An American firm is going its own way in combating the world’s CO2 crisis, not by building hybrid or electric cars but rather improving the existing combustion engine by as much as 33-50%. This is achieved by heating and optimizing the gas injection into the engine. Very interesting I would say. For more see here; http://www.tscombustion.com/index.html
News related material
I have for a long time been thinking about finding a good RSS reader, I have from time to time stumbled across some good sites with interesting content but the RSS reader in IE does not seem to be quite good enough. I don’t want to have to go into a special pane of IE to view my feeds, I would like them to pop up by them self.
Anyway, so far I have found this Alertbear (not Alertbar as I first though, but bear as in the animal), it is quite good – still missing a few customization options (I would like to be able to decide the update interval of EACH feed separately, but Alertbear only offers one update interval for ALL feeds).
Alertbear come preset with a bunch of feeds, and you can add your own feeds quite easily. Once you have added your feeds you can configure Alertbear to how often it checks for updates (sadly as mentioned only ONE interval, not one per feed) and what should be done once news are received (popup etc). Mine is set to show headlines for 20sec upon receiving them.
There is also a ‘History’ function, this is more like a regular RSS feed reader but quite a good one (you get it by right clicking the tray icon and clicking “Show history”).
All in all it seem like something very close to what I have been looking for (about 94% of my needs are met I would say), there are some cosmetic and customization issues but they are minor. Anyway, if you know of a better alternative do tell..
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Yes, believe it or not, in Switzerland it is actually illegal to use a GPS that has preloaded POI’s (Point of interest in Garmin terminology) or PND (or what ever they call it on your GPS unit) that warn about speed control cameras and police checkpoints etc. If you are stopped and found using such a device it will be confiscated and you will be fined.
As from what I can tell it is only illegal if the device has loaded POI/PND for Switzerland speed camera’s/police checkpoints, the use of POI/PND for sights/hotels etc in Switzerland are still legal. But mind you I got this from documents in German (not available in English) and my German is not all that good, so if you are passing Switzerland maybe you had better check yourself.
Links to documentation;
http://www.news-service.admin.ch/NSBSubscriber/message/attachments/6995.pdf
http://www.surfinagain.com/images/astrafaq.pdf
http://www.astra.admin.ch/dokumentation/00109/00113/00491/index.html?lang=de&msg-id=10094
http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/09/switzerland-bans-some-gps-devices-for-speed-camera-warnings/
A new google like type search engine for music files has emerged, http://skreemr.com/advanced_search.jsp (the advanced search page), you can here search for music and the service will then scour the Internet for the MP3 you seek and return a list of possible links. Once you click a link the music is ‘streamed’ to your computer (right click on the link and save link as will allow you to ‘download’ the music).
It also has a custom software which can be downloaded here;
http://songr.co.cc/
Legality;
Some in Denmark claim that this is not ‘true’ streaming as the file is downloaded before or during playback and that you thus is breaking the copyright. I don’t know, it’s a gray zone so you need to consider both the legality in your country and your continence also… never the less an interesting search option.
It would appear the days when DNA evidence was counted as being 99.99999999999999999% trustworthy has encountered a problem, scientists from Israel has in a lab proven that they could falsify DNA evidence so that they would appear to come from a specific individual – all they needed was apparently a DNA profile of the person they wanted to ‘mimic’ and they could produce spit and blood with his/her DNA profile (I would suspect seamen could also be produced this way). This way DNA evidence like eg blood could be falsified and put on a crime scene to frame someone, it is a scary thought as DNA evidence today carry very high weight in courtrooms.
All may however not be lost as the company behind this breakthrough is working on a detection model to spot these ‘fake’ DNA samples, but still the thought is scary.
http://newz.dk/dna-beviser-kan-fremstilles-i-laboratoriet
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18dna.html?_r=1
http://www.fsigenetics.com/article/S1872-4973(09)00099-4/abstract
The Danish CableTV provider YouSee.dk will as of September 2009 cease encoding their digital tv signal, thus you will no longer need a decoder card for your DVB-C enabled TV/box. Now sadly this does not mean that you can view more channels, only that you now can watch them in digital quality something that earlier would require a separate subscription. Indeed good and interesting news for those of us that has YouSee.dk 🙂
Source;
http://www.business.dk/article/20090819/techmobil/90819062/
It would appear that I am not the only person capable of misplacing things, NASA apparently ‘misplaced’ the original recordings of the lunar landing for 40 years, and just recently rediscovered them.
It would appear that what we have been watching these past 39 years was nothing more than a video camera re-recording of the original footage. But now NASA plan on restoring the the tapes and releasing them. Nice..
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/110442/WORLD-EXCLUSIVE-NASA-finds-missing-moon-landing-tapes
Felicita 🙂 Finally, after several months my blog is back on track…
It has been a long and difficult road, a road that involved some serious SQL debugging finding a new host and a lot of debugging in general…
So what happened you ask? Well, believe it or not but the hosting provider, I found as a replacement for my old provider (that went bankrupt), also went bankrupt.. Can you believe the luck!?! No!? Well neither could I!!!.. And desperation grew as the only backup I had of my SQL database was in an unreadable format.. Anyhow, many long nights later – I finally cracked the formatting of the mySQL file and found a new provider that seem reliable (well, with my luck you never know 😉 )..
Now I am hosted with www.servage.dk (www.servage.net) and they have been around for quite some time, and seem large enough that imminent bankruptcy does not seem likely. If you are interested in hosting with them use couponcode CRA100 it will give you a discount from 39DKK to 29DKK (and no it’s not my referral code 🙂 ).
For now the only thing left is to offer my apology for the long downtime and to once again say “Hello world!” – a blog is reborn 😀 There is still a bit of reconfiguration left, and a large backlog of blogposts to be published, so bare with me for the next few weeks 🙁
Best Regards
Mike
A week ago or so someone via Google Earth located what could have been the greatest scoop of – well I guess ever – the possible remains of the lost city of Atlantis (see picture), it was a large man made structure like shape in the ocean.
Sadly Google has come up with a different less exotic explanation, stating that its actually sonar tracks (yeah, I know sounds strange, but take a look at their blog for a more detailed explanation).
Bummer, it would have been cool finding Atlantis.
Unless you live under a rock (on the moon), you should have heard about the court case against “The Pirate Bay” a torrent tracker site in Sweden, charges are piracy and aiding in committing piracy (well more or less).
If you find the case interesting you can follow it here;
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/yo_ho_ho/index.html
and here
http://live.piratpartiet.se/ (Swedish)
It is an interesting judicial dilemma, and I am quite entrigued in regard to what the outcome will be.