New Google Brain to Keep “Golden Copy” of Your Deepest Hopes, Fears, Secrets Today Google introduced a new product, Google Brain. Building on its popular Google Goggles, a headset that records users’ audiovisual sensory input and uploads it to Google’s servers, the Brain attachment will build and transmit to Google a constantly-updated computer model of […]

The BBC reports on a weird trend of people taking their mobile phone to their grave. The origin of this idea was fear of being buried alive, according to Martin Raymond, director of international trend-spotting think-tank, The Future Laboratory. However, that does not explain cremations with cell phones: “We came across this in places like […]

I know – I know, I’m a geek! But this is cool: I overclocked my slug. The NSLU2 as supplied from Linksys actually runs the little MIPS IXP420 CPU at 133 MHz, which is half its rated clock speed. You can fix the NSLU2 to run the processor at the full 266MHz by removing a […]

Well maybe that’s finally going to put these idiots at AOL out of business. AOL announced in January that they started giving preference to email senders who subscribe to the pay-per-email Goodmail service. So if you pay up, you can spam the hell out of AOL users. As part of its e-mail security practices, AOL […]

Last night I stayed up until 2:00 AM tinkering with my SLUG server – a modified Linksys NSLU2 device. V1 ran off of an old, noisy hard drive attached to it via the USB port. Last week I got a 1GB flash drive and I formatted it with an ext3 partition. The plan was to […]

Lately I have found myself staring at this. It’s mesmerizing and it makes me wonder about the quality we call “random” (as opposed to the mathematical concept). I think our brain is just really wired to try very hard to extract meaning out of visual stimuli and it is very hard to get it not […]

The SLUG’s alive! Friday I bought another Linksys NSLU2 and spent most of the weekend hacking it. I re-flashed it with the uNSLUng v5.5 beta firmware, configured a thttpd web server, a CUPS print server and a set up an automated torrent downloader. The little Linksys box is sold as a home-network NAS device for […]

WOW – deep-fried nerd alert! Are you ready for the grease PC? The guys at Tom’s Hardware posted the report of some Germans who had the – uh – intriguing brainstorm to take a high-performance PC, rip out all the fans and dip the whole thing in 8 gallons of canola oil, to see what […]