Often the most fun new technologies are actually mashups of existing products and services. Take this new site for example, 4square&7yearsago. It doesn’t really serve any useful purpose other than to remind you of good times gone by, but it’s certainly fun nonetheless.
Using Foursquare checkin data, this app will send you an email everyday reminding you of where you were on this day one year ago.
Last Friday a juvenile Egyptian Cobra escaped its enclosure at the Bronx Zoo reptile house. Yesterday, Twitter user @BronxZoosCobra began tweeting about its escapades around New York and now has over 77K followers.
via: LaughingSquid
from: NY Times Bits Blog
David McRaney has a great post up on the “You Are Not So Smart” blog about the misconception that we make rational decisions based on future values of things.
When you lose something permanently, it hurts. The drive to mitigate this negative emotion leads to strange behaviors. Have you ever gone to see a movie only to realize within 15 minutes or so you are watching one of the worst films ever made, but you sat through it anyway? You didn’t want to waste the money, so you slid back in your chair and suffered. Maybe you once bought non-refundable tickets to a concert, and when the night arrived you felt sick, or tired, or hung over. Perhaps something more appealing was happening at the same time. You still went, even though you didn’t want to, in order to justify spending money you knew you could never get back. What about that time you made it back home with a bag of tacos, and after the first bite you suspected they might have been filled with salsa-infused dog food, but you ate them anyway not wanting to waste both money and food? If you’ve experienced a version of any of these, congratulations, you fell victim to the sunk cost fallacy.
Read the whole thing, it’s worth it.
Awesome infographic from Column Five, poking fun at those social media addicts that we all know so well. (Click for fullsize)
This has to be one of the coolest things on the web right now. The new Amazon Appstore gives you a fully functioning Android virtual machine called Test Drive with which you can install and uninstall applications, modify settings and just generally play with an Android device. Unfortunately only for US customers right now, this is not some flash demo, but rather a genuine cloud based virtual machine that you interact with through your browser. In their words:
Clicking the “Test drive now” button launches a copy of this app on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that provides on-demand compute capacity in the cloud for developers. When you click on the simulated phone using your mouse, we send those inputs over the Internet to the app running on Amazon EC2 – just like your mobile device would send a finger tap to the app. Our servers then send the video and audio output from the app back to your computer. All this happens in real time, allowing you to explore the features of the app as if it were running on your mobile device.
Whilst this is a cool new thing that will allow you to evaluate apps before you buy them, this is also the start of something far better. Imagine if you could run one of these in the cloud and not only install apps from the store or market, but apps that you write yourself as well.
What would you do with a fully functioning Android Virtual Machine?
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Petrol Price to rise by 65c
I hear the petrol price is expected to rise by another 65 cents next month.
I strongly recommend that you read this carefully and start looking for cheaper transport now.
Here are a few pointers to get you started.