I don’t know if you have heard about Wikibooks yet or not. If you haven’t then you are missing out on a great resource. Basically Wikibooks is a community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. Sort of like Wikipedia but specifically for Books.
One of the books they have is a book on Cryptography that is quite easy to read and follow. At the time of this writing a lot of the sections in the book still have to be added but new content is added regularly and over time I think it will become a great resource for everyone.
Check it out.
- Suramya
The best way to prove competency in a field is to show a working sample of your work to the client. GGRP wanted to show off their sound engineering capabilities so they contacted ‘Grey Canada’ which is an ad agency located in Vancouver, Canada.
They then created a record player from a piece of corrugated cardboard that folded into an envelope. Once assembled, a record can be spun on the player with a pencil. The vibrations go trough the needle and are amplified in the cardboard material. (See image below) This was then sent out to creative directors across North America
Cardboard Record Player
Source: Ads of the World.
- Suramya
Jalapeno Ice Cream… Wow. I want some.
Jalapeno Ice Cream
Wonder if it is real? hmm.. a Google search tells me that it is quite real. Even found a recipe for it:
1 medium jalapeño or serrano chile
1 cup water
1 3/4 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 cups milk
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
9 large egg yolks
1 tablespoon framboise or vanilla extract
Quarter the chile lengthwise and remove the seeds, veins, and any remnants of stem. Chop it into 1/4−inch pieces. Place the chopped chile in a small saucepan. Add water and 1 cup of the sugar. Bring to a gentle boil over medium−low heat. Cook for 10 minutes, then remove from the heat and let stand for at least 4 hours.
In a medium−size heavy−bottomed saucepan, combine milk, cream and 1 tablespoon of the sugar. Bring to a scald.
Meanwhile, put remaining sugar (1/2 cup plus 3 tablespoons), egg yolks and framboise or vanilla extract in a large bowl and whisk just to blend. While gently whisking the yolks, drizzle the hot cream mixture into them so that they are gradually warmed up. Return the mixture to the saucepan and set over medium−low heat. Cook, stirring with a wooden spoon and constantly scraping the bottom of the pan, until the custard has thickened slightly and coats the back of the spoon.
Strain the custard through a fine sieve into a bowl and nestle it in a larger bowl of ice. Let cool, stirring occasionally, then transfer to an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
Drain the chile and add to the soft ice cream. Transfer to a storage container and freeze until firm.
Found this while surfing on: www.foundshit.com.
Recipe Source: freecookingrecipes.net
- Suramya
An American architect Bryan Berg has created a replica of the Venetian Macau using 218,792 playing cards from 4,051 decks of cards. It took him 44 days to create the model which measures 33 feet by just under 10 feet.
Bryan Berg with the world’s largest house of cards
All I can say when I see this is: Wow! It takes skill to do something like this and its just wow. If you are in Macau then do check it out. Its located in the Macau’s Cotai Strip.
Source: American architect beats his own record after creating the world’s largest house of cards | Mail Online.
- Suramya
Being unique is not always a good thing. Which is something best shown by this ‘Motivational’ poster. The same applies to being online. If you are unique then people can identify you based on your setup.
What am I talking about? Basically EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) did a bit of research and found out it is possible to finger-print someone’s browser based on their settings and plugins by the information each browser shares with the sites it visits even when you have turned off cookies. This can theoretically be used to track the sites you visit on the web. So if you use some plugin’s that not everyone uses or you use a rare browser then that makes you unique and thus identifiable on the web.
In my case my browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 215,353 users tested so far so I guess my visits can be accurately tracked.
The following information sent by the browser is used to fingerprint it: User Agent, HTTP_ACCEPT Headers, Browser Plugin Details, System Time Zone, Screen Size & Color Depth and System Fonts installed. More information on the methodology used to identify the browser is available here.
Check out how unique you are on the Panopticlick site run by EFF. They also have some hints on how to prevent browser finger printing which you definitely should check out.
- Suramya
Ukrainian artist Oksana Mas used 15,000 hand painted Easter eggs to create a mosaic depicting the Virgin Mary on a wall of the Saint Sophia cathedral in Kiev. Now that is some amazing artwork. The traditional Easter eggs are made of wood and painted in the traditional Ukrainian style.
Source: ZuZu Top.
- Suramya
The site TinyOgg.com which was launched recently allows you watch, listen and download Flash-based videos without the need to use Flash technology. What this means is that you can use the site to convert videos from sites like YouTube to .ogg files and download them to your local computer.
Now you might be asking what the problem is using Flash to view the video directly, instead of converting it to ogg. Here’s what the site FAQ has to say about this:
What’s the advantages of choosing Ogg over Flash?
Choosing Ogg over Flash is both an ethical and technical question. We all want our computers to do better, so here is how our computers are better with Free Formats:
1. You will be able to enjoy the media “natively”; there is no need to install any plug-in or add-on to your standard-friendly browser.
2. You will not need to load heavy and possibly unsafe scripts, which helps with speed and stability.
3. You will support a free, open Web where no corporation monopolizes an important technology, such as video.
4. You will enjoy more control over your digital life with Free Formats and Open Standards because no corporation decides what you can and cannot do with the files you have.
Personally I think that flash is a very resource intensive way to view videos. I tried it on a couple of videos and it worked great. Plus using this site lets me download the video to my local system without hassle. One of the other things I liked is that you can have the script download the highest available quality of the video automatically. So if a HD version of the video is available it will download it instead of the regular version.
The whole site is built on top of Free Software. Currently the site only supports YouTube but support for other service is under development.
Check it out. You might like it 
- Suramya
- Suramya
As some of you know, I am not a big fan of modern art. To me most Modern art looks like a five year old’s experiment with paints. To me that’s not art. Painting a blue line on a white canvas and calling it art is just plain silly in my opinion. A lot of people have tried to convince me otherwise but I stand by my statement.
The painting below on the other hand is art. It takes skill to paint like this and this is what I consider art not some random squiggles on canvas. Yes, you read it correctly the image below is actually a painting. Cool right? The artist’s name is Alyssa Monks, check out her site for more paintings by her.
Shower Scene
Visit TheToyZone.com for more images that are actually paintings .
- Suramya
This is a site that I have been meaning to write about for a while as its been sitting in my Drafts for a couple of months now. So I finally decided that it was about time I blogged about it.
Basically what this site does is that it uses your browser history to figure out the probability of you being male or female based on the kind of sites you visit. The script basically polls the browser to find out which of the Quantcast top 10k sites were visited by the user and then applies the ratio of male to female users for each site and with some basic math determines a guestimate of your gender.
Seems to work quite well too. I have checked it on a couple of systems and it does seem to get the percentages right. According to this system’s history I have a 98% probability of being a guy.
Check it out: Using your browser URL history to estimate gender
- Suramya
While surfing the net I discovered that Google has a service that reads out text, converting it to speech so I tried it out and it works great, the voice doesn’t sound robotic at all like some of the other converters that are available today. The best part is that you can use it by passing it a sentence as part of a URL and it will return a mp3 file with the voice over.
For example, visiting the following link will cause it to read out “Hello and welcome”: http://www.google.com/translate_tts?q=Hello+and+welcome
Try it out. To have it read out a different text just change the text after ‘q=’ with your own text, replacing the spaces in the sentence with a + sign.
The only other Text To Speech service I have seen that does this good work is the AT&T Labs Natural Voices site.
The advantage of the Google service is that it can be automated and can be used within scripts and other programs to generate natural sounding voice responses.
Source: blogoscoped.com
- Suramya
