Verbo.se

John Underkoffler does Minority Report

15/06/2010

The reaction of the audience when he starts waving about is priceless. Once again, this is a long video (for the web), but keep going, the demos get even better as it goes on.

Open Source Vuvuzela Killers

15/06/2010

This is why I love open source. Vuvuzela’s bugging the shit out of you while you’re trying to watch the match on your comp? Start VLC with this command line, or stick it in a batch file:

vlc –audio-filter=param_eq –param-eq-f1=233 –param-eq-f2=466 –param-eq-f3=932 –param-eq-gain1=-20 –param-eq-gain2=-20 –param-eq-gain3=-20 –param-eq-lowf=100 –param-eq-lowgain=15 –param-eq-q1=10 –param-eq-q2=10 –param-eq-q3=10

Or in Mplayer:

mplayer -af an=1:0.5:0.5, sinesuppress=233:0.01, sinesuppress=466:0.01, sinesuppress=932:0.01, sinesuppress=1864:0.01, sinesuppress=232:0.01, sinesuppress=465:0.01, sinesuppress=931:0.01, sinesuppress=1863:0.01, sinesuppress=234:0.01, sinesuppress=467:0.01, sinesuppress=933:0.01, sinesuppress=1865:0.01

Via Ghacks.

Japanese Scooters

03/06/2010

One of these might distract me from the Ninja 250R T disapproves of. :)

Ford Start Concept

26/05/2010

The first Ka came out in 1996 and stayed in production for 12 years. This is the StreetKa variant.

SportKa by Flickr user CoreForce
SportKa by Flickr user CoreForce

It’s a Marmite car, you either love them or hate them, there’s no middle ground. I fall into the former category, despite my general dislike of Ford; probably because of that in fact, since they go against the general bland Ford grain. Ok, it’s a chick’s car, but so are Minis and Beetles old and new, dinky little Alfas, and rocketship Daihatsu GTtis, and you still want one of those, right?

In 2008, they replaced it with this… thing:

MK2 Ford Ka by Wikipedia user Thomas Doerfer
MK2 Ford Ka by Wikipedia user Thomas Doerfer

Now that is a Ford. The one above is a trendy, sporty version, and it’s still crap. It’s like the inbred bastard child of a Yaris and a Suzuki Ignis. It’s like a MK1 Ka that was shoehorned into a slot between two bread vans by a bad driver*. The first car I drove was an 850cc 3 cylinder narrow-ass two-slots-on-top toaster of a car called a Daihatsu Domino, and it was still cooler than that thing.

I don’t know what the average lifecycle of a car model is these days, but with midlife refreshes it has to be at least 6-8 years, meaning it has another 4-6 years in production. And let’s be honest, you’re not going to improve this narrow, boring exercise in drab with a midlife refresh; unless of course it’s performed with a mallet.

And then, this year, some whizkid in a design studio came up with this:

Ford Start Concept via Autoblog
Ford Start Concept via Autoblog

Again, this is just two years after the MK2 rolled out. What I want to know now is, given that this has to have been rolling around in said whizkid’s brain for a while now, why the fuck didn’t they skip the usual concept bullshit, and just build that? That ain’t just a chick’s car like, anyone’ll buy it. It’s perfect for the current market.

But hey, that’s Ford for you.

* Yaris’ and bad drivers, there’s a Venn diagram. Might as well add Skoda and 3 series drivers in for good measure.

Ireland To Take 6 Months+ To Launch A Website

26/05/2010

We sell ourselves as a big IT player, but we act like Farmer Joe when it comes to actually implementing stuff. In fact that’s an insult to Farmer Joe, there are plenty of farmers out there who could or have got a website up and running in less than a month.

BreakingNews.ie: A new national website dedicated to promoting Ireland as an ideal place for business, tourism, culture and education is set to come on stream next year.

My company can get a starter website with content management up in an hour, why can’t Gov.ie do the same thing and build it out as needs be. We’re kinda in trouble now, you know?

I’d love to know who’s going to be implementing this, and at what cost. A big player no doubt, offshored, for a ridiculous price that will overrun. Presumably they’ll be hand-crafting each pixel out of pixie dust.

Scene from an Airport

24/05/2010

With Bruce Schneier and an unnamed TSA officer.

I’ve gotten to the front of the security line and handed the TSA officer my ID and ticket.

TSA Officer: (Looks at my ticket. Looks at my ID. Looks at me. Smiles.)

Me: (Smiles back.)

TSA Officer: (Looks at my ID. Looks at me. Smiles.)

Me: (Tips hat. Smiles back.)

TSA Officer: A beloved name from the blogosphere.

Me: And I always thought that I slipped through these lines anonymously.

TSA Officer: Don't worry. No one will notice. This isn't the sort of job that rewards competence, you know.

Me: Have a good day.

Google Caught Rotten in Germany

15/05/2010

Mark Suckerberg isn’t the only one that doesn’t respect your privacy you know. Do No Evil my hole.

Official Google Blog: Nine days ago the data protection authority (DPA) in Hamburg, Germany asked to audit the WiFi data that our Street View cars collect for use in location-based products like Google Maps for mobile, which enables people to find local restaurants or get directions. His request prompted us to re-examine everything we have been collecting, and during our review we discovered that a statement made in a blog post on April 27 was incorrect.

In that blog post, and in a technical note sent to data protection authorities the same day, we said that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.

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