Offbeat posts

As Christmas and other holidays lurk around the corner, it’s time to take a lighter view. Why? There’s so much stress in western culture surrounding the holidays. Sometimes, it’s good to take a moment to simply smile (and maybe even laugh). This graphic by our friends at Flowtown takes a look at what Facebook might look like if the updates were coming from up north. Click to enlarge. …

The House Judiciary Committee has ceased without a vote to try to pass the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) out of committee today. At the heart of the delay is the controversial provision that would give the Attorney General the power to shut down websites for copyright infringement. Committee Chairman Lamar Smith said the hearing would resume at the “earliest practical day that Congress is in session.” That could be weeks. IT experts have warned that DNS tampering would create security risks for both website owners, ISPs, and the government itself. Yesterday, Representative Jason Chaffetz…

Every year, Google composes a Zeitgeist report that attempts to capture the essence of the year and give a glimpse of what we can expect in the coming year. This year’s message was simple but fitting: “we made it.” It matches the sentiment shared by many through the tumultuous revolution around the sun known as 2011. We saw notable deaths that marked the end of eras, the end of regimes, and the end of legends. Disasters from above and below rocked the world in ways we haven’t seen in decades. People rebelled, occupied, and even found themselves in situations where the only way to make things seem sane…

The trends of sales during the holidays often relies on the wants of children and teens. It isn’t just in their own gifts that we end up seeing the shift; adults will often follow the lead of their children when considering which gadgets to buy themselves and other adults. In 2011, the iPad continues to grow as a desired gadget. Despite the onslaught by Amazon with their Kindle Fire, which hopes to regain their “top Christmas gadget” status that they had in 2009 with its predecessor, kids are still seeing a brighter future for the device with the bigger screen, more apps, and 3G capabilities. On the…

Predictions of the future are often foolish and do not give an accurate representation of reality. In this case, they got it nailed pretty nicely. We don’t know the history of this video, but it seems authentic. In it, they predict webcam, online bill pay, email, and online shopping as well as a few other nice features of today’s technological world. Not bad for hippies of the 60s. …

It is said that most acts of kindness are done with ulterior motives in mind. The offer that Google’s top executives – CEO Larry Page, co-founder Sergey Brin, and Chairman Eric Schmidt – made to NASA to save the iconic landmark may qualify. NASA needs $33 million to revamp the hangar. The Google execs, through a separate company they own called H211 which operates the 8 private jets owned by the Google trio, would like a new place to park their jets. H211 would like around 2/3rds of the floor space at Hangar One for their jets. Their proposal would keep NASA as the owner and would allow them to lease the…

The iPhone isn’t just a communications tool, it’s a personal computer connected to every piece of electronic information in the world. It’s the most powerful tool in existence and the biggest thing to happen to education news since the invention of writing. It can compress the Einstein’s life work and the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius into three by four inches, and most people waste it on Angry Birds instead. Increase your IQ and become a better person by using these education apps instead. Star Walk Star Walk turns space itself into an open book, one read through your iProduct. It adds…

Social networking really started with teens on MySpace. Since then, it has progressed to the rest of the world. MySpace may be virtually gone, but teens are still hitting up their computers and mobile devices to social network more than ever before. The world of teen social networking, as we now know, is cruel. This infographic by our friends at ZoneAlarm breaks down the world of teen social networking as we know it. Click to enlarge. …

Sky watchers on the US west coast all the way over to east Asia are in for a rare treat in the early morning hours this Saturday, December 10th. A total lunar eclipse will grace the sky and is anticipated to be one of the brightest, deepest red moons in years. According to NASA, “The action begins around 4:45 am Pacific Standard Time when the red shadow of Earth first falls across the lunar disk.  By 6:05 am Pacific Time, the Moon will be fully engulfed in red light. This event—the last total lunar eclipse until 2014—is visible from the Pacific side of North America, across the entire Pacific Ocean…

The Tom Cruise-driven vision of a future (almost) completely without murder worked with the concept that if we could use precognition to know when a murder was going to happen in the future, we could prevent it from ever happening. It was a science fiction concept that has tantalized the imagination on different levels with other concepts introduced in the film. Floating visual computer interfaces and iris-recognition technology aside, the crime-fighting components are well out of reach. Or are they? According to this infographic, we may actually have somewhere to go with all of this using…