June 17th, 2008
If you go to Google translator and translate “simpaticone” (very funny person) from Italian into English, the result is “Barack Obama”.
I guess it’s to do with the fact Google uses statistical machine translation. Translation Googlebomb anyone?
Via Google Blogoscoped.
May 24th, 2008
These days, almost every image that is used in marketing and promotion material gets photoshopped before. One of my favourite websites is Worth1000 which is a photoshopping contest website. The galleries contain a whole range of great photoshops. For example, check out the gallery of photoshops on life without electricity.
Today CyberNotes pointed out some photoshop mistakes. These include celebrities with three arms, headless people and hands with extra fingers. For example, check out the High School Musical 2 album cover.
There are a whole collection of photoshopping mistakes, errors and just general disasters at the Photoshop Disasters blog.
April 28th, 2008
I found this picture from CollegeHumor really funny. But beyond that, it’s a great commentary on how Facebook and the Social Web is changing people’s relationships and how they communicate with each another.
It’s time for Facebook to introduce a new relationship status: It’s an effing disaster. (from CollegeHumor)
In fact, a disturbing trend is how some youngsters have switched from splitting up with partners via text to splitting up by changing their Facebook relationship status.
April 21st, 2008
This video made me smile!
My favourite part:
don’t use bold, please use strong
if you use bold that’s old and wrong
It looks like this guy (the SEO rapper) is totally serious and looking through his other YouTube videos, hes also got raps about social networking, link building and web advertising.
This reminds me of some really lame HTML jokes:
Why did the XHTML actress turn down an Oscar?
Because she refused to be involved in the presentation.Why was the XHTML bird an invalid?
Because it wasn’t nested properly.
Boom boom.
March 31st, 2008
It’s April Fools day tomorrow so I wanted to share one of my favourite april fools pranks.
When a close friend is away from their computer, minimise all their windows and start moving all the icons around on their desktop into random places. Take a screenshot of this new disorganised desktop and save it as an image. Now go back to the desktop and move the icons around once again. Once you’ve finished, set this screenshot you took earlier as the desktop wallpaper. For extra laughs, hide the system taskbar.
Happy April Fools!
December 30th, 2006
Ryan reminded me of the prediction in the bible code that the world would end in 2006. According to Wikipedia:
Bible codes, also known as Torah codes, are words, phrases and clusters of words and phrases that some people believe are meaningful and exist intentionally in coded form in the text of the Bible. These codes were made famous by the book The Bible Code, which claims that these codes can predict the future.
Fans of the bible code claim to have shown how the bible code has predicted past events such as the assassination of JFK.
So if we believe these bible codes, the world is going to end in the next few days. Michael Drosnin is the journalist who has probably publicised bible codes the most and is one of it’s biggest supporters. He wrote the series of books on the Bible Code in which he claimed the Bible was written by aliens from space.
The best bit?
The third book in the series is to be released in 2007, called The Bible Code III: The Quest. The Bible Code makes numerous predictions and post-diction, such as the coming of the apocalypse in 2006
From Wikipedia (my emphasis)
November 12th, 2006
The blue screen of death is one of the most annoying screens you can get on Windows. I think I’ve only seen it on my computer once in about the 3 years I’ve got it but I saw a computer at the weekend with BSoD-ed whenever somebody logged in and tried to use it for more than a minute or so. I think the computer was infected with a virus but we hypothesized some other possible reasons, such as the proximity of a stand selling Apple products just next door.
For those of you who don’t see the BSoD enough, you can get a Blue Screen of Death screensaver at the Microsoft website. The screensaver is designed to be quite realistic and to adapt depending on the operating system. It even shows the bootup screen!
Bluescreen cycles between different Blue Screens and simulated boots every 15 seconds or so. Virtually all the information shown on Bluescreen’s BSOD and system start screen is obtained from your system configuration - its accuracy will fool even advanced NT developers. For example, the NT build number, processor revision, loaded drivers and addresses, disk drive characteristics, and memory size are all taken from the system Bluescreen is running on.
A bit of fun for LAN parties I suppose.
October 24th, 2006
Just a selection from the xkcd forums:
The physicist says "let’s try to measure the coefficient of friction between the hill and the tires."
The engineer says "let’s see if there’s something wrong with the brakes."
The computer scientist says "let’s take the car back up the hill and see if it happens again."
Just incase anyone needs references:
See also HTML jokes.
October 20th, 2006
This week’s "blogs of the week" aren’t really blogs in the traditional sense. They don’t consist of articles or stories - rather they look at the world of technology through a web comic.
bLaugh is a web comic describing itself as "the unofficial comic of the blogosphere". I think it’s quite a new comic.
I think it’s quite a new comic and I’ve only been reading it since yesterday but I read through some of the older comics and it’s good stuff.
Joy of Tech is another nice technology comic strip. It’s run by a bunch of Apple fans so most of the comics tend to be pro-Apple. It’s been going for several years and there are some quite amusing comics in the archive. I was a big enough fan at one point to buy the book 
It’s also worth mentioning xkcd, a comic which I wrote about a few weeks ago.
October 14th, 2006
I recieved these off a friend (source unknown) and I couldn’t resist posting them.
If you’re still with me, terrible maths joke:
Q: What is the volume of a pizza with radius z and height a?
A: pi z z a
And I got this one off a university graduate. I was sat there stone faced when he told me it.
There is a maths party and all the functions are invited to it. Sine, cosine, log e^x and everybody else is there. During the party, cos notices that e^x is in the corner, by himself. Sp cosine walks up to e^x and asks him: "Why don’t you come and integrate with everybody"? e^x replies, "I can’t, I only integrate with myself".
Yep, terrible - be glad I didn’t post HTML jokes!
