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01 Jun 2010 10:41

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Tech: These colorful blocks represent the fastest supercomputers

  • This may be one of the coolest infographics we’ve ever seen. This interactive work splits the relative speed of a bunch of supercomputers up a number of ways – by speed, by OS, by country – and looks awesome. Linux pretty much owns this market, by the way, and IBM and Intel have their fingers in the mix the most, although AMD, HP and Cray hold their own. source

31 May 2010 21:57

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Tech: WHOA: Pulse is officially the coolest iPad news-reader, ever

  • We want to have babies with this RSS reader. OK, maybe not babies, but definitely some sort of spawn. Our statistics meet your cool little boxes in a dark room somewhere, and things might happen. After all, you’re my wonderwall. (Thanks TechCrunch for the tip. This $3.99 pile of awesome, created by a bunch of recent Stanford grads, is totally worth it.) source

31 May 2010 21:42

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U.S.: The dude in this photo has his own personal lobbyist

Rodney Anderson is a cool dude. A mortgage broker, he realized that some of his clients weren’t able to buy homes because of old medical bills. His lobbyist is fixing that. source

23 May 2010 11:48

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Tech: GPS in need of an upgrade, and it’s gonna cost a couple bucks

  • $8 billion to upgrade the widely used geo-navigation system source
  • before The system had a margin of error of about 20 feet – OK for driving, bad for walking a city street.
  • after After the upgrade, the system will be able to get within an arm’s length of the location. Whoa, cool!
  • » Not just for nav: It’s used for all sorts of purposes, including tracking financial transactions from ATMs and stock trades. In 2007, when the system was knocked offline in San Diego, cell phones and hospital paging systems stopped working. In other words, the technology, which currently uses 24 satellites to do its dirty work, is pretty useful.

20 May 2010 01:06

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Music: (Sine) Wave of the future: Multitouch musical instruments

  • what roger linn can do Linn has created a cool new musical instrument that plays music on a touchscreen in a pretty innovative way. The organization (in chromatic scale) is key to this setup being fairly easy to play. The downside: Amazon bought the technology Linn used to make the device.

  • What Bebot can do It’s actually kind of reminiscent of an iPhone app called Bebot, which allows you to play a touch-sensitive synth in a similar fashion. It doesn’t use a scale in the way Linn’s awesome instrument does, but it does have a cool robot who sings your tunes. Hooray!

17 May 2010 22:16

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Culture: If nothing else, “Iron Man 2” as cool costumes. How were they made?

Both Iron Man and Whiplash are wearing armor suits created using top-of-the-line 3D printing technology. It’s not CGI, but it’s damn awesome. source

27 Apr 2010 23:11

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Offbeat: ChatRoulette’s second celebrity: Speed illustrator Paz Bernstein?

  • While Merton was getting all of the attention, talented illustrator Paz Bernstein was hopping on ChatRoulette and drawing people live, on the fly, using a Wacom tablet. The fact that these illos are so well-done in such a short amount of time speaks highly of his abilities. And hey, now that Merton’s kinda faded a bit, maybe you can have a chance to shine, Paz. Oh, check out the dude’s portfolio. It’s pretty good and wide-ranging. source
 

24 Apr 2010 16:27

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Offbeat: MacGyver or The Dude? Who’s more awesome? Let’s compare


  • MacGyver, for reals Richard Dean Anderson finds himself in crazy situations which he solves using random everyday objects because he’s MacGyver and he’s awesome or something.

  • The Dude, for reals The Dude, or His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing, is kind of the same thing, except with more stoner and more Lebowski.

14 Apr 2010 11:47

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Tech: The Library of Congress thinks tweets are really important

  • Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive — ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow.
  • A tweet from @libraryofcongress • Which sounds absolutely awesome. Could you imagine? Twitter getting archived into the annals of history? The sandwich you ate? All the malware links? The Bieber-bombings we’ve seen over the last month or two? The FourSquare mayoral races? Sign us up! source

10 Apr 2010 15:26

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Offbeat: How bored auto mechanics have fun: Exploding airbags

  • This already looks way more fun than what we’re doing today, which is blogging.