Yahoo! Gets A Face Lift - Nobody Seems To Care?

It's a slow news day when the biggest story seems to be Pee-wee Herman's press conference featuring his first tweet... so it surprised me to see that only one of the feeds I regularly check, BBC.co.uk, was reporting on the refresh of the Yahoo! portal and a $100 million global ad campaign to support it. Has Yahoo! fallen so far out of the public's attention that it can't even attract a little link love from the blogoshpere? Good luck with that ad campaign Yahoo!

BBC story here.

Roddenberry's Apple Macintosh Plus Up For Auction

The first Apple Macintosh Plus to roll off the assembly table, serial number F4200NUM0001, was apparently given as a gift to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. While no one knows whether or not he used the little mac to create any of his works, the machine is being offered for auction on October 8th and 9th. The auctioneer, Profiles in History, is expecting to fetch between $800 and $1200 but if the buzz is any indication I'd expect to see it go much higher.

cnet's Technically Incorrect blog

Viewing The Worlds Glaciers - From Space

The good folks at Wired's Wired Science blog have compiled a collection of images, captured from space by astronauts and satellites, of some of the worlds most impressive glaciers. "To a geologist, glaciers are among the most exciting features on Earth. Though they seem to creep along at impossibly slow speeds, in geologic time glaciers are relatively fast, powerful landscape artists that can carve out valleys and fjords in just a few thousand years."

Here is one from the collection. "Covering nearly 1,400 square miles, the vast Heiltskuk Ice Field lies in the southern Coast Mountains of British Columbia. Taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station, this photo captures the snow-covered mountain slopes as well as several of the ice field’s valley glaciers, which are wide swaths of slowly flowing ice and debris."

Google docs To Be Spidered, If Published By Owner

A recent post in the Google docs help forum states "In about two weeks we will be launching a change for published docs. The change will allow published docs that are linked to from a public website to be crawled and indexed, which means they can appear in search results you see on Google.com and other search engines." This has a few users concerned about the security of their online docs to which Google says "Please note that this only applies to docs which you explicitly publish using the 'Publish as web page' or 'Publish/embed' option, and which are linked to from a publicly crawled webpage. This doesn't apply if it's only set to 'Allow anyone with the link to view (no sign-in required)'."

The following steps can ensure that your docs are safe from the spiders, if that is what you intend:

-Go to the 'Share tab'
-For documents and spreadsheets, choose 'Publish as web page'. For presentations choose 'Publish/embed'

-Click on the button that says 'Stop publishing'

This will have to be done for each document, though if you had set a document to be published then one would assume that your intent was to have people view it anyway, and having the search engines spider it's content may provide you with greater exposure to your works.

Avast! It's Talk Like A Pirate Day!

According to Cap'n Slappy and Ol' Chumbucket it's International Talk Like A Pirate Day!



Be careful however for the pirates may try to talk ye into purchasing some of their booty.

Joules The Robotic Cyclist

If you've followed the blog for a while you'll know that I have a thing for robots, and I'm a pretty big Google fanboy but that's another story. Thanks to Gizmodo for bringing my attention to Joules. According to Greyhair100's Youtube page "Joules the Robot sits on the back of a tandem bicycle and does the pedaling for both of us"

Did you recognize the song in the background? Robots and Daisy... perhaps Joules is a descendant of Hal 9000 or vice versa?

This Resonates With Me Like A Good Dilbert Cartoon

Thanks to Geeks are Sexy for this find! It sort of speaks to me the way Scott Adams does with his Dilbert character. I'm not sure why...

MIT Students Capture Photos From Space - Budget $160.00

Three MIT students, Oliver Yeh, Justin Lee and Eric Newton, used common consumer electronics and a weather balloon to snap pictures from space. Dubbed Project Icarus the three who specialize in taking low-cost aerial photographs that they display and sell through a website called 1337arts, captured the photograph below from 28 kilometres up.

"The camera used in the project was a 7.1-megapixel Canon Powershot the students bought used on Amazon.com. They installed an open-source firmware add-on to the camera that would allow them to program it to take a picture every five seconds.

To track the location of the balloon, they used a $50 pre-paid Motorola cellphone with GPS capabilities and installed a free program that would report the phone's location at regular intervals. A USB phone charger powered by AA lithium batteries kept the phone running during the five-hour voyage. They also installed an external antenna to boost the phone's signal"

Perhaps NASA should hire a few more MIT grads!



Source: CBC

Google Throws News Sites A Life Line

The Official Google Blog has announced the latest creation from Google Labs called Fast Flip. "Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting." My limited trial of the service leads me to believe that it is delivering on this promise, the page loads quickly allowing you to peruse the articles and then drill down on the ones you want to read. There is also a mobile version for Android-powered devices and iPhones.

At the moment Google has partnered with "three dozen top publishers, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek." The number would seem like a lot but you can flip through these articles in a hurry so it will be nice to see who else comes on board down the road. All in all I think I'll be giving Fast Flip a go, it will definitely be on my list of sources to check each morning.

Segway Inventor Wants To Cleanup The Worlds Drinking Water

Dean Kamen the inventor most famous for bringing us the Segway has created a new device called the Slingshot which turns contaminated water into pure drinking water. The device is smaller and more energy efficient than other purifiers and can produce about 200 gallons per day. Kamen hopes to find funding partners and distributors to help keep the cost of distribution down and see his device in wide use. "In your lifetime, my lifetime, we will see water be a really scarce, valuable commodity," Kamen says.