Worlds Most Powerful Flashlight

The Torch created by Wicked Lasers is being reviewed by The Guinness Book of World Records as a candidate for the worlds most powerful flashlight. At 4100 Lumens, it is capable of melting plastic, igniting paper or even frying an egg. The Torch eats batteries for breakfast, they only last 15 minutes with this monster.Here's some videos of it in action.Link:wickedlas...

Weird Brain Trick

Try this little experiment, while sitting down (also works standing up), lift your right leg and start making clockwise circles with it. While doing this draw the number 6 in the air with your right hand. You will notice that your foot changes direction, you cant seem to control it either. Weird.Link:Sou...

Scientists Create Synthetic Genome

Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute have managed to create the worlds first synthetic genome. It was bound to happen sooner or later, but I am surprised at how quickly things have progressed. The next step is the creation of a fully synthetic life form.They have achieved this feat using yeast to stitch together strands of DNA belonging to a bacteria known as Mycoplasma genitalium.The scientists plan to insert the new synthetic DNA into a host cell and make it produce new synthetic cells. They have already successfully demonstrated the transplanting...

Linux Kernel 2.6.24 Released

The latest version of the Linux kernel has some very cool features, 2.6.24 includes CPU "group scheduling", memory fragmentation avoidance, tickless support for x86-64/ppc and other architectures, many new wireless drivers and a new wireless configuration interface, SPI/SDIO MMC support, USB authorization, per-device dirty memory thresholds, support for PID and network namespaces, support for static probe markers, read-only bind mounts, SELinux performance improvements, SATA link power management and port multiplier support, Large Receive Offload...

We Hold These Truths to be Self-evident

Mathematical proof is the closest thing you can get to absolute certainty. The idea of mathematically proving something seemed alien to me when I first encountered it. I was amazed that no amount of brute force can invalidate a mathematical truth. It doesn't depend on the amount of evidence in support of it like physics for example. Take Golbach's conjecture, which states that every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as a sum of two primes, has been verified for hundreds of trillions of numbers but that still does not prove the conjecture...

Ubuntu Tweak

There are a lot of things that you can configure and customise in Ubuntu, unless you know your way around Linux, you have to spend time searching the net to find out how to tweak and configure certain things. I can remember when I first started using Ubuntu I spent a lot of time searching around for simple things like how to put the deleted items folder on the desktop. If you have used windows, you may have come across TweakXP or TweakVista, well...

Elisa: Ubuntu Media Centre

The Ubuntu Media Centre Team have decided to use Elisa as their core infrastructure to push the free software media centre effort forward. Elisa is a open source cross-platform media centre, designed to be as simple to use as possible. The software is in its early days and so is still quite basic in terms of features found in other media centre solutions. However, the project is gaining momentum and is improving rapidly. Here's a list of some of...

Ron Paul Owns Fox 'News'

Fox 'news' never ceases to amaze me, I find it incredible that they're allowed to broadcast at all. They are nothing more than a propaganda machine for the extremists in the Republican party.Link:outfoxed....

Adsense Code in Post Page Blogger

I have found a way to display my adsense ads on my posts while your viewing the individual post page and not when your on the home page. As you may know blogger doesn't give you control of the template for each page, I have found a very simple way around this. Before I show you how, I want you to go over to Tips for New Bloggers, there you'll learn how to actually put ads on your posts. Once you have your code simply add the following two red lines and your done.<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>Your code here</b:if>As you can...

The Scale of Things

We are very small....

KDE 4 Screenshots

I have never been a big fan of KDE ever since I first used it in openSuse. I used to think it was childish and a bit all over the place. However, KDE have redesigned everything for version 4 and from what I've seen so far it looks beautiful. It will come with a new icon set called oxygen and a new user interface dubbed plasma. Plasma also comes with a widget engine. KDE is not just getting a new facelift but is being designed to run faster, use less...

Installing Software from Source in Ubuntu

Have you ever come across software that doesn't have a deb file or isn't in any repositories? Well don't be put off, because compiling and installing from source is pretty straightforward. The software packages will either be in tar.gz or tar.bz2 form. There are essentially four steps you need to take to install your software. For this example I will be using pkg as the package name and me as my username, so just replace these two. Open up your terminal and follow the steps below.UnpackingConfiguringBuildingInstallingUnpackingYou can download the...

Million Dollar Problems

In year 2000, at a meeting in Paris, the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) announced that seven $1 million prizes were being offered for the solutions to seven problems in mathematics. A hundred years earlier in the same city, David Hilbert announced a list of 23 problems to drive forward mathematics into the new century. Here is the introductory speech that Hilbert gave at the International Congress of Mathematicians:Who among us would not be happy to lift the veil behind which is hidden the future; to gaze at the coming developments of our science...

Metal Foam with Memory

Researchers at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) have developed a porous foam made out of an alloy that can return to it's original shape after being deformed by physical of magnetic force. The material known as "magnetic shape-memory foams" consists of a nickel-manganese-gallium alloy. The material can deform up to 10 percent under a magnetic field, it retains the shape after the field has been turned off but returns to its original form when a 90 degree rotated magnetic field is applied. The phenomena is known as magnetic shape-memory....

Hardy Heron Features

The roadmap for hardy heron has a pretty big list of features, most of them, although very important, are technical and a bit uninteresting. Some of them should have been in Gutsy but couldn't meet the schedule. Hardy Heron is going to be a Long Term Support release, so there's also going to be a lot of fixes for existing features. So without further ado, the features which I'm anticipating the most are.Install on an existing filesystem without overwriting /homeWhen I moved from feisty to gutsy, I decided to do a fresh install. One of the things...

Nokia Iphone

I found this video on youtube showing a Nokia phone which looks a lot like the iphone. If this is real it will most likely have the new Symbian OS. This device will apparently be released sometime this ye...

Deleted Items Icon on Desktop

With Ubuntu you get the trash bin icon on the panel as default. I personally like it on the desktop, here's how to put it there. First press Alt F2 to bring up the run application window. Then type in gconf-editor and click run.This will bring up the configuration editor window. Now using the folders on the left, navigate to Apps>Nautilus>Desktop and then put a check on 'trash_icon_visible' box. Close the editor, you should now have the Deleted...