Roboticists at University of Pennsylvania have managed to build a modular robot that can reassemble its modules to the original form in the case of being kicked and scatettered on the floor. Don’t miss the last seconds of the video.
Starting with GTA Vice City Rockstar North has released new versions of GTA firstly on consoles and several months later on Windows. GTA IV has just been released on Xbox 260 and PS 3 and already rumours about the possibility of releasing on the PC are begining to appear on the internets. There is also a petition for releasing GTA IV on http://www.gopetition.com/ . I strongly believe that there will be a Windows version and it will be released no sooner than December of this year. We’ll just have to “hope and pray” for this bastardly violent and fun and awesome and whatever game to be released on Windows.
Piratebay seems to already have their hands on GTA IV. They’ve also changed their logo to probably celebrate the fact that there are already PAL and NTSC cracked copies of GTA available for search and download.
The Konica Minolta 8031 color copier is a very useful office equipment for copying color documents but making it printing and scanning adds a great value to its functions. I didn’t have any manual for the copier when it first arrived to my office and i had to search some time on the internet for the printer drivers and to learn how to access it’s scanning functions. The tutorial is made for any Minolta 8031/OCE CS220 copier with Fierry x3e controller (the Fiery controller is the component that makes the communication between a copier and computer and also has the hard disk for storing the scanned files and connected with a UTP cable between the copier controller and the LAN network card of the computer/switch.
Installing the Printer Drivers
Download the Visual Post Script Fiery X3e drivers from konicaminolta.com . You can also use the PCL drivers or find other drivers but this is the one i recommend it. After downloading, unarchive it somewhere on you computer.
Go to Start/Settings/Control Panel/Printers and click on Add Printer. Choose the “Local printer attached to my computer” without selecting “Automatically detect and install m Plug and Play Printer”. Click next and select “Create a new Port” and choose the Standard TCP/IP type of port. Click Next twice and insert the printer IP address. You can find the IP Address by printing the settings of the copier from the Fiery menu on the copier. Click Next until the Install Software wizard appears. Click Have disk and browse to the driver folder you’ve unarchived it earlier. Choose the inf driver (it’s the only one that appears), and then chose one of the 2 drivers that appears on the list (i’ve chosen the eu version). Click Next a few times and you’re done. A test page should be printed. Note that you got to have the same class of ip on you network card as the ip of the copier (example : if the coiper has ip 192.168.0.### your network card should have the ip 192.168.0.### where the last three number of both ips differ).
Retrieving the scanned files from the copier
Open the web browser and type in the address bar the ip of the printer. A page containing the menu of the printer should appear. Click on Scan Button, and then on Index1 (you can choose any Index). Click on any of the boxes containing the “—” symbol , choose scan to Mailbox, choose admin mailbox or any mailbox of which you can access (you know the password or it doesn’t have a password), give it a name and then click “Create”.
Go to the copier, press the button Scan, Go to Index 1 and press on the touch panel on the button with the name you gave it earlier. And then press Start to scan it.
Go back to the web browser on the computer, type the IP address in the web browser, and click on the Fiery Web Tools on the bottom right side. A pop-up should appear with another menu on the right. Click Web Scan (it might ask you to choose a mailbox and password). Of the menu in the right doesn’t appear then you might need Java runtime.
Another pop up should appear. In the upper right text box of Mailbox write the mailbox and write the mailbox you can have access to (in my case admin). Click refresh and a scanned file should appear. Click it and then you can choose the format you can choose for saving it (jpeg, tiff or pdf). Click “Save As” and the scanned filed should appear in the browser or a window screen to browse for the location where to save the file.
Many Apple stores in U.S. already don’t have iPhones on their stock so this can strongly suggest that a new iPhone is coming on its way. The most interesting feature wanted to be embedded in the iPhone is 3G capabilities which would make surfing the Internet outside the wi fi coverage much better. We shall wait and see.
Source : businessweek.com
Man, these russians are crazy. I wonder how much the fare would cost riding in these cabs. Probably these are second hand cars sold by rich oligarchs to taxi companies. Or maybe they even own the taxi companies.
Source : englishrussia.com ; it’s a great site and it gives an idea for a westerner about how it used to be under the communist regime and the consequences of it and also how former communist countries embraced democracy.
The last episode of South Park was really a bomb. Kile, Stan, Kenny and Cartman try to make money from the Internet and while waiting for their theoretical dollars to help Canada ending the strike they encounter all the known characters that made millions of views with their videos posted on YouTube such as Chris Rock, the Numa Numa fat guy and the Star Wars Kid. You can find a more detailed resume of the episode on Valleywag . And by the way, you can see legally full length South Park Episodes without having to download using torrent sharing or watching them on TV.
Thanks to the posted pics on BMW Sport Touring Forums you can now see rare shots of how a spacecraft is prepared for a new mission. These pics are relatively unknown for the general publicso i think it’s worth visiting the link.
BMW Sport Touring Forums via Digg .
The 1st of April is aproaching and i’m sure that the internets will be full of hoaxes on this time of the year. Google, the large IT corporation that serves our search queries is known for its “different” aproach with the users. Here are some of the interesting hoaxes made by Google in the last years and other companies in 2007.
In 2000 Mentalplex, an application for searching with your very own mind, eliminating the need of typing text in the search box. In 2002, Google revealed Pigeon Rank, the technology behind PageRank, one of the most important factors in sorting the search results. In 2004 people had the chance to sign up for a job on a lunar research center of Google, testing the new Luna/x OS. In 2005, Google released Gulp, a drink that would make people search more intelligent on the web with Google. In 2006 there was the Google Romance, a tool that would compete with online dating websites. In 2007 Google launched a special service for Gmail which could print your mail on organic paper and deliver it at your home. It also launched a super highspeed free internet service (TISP - Toilet Internet Service Provider) which would use the toilet paper and sewage as infrastructure.
What other companies and websites did in 2007 :
BMW launched a new text message : drivers would see the text mirrored on the windshield.
Ebay added a new “Unbelievable Deals!” section including the following categories : Cow licks, flying carpets, Happiness, A clue, Dream Date and Evaporated Water
Gizmodo posted about old inventions presenting them as new inventions.
Uncyclopedia moded their website to look like Wikipedia claiming that Wikipedia is a parody.
Information about Google hoaxes humbly provided by Wikipedia and information about other hoaxes humbly also provided by …. Uncyclopedia, erm Wikipedia.
There are currently several construction projects in the world involving supertall skyscrapers. Why is it so important to track the construction of tall buildings ? The answer is that tall buildings represent wealth and as we will see, some of the buildings under development are currently built in China (emerging super economic power), Emirates (oil) and even in Russian Federation (natural gas).
1. Waterview Tower - Chicago, U.S.A.
90 Floors, to be completed by 2009 and with a height of 319 meters.
The concrete building situated where a parking lot used to be for 30 years, the Waterview Tower from Chicago will host Shangri-La Hotel and Resorts betweeen floors 12 and 27 and a parking lot between floors 2 and 11. In order to harmonize with the city’s urban design and approval cinditions the building wil also host an outdoor garden and other recreating areas at the 29th floor.
2. Bank of America Tower - N.Y.C. , U.S.A.
50 floors, to be completed by this year and with a height of 366 meters.
It will be one of the most environmental friendly skyscrapers in the worlds and even if it is not finished it holds the second place on the top of the tallest skyscrapers in N.Y. after the Empire State Building. The bidget spent for this building wil be of 1 billion dollars.
3. Trump International Hotel and Tower - Chicago, U.S.A.
92 floors, to be completed by this year and with a height of 415 meters.
The design of the building was chosen from over 50 models and it would have been taller if it wasn’t for the terrorist acts in September 2001. Construction is still going but with difficulties. The hotel occupying floors between 1 and 27 should have been opened in December 2007 but was delayed until January this year.
4. Twin Towers - West Tower - Guangzhou, China
103 floors, to be completed by 2009 and with a height of 437.5 meters.
The first tower of Gunagzhou’s Twin towers will be completed in 2009 and will be a mixed skyscraper consisting of a hotel, conference center and office space.
5. Dubai Towers - Doha, Quatar
93 floors, to be completed by 2009 and with a height of 439 meters.
The mixed use building will cost over 650 million dollars and will consist of shopping areas,a 5 star hotel with 225 rooms, office spaces and luxurious apartments.
6. Federation Complex - Moscow, Russian Federation
93 floors, to be completed by this year and with a height of 448 meters.
The first supertall skyscraper will mainly consist of 2 towers with abridge between them containing restaurants and cafees and will cost 530 million us dollars.
7. Greenland Square Zifeng - Nanjing, China
69 floors, to be completed by this year and with a height of 450 meters.
Error messages are a part of our daily life. It doesn’t pass a day without having a type of error generated by a program installed on my computer. Cracked.com has a post dedicated for funny error messages with 30 images. Go check it, some of the images are really funny.
These days we can find a whole wide of laptops on the market. Choosing a laptop by it’s display, processor, ram and hard drive space is quite easy but choosing by the variety of video cards found on laptops makes the choosing of the desired laptop quite tricky.
If you don’t know, based on the tutorial from notebookreview forum there are five different kind of mobile graphic chips : integrated video chips that get their memory from the laptop’s ram, low-end graphic processors, mod end, high end and performance graphic processors. Check the notebookreview forum thread with the tutorial to find out what are the differences between the 5 types of graphic processors and the sorted chart by performances.
When i was a kid, i used to go a lot at my local arcade games playground. Between the arcade electronic machines i’ve found a particular interest for pinballs or flippers. Ever since i got my hands on a PC i dreamed of playing a real pinball game on Windows. The best pinball game i found on the web was KISS. Even though it was quite good the screen was moving on the table wherever the ball was and it was tricky to know from where the balls would come if i had multiball for hitting the Jackpot. Also interesting was the fact that this pinball game had also some kind of Dot Matrix Display which represents a vital part for a real pinball game. A few days ago, i found on a friends computer Visual Pinball. It is a very interesting tool to create copies of real pinball tables and believe me there are a lot of already made copies fo real tables with this software. As i said before, a vital part of a pinball machine is the DOD. The DOD shows info about how many balls, credits, points and what do you have to do to achieve the missions. Some smart guys that also worked on emulating electronic arcade machines on the PC (MAME) have also created a software that works in conjunction with Visual Pinball and links the ROM that shows the info on DOD.
Here are the steps to help you play copies of pinball tables such as Twilight Zone, Last Action Hero, Rocky and Bullwinkle on your very own PC with Windows.
Step 1 : Download Visual Install Pack from http://irpinball.ztnet.com/ . It contains both Visual Pinball and Visual Pinball MAME so you don’t have to worry about making the 2 programs to work together.
Step 2 : Install Visual Install Pack. A screen with installing Visual PinMAME and all you have to do is clicking Install, setting up paths for roms and tables if you don’t install in C:\Program Files\Pinball\ and clicking QUIT.
Step 3 : In order to play for example Twilight Zone you have to download the appropriate table design created with Visual Pinball (i found Twilight Zone version 7.3) and appropriate ROM for the emulation of the DOD (i found Twilight Zone 9.2. to work with table Twilight Zone version 7.3). For downloading table Twilight Zone 7.3 you have to make an account and register on vpforums.com (search at letter T and scroll down for the link that will download tz_73 archive). For no reason i couldn’t register on vpforums.com so i logged in using a different valid user and password found on the Internet for vpforums.com .
Step4 : Download the Twilight Zone version 9.2. from ipdb.org . IPDB is some kind of IMDB of pinballs. It stores a lot of pinball ROMS and you don’t have to register somewhere to download the ROM. Scroll down on the page and click Pin MAME Rom Sets (9.2.) . Usually the largest ROM file and probably with the highest version name is the best archive to download. Note that there is even a 9.4. version and a P-4 version and one or both of them might work with the table. I’m currently playing Twilight Zone with table version 7.3 and ROM version 9.2. so that’s why i advise you to download these versions.
Step 5 : Copy the decompressed table archive tz_73 in C:\Program Files\Pinball\Tables or the Tables folder of Visual install Pack folder if you have installed it somewhere else and copy and decompress rom archive tz_73in C:\Program Files\Pinball\ROMs or the ROMs folder of Visual install Pack folder if you have installed it somewhere else on your computer.
Step 6 : After installing Visual Install Pack, a shortcut to the executable of the program should have appeared on you desktop. Click it and after opening click File/Open, search for the Twilight Zone folder in Tables folder (the decompressed archive you’ve paste it there during Step 5) and Open it. Press button Play on the left, another screen will appear with various settings, press OK and soon the table with appropriate emulation of the DOD will appear. Have Fun!
After jumping from page to page today on my usual session of mint rubbing, i stumbled upon http://www.wulffmorgenthaler.com/default.aspx. Most of the comics might be considered not safe for work but the satire and quality of the strips is just plain genius.
Let me just paste you a comic strip for making you an idea :
If you want to make a nice logo and you don’t find any of your installed fonts suitable for making one, then my advice is to go check out http://www.dafont.com/. It’s a website full with tons of fonts and it’s a big chance that you might get what you want from there. My personal favorite is Trashco.
If you want to learn from scratch html or want to extend you knowledge in the areas of scripting languages such as Javascript or make your site dynamic by making it to interact with a database then my advise is to checking w3scholols.com.
Did you know that in late ’70s Philips made a joint venture with Sony to create the Compact Disc and that Sony wanted for a CD to hold the whole of Beethoven’s 9nth symphony ?
I like electronic music a lot but i never found a good resource to teach me the difference between house, trance, techno and so on. Even so called “experts” in electronic music claimed that house is a part of electronic music and trance and techno are sub-genres which according to Ishkur’s guide is not quite like that. Interesting to see also the breakbeat genre in the list. I always knew that there’s a strange link between hip-hop and electronic music. Anyway, once you get on the site you might spend some time on it to listen to all the great samples attached to each style. It’s a great guide and there’s also an online radio station where you might catch the full length tracks provided in the track
Link : http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/.
And as a bonus you can also read an article about beatmixing on Wikipedia.
Ever wondered about which is the tallest skyscraper in the world or want to know which are the tallest buildings in your city ? Skyscraperpage.com might help you find all the answers to that. It’s interesting to see what daring designs the skyscrapers of tommorow have because the website also contains diagrams of tall buildings in contruction or proposed. For those who don’t know currently the tallest building in the world is the Burj Dubai skyscraper in Dubai. It’s interesting that it’s not yet completed and the official final height hasn’t been made yet public. Another interesting project is the Freedom Tower in New York city which will be built where once the WTC twin towers stood.
It’s been a while since i last wrote or checked this blog. Traffic has fallen, times have changed and my english still sucks. Anyway, for those who read my blog and those who will in the future, i’d like to say that i’ll try to keep you all updated with the latest info about gadgets and stuff and for those who visit my small car blog, i’d like to say that i’ll try not to delete any offensive comment in the future.
