I just found an old Usenet discussion (c. 1993) on alt.folklore.computers in which Eric S. Raymond and I discuss nipples. Bizarre.
A brilliant music hack using the equally brilliant Echo Nest API:
What is this?
For when your favorite song just isn’t long enough. This web app lets you upload a favorite MP3 and will then generate a never-ending and ever changing version of the song. It does what Infinite Gangnam Style did but for any song.
It never stops?
That’s right. It will play forever.How does it work?
We use the Echo Nest analyzer to break the song into beats. We play the song beat by beat, but at every beat there’s a chance that we will jump to a different part of song that happens to sound very similar to the current beat. For beat similarity we look at pitch, timbre, loudness, duration and the position of the beat within a bar. There’s a nifty visualization that shows all the possible transitions that can occur at any beat.
I’ve been a big fan of WolframAlpha for several years now. The sheer amount of data in the system, as well as the functions that can be applied to the data, is staggering. Well, Stephen Wolfram and his team have outdone themselves with Wolfram Language. This is real next level, game changing tech.
I can’t wait to try this!
This is insanely scary and cool at the same time. From arstechnica:
“We had an air-gapped computer that just had its [firmware] BIOS reflashed, a fresh disk drive installed, and zero data on it, installed from a Windows system CD,” Ruiu said. “At one point, we were editing some of the components and our registry editor got disabled. It was like: wait a minute, how can that happen? How can the machine react and attack the software that we’re using to attack it? This is an air-gapped machine and all of the sudden the search function in the registry editor stopped working when we were using it to search for their keys.”
But the story gets stranger still. In posts here, here, and here, Ruiu posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a post-apocalyptic movie: “badBIOS,” as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps.
This makes the greatest online reference even better. The full Pokédex is available for your data mining needs.
To access it via Siri on iOS7, simply ask “Search Wolfram for Snorelax” (or whatever Pokémon you care about).
My (now teenage) sons would have loved this if only it had been released 5 years ago.
I find this incredibly fascinating. After almost 20 years of carefully planning and executing website releases, Netflix’s process both makes sense and scares the hell out of me.
Netflix, the popular movie streaming site, deploys a hundred times per day, without the use of Chef or Puppet, without a quality assurance department and without release engineers. To do this, Netflix built an advanced in-house PaaS (Platform as a Service) that allows each team to deploy their own part of the infrastructure whenever they want, however many times they require.
Additionally, they purposely introduce failures into their infrastructure to test resiliancy:
Failure happens continuously in the Netflix infrastructure. Software needs to be able to deal with failing hardware, failing network connectivity and many other types of failure. Even if failure doesn’t occur naturally, it is induced forcefully using The Simian Army. The Simian Army consists of a number of (software) “monkeys” that randomly introduce failure. For instance, the Chaos Monkey randomly brings servers down and the Latency Monkey randomly introduces latency in the network. Ensuring that failure happens constantly makes it impossible for the team to ignore the problem and creates a culture that has failure resilience as a top priority.
Good stuff.
via InfoQ
This is a brilliant idea if it actually works.
Our team is proud to present the Yuni — the first headphone offering true stereo sound for individuals with unilateral deafness or hearing impairment!
Since most headphone manufacturers ignore the needs of unilaterally deaf listeners, the options have been limited. Either miss half the music, or find a way to collapse the two stereo channels into a single channel and listen with one ear. But the interference between the two channels coming from the same speaker will boost some frequencies and cut others, resulting in a messy, cramped sound.
The Yuni gets around this problem with a revolutionary new stereo technology (patent pending) that places both stereo channels in a single earpiece, but with two separate speakers instead of just one — one above, and one below the ear opening. This design takes advantage of our ear’s natural shape, which functions to help us localize where sound is coming from. With the Yuni, you can hear and distinguish the two channels, identifying which sound is coming from which speakers. Even better, the music will sound truly spacious, not squished, and you can finally hear true stereo panning as the sound moves from one channel to the other! If you’re a unilaterally deaf music-lover who has never experienced these effects through headphones before, it may be difficult to appreciate how much your music will open up and come alive when it’s played the way it was meant to be enjoyed…in stereo.
I have been ~75% deaf in my right ear ever since I suffered nerve damage from a viral infection 15 years ago (who knew you could go deaf from sinusitis‽). I can still hear music decently well if I use headphones, so I’m not sure if I need a Yuni. It would be great to try a pair and see if the quality of the listening experience improves significantly.
Check out: Yuni: A Headphone for People With Single-Sided Hearing Loss by Daniel Glass — Kickstarter
c/o @Shyhoof – “An ode to the journey of ó on a shipping label.“
ODE TO A SHIPPING LABEL
Once there was a little o,
with an accent on top like só.
It started out as UTF8,
(universal since ’98),
but the program only knew latin1,
and changed little ó to “ij” for fun.
A second program saw the “ij”
and said “I know HTML entity!”
So “ij” was smartened to “ó”
and passed on through happily.
Another program saw the tangle
(more precisely, ampersands to mangle)
and thus the humble “˜³”
became “ó”
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