We’ve presented some of Johnny Lee’s Wiimote hacking projects in the past, but what you’re about to see is what impressed me the most so far. Using a Wiimote, a projector, and an infrared emitter, Johnny is able to transform almost any surface, from a standard sheet of paper to an umbrella, into an interactive display.
Rotate your blog ads with UBD Block Ad
By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
When Google revised the PageRanks recently, my blog got bumped up to a 6 and that has got me thinking about starting to sell some advertising space. But if I was being truthful with myself for a moment, I would admit that I am a really lazy person sometimes. The idea of managing the adverts, making sure everyone got equal time on the page and so on is just so boring and tedious. I would much rather be surfing the Internet and writing stories. So if I went down the blog advertising route, I would much rather automate the whole process and then not think about it.
I think I may have found the answer in the WordPress plugin UBD Block Ad.
This plugin basically automates the whole advertising process if the advert in question is a 125×125 box. First it will help you with a variety of design layouts and will format up to 10 adverts at a time.
But the killer function (in my view) is that it will automatically rotate those ads so each advertiser gets an equal amount of time on the page.
So everything is fully automated and the only thing you have to do is to enter the code for each of your ads inside the UBD setup page. That’s it! Plus it’s free!
So if you want to experiment with 125×125 ads, just download the plugin and give it a go.
Hear your Skype calls coming through with Skype Muter
By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Here’s a question for you – why does everyone call me on Skype when I am busy singing along to songs such as ZZ Top’s “Gimme All Your Loving”? This invariably means that I end up missing everyone’s phone calls because I am singing at the top of my voice, the neighbourhood cats are wailing and the deaf neighbour next door is banging on the walls telling me to shut up.
After missing a lot of Skype calls, someone not so subtly showed me Skype Muter and firmly suggested that I install it for when one of his calls comes through. It’s actually quite a neat little program and performs one single basic task. It simply stops your music when a Skype call arrives.
First though I had to install a version of Microsoft .NET which seemed to take forever, but when it was finished, the installation of Skype Muter took less than 30 seconds. You then have to go into it, click on the 2 or 3 settings and then authorize it in your Skype program (this last part is very important – I spent ages thinking the program was bust when all I had to do was approve the authorization request in Skype).
You can either tell Muter to make the music quieter or pause it completely. When the call is finished, it will start the music up again for you. It works with Winamp (my player of choice), Windows Media Player and iTunes.
Could Gmail Become a Corporate Solution?
By JR Raphael
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Gmail is taking new steps toward becoming a large-scale client solution. In what’s billed as one of the world’s largest Gmail rollouts ever conducted, an Australian school system is dumping its Outlook setup in lieu of a completely Gmail-based e-mail system for its 1.3 million students.
The transition — occurring at the New South Wales Department of Education and Training — is part of a three-year deal inked with Google and Australian communications company Telstra. The deal is worth $9.5 million and will move students from a 35MB mailbox limit to Gmail’s generous 6GB storage space.
Perhaps more significant, though, is the potential the move shows for Gmail to move into the Microsoft-dominated corporate environment. Another Australian school — Macquarie University — shifted its 68,000 students and graduates onto Gmail last year. Whether more universities and big businesses will eventually follow suit may be the true test of the platform’s reach.
So, cast your vote: In a theoretical corporate democracy, would you choose Gmail over your company’s current e-mail system? What do you think it’d take for your business to actually make the leap?
Where the Hell is Matt Harding? (2008)
Anyone here remembers Matt Harding, the Australian dude who got the crazy idea, and acted upon it, to travel all around the world to dance in some of the Earth’s most beautiful places? Well he’s done it again folks, and here’s the result of his latest escapade. Enjoy!
Are We Giving Robots Too Much Power?
In the following video, the Onion News staff discusses, with their usual flair for the dramatic, a situation that might be waiting for us in a few decades if we start giving robots too much power over our society. Enjoy!
The Robots of WALL-E
I’m sure you already know that WALL-E will feature a cute, trash-compacting robot, but do you have any idea on how many bots will play in the movie? A lot! Here’s a quick featurette presenting WALL-E’s robot cast, for your viewing enjoyment!
TokyoFlash’s Ultimate Geek Watches: Giveaway and Review
Generally, geeks notoriously avoid wearing jewelry, especially male geeks. But there is one exception to this rule: watches. This is probably because watches do not only add an element of fashion to their look, but are actually useful. And if the watch looks especially high-tech, then all the better!
I’m sure you’ve all seen some geeky-looking watches on the Net in recent months. Most technology blogs cover them from time to time, so if you’re following a bunch of them, you ought to have seen a few. Today, I’m not only going to show you 3 amazing watches from a company named TokyoFlash, but I’m also going to give away two of them (an approximate value of $150 each). Keep on reading for all the details.
Firefox 3 Stumbleupon toolbar offers exporting function
By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
While idly browsing online today (as one often does on a Sunday afternoon), I had a look at the options on the new Stumbleupon toolbar for Firefox 3 to see if anything new was there. I was intrigued to discover this:
It turns out that you can export ALL of your Stumbleupon “likes” from your Stumbleupon profile to your Firefox 3 Bookmarks.
The irritating part to this though is that if you have a lot of stumbled likes, it will take a long time for this process to be completed and your browser is basically frozen while it is going on. You can’t use Firefox for other surfing while this is happening and if you eventually want to shut Firefox down, you’ll have to terminate the whole thing. So if you have thousands of stumbles to transfer over, you might want to leave this running overnight while you’re sleeping.
When it’s finished, you’ll have a nice backup of all your stumbled sites in your Firefox bookmarks. You can then repeat the process every week or month depending on the volume of your stumbling activity.
I am pretty certain it doesn’t transfer over your tags as well, but nevertheless, having a simple record of the sites is better than nothing. But in future upgrades, having the tags transferred over would be a nice touch for better organisation purposes. I have over 12,000 stumbled sites and having them all tagged would make my life a lot easier when it comes to tracking down a particular site.
So taking this idea a step further, if you use the Del.icio.us extension which synchronises your Firefox bookmarks with your Del.icio.us account, then you could export your Stumbleupon “likes” to Firefox, then they will be synchronised to your Del.icio.us account. The only downside to that of course is that they won’t be tagged and organised, so it’s up to you if you want to go down that route. Personally I am still debating whether I want to throw 12,000 untagged URL’s into my Del.icio.us account.
Phone in your Twitter messages with Twitterfone
By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
I have always been a bit of a sucker for new toys and gadgets, especially ones on the internet and Twitterfone is now officially “my new toy”. The invite code has been sitting in the wreckage that is called my email inbox for the past couple of weeks now and it was only today that I finally got around to activating it and seeing what Twitterfone was all about. As soon as I did so, I got that gleam in my eye and my girlfriend said to her friend who was around, “uh, oh, I know that look… I’ll never get Mark off the computer now!”
So what is Twitterfone all about?