worlds. Benefits from the iPad? Instant on... great battery life, amazing standby time... solid state storage... and it's thinner and lighter. It's 0.68-inches thick at its thickest, 0.11-inches at its thinnest, and weighs 2.9 pounds (Again its shockingly thinner than the the old MacBook Air which was 0.76-inches thick and weighed 3 pounds). Like previously the new MacBook Air has a unibody construction, but now comes with one of those big new glass trackpads. They're also sticking with a 13.3-inch screen, running at a 1440 x 900 resolution (with an 11.6-inch "little brother" to boot). There's SSD storage, a 1.86GHz or 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo processor (the same ones available on existing MacBook Airs), GeForce 320m graphics, and 2GB of RAM standard. Apple claims the battery life tests offer 7 hours of "wireless web" and 30 days of "standby." Prices start at $1,299 for 128GB and $1,599 for 256GB of storage; they're available today at Apple  website.

Kitty Megapost!

Video of the Day

A video of a C-17 Airdrop: 4 humvees and 50 paratroopers. Badass much!

Top 5 Unusual Uses For Beer

Beer is one of the most sought after beverages in the modern world, after plain old water of course. However, beer is not just good for drinking, you can do so much with a good bottle of beer! Below are 5 alternative and unusual uses of beer, that is if you have any to spare!! If you have any other tips on other uses of beer, be sure to put it in the comments.

1. Wash Your Hair

Beer “shampoo” can add luster and body to dull limp hair. It is also a much more natural alternative to store-bought shampoos which contain a lot of chemicals. Just mix one can of beer with a raw egg and use it as you would use a normal shampoo. It was quite common in days gone by to use raw eggs for shampoo – it even lathers up like the chemical stuff. Try it – I am sure you will be pleasantly surprised. Just keep in mind that the shampoo will go off if you don’t use it within a couple of days. This is probably best as a once-a-month special treatment. You can also use beer on its own as a conditioner – rinse your hair with it, let it dry off, then rinse it off.

2. Naturally Remove Slugs

Slugs are a terrible pest in a garden – particularly if you are growing for eating. Instead of using chemicals like DDT on your veges, bury a small saucer up to its lip in the garden and put fresh beer in it each day. The slugs will be attracted to the smell, get drunk and drown. Be sure to refresh the beer daily. With a little luck you should have a saucer full of slugs and healthy looking cabbages!

3. Marinate Meat

Beer makes an excellent marinade. It really doesn’t matter what meat you are preparing – it will benefit almost all types from a few hours (the longer the better) in a marinade of beer. You can get really adventurous too – add any flavors you like to the beer – even things like marmalade or jam. A more common addition would be soy sauce or other Asian sauces. If you are marinating pork, you might want to add some chunks of pineapple and pineapple juice with some ginger for a sweet and sour result.

4. Soak in it 

Beer is an excellent skin conditioner. Next time you want to have a long soak in the bath, tip in a good can of dark beer before you hop in and just soak in it! This is a nice alternative to adding salt crystals (which soften water), but I see no reason that you couldn’t combine both for a super luxurious bath. Just don’t be tempted to drink the bathwater!

5. Make Beersicles for Summer

Hot blustery day outside? Never fear, beer is here! Instead of sickly sweet popsicles that won't really quench your thirst anyway, feel free to use the same popsicle maker for beersicles as the perfect accompaniment on a summer's day.

Trapped Chilean Miners

In case you haven't heard, 33 men have been trapped over two months down a mine in Chile. They have been trapped deep beneath the desert floor after a partial collapse that blocked the mine exit, surviving longer than anyone has before under similar circumstances.

For weeks the men were feared dead. But on August 22 they attached a note to a drill bit that had broken through to the chamber where they had taken shelter, saying they were all alive, well and awaiting rescue. That day is [finally] almost upon them. Below is an image that pretty much summarizes this unfortunate event, including the rescue plan. God bless them!

Click in the image to enlarge.

5 Web Alternatives to Popular Desktop Software + Video of the Day

Sorry for the lack of posting for the last couple of days!Firstly I will post about some useful web apps and then finish of with a video of the day.

Web apps these days have become so powerful and useful that in some cases, they’ve begun to replace desktop software.Desktop programs are great and all, but they don’t provide the same benefits as web apps that make use of cloud computing. With most web apps, you only need a browser and an internet connection to access all your data online. That beats having to install annoying programs any day. To give you a better sense of how useful web apps have become, below is a list of web tools and apps that can very well replace some desktop programs. As you will see web applications have come a long way, and hopefully you take the time to try them all out. You’ll be surprised how well they work. Without further ado, here are 5 great web alternatives to the popular desktop programs we all love.

P.S Is anyone else having problems with uploading images? I had to upload these pics through an imagehost...

Aviary

http://www.aviary.com/

The Aviary web suite offers powerful tools that allow you to edit images, vectors, and even audio! Take a look at the huge list of the tools included in their suite:

• Phoenix: Image Editor
• Toucan: Color Editor
• Myna: Audio Editor
• Peacock: Effects Editor
• Raven: Vector Editor
• Falcon: Image Markup
• Roc: Music Creator.

JayCut
http://jaycut.com/

JayCut is a very easy to use and powerful online video editor. With Jaycut, you can create videos with the same tools used in desktop programs. Add clips, transitions, audio, effects, and more with their simple UI. When you finish editing a video, you can choose to download it or export it directly to YouTube. Export up to 20 videos a month with 2GB of storage under a free plan, or pay monthly for a better plan.

Zamzar
http://zamzar.com/

Instead of downloading dozens of different programs to convert a file, you can always use the Zamzar, the free online file conversion tool. Can’t open a crucial .docx or .pptx file and your boss is screaming in your ear? No problem, just upload and convert your files using Zamzar. Zamzar supports dozens of image, document, video, and music formats and is the only tool you will ever need to convert files.

WobZip

http://www.wobzip.org/

Have you ever tried to open a compressed file only to find out you don’t have the right unzipping software to do the job? In comes WobZip, an online tool that helps you uncompress your files. It supports a variety of compression formats, including the popular ZIP, RAR, and 7z formats. You can upload a zipped file from your computer or direct WobZip to a URL. The best part? WobZip will scan the files using BitDefender to make sure there isn’t a nasty virus lurking around.

Meebo

http://www.meebo.com/

With Meebo, you can chat with your friends from anywhere as long as you have a browser and an internet connection. Meebo is an online tool that allows you to login to any major IM network, including AIM, MSN, GTalk, and Facebook. You don’t even need to create an account, just input your IM information and you’re ready to go. If you take the 20 seconds to set up a Meebo account, you can login to multiple accounts at once. This sure beats downloading and managing three IM programs at once, doesn’t it?

Video of the Day

How to solve a Rubik's cube in 20 moves

Heres are nice little infographic on solving a rubiks cube as well as some interesting info on the toy we have all come to love. It takes me far more than 20 moves to solve it :( Anyone able to solve rubiks cube and if so, any special technique?

 

Watching Other People Use a Computer

The Mysterious Histories of Those @#$%ing Computer Symbols

Power

As far back back as WWII engineers used the binary system to label individual power buttons, toggles and rotary switches: a 1 meant "on," and a 0 meant off. In 1973, the International Electrotechnical Commission vaguely codified a broken circle with a line inside it as "standby power state," and sticks to that story even now. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, however, decided that was too vague, and altered the definition to simply mean power. 


Bluetooth

You've probably heard the story of 10th Century Danish King, Harald Blåtand, as it relates to Bluetooth, right? He was renowned connoisseur of blueberries; at least one of this teeth was permanently stained blue; What you might not know is that the Bluetooth symbol is actually a combination of the two runes that represent Harald's initials. It just so happens the first Bluetooth receptor also had a "teeth-like" shape, and was-you guessed it-blue. But the symbolic interplay doesn't end there. As the Bluetooth SIG notes, Blåtand "was instrumental in uniting warring factions in parts of what are now Norway, Sweden, and Denmark - just as Bluetooth technology is designed to allow collaboration between differing industries such as the computing, mobile phone, and automotive markets."

USB

Created as part of the USB 1.0 spec, the USB icon was drawn to resemble Neptune's Trident, the mighty Dreizack. In lieu of the pointed triangles at the tip of the three-pronged spear, the USB Promoters decided to alter the shapes to a triangle, square and circle. This was done to signify all the different peripherals that could be attached using the standard. 

Play

While the Play/Pause symbols aren't native to computers, they've made their way onto keyboards, media players (real and virtual), and every other device capable of playing audio or video. Unfortunately, neither the right-pointing triangle nor the double pause bars seem to have a definitive origin. They first appeared as tape transport symbols on reel-to-reel tape decks during the mid-1960s. In some cases, they were accompanied by the (double triangle) rewind and fast forward symbols. The direction of the play arrow indicated the direction the tape would move.

Pause

As far as the pause symbol goes, many have noted it resembles an the notation for an open connection on an electrical schematic. Some say it is simply a stop symbol with a chunk carved out of its center. In musical notation, the caesura indicates a pause.

At

The @ has been known by many names: the snail (France and Italy), the little mouse (China), the monkey's tail (Germany). In 1971, a Bolt, Beranek & Newman  programmer Raymond Tomlinson decided to insert the symbol between computer network addresses to separate the user from the terminal. Prior to Tomlinson's use, the @ also graced the keyboard of the American Underwood in 1885 as an accounting shorthand symbol meaning "at the rate of." Go back even further and things start to get hazy. Some suggest that @ has its origins in the sixth century, when monks adopted it as a better way of wirting the word ad-Latin for "at" or "toward"-that was not so easily confused with AD, the designation for Anno Domini, or the the years after the death of Christ.

Sleep

People were confused by "the standby state." It seemed counter-intuitive for an electronic device to be neither on nor off. So, after the IEEE nicked the ICE's standby button, it decided some rechristening was in order. The governing body re-named standby mode "sleep," to invoke the state where humans are neither on nor off. Today, a crescent moon is the de facto sleep state symbol on devices in the US and Europe. Its metaphorical power is undeniable! Travel to Japan, though, and you'll probably see the occasional Zzzz button.

Ethernet

Despite being "invented" many years prior, the thing we now recognize as the Ethernet port symbol was actually designed by IBM's David Hill. According to Hill, the symbol was part of a set of symbols that were all meant to depict the various local area network connections available at the time. The array of blocks, which are purposefully non-hierarchical, each represent computers/terminals. While Hill makes no specific mention of Bob Metcalfe's earliest Ethernet sketches, it's easy to see how the modern symbol uses them for inspiration.

Firewire

Back in 1995, a small group at Apple-the main developer of FireWire-set about designing a symbol that could accurately reflect the new technology they were working on. Originally intended as serial alternative to SCSI, FireWire's main allure was that it promised high-speed connectivity for digital audio and video equipment. So designers opted for a symbol with three prongs, representing video, audio and data. Initially, the symbol was red, but was later altered to yellow for unknown reasons.

Command

What do Swedish campgrounds  and overuse of the Apple logo have in common? A lot, according to Andy Hertzfeld of the original Mac development team. While working with other team members to translate menu commands directly to the keyboard, Hertzfeld and his team decided to add a special function key. The idea was simple: When pressed in combination with other keys, this "Apple key" would select the corresponding menu command. Jobs hated it-or more precisely the symbol used to represent the button-which was yet another picture of the Apple logo. Hertzfeld recalls his reaction: "There are too many Apples on the screen! It's ridiculous! We're taking the Apple logo in vain!" A hasty redesign followed, in which bitmap artist Susan Kare poured through in international symbol dictionary and settled on one floral symbol that in Sweden, indicated a noteworthy attraction in a campground. Alternately known as the Gorgon loop, the splat, the infinite loop, and, in the Unicode standard, a "place of interest sign," the command symbol has remained a mainstay on Apple keyboards to this day.

SBBOD

This terror is known by many names: the hypnowheel of doom, the spinning pizza, the pinwheel of death, the SBBOD (spinning beach ball of death). Apple officially calls it "spinning wait cursor," but most Mac users hail it with a simple expletive. It first appeared in Apple's OSX and continues to indicate that an application is not responding to system events. As many have noted, the SBBOD is actually an evolution of the wristwatch "wait" cursor that the company first used in early versions of the Mac OS. While its design origins remain mysterious, Apple likely dropped the watch as it reminded users of the time passing as the program remained perpetually hung up. Despite this, the modern iteration has proved only one thing though: it's entirely possible to despise a pretty, hypnotic spinning wheel. There is also word that it is linked the spinning magneto-optical disk from which NeXTstep OS and applications loaded.

Real Life Street Fighter Moves

Sorry for the lack of a post yesterday, got really caught up, with life!! Here's a little vid that just makes you go daym!