r3dux.org

As seems to be the way of many engineers good enough to work for Google – if they don’t know the answer to a question, they find out! Even if they have to build a potentially lethal contraption to do so!

Warning: The music accompanying the video is the Riverdance. Srsly. Sharply jabbing both ears with a knitting needle will fix this problem. Or hitting mute. Whichever

Who knew?

• Sugru is new silicon-based putty which will adhere to just about anything, and can handle temperatures between -60C and 180C. I wouldn’t start slapping it around willy-nilly like the site’s suggesting because a.) It looks duff b.) Just no, alright?, but it’s gotta be useful stuff to have around…
• How responsive is your ISPs DNS? You might find that some (free) third-party DNS servers resolve your queries quicker, and hence speed up your browsing experience. Find out for sure with the platform-independent DNS checking tool namebench – it only takes a couple of minutes to run the scan, and I think I got about a 30% look-up speed improvement by changing my DNS servers to the ones namebench recommended.
• Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. So now you know. Not that I particularly feel I need to learn yet another programming language, but it’s interesting to see what can be done quickly and easily with it, and you could always translate any bits of functionality you liked into your language of choice…
• Ubuntu doesn’t ship with a system-wide graphic equaliser. So here is a system-wide graphics equaliser for Ubuntu. Can’t really argue with that, can you?
• XBox Live Arcade is changing to be more like the PS3 Home service, apparently. Looks interesting.
• Gravity could be caused not by mass, but by information, if this fella’s right: First article. Second article. (articles are well explained for us non-rocket-scientists, so don’t be afraid )
• If you’re interested in graphics, eurogamer has a spiffy-ass article on anti-aliasing with some great before/after shots and discussion of different methods strengths and weaknesses.
• MakeUseOf.com has absolutely stacks of great tips, tricks and useful knowledge about all sorts of things. I’ve signed up to the daily newsletter, and wouldn’t want to go back to life without it – they really do have some very useful articles. If anything, I’d say the only downside to the newsletter is that you’ll want to spend some time reading and experimenting with things every day, which can turn out to be a bit of a time-vampire. Truly excellent stuff.