Being broadband-deprived for a few weeks has somehow disconnected me with the blogosphere and the world for a while. Didn’t think I rely on the internet so much…

Anyway, I caught up with a number of news and stuff. This barcode stuff is one of the coolest stuff i’ve seen since I’m back. This design film in Japan, Design Barcode Inc, introduce designs to make barcodes cool and more eye-catchy. These revolutionary designs are functional and pretty - plain cool!

Pending Todo’s:

• unpack
• clear room
• unpack
• unpack
• unpack

There are amazing places we can find videos online. Now we can even watch TV shows online at peekvid. Grey’s Anatomy, 24, Family Guy…. It even has the classic Smurfs and Pink Panther!!! Its resolution isn’t the best, but it certainly works!

I recalled seeing such an automatic mahjong table on sale four years ago at Bukit Timah, but didn’t have the chance to catch it in action. Now this video is a dream come true!

First I wonder how much this cost. Next I wonder how the table knows which is the right side up for the tiles. Nevertheless, amazing!

(Thanks IZ Reloaded)

I have a desktop computer and a laptop. There are just times when I need to copy a block of text or a file just from one computer to the other. I’ve tried everything - using a thumbdrive, creating a dummy icq account and sending the file over, setting up a silly adhoc network, emailing myself. It’s simply frustrating to commit all these effort just to transfer a few bytes of stuff over a few inches.

It took so long for someone to create such a simple and cool concept, the Internet Clipboard - cl1p.net. Copying and pasting between computers…

Indeed email is great, but sometimes, you just need to copy and paste!

One thing though, too bad they are kinda late in getting the domain name. Thought clip.net would be less awkward.

For a lazy bum like me who just hates to do laundry, let alone fold the clothes, this instructional movie is one hell of a godsend! It is so darn cool! And it really works! Try for yourselves!

As we are presented with some of the most amazing effects and CG in the movies, do we actually know which objects in the movies are real and which are just one of the most realistic CG ever?

I just tried this ‘Fake or Foto’ challenge quiz and failed miserably! See if you can discern reality from CG better than me!

Take quiz round 1. And then round 2.

In my security class about 2 years back, my professor mentioned about using visual passwords and visual hashes to help in user authentication and stuff (the details of which I totally gave back to him). I thought it was really cool to be able to convert strings to formula which generates a picture or ‘abstract art’ I call it. Now I stumbled upon this site which allows us to create all sorts of Random Art, simply by typing in anything you want. Essentially, the program takes your string of words and create a mathematical formula to define all those pixels. Then it spews it out as a square picture, unique to your string.

Its possible contribution to the security world aside, I’m pretty amazed and impressed by some of the random art created by the program. Some of my favorites pieces by this digital Picasso:

Of course I couldn’t resist making some of my own masterpieces. Can’t believe I can’t even match a computer!!

And yes!! I look like “celebrities” like Jet Li, Dalai Lama and Wen Jiabao.

MyHeritage put the face-recognition technology to the most creative use - trying to match your face to the well-known people around the world. It’s strangely addictive uploading your photos and seeing who you actually may get mistaken for. The higher the percentage, the higher the match obviously. I literally burst out laughing when I saw those matches. It’s funny most of my matches are non-asians, more to the likes of Eminem, Chester Bennington, Bill Gates (ouch!) and Robert Downey Jr.

I have used Weather.com and Accuweather.com, but none is as accurate as the almighty Weather Forecasting Stone!

Just stumbled upon this amazing video at Robert Scobleizer’s blog. Apparently, someone claimed that this video was done by Microsoft marketing for an internal meeting with its designers. Why am I not surprised?