A Welsh View

Video: Honda Insight - Let It Shine Advert

I love how Vimeo have integrated this Honda advert into their site. I'd definitely watch more adverts if they were as creative.

Google News Timeline

Google News Timeline is not very impressive when viewing daily news but switch it to year view and it becomes much more interesting.

SprintCam V3 HD Shoots Breathtaking Full HD Video at 1,000 FPS

Gizmodo has posted a video showing the very impressive footage from the Sprint v3 HD camera that can record full HD video at 1,000 FPS.

Google Street View Car 'Ducks' To Avoid Low Bridge

A Google Street View car in Pittsburgh, Pa. had to 'duck' when it encountered a bridge that was too low to allow it to pass with its camera extended on its stalk. As soon is it got to the other side of the bridge it extended it again.

Related: Google Street View car getting stuck in the mud in Australia.

Update: All links were going to the same page rather than different pages. I've fixed it.

A Pirate's Code of Conduct for BitTorrent

Gizmodo's 8 article pirate's code of conduct for BitTorrent.

Article 1

Every man shall upload half of what he downloads, with the saints filling in the rest. It's like tossing back a tiny fish so that it may grow into a great whale...only so we can hunt said whale and feast on its blubber during a later voyage.

Video: Amiga 500 - Spaceballs State of the Art

I used to love watching this demo when I was a kid. I was amazed that my computer could produce graphics like that with such little processing power and RAM. [via @aliguana]

Video: Inside a Google Data Center

An interesting video showing the inside of a Google Data Center including the many shipping containers that house the servers.

Omegle - Chat To Strangers Anonymously

Omegle allows you to chat with a complete stranger anonymously. I just spoke with someone from Holland. [via @veronica]

Behind The Scenes At Mininova

TorrentFreak has an interview with Mininova and some behind the scenes photos of their office in the Netherlands. I always imagined big torrent sites being run by a bunch of guys in their bedrooms but Mininova is a tax paying company with revenues of over $1m.

Tinyarro.ws - The Shortest URLs on Earth

Using Unicode symbols, Tinyarro.ws creates probably the shortest URLs on the Internet. As an example, here's my URL www.➡.ws/鐞

Video: What Do You Do When Someone Breaks Into Your House?

Jump on Twitter and uStream of course. That's what Revision3's David Prager did. Gawker has the full Twitter transcript.

WobZip Extracts Compressed Archives Online

Wobzip is an online tool that allows you unzip a wide range of files online. It's useful if you are at a location where you can't install an application to unzip a rar or 7z file. You can also open zip files that are stored online. [via]

Gmail Makes It Easy To Add Multiple Attachments

Gmail has made some improvements to how you upload attachments. You can now upload select multiple files and you get a progress bar to show the progress of the uploads. This makes uploading large files much more user friendly. [via]

Site Offers Unique Way For Users To Sign Up

Huffduffer has quite a unique way of allowing users to sign up to the site. It's in the form of a declaration. [via]

GMail Outage

GMail is currently down (just the web interface) and the world seems to be coming to an end for some.

Wired's Top 10 iPhone Games

The top 10 iPhone games as voted by the readers of Wired? Where's Bejeweled 2? That's pretty much all I use my iPod Touch for!.

Man Fights Off Mugger Who Wanted His TED Pass

An account from James Duncan Davidson who fought off a mugger who wanted his pass to the exclusive TED2009 conference. The mugger wasn't interested in taking money or the man's laptop, he just wanted to get into the conference. The mugger threatened to f@*k up Davidson but he managed to fight his way free. He could have just watched it all for free online. [via]

Twitter Chatter During the Super Bowl

An interactive map showing the location and frequency of commonly used words in Super Bowl related tweets.

I've never been able to get into Twitter. I guess I haven't got anything interesting to say. And what's strange is that over the past week or so, quite a few people have started following me even though I don't post anything.

Google Maps Car Hits A Deer

A Google Maps car has recorded itself knocking over a baby deer, New York state. The deer runs out in front of the car in one photo and then is seen on the floor in the next photo. The data then ends for that road.

When you visit the road on Google Maps there is a notice saying that Street View is unavailable due to high traffic but moving back and forth along the road and the message changes to "image no longer available". [via]

Obama's New Robots.txt File

It may be insignificant in the giant scheme of things but the robots.txt file for the White House website has changed from a huge 2,400 line file yesterday to this today.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

For the less tech-savvy, the robots.txt file instructs search engines on what to include and not include in their indexes. [via]

Video: An Animated History Of The Internet

A nicely animated and directed history of the Internet. [via]

Two Google Searches 'Produce Same CO2 As Boiling A Kettle'

A physicist from Harvard University has published a report stating that conducting a typical search on Google generates about 7g of carbon dioxide - about half what it generated when boiling a kettle.

The emissions are caused both by the electricity required to power a user's computer and send their request to servers around the world.

Google disputes the findings and says that about 0.2 grams of CO2 are produced when conducting a search.

I'm going to have to limit my egosearching to just once a day! [via]

Facebook Reaches 150 Million Active Users

Facebook has reached a milestone of 150 million active users, half of which sign in daily. If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.

Are you a Facebook addict? I resisted for a long time and have only recently signed up. [via]

Google Expands Street View In The US

Google has expanded Street View in the US and it now covers, essentially doubling the amount of the country that is covered. The image above shows the how much is now covered and the Google LatLong blog has posted a small selection of some landmarks that are now featured. [via]

Google Zeitgeist 2008

Google has released it's annual Zeitgeist sorted by 35 countries and then sorted by categories such as politics, sports and showbiz.

Remindr - Get Reminders via Multiple Services

Remindr is a free web based service that can send reminders to IM, Twitter, email and your mobile phone. The site doesn't require you to register, you simply enter your reminder along with a date and time and how you want to be reminded. [via]

Pirates of the Amazon

A Firefox plugin has been created that, once installed, adds a download link to products on Amazon so that you can get the product for free.

The people behind the project made this statement:

“We are not affiliated with The Pirate Bay, and do not host or even link to any illegal content,” they write. “This artistic project addresses the topic of current media distribution models vs. current culture and technical possibilities.”

The site that was hosting the Firefox add-on, Pirates of the Amazon, is currently down, but Torrent Freak has mirrored it.

50+ iPhone App Store Apps for Free

A list of 50+ iPhone/iPod Touch apps that used to cost money but are now free due to a promotional sale for Black Friday.

Google Job Interview Process

For those interested in the interview process at Google, Peteris Krumins over at Catonmat.net has posted a detailed report on his experience. It involved four interviews over the phone and then flying from Latvia to California (all expenses paid) for four interviews at the Googleplex.

Google Adds Themes To Gmail

For some time Firefox extensions have allowed users to redesign GMail but now Google has released some official themes that allow you to jazz up the interface. There are 30-odd themes available that can be access through Settings.

At the moment, the themes are being rolled out so you may not be able to see the option yet. More at the Official Gmail Blog. [via]

Google Hosts Millions Of Historic LIFE Magazine Photos

Google have partnered with LIFE magazine to host millions of their images ranging from the 1750s to the present day, many of which have never been published before.

Woman Loses $400,000 to Nigerian E-Mail Scam

An Oregon woman who was duped by a Nigerian scam is $400,000 out of pocket.

Janella Spears says she became curious when she received an e-mail promising her $20.5 million if she would only help out a long-lost relative identified as J.B. Spears with a little money up front.

The fact that the scammers had identified a relative by name was enough to persuade her to first send $100 and then thousands more over a period of 2 years. Link

San Francisco Artist Looks To Replace Lost Eyeball With Webcam

A San Francisco artist, who lost an eye in a 2005 car accident, wants to replace her missing eye with a Web cam, and experts think it could be possible.

"There have been all sorts of cyborgs in science fiction for a long time, and I'm sort of a sci-fi geek," said [Tanya] Vlach, 35. "With the advancement of technology, I thought, 'Why not?'"

Link

High Quality YouTube Video Hack

Jason Kottke has a great tutorial on how to link, embed and save YouTube in high quality.

Ancient Rome in 3D for Google Earth

Google Earth has teamed up with the University of Virginia to produce a 3D rendition of Rome in the year 320AD featuring 250 "highly detailed" and 6000+ other buildings.

The modelling is based on a physical model of the city called the “Plastico di Roma Antica” created between 1933 and 1974. As well as exteriors, the virtual city displays 11 buildings with viewable interiors, including the Colosseum and the temple of Vesta.

Download Google Earth here. [via]

House Keys Copied From 200 Feet Away

UC San Diego computer scientists have built a software program that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer scientists only need a photograph of the key.

The software has been tested a photo of keys taken from almost 200 feet away and with a photo taken by a mobile phone.

Professor Stefan Savage, a computer science professor who led the student-run "Sneakey" project, noted:-

“If you go onto a photo-sharing site such as Flickr, you will find many photos of people’s keys that can be used to easily make duplicates. While people generally blur out the numbers on their credit cards and driver's licenses before putting those photos on-line, they don’t realize that they should take the same precautions with their keys.”

You can read more about the project here. [via]

Spam Gets 1 Response Per 12,500,000 Emails

A new study, by a team of seven computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD, has shown that spam gets 1 response per 12,500,000 emails. They reached this figure by infiltrating a spam network (the Storm botnet) and controlling 75,869 machines. "After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted."

Video: Tennis for Two - The World's First Graphical Videogame

A demonstration of Tennis for Two - the world's first graphical videogame. The game was created by Dr. William Higinbotham in 1958. [via]

uSend.io - Ultra-Simple File Sharing

uSend.io is a very simple way to send files up to 100MB. No signup and an ultra-easy interface.

And if you need to send large files. VIPeers allows you to upload files up to 5GB in size and then share it in a variety of ways (direct link, bit torrent). If you want an account to the invite-only service, use lifehacker20 when signing up (before Monday). [via]

Microsoft Office Bus

This and these photos are not new, but it's the first time I've seen them. I'm sure the bus is nothing more than a publicity stunt.

Video: Windows 7 Task Bar

The Aero Peek feature is pretty neat. [via]

China Channel Firefox Add-on

The Firefox add-on China Channel offers internet users outside of China the ability to surf the web as if they were inside mainland China. Not something that you'd want to use all the time but interesting to see how restrictive Internet access in China is. [via]

Electromagnetic Keyboard Eavesdropping Research Revealed

Swiss researchers have developed 4 different attacks that are capable of reproducing what someone has typed on a keyboard without using any additional hardware or software.

Every keyboard tested was vulnerable to at least one of the four attacks the researchers used. One attack was shown to work over a distance of 20 metres.

In their work the researchers used a radio antenna to "fully or partially recover keystrokes" by spotting the electromagnetic radiation emitted when keys were pressed.

In a web posting they added: "no doubt that our attacks can be significantly improved, since we used relatively unexpensive equipments [sic]."

Link [via]

Advice On Converting DVDs To MP4 Format

I'm looking to transfer some of my DVDs to my iPod Touch, does anyone know any free Windows software that makes the whole process of transferring to MP4 format as quick and easy as possible?

So I Got This Web Client The Other Day

It's my dream too.

Video: Steve Ballmer Is Crazy

Taken from the Life Without Walls website. [via]

Atari Modern Classics

What would present-day computer game boxes would look like if they had been draw by an Atari 2600-era artist? Here are a few examples. [via]

Colorado Newspaper Twitters Three-Year Old’s Funeral

In what may be a way of reporting a news story first, the Rocky Mountain News has Twittered the funeral of a 3-year-old boy. The feed is still active and includes posts such as "coffin lowered into ground" and "family members shovel earth into grave". The child in question was the victim of a car accident. [via]

Stop Forwarding Crap Email

StopForwarding.us is an anonymous way of telling people you know to stop forwarding chain letters and pointless emails.

Free File Hosting For Life (Sort of)

FileSavr.com is giving away 250GB of storage to those that sign up before September 15th (a saving of $10/month). The account is paid for until 2038. The service looks very basic and could go out of business at anytime so it's not wise to store crucial files there. [via]

Update: I've updated the link. Appears I wasn't linking to the deal page where you can get it for free.