News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
Rather than throwing away broken stuff, consider sending it back to the manufacturer and asking for a replacement. The worst they can do is say, “No,” and the success rate is surprisingly high.
Is it graffiti when you don’t use any paint but merely clean select portions of a dirty surface?
ThePCSpy ran some performance tests to determine how much various programs slowed down the Windows boot process.
If you haven’t seen it before, the “How It Should Have Ended” web site has short, animated videos of how various movies should have ended. There are quite a few that I don’t particularly like (e.g., ‘Saving Private Ryan‘), but the ‘Lord of the Rings‘ and ‘Star Wars‘ clips are hysterical (and ‘Superman‘ isn’t too bad either).
This Florida county is going to turn its 28-year old landfill into energy and construction materials. They will vaporize the trash using plasma arcs, producing gas (to run turbines) and a rock-like material that can be used in construction projects. They expect to fully consume the landfill in about 18 years. We need more of this kind of stuff!
Samsung has developed a potential replacement for flash memory, Phase-change Random Access Memory (PRAM). It’s 30 times faster than flash, lasts 10 times longer, and is less expensive to manufacture. Expect to see it in 2008.
From the linked article: “BMW officially announced the Hydrogen 7 today. The car is touted as the first hydrogen-drive luxury performance automobile for everyday use.” It runs on hydrogen or gasoline.
A furniture store in Plano, Illinois held a promotion over the Labor Day weekend: If the Chicago Bears shut out the Green Bay Packers on their opening day football game, then any furniture purchased during the holiday weekend would be free. The final score was 26-0, and there were a lot of happy people after the game.
Link: http://msnbc.msn.com/…
I never use the Caps Lock key, and every so often I’d hit it accidentally. So I physically removed it from keyboard—end of problem. But the linked article has a Windows registry script that converts the Caps Lock key to a Ctrl key. Additionally, Sysinternals has a freeware utility that essentially does the same thing.
New technology for supersonic jets makes them much quieter, and we may actually see them in use over the continental United States. Maybe in another few decades they’ll be in common use (we can only hope).
This video shows how crows have adapted to modern cities. The crow in question drops a nut on a pedestrian crosswalk, waits for a car to run over the nut and crack it open, then waits at the edge of the crosswalk for the light to change, and safely walks out to eat the nut.
