technology, internet oddities & other random stuff
Archive for June, 2007
Hands up who knows what a Theremin is?
Jun 24th
The Doctor Who theme music is the only exposure most people have ever had to the sound of a Theremin, and most don’t even realise it. There’s a bunch of guys called The Ether and Aether Experiment who’ve covered Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy and it sounds strangely cool:
via the Laughing Squid
Akismet woes
Jun 20th
Anyone with a blog will know the value of Akismet. It automatically filters out comment spam based on a global list of spam content and senders. As soon as I identify a comment as spam, every other instance of Akismet knows about it and blocks it.
I moved servers recently, so this site is now running on a web server VM in my attic. One thing I noticed afterwards was that I stopped receiving spam, or more accurately, Akismet stopped listing spam. Either the spammers forgot where my blog was, or it was borked. I don’t want to risk loosing valid More >
The search for a Microsoft Exchange Alternative
Jun 4th
Back in the old days phone and fax was king. E-mail was nifty gimmick, but nothing more. All you needed to do to provide e-mail to your users was to give them access on their desktop. You could get away with draconian inbox size limits to simplify your storage and backup requirements. An outage of a couple of hours was no big deal.
Because of this we had loads of different options if you needed email. You could use an “enterprise” platform like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and the like, or you could roll your own with any number of SMTP, POP or More >
Google’s new street level view
Jun 2nd
Google have had had cars driving around the streets of the US for the last few months taking pictures and they’ve finally gone live. In theory you can visit maps.google.com and select any point on any street (as long as it’s outlined in blue) and you can instantly view a street level panoramic image. Now obviously some pictures are more interesting than others, and this site is collecting the best.
So far some of the cooler ones are:
- A possible drug deal
- A 1950’s Ferrari (maybe a 410 S) parked on the side of the street
- Scooby-doo’s van
