History – Page 4

Merlin!

17/07/2009

I wish I still had mine. :(

viaÂ Giz.

Witchfinders Direct

21/05/2009

From CBBC. Given the dearth of decent original material on “adult” TV, perhaps we should all start working shift and stay at home during the day.

Secret Billionaire: The Chuck Feeney Story

12/05/2009

If you get a spare hour in front of a computer between now and May 26, this RTE documentary about Chuck Feeney is well worth watching. I rarely last more than 5 minutes watching video on a monitor, but this held my attention the entire way through. An incredible man.

Stylophone

22/10/2008

I’m so old…

Colossus Is Back Baby!

17/11/2007

No, I haven’t put all that weight back on again. This is the Colossus that cracked German ciphers during WWII, rebuilt over an incredible 14 years in Bletchley Park. Valves an’ all!

I’m going to London in February to buy a whole new set of clothes, so poor old T is going to be dragged all the way to Milton Keynes. :)

Jakob Nielsen’s Dishonesty

26/08/2007

I’ve always disliked Nielsen’s holie-than-thou attitude and painful-to-look-at website, so I’m only too delighted to highlight his admission that in 1997 he suppressed research that demonstrated that users respond to dialog-box style ads on websites.

Now hold your horses before you dive in to defend his honour. Yes he’s admitted it now, and there’s no denying that that’s a step forward. But ask yourself, when did you start admiring him, recently or ten years ago? Would you now, with the same information?

Neilsen is a dinosaur. Move on people.

Did you know?

10/08/2007

That the phrase “By Hook or by Crook” originated when William the Conqueror swore that he would take Waterford by Hook Head to the east of the harbour, or Crook head to the west. I didn’t (until a few weeks ago).

World’s Smallest Park

18/07/2007

Click the image for a Wikipedia explanation. I love the idea of the minature ferris wheel being delivered by a regular-sized crane!

From Google Earth Community, via Digg.

IBM 704

11/06/2007

Shorpy: This network of black magnetic beads, smaller than a postage stamp, is one of a number of input-output “memory” units in the new “704” electronic calculator built by International Business Machines. This particular “memory” unit of the 704 instantaneously strips all information off a slow-moving punch card, stores the data momentarily in the form of magnetic charges, and passes along the individual items, one at a time, to a lightning-fast calculating section, which can handle around 10 million operations an hour, theoretically replacing 3,000 hand-operated adding machines. Orders are in for over thirty 704’s, which I.B.M. will rent at some $20,000 a month each.

Creation Museum’s ‘Adam’ runs porn site

11/06/2007

You couldn’t make it up.

WTOL-TV Toledo: The man picked by the Creation Museum to play Adam leads quite a different life outside the Garden of Eden. Records show that Eric Linden owns a pornographic web site called “Bedroom Acrobat.”

Verbo.se

Category: History