Peterbe.com

For those who use last.fm and like to visualize stuff with pretty graphs. For the really curious, here's mine of the last year (15 Mb)

The Fail Blog is funny but sometimes disgusting and borderline sad. Fail Dogs is almost better. A lot of the headlines they put on the pictures just makes it twice as fun. For example this one or this one

Enjoy!

A very sweet result to the Alan Turing petition ("Petition to: apologize for the prosecution of Alan Turing that led to his untimely death.").

It goes to show that there is hope for undoing wrongs in the past. Great work John!

If you met someone from Nestle, Pfizer, Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Dow Chemical or Monsanto in a suit and who is proud of her job, would you punch her in the face? No? But would you pretend that you don't know about the ways of her company?

Eco blogger Eco-Chick has written a great write-up on some of the worlds greediest and least irresponsible companies. A great read if you're one of the millions of people who understand that corporate ownership of the world is a bad thing but don't necessarily know any specific details or examples.

When you're desperate for money you can do crazy things like rob a bank or mug an innocent old lady. But decisions to mug an old lady is 100% yours whereas office workers for irresponsible corporations are usually just a cog in a wheel, and therefore they all blame their destructive practices aren't their own idea or initiative. That is was someone "in upper management who decided". Would you dare to confront those excuses at a dinner party if you met one?

Hard-to-explain-type-of-online-art

"A table of countries lists every country and whether they drive on the left side of the road or the right side of the road."

I've been looking for something like this but thought I had to find an external VCAL file to import into my Google Calendar. Apparently Google Calendar has a whole bunch of useful public calendars. For example, UK Holidays.

To enable any of these click the little down arrow next to the word "Add" on the left hand side under the list of all calendars you have enabled.

The rest is easy and needs no explanation. I did however spot one "bug" or perhaps I just confused myself. When I went in the second time to take a screenshot of the list of public calendars available it had mistakenly unselected the ones I selected a few seconds ago. Perhaps a caching problem.

Typeracer is a game where you're competing with other typers by trying to write a text as quick as possible. One race takes about 1 minute.

Not only is it very well done and extremely "educational" but it's also fun. Unlike other games of the same genre you're not judged by your speed and accuracy. In Typeracer it's all about speed. Your mistakes is your problem since they stop your speed. It's hard to explain but it just works great. Play it and you'll see.

Having played this I realise that my spelling is absolutely terrible. I've grown to depend on the spellchecker in Firefox and when I'm doing programming I don't have to spell particularly much because I use auto-complete. At the moment I average around 55 words per minute which means I win quite a few races but still far far away from the high scores which start on 100+. Gotto to practice more!

I have for a long time been excited about getting one of those SSD drives to boost my laptop. Especially one of those SanDisk 40,000 RPM drop in replacement drives. Skimming around on YouTube there seem to be lots of videos showing how fast the new SSDs are at booting the operating system compared to HDDs.

BUT! These comments caught me attention:

chinesemilkman
"I've worked with those newfangled SSD Macs at my student computing support job and if memory serves, they run applications slower than your standard HDD Macs. I doubt any SDD storage product would run audio and visual as fast as a SATA II. Maybe one day they will optimize performance but in actuality, I have my doubts that any current SDD out performs top of the line HDDs in performance. AND COMPARING BOOTUP SPEED IS NOT A RELIABLE PERFORMANCE TEST! Lame marketing gimmick is what it is."

johnnyfast
"Interesting how NONE of the SSD tests show a real world multi-tasking environment.
I have an OCZ SSD 64 and it totally fails, as soon as my PC is doing 2 or more read/write multi tasks I get horrendous lock ups. It is going back to the shop as unfit for purpose.
SSD is a one trick (read speed) pony."

I mean, they "promise" speed, higher durability and lower power consumption. I was ready to almost accept the extreme prices and the disappointingly small sizes but if speed is only in boot up and single operations then I'd rather spend my money on RAM or CPU or something.

If you zoom in enough you can also see the label on Dick Cheney's wheelchair. I think we'll see more of these mega megapixel shots with Google maps like navigation.