In the theme of our current competition, here is an interesting post over at our friends darkoastedblend. Some ideas on what you can do with your good old computer equipment.

Given the Moore's law that the power of computers doubles every 24 months, we end up with a lot of useless devices and obsolete hardware, that you sure can recycle in a normal way, but it's much more fun to recycle it in a wild and unusual ways! Let's see how to give a new life to the computing zombies of yesteryear.

Check it out here

Ever wanted to know how Photoshop came about? After all, it is a program we use pretty much daily. The oldest version I remember using was Ver 2. It's moved on quite a bit since then :)

Check it out...

Extract:
In the summer of 1988, John thought they might have the basis of a commercially viable product. Thomas was reluctant: “Do you have any idea how much work it is to write a commercial application?” he asked John. But with his naive optimism, John convinced Thomas it would be worth the effort. “I’ll figure out how to make money with this,” he told his brother. Well, John was right, but so was Thomas. It did take a lot of work.

(via CPULV)

Did you know that Yahoo has its own innovation team? Some really interesting projects about visualising web information in some very graphically and visually strong ways.

Here is an example of this using Yahoo Travel Information....visualising user contributions where a map emerges: Trip Map

Yahoo Innovation Team

Welcome to the Obsolete Technology Website.

This is a fun page to browse through. Next to a detailed page for most expired models, you can find old ads, compare the specs of old computers and find lots of links to similar sites. You can follow early models through the timeline of computer development and trace the way of computers back to the dawn of time (well, back to 1970 in this case ;))

Have a look...

I came across this phone-becomes-TV idea today. The designer Seokwon Hong at Yanko has thought of Brix, a phone which turns into a TV. In order to avoid you being stuck with a small screen that will display very little, their idea is that several Brix owners can put her phones together to create a big-screen TV. The entire surface of the Brix phone is one touch-screen display.

The idea is very democratic and seems nice and I like the various possibilities in which you can arrange the phones, like widescreen and extra information screens, but I think the difficulties that will arise are self explanatory... I can imagine dialogues like "But I want to watch....."

Check it out here...

(via Gizmodo)

Check out these very cool light graffiti ...i don't think I've seen them so three-dimensional before. It's also very interesting to see the way they experiment with different types of light sources. Whilst some are very light, others thick and patterened. Very cool indeed..

In some ways I can't help feel a little disappointing that the only way to enjoy them is to see them flat in the forms of photographs. Few years back, we had a student who was experimenting with Maya by attaching particle emitters to already available motion paths of dancers. Some really cool effects would come out of it and these particle paths would "live forever" so you end up with a sculpture like object you can explore three dimensionally in Maya.  Surely, this requires a lot less patience as I am sure this kind of light graffiti are a lot harder to produce.

LICHTFAKTOR on Flickr

We have been wanting to do a post about RSS for a while now but never seem to got around to it. With so much fun and interesting stuff out there somehow posting about RSS doesn't sound so fun. In any case, RSS is something i pretty much live by, day in, day out. An hour doesn't go by when I am in front of computer that I don't resort to RSS.
So, for our dear members who do not know what RSS is, this post is dedicated to you. If you are already familiar with RSS you can skip the What is part and maybe just check out the list of readers below.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is, in simple terms, a feed format use to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news, photos, movies, podcasts.
Now, what does that mean to you? Every day, we visit at least 5-10 sites ..for us, hard core surfers, we may visit 50. Everyone has their favourite websites, whether this be BBC news, Times, Guardian, CNN, Gizmondo, some blog you like reading, and so on. It can be quite time consuming going through each one of those sites to see what's on, checking the latest news and reading the latest blog posts. This is where RSS comes in. RSS is a simple method of pushing site updates to your preferred "News Reader".
You load up all your RSS feeds in your News Reader and it will update automatically for you listing all the recent posts/news on all of your favourite sites. This means that with the simple use of arrow keys on your computer you can browse the latest updates on your favourite sites. Things don't just stop there, you can subscribe to "photo casts" and get latest photos from your friends photo library on flickr straight to your desktop. If you are interested in the particular news item, you just click and the application will send you straight to that webpage. RSS is the best thing since sliced bred ...I guarantee it! :)

So, now that we know what RSS is for , how do i get it?...
Most modern browsers now automatically recognise RSS feeds on websites. You will usually see a feed icon somewhere, if not in the address bar, then on the site. You click on it, and your favourite RSS app will pick up the feed. From there on, you are set to go.

This is where we talk about the RSS readers. There are two types, the applications and the web based ones.
Here I outline some apps and below some web ones. There are millions, so i will try to stick to what i think are the best.

MAC Net News Wire (Lite Version FREE)
I would say the best out there. I use this at least 50 times a day...and it syncs with the web version so you can read your news anywhere.
and some other ones News Fire  , Vienna (FREE), Shrook (FREE)

WINDOWS NewzCrawler, FeedDemon, Omea Reader

WEBBASED, NewsGator, BlogLines , GoogleReader (FREE)
If you have a google account, googlereader is for you

Now, download you favorite reader and subscribe to Allmightys RSS feed to stay up to date with all the latest news. Subscribe Here

For all the Tape lovers out there:

Chinavision Wholesale Electronics is promising to launch an MP3 player in the form of a cassette. Apparently it will be a stand-alone player as well a car cassette (or any cassette player, if anyone still owns such a device...I do ;) )

Only drawback is that the supported software so far is only Windows XP and 2000.

So far, here is the info and stats for this piece of nostalgic equipment.

Not to worry, this doesn't mean just because our current theme is "Once Upon a Time.." that we are going all retro with the blog posts...we might a little :) ...but this is really cool..

I remember when i was about 6 years old my parents just got back from Tokyo and got me one of those casio watches with a game on it. For the hell of me i can't remember what game it was but looking at these watches now i wish I still had it.
btw, this was 1981 :) ..things have moved on a little since then.

Nerd Watch Museum

(via the very cool make)

Now how fantastic is this?! These guys have made a map based on the most popular searches on the web. Its the year 2006 and the world is going mad with the World Cup. I also find it quite funny to see UK Big Brother obsessed...but we knew that anyway.

Google Searches World Map

It would make an amazing tee....

(via Infosthetics)