Tech Brief
• Google sucked up many hours of people's time when it turned its logo into a playable game of . Turning provides hours of enjoyment but, , not everyone is happy.
"It appears the new Google Buckyball animation is consuming 100% CPU. I found this out after fearing, eek system CPU usage bit much, Trojan panic and found out it was the Google homepage animation sucking my CPU and increasing my electricity usage."
• In about three weeks time when the world has been made anew you will be able to reflect that this was the moment everything changed. The good people at have made a cheap personal portable 3D printer. .
"I can almost hear the street rubbing its hands together in anticipation of finding its own uses for this thing..."
• Sometimes DIY is more LOL. When Tim Molter and Alex Nugent get to work it is OMG. :
"What we needed was a compact and efficient design with maximal core density. Rack mountable servers were quite expensive relative to a hand-built quad-core Linux boxes. We imagined there existed some kind of cabinet that would be perfect for housing a bunch of computers."
There did. The Helmer drawer unit from Ikea which seemed almost built to fit their 24-core Linux cluster.
"The power supply, which is a 380W full size ATX PSU sits flush with the top of the drawer. The micro-ATX mobo (motherboard) fits in the rest of the space with about a millimeter to spare from front to back and about a centimeter on the left side of the drawer."
• More bought a load of old Wing Commander games and found that they did not run very well on Windows 7. Not surprising given that the first game ran on DOS.
"I installed the first and tried it out. My Win7 switched to 256 colors at a 640x480 resolution, but the game ran... with completely wrong palette. Bugged by this I played with the compatibility options, and got the game to almost work well, with the palette going wrong at some points.. so the game was sort of playable, but I hated the fact that Windows changed to 256 colors and I couldn't see my mailbox properly in the other screen, etc. I also tried WC2 and WC3, and they had similar - or worse - problems."
The stumbling block was that Microsoft had nuked the key code, Direct Draw, that displays the games correctly. So, he did what any self-respecting geek would do in the circumstances.
• Finally a glimpse into the world of search marketing via Ad Age which got hold of a Google document detailing what big brands spend on keywords and getting their message out via the interwebs.
"Our review of $574 million of Google's U.S. billings over the first half of 2010 shows plenty of global corporations spending millions each month on search advertising, as well as a great many huge corporations that spend very little, if anything, at all on search."
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