scratchings: December 18, 2005

December 24, 2005

An end to women's periods

A new contraceptive will soon let women stop menstruating. In 2006, a new oral contraceptive called Anya, developed to "put women in control of when or if they want to menstruate," is expected to hit the Canadian and U.S. markets

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3 Useful PHP& XML tutorials

Here are 3 useful tutorial on how to parse XML using PHP.

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December 22, 2005

Systm Episode 5 - Asterisk Released

What is Asterisk? Asterisk is an insanely powerful, yet easy to use, open source voip telephony toolkit (server software) that runs on virtually any platform. It allows anyone to manage VoIP services in their own home in more powerful ways than the most expensive PBX (public branch exchange).

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Freevo - Because small is beautiful

Freevo is an open-source home theatre PC platform based on Linux and a number of open-source audio/video tools.Freevo unlike MythTV which has its own picture viewer, video player, music jukebox, etc., Freevo is configured to use popular programs like Mplayer, Xine and XMMS instead of creating their own.

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Movements of all cars in Britain to be monitored by evil sytem.

The movements of all vehicles on the roads in Britain are to be recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records of scanned number plates of all cars that use the roads. 100% Apalling.

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How much do the richest people in the world donate to charity?

Ever wonder how generous Bill Gates and Warren Buffett really are? Well it may surprise you to find out just exactly how much Bill Gates donates each year. More than you think...

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Hack Image Shack!

Welcome to the frightful exploitation of public image hosting! Here's a small Perl script designed to harvest images from Image Shack's servers and save them to your local computer. The script yields some extremely interesting finds... Quite clever, indeed!

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Dell 3007WFP 30-inch Widescreen Digital Flat-Panel Monitor

Isn't she just gorgeous to look at? Dell will be introducing their new 30-inch flat-panel display during CES

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A cool experiment - You Are Beautiful

"One early Sunday morning, we arrived at our predesignated fence. With a box of cups, and a thermos full of coffee, we set to work." These guys place a message on the fence using cups, I found it interesting how the original message "You Are Beautiful" changed over time.

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December 21, 2005

Robot Gains Self Awareness In Lab

A new robot has been developed at Meiji University in Japan that can tell the difference between its own image in a mirror, and an identical robot mimicking it.

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Myth Busters Answer A Bunch of Tech Questions from Slashdot

Over at Slashdot a while back users where able to submit questions to be answered by Jamie and Adam from the Discovery Channel's awsome show "Myth Busters". Well, Jamie and Adam came through and here are the answers to the questions submitted.

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What do you charge as a Graphic Designer

about.com's article on what you should charge as a graphic designer. A great article on what you should chagre your clients.

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Install your web server with a single install!

XAMPP will install Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl for Linux, Win32, OSX and Solaris and all you have to do is run the XAMPP install. This works great for Solaris and Win32 from my experience!

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Reuters Year in Photos

Only Reuters can bring you images like these. What a world we live in.

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HowTo: Score an Xbox 360 online at MSRP

This Microsoft employee figures out (and shares) how to snag an Xbox 360 online at MSRP by combining two easy to use tools - no auctions required.

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December 20, 2005

One Billion Internet Users

"Some time in 2005, we quietly passed a dramatic milestone in Internet history: the one-billionth user went online. Statistically, we're likely talking about a 24-year-old woman in Shanghai."

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Learning JavaScript Basics

This detailed article covers the basics for a beginner to learn JavaScript. Also, simple code samples along the way as you learn.

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P2P Population Nears Record High

"The P2P community is once again on the rebound, recovering from its temporary mid-year plateau."

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Anybody, free computer science courses?

OpenCourseWare Finder is a nice website with a collection of open courses including the open courses of MIT!

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The ultimate Google operator command list

This list of Google search commands will allow you to narrow your search down a bit. Did you know that you could view only stocks with the "stock:" command? That's just one of many Google operator commands.

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Chat-O-Licious - AJAX/ASP.Net realtime chat client

Here's another neat realtime chat client using AJAX and ASP.Net. Minimalistic, fast, and easy to use :)

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Space photos - landmarks

Amazing space photos of landmarks and buildings.

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The widget we all should have in our toolbox

Must try this, the coolest part is when there actually occurs an error!

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Cracking Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), Part 1

In this two-part series, Seth Fogie examines the internals of WPA and demonstrates how this wireless protection method can be cracked with only four packets of data. Part 1 outlines the details of WPA as compared to WEP and builds the foundation for Part 2, in which he describes in detail how WPA-PSK can be cracked.

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use Google as a free proxy

at work? blocked site? proxy blocked also? Fear not, since google is almost never blocked! This artice shows you how to use Google itself as a real-time (as in: not via Accelerator or Cache) web proxy for shady and interesting websites! Don't Be Evil? yeah Right!

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Digg New Feature - Spyv2 Out Now

new digg.com/spy is up and running! new graphics and features. check it out!

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Top 10 PC Games of the Year

Who Made the Cut? Great Article that Outlines the Games That Made Gaming History This Year!

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Tutorial to make a Complete Design

Make a really clean sharp web design with Photoshop. This covers all the steps and you don't need any experience to do this (it'll walk you through all the steps).

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Google Earth Frightens Nation-States

Idiots in government across the world tremble before the might of Google Earth.

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Google Zeitgeist '05

Google just released their Zeitgeist 2005 with lots of fun and interesting tidbits

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Why Apple Is The New Sony

Five years ago, Apple Computer was barely an afterthought in the halls of electronics companies. Not anymore. With its best-selling iPods and landmark licensing deals with music and television moguls propelling new ways of consuming digital media, Apple now is the pacesetter.

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The new technology at the root of the NSA wiretap scandal

There's something very serious and very scary going on with the NSA wiretaps, and all signs point to something technologically massive.

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December 19, 2005

How to disable Nero Scout

How come all of the best apps eventually get bogged down with useless bloat? Ahead Software, makers of Nero, now install garbage called "Nero Scout" with the Nero suite. Scout maintains a database of all your media files, as if you need yet another indexer running all the time, hogging system resources. This tip shows how to get rid of Nero Scout.

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Trigonometry explained

Here you can find trigonometry explained in a easy way, with lots of examples and applets so you can "see" what's all about.

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Google suggest like lyrics site

Very cool lyrics site with auto suggest artist, song or album as you type in the search box. No ads, no popups and no big graphics. Just plain search box. Looks very much like the front page of Google. It's also quite fast. Almost every search I did was just over 1 sec. This one definitely goes on my bookmarks.

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December 18, 2005

Top 10 Funniest RSS Feeds of 2005

A list of the top feeds that made us laugh in 2005. If you aren't subscribed to them yet, you should be.

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