Patrick Stewart

Good.is has a nice list of best sesame street guest appearances (via Digg). Among them I found Sir Patrick Stewart appearing in a skit called "Soliloquy on B".

It's an amazing find, and it led to an even funnier find - a skit called "Make it so Number one".

Voice recognition elevator in Scotland - "Eleven"

A great skit about a voice recognition in Scotland:

Piano stairs - The Fun Theory

The Piano Stairs are a fun innovation to the normal mundane stairs. By transforming the stairs into piano keys, which activate when people walk on them, make the experience of going up or down the stairs completely different.

Firefox downloaded 1 billion times

Firefox, the ultimate web browser, has reached an incredible milestone - 1 billion downloads since its launch in 2004.

See the PCWorld article about it, The Guesstimater, the official notes at One Billion plus You and the Spreadfirefox page.

The future of DRM

Where lies the future of DRM? Is DRM dead? Has the community's voice finally been given a proper listen to?

Only time will tell where or not the DRM will cease to exist.

VLC player hits 1.0.1

VLC is an open source media player which supports a wide variety of formats. Just a few days ago it reached the version 1.0 milestone, which is great for all of us.

VLC is a great alternative to many proprietary media players, and usually provides wider format support, making it the media player of choice for many novice and proffesional users.

See the official notice here and also the discussion on Digg about it.

Frank Herbert's Moisture traps

Dune is a great novel. If you haven't read Dune by Frank Herbert yet - go and read it! Even though I've read it quite a few years ago, and read some of its sequels, it is very interesting to read that some of Herbert's ideas might become a reality.

This Slashdot article is very interesting as it points to a possible use to the moisture traps described in Dune.

This is yet another example of how ideas spawned in the SciFi world might make its way into the real world.

From the pages of a SciFi novel to concept works and perhaps later into real-life versions of the inventions, the ideas of our SciFi authors are making their way over.

See also the reference from Stanford.

Is Laserbeak about to be invented?

When I started reading this article I thought "hey, that could be cool". Just a few miliseconds later - that could be REALLY cool, since that is exactly what Laserbeak from the Transformers used to do.

Sure, it might still be in the development stage, but it's cool that during you lifetime, characters and ideas from the cartoons you grew-up with are becoming reality.

Last.fm shuts down the cool webapps

Last.fm used to be a great site for music fans. It used to be a great way to listen to music online, without having to fret over logging in or doing anything other than picking a musician or artist you like, and it would just play.

I liked it so much that for a long time I've had a web-app as part of the main page of the blog. The web-app was simple: if you click on it, it would start playing songs by Norah Jones and other similar artists.

It's really sad that they have taken the whole web-apps off the net. I've heard a lot of rumors, and read a lot of things online as to what's been happening over there in the past several months.

Perhaps some day, the site will regain its old reputation as being a cool music website online. For now, the need to log in, and the shutting off of the web-apps are complete disappointing.

Sugar Delirium

Sugar Delirium is an interesting site that shows you different foods and how much sugar (or the equivalent thereof) is in that food.

It actually is very informative in the way it conveys the information - the picture of the product along with sugar cubes to represent the amount of sugar in that product.