Forgot to mention this - a few days ago Konfabulator, a desktop ‘widget’ application (which basically means you can download little apps to sit on your desktop, such as weather forecasts or share prices), was bought up by Yahoo!. This means that it is also now free to download and use.
It will now be officially called Yahoo! Widgets, although it will keep the same Konfabulator code, and for now, widget downloads database.
After creating Montage-a-Google, a web app that generates montages of images by searching Google’s image database for a specific search term, Grant Robinson has created a surprisingly addictive game based on the same technology.
Guess-the-Google shows you 16 pictures, which would be top of the list if you searched for a word on Google’s image search. But guess what? It doesn’t tell you what word. Guess the word that would have got those results, and score points based on how long it took you, how many incorrect guesses you made, and whathaveyou.
It’s harder than you think, actually. If you get a good score (let’s say 200+), let me know and we might get a bit of a competition going.
The once must-visit Google Tutor, which has in the past few months gone to the dogs slightly while the owner looked for someone to hand the site over to, is now under new management.
It promises to offer the same “mission, vision, objective, purpose & services” as it did under old boss Mark Fleming, so hopefully we’ll see a good few more new tutorials and tips up there soon.
I found this list of unusual personal names of people on Wikipedia, and there are sure quite a few weird names on there.
If you’re about to bring your bundle of joy into the world, and think that plain old John is a bit boring, why not name your nipper Depressed Cupboard Cheesecake? Obviously, the parents of DCC, who live in Kent in the UK, were on an extreme hallucenogenic high. Surely.
If you’ve missed the news recently, the BBC’s In Depth page for the London Bombings has a huge amount of coverage on the recent arrests and information released.
Apologies for the lack of long posts in the past few days - I’ve been a little busy, but all will get back to normal tomorrow I expect.
You can now compare everyone’s favourite Google Maps to Microsoft’s recently launched Virtual Earth. Much has been made of the new Microsoft project, but does it live up to the shadow of Google?
The possible mastermind of the London attacks is being detained in Zambia - and he’s British. [SkyNews]
Homes damaged in yesterday’s Birmingham tornado could be demolished [BBC]
The papers take in yesterday’s IRA peace statement [BBC]
Canada bans copying CDs to iPods - is that not what MP3 players are legally for? [Boing Boing]
Microsoft has released screenshots of it’s recently-launched Beta of the next Windows incarnation - Windows Vista. It all looks pretty snazzy to me - ooh, look at this one, tags for documents anyone?
Via: [Lifehacker]
As part of Wired Magazine’s 10 Years That Changed The World series, John Batelle tells the story of Google’s early development - and how two students began a multi-million pound business, even though they didn’t really like each other.
An interesting read.
Liz Beattie, the infamous teacher who wants “failure” in schools to be replaced in ‘education speak’ by “deferred success” has lost her campaign to get it brought into all teachers’ vocabulary. The BBC reports that her colleagues of the Professional Association of Teachers voted against the motion because they would be ‘ridiculed’.
Well, guess what Liz?
