A stub is a short article which rounds up little bits of information that I’ve found throughout the week. These may be web or computer related, or they may be more general things. It’s more a personal log than an actual article, reminding me of things that I may’ve forgotten, but some of it may be of help to someone else!
This week has been a particularly productive, but the fact that it’s the last week in February already is a little startling!
This week:
- Scientists have found a method to sober mice up from inebriation using a combination of enzymes. Incredible and slightly worrying as to what will be done with it now!
- Nothing to do with technology, and a lot to do with pure determination – this woman can legally pilot a plane despite being armless.
- Quite simply bizarre, Amazon sold out of these replica UAV predator drones after “parody reviews” were posted, suggesting the toy was good to “hone children’s killing skills”. Looks like people really do respect reviews on Amazon.
- Bill Gates calls the Windows Phone strategy “inadequate”, which certainly makes me wonder if Steve Ballmer will still be quite so smug in future…
- A strange story all around, the signer Chubby Check has sued HP who allowed an app with the same name, onto their Palm OS app store. The app purports to estimate one’s penis size. Clearly there’s very little else to do if you have a Palm OS based device!
- With Burger King, Jeep and Jeremy Clarkson all suffering hacked Twitter accounts, it could only get more bizarre when high-profile hacker collective, Anonymous, also had it’s account hacked. The usual call to strengthen passwords followed! Hopefully a better, less human reliant system of authentication can be decided on to get past all these “hacks”.
- Moving on to more legitimate hacks, I only just found a new set of .htaccess rules which will help you defend your site from common exploits and bad URLs, I’d advise you use it!
- An article which turned out to link to a rather half-baked alternative to GPS, but it did raise a more interesting idea of an alternative, open solution to global positioning.
- I was incredibly impressed by this video from Ubuntu, briefly demonstrating the Ubuntu tablet OS. The OS turned out to be the beginnings of a single, unified OS for all devices. While this descriptions sounds disappointedly like Windows 8, the video shows an impressive transformation of the UI (which Mark Shuttleworth describes as less jarring than Windows 8) depending on the device/situation that it’s used. I certainly wouldn’t be averse to this kind of unified OS!
- An article from Wired, originally asking “Can Google Glass ever look cool?”. The article actually touches on a far more important point, that our concentration is already adversely affected by mobile phones in our hands, but if it was in front of our eyes all the time, the situation would be magnitudes worse.
- For those interested in DB flavours, Slashdot submitter, Travis Brown, evaluates DynamoDB and MongoDB.
- Interestingly, it looks like Apple has been working on a touchscreen watch since 2011! With Pebble now lurking about, they better move fast!
- In Beta #37 had special guest, Salah Esmaeili. He spoke about producing a 3rd-party Twitter client for Android, during a time when Twitter has strongly advised against creating 3rd-part clients, and coming from a designers background and learning to program from scratch. This led to some very interesting discussion points around learning to code by yourself, programming for Android, programming for both tablets and mobiles and working around the Twitter API 1.1, which changes and, in some cases, restricts apps such as his own. 5By5 | In Beta #37: Speak Designers’ Language
- And finally, this simply looks very interesting, a pen which creates 3D structures, with fast hardening plastic from the looks of things! They’ve surpassed their goal by a huge margin, but there’s still time to back it if you wish!
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