News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
Researchers have determined you can effectively sanitize a used sponge by microwaving it. Note that it’s very important to wet the sponge first, as microwaving a dry one can cause a fire.
Link: http://www.livescience.com/…
(via Lifehacker)
Back in 1980, an entire Louisiana lake drained into an underground salt mine, sucking in the surrounding landscape, 11 barges, and saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico. The freshwater lake, with a maximum depth of 10 feet, was transformed into a very deep (1300 foot) saltwater lake. Nine of the barges resurfaced after the lake stopped draining. The video has some good footage, and more information is available at Wikipedia.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/…
(via Neatorama)
Music producers are outdoing each other to see who can provide the loudest music CDs (at the expense of dynamic range), and anyone with an mp3 library knows the annoyance of having one song at a good volume while the next blasts you out of your seat. The linked article gives information on how to normalize your entire library with MP3Gain, a free utility. An advantage of MP3Gain is that it uses statistical analysis rather than peak normalization.
Link: http://lifehacker.com/…
Here’s a neat little site that gives information about the date you were born (or any other date, for that matter).
Link: http://www.kakophone.com/…
(via Nothing To Do With Arbroath)
Windows Vista will be released to the public this Tuesday (Jan. 30th). Early adopters beware, as there are five different versions (well, actually six). The “lesser” versions are purposely crippled to leave out various features. The linked article is a bit long-winded and technical, so I’ll summarize.
Windows Home Basic is for grandma and grandpa. Anyone even close to being a power user will want Windows Home Premium. On the business side, there’s Vista Business and Vista Enterprise. They’re quite similar, with Enterprise having a few more esoteric features. The business versions have more advanced networking support, while home versions are more multimedia-oriented. Finally there’s Windows Ultimate, which has all of the available features.
Link: http://www.eweek.com/…
(via Lifehacker)
The upcoming change to daylight savings will require updates to operating systems, programs, programming language libraries, BIOSes, and a good number of consumer electronics products. Microsoft, however, has announced they will not patch older versions of Windows. There is an unofficial patch as well as an official Microsoft workaround. The linked article from Microsoft does not mention Windows 95, 98, 98SE, or Me, but I’m assuming they won’t be updated because their support has ended.
Link: http://www.microsoft.com/…
(via Slashdot)
A grocery chain in Rochester, NY allows you to email a birthday cake greeting, which will then be printed on the cake by a (presumably) automated system. One cake had a message in both English and Italian, and this apparently messed up the system, causing several lines of computer code to be printed on the cake. I’m not sure why an Italian message would cause this mistake, but that seems to be the general consensus of why it happened. Check out the linked article for a picture of the cake.
With a few exceptions, I try not to use Chad’s News as an editorial platform. But this statement by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales absolutely astounded me. It is wrong, wrong, wrong. (And keep in mind that I voted for this administration.)
Link: http://sfgate.com/…
Researchers tested 45 Irish banknotes and found traces of cocaine on all of them. Assuming this also applies to most American high-denomination currency, the finding is especially significant for people in the US—because detecting traces of drugs on currency is sufficient cause for law enforcement to seize (and keep) the money via a process known as forfeiture. Simply put, don’t carry large amounts of cash.
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Nothing To Do With Arbroath)
Greg Marshall and Adrienne Foley were getting married, but they couldn’t agree whose name should be changed. So they resolved it via a game of miniature golf—the loser would take the winner’s last name.
This college student packed three flour-filled condoms in her luggage for a trip home. Unsurprisingly, she was detained, arrested, and held in jail for three weeks until tests determined it was only flour. Note that the linked article doesn’t give all of the information. Security officials did a field test that came back positive, so they did have cause to arrest her.
Previously the fodder of first-person-shooter video games, railguns are becoming a reality. The US Navy is actively developing railguns with an expected range of 200-250 miles, more than ten times that of current 5-inch guns. They expect to use the railgun in place of the (much more expensive) Tomahawk missile. This is not just a vague concept—they’ve already developed and tested a prototype at 1/8th power. We can expect to see them deployed in about 13 years.
Link: http://fredericksburg.com/…
(via Engadget)
