Blog Marco

Sneaky RewardsCentral aka EmailCash recently changed their Guessing Game from guessing a number between 1 and 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 and instead of daily draws they now run it weekly?! They've spectacularly reduced the chances of winning. That and they send out crappy rewards.

You have got to check out new search engine WolframAlpha. What is this new search engine do? How is WolframAlpha different to Google? Wolfram Alpha offers an exact answer, instead of showing up the links to pages that may (or may not) contain the answer, like Google and other search engines. You type a question and instantly get an answer. "Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn't merely look them up in a big database. … In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn't understand the question or the answer, and doesn't compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge." Do we even need to think anymore?!

Wolfram Alpha For Easter Eggs and Novelty Search Ideas

Sydney had terrible weather yesterday. It was like a cold winter's day, rainy and windy. I received a package yesterday, stuffed by the postman into my mailbox. This yellow envelope was drenched. The envelope was from Rewards Central. RewardsCentral is a new website brand which grew out of EmailCash. It's basically the same company, same website - they just felt they outgrew their EmailCash namesake. Back to their crap rewards.

RewardCentral rewards customers with crap rewards. A MousePad for getting 500 Exp?!? Well, thanks for the mousepad... but is this all we get? I would have preferred a cheap pen. The "With Compliments" slip says: "As one of our highly valued members we are happy to present you with this RewardsCentral mousepad. We hope you enjoy it!" All I'm going to enjoy is throwing it into the bin since the plastic is peeling off the mouse pad from being water damaged and its USELESS. Thanks RewardsCentral and your crap rewards.

Here's a new website for you guys to check out: Street Fashion BLVD. It's new, its hip and its all about STREET FASHION.

CNET produced a list of the top 10 websites for students. It is in fact a list of 15 websites... bonus! Plenty of timewasters like Facebook but Flickr maybe useful for your photos. Wikipedia is of little use since we can't use it as a reference to any school/university projects.

I've updated my photography website after a few years of neglect. Compare it to the old format.

I've just made it into a simple one column, one page website. Nothing like the flash loaded pages that photographers have nowadays. Flash may look good, but what use is it for SEO?

Anyway, photography is just a hobby.

Following the blog entry about Internet Addiction... Here are ten signs that you are tech obsessed.

1. You forget basic bodily functions

In internet-obsessed South Korea, hardcore gamers have been pushing themselves to their mortal limits in their quest for points. A man dropped dead at his screen in December after playing continuously for a marathon 10 days. That eclipsed the stamina of the previous victim, who died after two days in the chair in August last year. Another South Korean died in 2002 after 86 hours of non-stop playing.

2. You collect ridiculous accessories
3. You check your email on Sunday ... at 3am
4. You know your mates by their online 'handles' rather than their real names
5. Your favourite song goes "beep"
6. Instead of laughing, you say 'LOL'
7. You answer your mobile phone when you're on a date
8. You change their 'outfits' depending on their 'mood'
9. You own a BlackBerry
10. You speak in a secret language

According to Yahoo!...

China launched a Web site, www.linese.com, on Saturday offering free Chinese lessons and materials to promote the study and use of the language abroad.

China can make rain.

When he's not tending cherry orchards outside Beijing, Yu Yonggang can be found behind the twin barrels of a 37mm anti-aircraft gun, blasting shells at passing clouds.

Yu is one of 37,000 peasants enlisted by the Chinese government to help produce rain in parched areas. The 45-year-old farmer works with China's other trigger-happy rain men to water the crops, break up damaging hailstorms and put out forest fires. After a sandstorm blew through the capital in May, he lobbed shells and rockets skyward to coax rains that washed sand and grit from city streets.

Now Yu and the other rainmakers face their toughest challenge: making sure it stays dry for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The idea is for the peasant gunners to work with meteorologists watching radar in the capital. Together, they will hunt pregnant rain clouds and pound them with rockets containing silver iodide. The hope is that any moisture will fall before the clouds can threaten the parade of athletes and lighting of the Olympic flame at the new National Stadium.

Random Digg Links That Interest Me... but I haven't visted them yet. Just saving these links here, instead of stuffing them into my overflowing "Websites to Visit" folder in my Bookmarks.

Learn about Logic. Some philosophy stuff to ponder about.

Build a Powerful Water Balloon Launcher (with Video)

A stapler that will NEVER run out of staples!!! (with VIDEO)

Does Your Handwriting Express Your Personality?

Something Illegal? Does Your Handwriting Express Your Personality?

Free Photos for Your Web Site or Blog, and also here and here.

Save something for a rainy day: How to: Set Up an Offshore Banking Account

Here's another collection of speedlinks in this web surfing session...

A neat invention.

Availabot makes it easy to see when a particular friend of yours is available for instant messaging, even when you’re not sitting in-front of your computer. Rather than showing up on your screen, it shows availability as a physical object in the world. That means that you can move the puppet out of view when you don’t want to be distracted, watch out for it when you’re working on other tasks, and have a background awareness of your friends from the corner of your eye.

Be original. Turn up to your electrical engineering interviews with a circuit board (PCB) as your business card.

What do you get when you cross the classic Wolfenstein game with Guantanamo Bay? Wolfengitmo

NSFW: For Photographers: How to Take Better Dirty Pictures

Honey, how does this suit made of babies look on me?

The King's Quest series of games was a favourite of mine back in the late Eighties... released by Sierra it was among the most popular games of that time (along with Leisure Suit Larry!). I remember how these games managed to fit into ONE 1.44" High Density Floppy Disks, now games take whole hard drives to run. I never managed to finish any of these games until a few years ago in one of my holidays I actually went to a cheats website and finished King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and Space Quest off... Just for the sake of finishing a game I couldn't finish.

You can download a revamped King's Quest I and II here.

Business: Accidental Tech Entrepreneurs Turn Their Hobbies Into Livelihoods

Firefox: 27 Of The Most Useful Firefox Extensions

Free eBooks: Top 100

Interesting: Library Phone Answerers answer your questions

Continuing on from my previous speed linking post to random websites here are a few more links:

Watch an interesting video of a dry ice bomb. Read some useful reader comments about the dry ice bomb.

Print a set of fake eyesonto a poster to boost honesty.

Buy Google Water for Charity.

For you tech geeks who love getting their hands dirty: Build an RFID skimmer.

Two electrical engineering students from Tel Aviv University have written a paper to be presented at Usenix called "How to Build a Low-Cost, Extended-Range RFID Skimmer." It does pretty much what it says on the tin: shows you how shockingly insecure the RFIDs in your office key-fob, subway-card, car-key, etc all are -- easy to "skim," clone, and walk away with. The two achieve skims at more than 25cm, and note that they are "halfway to a full-blown relay attack."

I've setup a Squidoo page (called a "lens") for my Share Trading website. It's basically listing some basic information about the website as a feed of the latest entries from my blog. You can potentially earn money on Squidoo, to do that you can signup to become a "Lensmaster" and make your own Squidoo page for your own favourite topic.

I'm in the market for some free fonts. So from a little digging here are the best of the best (probably useful to the webmasters and the odd designer or two): 9800 free fonts, Make your own Font and pixel fonts. Enjoy your free fonts!