Author: Duncan Geere
Fool your grandchildren into thinking you were at Obama's inauguration
Unfortunately, the children of the future will be born with a filter in their brain that detects Photoshop tomfoolery, so it might only be your kids that you’re able to fool with this one. FotoFlexer has built a site that’ll let you moosh your face into Obama’s inauguration event.
Okay, you aren’t really going to be fooling anyone seriously with this, but it’s fun for five minutes, and a good marketing stunt by FotoFlexer. Go shop yourself into the inauguration here.
My Inaugural Photo (via TechCrunch)
Related posts: Inauguration 2.0 – Presidents’ speeches broken down into tag clouds
| Spammers take advantage of Obama’s inauguration
Biggest data breach ever at Heartland Payment Systems – 100 million transactions at risk
Although we’ve seen some whoppers in the UK, you can always count on the Yanks to do things bigger and better. One payment processing company, the brilliantly-named “Heartland Payment Systems” processes transactions for a quarter of a million businesses in the USA and has found some monitoring software on its servers, sending data to an external machine.
“We found evidence of an intrusion last week and immediately notified federal law enforcement officials as well as the card brands. We understand that this incident may be the result of a widespread global cyber fraud operation, and we are cooperating closely with the United States Secret Service and Department of Justice.” said Heartland president Robert Baldwin
In the USA, unlike the UK, companies have to disclose when data breaches occur. It’ll be interesting to see if Europe implements a similar law, but the UK government is opposed to such a move.
(via Out-Law.com)
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13" White Macbook gets a sneaky upgrade
Bought a Macbook recently? Start kicking yourself, because Apple has just announced a sneaky upgrade to the 13″ white MacBook which pumps up the capabilities of the diminutive, but popular, machine to the standards of its unibody compatriots.
The machine pumps the processor up to a Core 2 Duo with faster 1,066MHz FSB, a doubling of RAM (2GB, rather than one) and a considerably nicer integrated graphics unit. Bluetooth’s upgraded from 2.0 to 2.1, too.
It hasn’t hit the UK store yet, only the US one, but I suspect us Brits will get the same upgrade within a matter of days. In the meantime, if you were planning a purchase, it might be worth waiting a day or two until the UK store updates too. Price is still the same.
UK Apple Store (via Engadget)
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New Street Fighter joysticks are better than a hundred-hand-slap to the face
You can divide the world into two groups of people – those who played Street Fighter in arcades, and those who just played it on the SNES (anyone who’s never played it isn’t actually a person). The former group, although small in number, will go nuts for this tournament-spec joypad, based on the original arcade cabinets. No ‘cheating’ with the XCM Dominator for them.
Those who fit into the second group, but are still excited about Street Fighter IV, might be more excited about the ‘standard’ edition joystick or joypad pictured over the fold, which has shoulder buttons and everything. All three are available from MadCatz “soon”.
Inauguration 2.0 – Presidents' speeches broken down into tag clouds
You can tell it’s the 21st Century. The good folks over at ReadWriteWeb have broken down the full text of Barack Obama’s inauguration speech yesterday into a tag cloud using Wordle.net. The results are interesting – “nation” and “new” come out on top. Click for embiggening.
Just for fun, they’ve also analysed the speeches of Bush in 2005, Clinton in 1999, Reagan in 1981 and Lincoln in 1861 and 1865. You can see the clouds after the jump, but it’s quite interesting to see how much Bush relied on the word ‘freedom’ Reagan on ‘government’ and Lincoln on ‘constitution’ first, and then ‘war’.
Dual-SIM LG-KS660 mobile set for the European market
Next to the very smiley Japanese lady in the picture to the right are two LG-KS660s, newly announced in Japan from LG. It’s headed for Europe but other than that, we don’t have tonnes of info yet sadly.
What we do know, aside from its dual-SIM nature, is that it’s got a touchscreen, 5-megapixel camera, 8GB of internal memory, TV-OUT and USB connector. It’s basically a touchscreen version of the Nokia N96, in most respects.
We don’t have any pricing or release date info yet, either. Personally speaking, if I was in a bath, and I’d heard the news this was available, I wouldn’t jump out and head straight for the local Carphone Warehouse. I’d wait till I was done in the tub. Even then, I might make a cup of tea and dry my hair first.
(via Akihabara News)
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Seagate Fail part two: firmware fix breaks other drives
Poor Seagate. Late last week, the news broke that their Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drives were failing en masse. Admirably, the company’s already published a firmware fix, but maybe they pushed it out a little too fast because it’s causing 500GB drive owners’ discs to fail en masse.
The update has been taken offline for the moment, and users of 1TB and 750GB drives are reporting successful updates, but if you’re on a 500GB drive and you’ve downloaded but not installed the update, then I certainly don’t recommend doing so just yet.
Seagate Forum (via Tom’s Hardware)
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Watching the inauguration from space
Watching the inauguration yesterday from the ground, it was almost impossible to get a proper sense of scale of the proceedings. It was clear it was massive, but how massive? Well, click the image above to get a bird’s eye view of the scene in Washington from 681km up in the atmosphere.
You see those brown blobs? Those are massive crowds of people. Millions, in fact. The image is courtesy of Google’s (well, it’s not really theirs) GeoEye-1 satellite. More awesome satellite images over the break.
INQ1 heading to more networks
The INQ1, which I loved just before Christmas, looks like it’s getting a release on other networks, as opposed to Three, which currently has it exclusively. INQ is in talks with “at least two major operators” about launching the ‘Facebook phone’ to a wider public.
INQ head honcho Frank Meehan said:
“Talks with operators are going very well, and we definitely expect it to be available on other networks this year. We’re privately owned and well funded though, so we’re not in too much of a rush. The important thing is to get the right business”.
Promisingly, there’s also more INQ phones planned, including one with a QWERTY keyboard, and one with a touchscreen. They’ll likely show up in the latter half of 2009.
(via Trusted Reviews)
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Rumours of Google planning an incredible unlimited cloud storage service
Whispers around the intertubes would have you believe that Google has something very special planned for this year – unlimited cloud storage. It would mean that if you’ve got a fast enough broadband connection, then you’d no longer need more than a tiny hard drive – everything else could be stored online.
For the record, I don’t think Google’s quite there yet. Even their email product is officially limited, when its competitors’ products aren’t. There’s every chance that we’ll see some sort of limited storage product released by the Goog in 2009 but, well, the ‘unlimited’ label – I just don’t think it can happen yet.
(via ShinyShiny)
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