Wonderful Thoughts A weblog about latest news and reveiws on technology,science,computing,software and autoblog. Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 0 0 1 840

Articles from Wonderful Thoughts

T. Rex - It’s What’s For Dinner 2007-08-26 03:27:56 Sequencing proteins from a 68 million-year-old leg bone from a T. rex, scientists have learned that what they were actually looking at — was a drumstick! Comparing sequences of proteins with other animals it was discovered that the closest living relative to the T. rex was practically right under our noses all along, in the refrigerator aisle, and on dinner plates the world over, dressed in a variety of cunning disguises from coconut curry to cacciatore. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the humble chicken. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. This revelation is amazing, amusing, and a little disappointing; rather like pulling back the curtain of the Great and Powerful Oz and finding a pudgy little man from Kansas. Still, this brings an answer to the great philosophical question; Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It would be the egg, laid by an ancestor who was more reptilian than avian. According to the UK Guardian, study of a 68 million-year-old leg bone of a T ...

DVD Review: Tales From the Crypt - The Complete Sixth Season 2007-08-26 03:27:53 Written by El Articulo Definido As a kid I was always a big fan of horror and anything that required me sneaking into the living room to watch late night HBO. Tales From the Crypt fit that bill. Granted, by the time TFtC hit the airwaves I was 13 and didn't have to do much sneaking, it was still on late enough that I didn't want to wake the old people in the house. Now Warner Bros. is releasing them on DVD. Season six just hit the shelves recently, and while the show only lasted a total of eight seasons, and didn't pack the same punch in those later years, it was always fun. Season Six features 15 classic episodes from 1994, featuring many stars of the silver screen, as well as some future stars waiting for their big break, including Benicio Del Toro, Sherilynn Fenn, Isabella Rosellini, Bruce Davison, Isaac Hayes, and many others. In "The Assassin," Corey Feldman and Jonathan Banks play hitmen out to kill one of their own who has gone into hiding; capturing ... Dvd

Liner Notables: The Great Lost Kinks Album 2007-08-26 03:27:47 Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits… Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be, Ray Davies reminds us in “Til Death Do Us Part,” which kicks off The Great Lost Kinks Album, leaving him in no mood to catch up: In my little life,I know that the world must keep on turning,Even though it leaves me far behind… A collection of enjoyable but low-key and disheveled outtakes, rarities, and B-sides, mostly from the late-'60s, the LP’s 1973 release date instantly pegged it an instant period piece — “Groovy Movies,” anyone? — but often refreshingly so, considering the then-encroaching age of hand-wringing soft-rock and cosmic bloat. The Great Lost Kinks Album — much like the previous year’s marvelous and somewhat more conventional catch-up an ...

So Bad They’re Good Movie Contest Winner 2007-08-25 15:17:19 Out of the list of horrible movies I watched over the last two weeks, a few were standouts: Plan 9 From Outer Space, Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, Do Or Die, and Reform School Girls. Each is horrid in its own particular way, but for the purposes of this contest I declare the winner to be Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. You can read my review, but here are some reasons why this is my new favorite terrible movie: It’s real throwback to the sixties, complete with a girl rock band. All those James Bond movies, The Prisoner, and France Gall songs formed a soft spot which was perhaps easily exploited. Some pretty cool music - post psychedelia rock bands with horns and strings, reminiscent of the Carpenters, Brady Kids, 5th Dimension, The Association, etc. A shocking ending that even I wasn’t prepared for. Z-Man. Aargh. The acting is bad, but not so bad that I couldn’t tell one character from another. They’re each distinctly awful in their own way. I wasn’t bo ...

Dale Jr Beat Me To It 2007-08-25 12:24:43 After not seeing the Michigan race last week I came home with a few story ideas, some good and some bad, but there was one that I really wanted to write about: Teresa Earnhardt. In fact, just before I left to go to the races at MIS I sort of hinted about the way I felt in a post entitled “8′nt Going To Happen“. After attending the weekend festivities at MIS I came home a little more supportive of Teresa Earnhardt than I was before. Here’s why: Some of those Dale Jr fans can be harsh. Check out the pictures, they are of an unofficially licenced T-shirt (front and back). Although I laughed when I first saw it, I think it was more of a laugh in disbelief rather than humour. The front is very harsh. My friend, the NASCAR virgin, who went with me to the races couldn’t believe his eyes when he read it, unfortunately I could (once reality set in) because I’ve read and heard what people have been saying about Teresa. Now if the image on the back were to be ...

Dale Jr Beat Me To It 2007-08-25 12:24:43 After not seeing the Michigan race last week I came home with a few story ideas, some good and some bad, but there was one that I really wanted to write about: Teresa Earnhardt. In fact, just before I left to go to the races at MIS I sort of hinted about the way I felt in a post entitled “8′nt Going To Happen“. After attending the weekend festivities at MIS I came home a little more supportive of Teresa Earnhardt than I was before. Here’s why: Some of those Dale Jr fans can be harsh. Check out the pictures, they are of an unofficially licenced T-shirt (front and back). Although I laughed when I first saw it, I think it was more of a laugh in disbelief rather than humour. The front is very harsh. My friend, the NASCAR virgin, who went with me to the races couldn’t believe his eyes when he read it, unfortunately I could (once reality set in) because I’ve read and heard what people have been saying about Teresa. Now if the image on the back were to be ...

DIY Life is looking for talent 2007-08-25 12:12:18 Have you ever done things yourself? Have you ever thought about getting paid to blog about it? Are you handy as all-get-out? If so, have I got news for you… Weblogs, inc. (an AOL company) is the world’s largest publisher of web logs (blogs) and is looking for talented writers with a definitive do-it-yourself sensibility to join our team of bloggers! We need people who know a lot about everything and who can help our readers become a bit more handy on a regular basis. We would like to invite you to apply to blog for us. Here’s how it works: You write short articles online (blog posts) for us that help our readers do-it-themselves with handy tips on everything including: home improvement, gardening, computers, scrapbooking, finances, weekend building projects, kids, cooking, wedding tips, organization, toys, recreation, etc. and we’ll pay you to do it. Here is what we need from you:To apply for this blogging “position”, send the following information ...

Turn your Windows Smartphone into a health monitor 2007-08-25 12:12:13 You know, there are bio-hacks that come along once in a while that are really worth mentioning. In true geek-it fashion, an aspiring ‘entrepreneur’ (among other things) has developed a portable, miniature health monitor that uses a pretty advanced assembly of chips — from accelerometers to Bluetooth to flash storage — in order to display health information from an electrode wearer in real time. How does it do this? Why, it sends the information gleaned from the electrode-wearing subject directly to a Bluetooth-enabled Windows Smartphone (running a small application), which provides a real-time ECG readout in addition to other health telemetry data. No need for a hospital visit with this contraption, which if put into a single unit would be no bigger than a small cellphone. It’s powered by a small Lithium-Ion battery with attached voltage regulator. This is obviously a prototype, but it’s a pretty finished product all things considered except packag ... Health

Fix your jammed garbage disposal 2007-08-25 12:12:10 More than once something has gone down the garbage disposal that shouldn’t have. The scary thing is that people stick their hand down after that item without thinking, and that could end up with disastrous results. Unless you want to be one hand or body part less I suggest following these simple instructions. First off, please make totally sure that the power to the garbage disposal is off. Sometimes people forget that the disposal is still on when they try to remove the cause of the jam, resulting in some serious bodily harm. You can try to remove the jam from above (inside the sink) by pressing the end of a short broomstick against one of the impellers and then jab in the other direction. After a few tries in each direction, the jam should come loose. Remove the debris with a long handled tongs or a long nose pliers. You can remove the jam from the under side of the disposal by manually moving the motor shaft and flywheel so that you can dislodge the jam. Usually a 1/4 inch All ...

BuildHardLinks.com - Physical World Hyperlinks 2007-08-25 09:24:05 What it does BUILDhardlink.com seems to have stumbled upon a simple if not obvious solution to the need for a barcode to be used when creating physical links. Physical hyperlinking or hardlinking is a concept that is in the very early stages of emergence in most parts of the world. The way it has traditionally worked is you take a picture of a barcode (QR Code) with your phone camera as might be found on some object, say a movie poster. The result is your phones browser redirects to information about that object. In their own words “The BUILDhardlink.com site encourages users to build hardlinks for personal or business use and add them to an Open Use Content database that can be freely accessed by anyone with an Internet enabled cell phone. Just as a hyperlink takes you from web page to web page, a hardlink takes you from a physical object to a data store of information about that object in the form of pictures and text.” Why it might be a killer No proprietary software or barcodes ...

Jitsu.org - OpenSource UI Toolkit for Creating Web Apps 2007-08-25 09:24:02 What it does Jitsu is an open source toolset for building cool, innovative web apps. Apart from the hip appellation, Jitsu features an XML markup language, page compiler, animation engine, Ajax, and runtime inspector, among other things. Its implementation of Ajax makes it designer friendly, which is crucial for building consumer web applications. It’s got client-side data binding to make for rapid iterations, meaning changes are easy to achieve without having to rebuild everything from the ground up. And Jitsu is free. It makes it easier for programmers to build front end apps that users will appreciate. Other features include a compiler which converts markup to javascript, javascript runtime, cross platform library and backbutton support. Jitsu works best with Firefox and IE. It doesn’t require any particular back-end server solution. In their own words “Jitsu contains an integrated set of tools to enable developers to build and deploy sophisticated user interfaces ...

Nitobi.com - Ajax Components 2007-08-25 09:23:57 What it does Nitobi supplies reusable software to developers looking to make high quality, use-friendly web applications. They offer a variety Ajax components for Java, PHP, Net and ASP. If you’re looking to create a new user interface, to develop apps, or to expand on existing components, Nitobi has the solution. They offer customization as well as training on Ajax, iPhone apps, and much more. Among their UI products you’ll find grids, trees, Tabstrip, Fisheye (a toolbar component for zooming lists), Callout, for user alerts, Calendar and Spotlight among others. Components can be downloaded as is or customized specifically for your needs. Documentation and support are always available. Nitobi will help you enrich your apps, so you can achieve more with less effort. Download the free trial version of their UI suite or get live demos and see how Nitobi can benefit your company. In their own words “With a focus on end-user experience, we’re committed to changing the ...

Search4RSS.com - Search Engine for RSS Feeds 2007-08-25 09:23:45 What it does Search4RSS is a search engine designed specifically for RSS feeds, of course. The search engine works with your existing Yahoo id’s. Here’s how it works: first select an engine from the drop down menu; you can choose from, among others, Google, YouTube, Delicious, Flickr, and Technorati. After you select your preferred engine, enter in your keyword or query. Your results are presented alongside suggestions for related tags. The site has over 150,000 feeds which are sorted by category. Anyone can provide feed submissions. The site is best used with Mozilla. Feedback is welcomed. In their own words “Search4RSS started 2 years back as a regular RSS Search engine website and now we are giving our domain a new direction. With so many Web 2.0 application evolving around the web we decided to give ourselves a try to create a Web 2.0 application which would consolidate your search and data from various domains like Yahoo Web Search, Technocrati Blog search, Google ...

RadioCorridor.com - Safely Discuss the Job 2007-08-25 09:23:43 What it does RadioCorridor is like a private social network for your company, but here’s the best part, it’s in no way associated with your company. So, you and your work mates can join and schmooze away without worrying about what the boss will say, unless of course you’ve invited your boss along the way. Users can join existing forums e.g. the forum for ‘Crazy interview stories’, or ‘Customer service: the true story’, or ‘Are we better than the competition?’ or they can create their own. Each company’s network is private, so only company members can join (you’ll need a valid company email address), and even then each member can select who gets to see and read their messages. There is a public lounge which is open to everyone. There’s also a phonebook section where members can leave their contact deets if they please. Radio Corridor is and always will be free. In their own words “Radio Corridor is an online community of people working in the same compan ...

mShopper.com - Compare prices and shop from your phone 2007-08-25 09:23:38 What it does If you are serious about finding the lowest price offered on a given product then you will love mShopper.com. Let’s say you are Christmas shopping and love schmying in top end stores but can’t afford it, just pick any in-store item, enter the brand and model number or UPC code, and within sixty seconds mShopper.com will send you a list of available prices. If you are already registered on the site, buying is as easy as choosing “Buy It Now” and entering you pin number. If not, you can register on mShopper.com simply by entering your cell phone number and waiting for a text message with the link to the application and registering with a security pin code. mShopper.com has already joined forces with big stores such as Macy’s, OfficeDepot, and Target as well as smaller niche companies and is constantly looking for more partnerships. mShopper.com is also into philanthropy and gives users the opportunity to donate money during checkout. While shopping from a cell phon ...