World’s First Digital Camera

Ahhhhh the 70’s… the decade where the first Star Wars movie was released, where afro haircuts where all the rage, and where the first digital camera came into existence. Yep, you read that right! In 1975, Kodak released the world’s first digital camera prototype, a clunky-looking device that used casette tapes as the medium to store pictures. Each photo took 23 seconds to snap, producing a 100-line black and white image that could only be displayed on a television set. No wonder why it never became popular.



XP SP3 is out!

After being pulled out from Microsoft’s website because of “unforseen” compatibility problems last week, our friends from Redmond have made it available again today. Hurry up and get it while it’s fresh, or before it gets removed again!

Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) includes all previously released updates for the operating system. This update also includes a small number of new functionalities, which do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system.



A MacGyver Movie is Coming – I Think I’m Excited

By Mark O’Neill

Gizmodo is reporting that a MacGyver movie is in the works and I have to admit that at first my attitude was “so what?”.    But when I told my girlfriend and her mother, they started shrieking with pleasure “MACGYVER!!!” (think of Homer’s sisters in “The Simpsons) and so I just had to investigate the mysterious phenomenon otherwise known as the Richard Dean Anderson Syndrome.

So I started hunting on YouTube for old MacGyver clips and I was amazed at some of the stuff Macgyver got up to. Check out the following clip below for one of his more sensational escapes from some dodgy German speaking East German border guards.  A wooden jetski coffin?  Kind of makes the A-Team getting locked up in a garage and then busting out in a home-made tank look lame in comparison!

But here’s the big question – after all this time, can that unique Macgyver hairstyle be replicated?

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One encoding to rule them all

Despite the joke in the image above, it certainly seems that the web “hearts” Unicode.  According to Mark Davis of Google, the use of Unicode on the web has recently surpassed both ASCII and Western European encodings, as shown by the blue line in the chart below:

In case you can’t read it, the red line is ASCII, the orange line is Western European, the green line is Chinese, and the gray line is Japanese.  Unicode allows the characters in the other sets (and many more besides) to be encoded in a single character set (hence the name).

It should come as no surprise that Google converts all text into Unicode prior to indexing.  A single world-wide character set greatly simplifies the search for common terms.  You’d also expect Google to stay on top of the latest standards as new characters are added.  Google upgraded to Unicode version 5.1 less than a month after it was released.  No word on which Unicode transformation format Google uses internally, but the search results on Google.com, Google.cn, and Google.co.jp are all rendered in UTF-8.

The Unicode 5.1 standard added 1624 new characters including the Malayalam and Myanmar languages, along with additional characters and scripts for many previously supported languages.  I was intrigued by the addition of more ancient scripts (Carian, Lycian, Lydian, and the Phaistos disc) and symbolic sets — hey, now we can write a Mahjong game using only Unicode characters!

The Galactically Hot Women Of Star Trek TOS

By Mark O’Neill

The problem with getting your name about on the internet a bit is that you get some weird people constantly emailing you, giving you links and telling you to click on them. One such person was today who told me that he “liked my stuff on Geeks Are Sexy” and told me that he had “pics of hot Star Trek babes for my enjoyment”. Hovering over the link with my mouse, I could see it was Flickr so that reassured me enough to click through and have a cautious look.

And wow, what a collection of babes there were waiting for me to show up! Someone had gone to all the trouble of collecting all the “hot women” from the original series of Star Trek, or to put it another way, all the women that William Shatner showed his Prime Directive to. But is it just me or are most of these women NOT hot? Did the make-up department go a little bit too crazy with the make-up? Or was that the “in” thing back then?

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Cell Phone Spying: Is Your Life Being Monitored?

Cell Phone SpyingIt connects you to the world, but your cell phone could also be giving anyone from your boss to your wife a window into your every move.  The same technology that lets you stay in touch on-the-go can now let others tap into your private world — without you ever even suspecting something is awry.

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Facebook in Real Life

Like most web users, you probably registered a Facebook account at one point or another. We all know how it goes: You create an account, start searching for some friends, and once you’ve got a few, you start getting flooded by people wanting you to install their crappy Facebook apps. I really, really hate that part of the service. Fortunately, there’s a way to auto-ignore all those stupid requests.

Anyways, to get back to our post…

Have you ever thought about what your life would be like if making friends would be just like in Facebook? Pretty nightmarish right? The guys from “Idiots of Ants” seem to think so too because they filmed a short sketch to illustrate a real-life Facebook-like “friending” experience, from the initial poke to the app installation request. Check it out.