News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
The eRazer™ is a neat little gadget that allows one to directly erase a hard drive without involving a computer. There are several models, with options for single- or multi-pass erasure, 2.5″ or 3.5″ drives, and IDE or SATA interfaces.
Here’s an unintended consequence of daylight saving time. A woman had twins in the early morning of Nov. 4th. The first one was born at 1:32am, and the second at 2:06am—but the clock had turned back at 2am, so the second was officially born at 1:06am. Which makes her the oldest. Or does it?
Link: http://www.wral.com/…
(via Neatorama)
During US naval exercises in the Pacific, an undetected Chinese submarine surfaced within torpedo range of the battle group’s aircraft carrier. Needless to say, this was -not- supposed to be possible.
Link: http://www.clevelandleader.com/…
(via Slashdot)
The latest issue of Popular Science magazine has the best of what’s new for 2007. Here are a few items that caught my attention:
Using GPUs to solve complex problems – Some problems require massive amounts of fairly simple calculations. Turns out that the large number of processing units in a GPU, sometimes over a hundred, is the poor man’s supercomputer. Here’s a related Slashdot article.
Commercial holographic storage is a reality – Holographic storage has been in the works for some time, but it looks like it’s finally becoming a commercial reality. Pretty expensive, though. Chad’s News, of course, has been on top of this subject for years.
No-stink, one-coat paint – No smell and no primer or base coats required. And it’s not that expensive either.
A sensor in the ear detects tongue motion to control a wheelchair – This sounds much, much better than blowing in a straw, although I’m not sure that 97% accuracy is good enough.
A New Yorker saw a woman on the subway and fell in love instantly, but he was unable to introduce himself. So he posted a description on the internet, and before too long had managed to find out who she was. This just goes to show the viral power of the internet.
Link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/…
(via Kim Komando)
Saturday was the 32nd anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald (made famous by Gordon Lightfoot). The video has some neat clips of the ship—I had no idea it was so big.
You have to be something of a network expert to understand this video, but that doesn’t make it any less hilarious.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/…
(via The Presurfer)
PhotoRec is a free utility that recovers files from corrupted flash drives, memory cards, and CD-ROMs. It can be downloaded here.
Link: http://www.cgsecurity.org/…
(via Lifehacker)
Toshiba has fired a salvo in the HD format war with an HD-DVD player that’s selling for $99, while Sony’s Blu-ray devices are going for hundreds more. Sony, however, is still getting a boost from the Blu-ray players embedded in its PS3 game consoles. Who’s going to win? Stay tuned for more updates.
Link: http://www.videobusiness.com/…
(via Engadget)
Some of these (perfectly timed) photos make me cringe.
Link: http://sawse.com/…
(via digg)
This woman hid her car and claimed it was stolen, not realizing that it had LoJack installed.
Link: http://www.signonsandiego.com/…
(via The Consumerist)
There are many sites that will calculate your connection speed, but I like this one. It gives statistics for upload, download, and ping, and it also allows you to select from servers worldwide.
Link: http://speedtest.net/
