The Teenager Audio Test - Can you hear this sound?

Clicking the play button below will produce a tone that is generally only heard by people under the age of 25. It has been used as a deterrent device to keep teenagers from loitering in malls and shops, and sounds similar to a buzzing mosquito. Typically the longer you listen to it, the more annoying it gets.

This actually hurt my ears and I'm well into my 30's.

We are becoming a new species, we are becoming Homo Evolutis - Ars Technica

The day may come when we are able to take the best biology of the known animal kingdom and make it part of our own. This isn't just about being a bit stronger, or having perfect eyesight our whole lives. All of our organs and limbs have weaknesses that can be addressed, and there are also opportunities to go beyond basic fixes and perform more elaborate enhancements. At a private lunch on Thursday, Enriquez spoke of a young girl who, after suffering a knee injury, received tendon replacement therapy centered around tendons grown in a lab. It not only fixed her knee, but made it stronger than normal. Later in life as she pursued life as a professional skier, the coach actually asked that she have the same surgery on her other knee to increase her abilities.

WD 2TB Caviar Green Monster Drive Preview - HotHardware

A quick glance at the numbers here show this new big-boy Caviar Green drive from WD offering more than competitive performance versus the likes of Samsung's Spinpoint F1 and Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 -- both 7200RPM-based products. HD Tach shows an average read speed of 90MB/s and average writes at 80MB/s. We'll be digging into performance metrics with other tools like IOMeter in the days ahead but this early view certainly looks good for a disk with this sort of capacity. We'll be looking at power as well but WD claims this drive drops in somewhere around 7 Watts under read/write load and 5 Watts at idle. With the ever-increasing demand for bulk storage, this new WD drive offers a smaller carbon footprint as well, with a full 2TB available in a single 3.5" drive.

MSRP for the new ginormous Caviar is set at $299.

About -- Carnivore

CarnivorePE is inspired by DCS1000, a piece of software used by the FBI to perform electronic wiretaps. (Until recently, DCS1000 was known by its nickname "Carnivore.") Improving on the FBI software, CarnivorePE features new functionality including: artist-made diagnosic clients, remote access, full subject targetting, full data targetting, volume buffering, transport protocol filtering, and an open source software license. Carnivore is created by RSG.

Macintosh Performance Guide: Configuring Photoshop

1) Hide the Histogram panel when running actions or scripts (testing or not). Hiding it drops the diglloydMedium/Huge execution time by about 10%. Even in the middle of an multi-step action, Photoshop updates the histogram display after each step, which can be a time-consuming operation, especially with CacheLevels=3.

2) Use the Bigger Tiles plugin in conjunction with DisableScratchCompress plugin. Failure to use these plugins results in a penalty of up to 50% on Mac OS X in any “decent” configuration (over 100% for Photoshop CS3). Download the Plugins. It’s bizarre that Adobe calls these “legacy” plugins, because they have a massive performance impact.

Contemplating the Consumerist sale and the adpocalypse

In short, both a TV program and a magazine represent a finite unit of (more or less) undivided attention. Each of these media objects is carefully designed to grab your attention and to hold it within a bounded space—with boundaries being the start and end times of the program for TV, or the two covers of a magazine.

What advertisers buy when they purchase a magazine or TV ad is slice of the attention of some subset of that media object's audience. And the ads that they create for those purchased slices are attention-worthy objects in and of themselves, e.g., Angelina Jolie posing with a diamond watch, or a hilarious vignette centered around a brand of beer.

A web page, in contrast, is typically festooned with hyperlinked visual objects that fall all over themselves in competing to take you elsewhere immediately once you're done consuming whatever it is that you came to that page for. So the page itself is just one very small slice of an unbounded media experience in which a nearly infinite number of media objects are scrambling for a vanishingly small sliver of your attention.

I agree. Fully.

Bad Technology: A Call for Revolution Against Beta Culture

I'm tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The "This will work in the next version." The "It's in our roadmap." The "Buy now and upgrade later." The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn't tested enough before reaching our hands. The feeling now extends to hardware: Everything is built to end up in the trash a year later, still half-baked, to make room for the next hardware revision. I'm tired of this beta culture that has spread like metastatic cancer in the last few years, starting with software from Google and others and ending up in almost every gadget and computer system around. We need a change.

On a similar note, I have CS 4 here which I simply can't run. It crashes at least 10 times a day. So I spent 600 bucks on a upgrade I don't use. Fuck you Adobe.

The Frontal Cortex : The Cognitive Benefits of Nature

Thoreau would have liked this study: interacting with nature (at least when compared to a hectic urban landscape) dramatically improves improve cognitive function. In particular, being in natural settings restores our ability to exercise directed attention and working memory, which are crucial mental talents. The basic idea is that nature, unlike a city, is filled with inherently interesting stimuli (like a sunset, or an unusual bird) that trigger our involuntary attention, but in a modest fashion. Because you can't help but stop and notice the reddish orange twilight sky - paying attention to the sunset doesn't take any extra work or cognitive control - our attentional circuits are able to refresh themselves. A walk in the woods is like a vacation for the prefrontal cortex.

Damn....

Memoirs of a Space Engineer - Leadpencils

And that video was interspersed amongst all that telemetry data. So in fact the video data rate was very slow. 40,000 pixels per 8 hours, 5,000 pixels per hour, 83 pixels per minute, 1.4 pixels per second.

Being nosey buggers as we were, we just had to do something about this. So we got a large sheet of graph paper and marked it out into 200 x 200 squares. Each square was divided up into 4 smaller squares. And we armed a team of 8 people each with a lead pencil. As the data came back, according to the video data value we would shade in a number of the squares. When viewed from a distance it gave quite a representable picture.

Pic is Here.

DNS kerfluffel

Man, I really can't wait till everyone updates this damn DNS patch. Email is on the fritzm websites are being goofy.... good lord....

Changes to bookmarks are lost whenever you restart Firefox

Bookmarks not saved

If your changes to your bookmarks do not appear when you restart Firefox, the issue may be that your bookmarks file is write-protected. A write-protected file cannot be changed, which prevents your edits to your bookmarks from being saved. Firefox 3: Windows:

To enable writing of your bookmarks file:

1. Go to your Firefox profile folder. 2. Right-click the file places.sqlite, and select Properties to open the Properties window. 3. In the Properties window, select the General tab. Near the bottom of the window, verify that Read-only is not selected.

4. If the folder also contains a file called bookmarks.html.moztmp, verify that it is not marked as read-only.

Mac OS:

1. In the Finder, go to your Firefox profile folder. 2. Select the file places.sqlite. 3. From the menu bar select the File menu and select Get Info. The bookmarks.html info window will open. 4. In the bookmarks.html info window, remove the check mark from the Locked check box.

iphone bug

So, if you unplug your headphones while listening to a song, the iphone will think that the headphones are still plugged in. This means your phone will not ring and you can't hear anything when you try to talk. Kinda frustrating to say the least. Change the volume with the side volume toggle and if it reads "(headphones)" by the volume setting, you have the bug.

The fix is to plug the headphones back in, go to the ipod area, stop the song from playing, go to a different menu in the ipod player and then go back to the main menu. Then you can unplug the headphones and reset the glitch.

That should do it.

If you left the house without the headphones or the $20 Griffin adapter (for gen 1) you are shit out of luck I guess. Way to design a recessed 1/8" jack apple.

Hmmm

Mac OS X 10.6 code named Snow Leopard, may be pure Cocoa

The next version of Mac OS X is code-named "Snow Leopard," and will indeed be Intel-only, we have learned. This info is hot on the heels of TUAW's original scoop about Mac OS X 10.6 being readied for shipment as soon as Macworld 2009 and being Intel-only.

People familiar with the situation have confirmed to us that TUAW's details are true—Snow Leopard is currently on track to come out during next January's Macworld, and it will not contain major OS changes. Instead, the release is heavily focused on performance and nailing down speed and stability. With Apple's current (and future) focus on smaller, thinner, and more mobile devices, this move makes perfect sense. Things like the MacBook Air, iPhone, iPod touch, and other mysterious devices that have yet to be announced need better performance for better battery life, and that's definitely something Apple wants to excel at in the years to come. Our sources did not note whether Apple planned to discuss Snow Leopard at this year's WWDC.

I can't help but think Apple is going the wrong path here. They are targeting light users and portability over power users and work stations. I am already planning on getting Vista 64 so I can run CS4 in 64 bit mode and this may push me over the edge to a full Windows user. Seems like they don't give a shit about power any more and just care about consumer level crap.

Dammit, I love OSX too. Too bad it seems to be becoming a bad choice for anyone who needs speed and performance.

This is handy

macosxhints.com - 10.5: Compress a file or folder via drag and drop to Dock

nspired by this hint about the Screen Sharing application in /System » Library » CoreServices, I found another small but very nice application there.

Drag Archive Utility to your Dock (or toolbar or sidebar). Now, you can drag a folder onto the application, the result of which will be a compressed archive in the same location. If you don't like the default .cpgz format but prefer ZIP, or want to have another destination for all archives, just open the utility and change its Preferences.