Posts Tagged Instincts

Junk To Do When Shaking Windscreen Wipers Ruin Your Drive.

Posted by on Monday, 2 August, 2010

I don’t care who you are and what your station is in day to day, whether you be a prime minister or a humble tramp, at one minute or another you will have undergone the abhorrent atrociousness that is shaking wiper blade. Even the most well intentioned individual is vulnerable to casuality from squeaky wiper syndrome the rain falls on the Christian and abomination alike, good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people, it’s a unassailable natural law. That is to say the universe is an sick melting pot of chemicals randomly jumping off of one another, it is only through the development of complex forms from apparently random stochastic processes that gives rise to the dream of identity and hence the headache of perceiving the squeaky noise a wiper blade makes as some kind of affliction. When in fact it is supremely unimportant in fact as the bard once said there is nothing good or bad in the world but only thinking makes it so. So I guess from this you can accept what you may, either accept it with Christlike equanimity like a serene Buddhist cow or give into your most primitive animalistic instincts or do something about it. The shaking a wiper blade makes is in fact what a physicist would call a non linearity, that is to say the vibration is seemly random but in fact is chaotic in the sense of being completely deterministic just extremely hard to predict. This is because when modelling a wiper blade with mathematics there are some truly profound limitations of using this symbol manipulation language to image natural patterns. First off all just about the entire of the universe wiper blade included are non linear functions, very few natural phenomena are in fact completely linear, the problem is the non linear differential equations are incredibly challanging to solve analytically, that is to say come up with an equation which predicts there motion given a limited collection of parameters.

The good news is however that windscreen wipers can be styled numerically, that is to say you can generate good computer stimulation and run a model of the noisy windscreen wipers. This technique will produce a big amount of numbers and is therefore less aesthetic than the analytic approach but incongruously this is the way things are until an additional to the hideously limited notion of formal mathematics in a Euclidean universe is found. Right the first thing you might try is getting off your ass and actually cleaning the wind screen with a rag to remove any grease that may be on there catching the windscreen wipers during its action.

Another thing you could try is buying some new replacement wiper blades, squeaking is usually an body of evidence that the rubber replacement wiper blades is completely shot and you need to buy a replacement right away without delay. You see rubber is a terrible replacement wiper blades material; it gets broken rather rapidly by the elements and decays into a atrophied pile of mush in no time at all concluding in lame squeaky replacement wiper blades. The replacement wiper blades should therefore be replaced by a better atom the answer silicone.


Car Gadgets: Do They Really Help?

Posted by on Tuesday, 23 March, 2010

We all know that in the UK we are not allowed to actually text, tweet, or tap away on any other social sites when we are driving which of course is very understandable indeed but if this is all true why are we allowed to be staring into our Sat Nav screens when we are driving? Surely this is just as bad as doing the other things on the list?


The Dangers

The danger of course comes when people are not knowing where they are going and are just glued to the Sat Nav rather than the road. Other people around you need to be thought about too, you will not just be injuring yourself if you make a mistake. The best piece of advice is to pull over if you are lost and have a look at the screen or of course better yet if you are travelling with someone in the passenger seat get them to take a look!


Easier

A Sat Nav in the car will allow you to make things a bit easier and this is certainly true for a number of other gadgets that you can have for the car but this does not mean, by any means that you should simply rely on these gadgets. The best thing to do is to always rely on your instincts and not just the gadgets, the instincts will always be better. If you do have a crash because you were not paying attention  you will be looking at your next car from the viewpoint of someone whtat has bad credit car finance and you will need bad credit car loans.

Gap insurance will help you out on something like this but the best advice that I can personally give you is never take your eyes off of the road under any circumstances.


Windows Phone 7 Series: Everything Is Different Now [Windows Phone 7]

Posted by on Monday, 15 February, 2010

It’s astounding that until this moment, three years after the iPhone, the biggest software company in the world basically didn’t compete in mobile. Windows Phone 7 Series is more than the Microsoft smartphone we’ve been waiting for. Everything’s different now.

Today, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft is publicly previewing Windows Phone 7 for the first time. The brand new, totally fresh operating system will appear in phones this year, but not until the holidays. All of the major wireless carriers and every likely hardware maker are backing it, and they’d be stupid not to. It’s awesome. We’ve got a serious hands on for you to check out, but here is everything that you need to know:

The name—Windows Phone 7 Series—is a mouthful, and unfortunately, the epitome of Microsoft’s worst naming instincts, belying the simple fact that it’s the most groundbreaking phone since the iPhone. It’s the phone Microsoft should’ve made three years ago. In the same way that the Windows 7 desktop OS was nearly everything people hoped it would be, Windows Phone 7 is almost everything anyone could’ve dreamed of in a phone, let alone a Microsoft phone. It changes everything. Why? Now that Microsoft has filled in its gaping chasm of suck with a meaningful phone effort, the three most significant companies in desktop computing—Apple, Google and Microsoft—now stand to occupy the same positions in mobile. Phones are officially computers that happen to fit in your pocket.

Windows Phone 7 is also something completely new for Microsoft: A total break from the past. Windows Mobile isn’t just dead, the body’s been dumped, buried and paved over by a rainbow brick road.

The Interface

It’s different. The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4×4 or so, like basically every other phone. No, instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before: Making the iPhone’s interface feel staid.

If you want to know what it feels like, the Zune HD provides a taste: Interface elements that run off the screen; beautiful, oversized text and graphics; flipping, panning, scrolling, zooming from screen to screen; broken hearts. Some people might think it’s gratuitous, but I think it feels natural and just…fun. There’s an incredible sense of joie de vivre that’s just not in any other phone. It makes you wish that this was aesthetic direction all of Microsoft was going in. Another, sorta similar interface, in terms of data presentation, is this Android Slidescreen app, which gives you a bunch of info up top.

Windows Phone 7 is connected in the same sense as Palm’s webOS and Android, with live, real-time data seamlessly integrated, though it’s even smoother and more natural. Live tiles on the Start screen, which you can totally customize, are updated dynamically with fresh content, like weather, or if you’ve pinned a person to your Start screen, their latest status updates and photos.

The meat of the phone is organized around a set of hubs: People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office. They’re kind of like uber-applications, in a sense. Massive panoramas with multiple screens that are each kind of like individual apps. People, for instance, isn’t just your contacts, but it’s also where social networking happens, with a real-time stream of updates pulled in from like Facebook and Windows Live. (No Twitter support announced yet, it appears—a kind of serious deficiency, but one we’re sure will be remedied by ship date.)

As another example, Music + Video is essentially the entirety of Zune HD’s software, tucked inside of Windows Phone 7.

A piece of interface that’s shockingly not there: A desktop syncing app. If anyone would be expected to tie their phone to a desktop, you’d think it’d be Microsoft, but they’re actually moving forward here. All of your contacts and info sync over the air. The only thing you’ll be syncing through your computer is music and videos, which is mercifully done via the Zune desktop client.

Hello, Connected World

The People hub might be the best social networking implementation yet on a phone: It’s a single place to see all of your friends’ status updates from multiple services in a single stream, and to update your own Facebook and Windows Live status. Needs. Twitter support. Badly. But you have neat things going on, like the aforementioned Live tiles—if you really like someone or want to stalk them hardcore, you can make them a tile on your Start screen, which will update in realtime with whatever they’re posting, and pull down their photos from whatever service. There’s also your very own profile page, where you can scan your current social state and post updates to multiple services simultaneously.

All of your contacts are synced and backed up over-the-air, Android and webOS style, and can be pulled from multiple sources, like Windows Live, Exchange, etc. Makes certain other phones seem a little antiquated with their out-of-the-box Contacts situation.

Holy Crap! The Zune Phone!

Microsoft’s vision of Zune is finally clear with Windows Phone 7. It’s an app, just like iPod is on the iPhone, though the Zune Marketplace is integrated with it into the music + video hub, not separated into its own little application. It’s just like the Zune HD, so you can check out our review of that to see what it’s like. But you get third-party stuff like Pandora, too, built-in here. Oh, and worth mentioning, there will be an FM radio in every phone (more on that in a bit).

Pictures is a little different though, and gets its very own hub. That’s because it’s intensely connected—you can share photos and video with social networks straight from the hub, and via the cloud, they’re kept in sync with your PC and web galleries. The latest photos your friends post also show up here. Of course, you get around with multitouch zoom and zip-zip scrolling stuff.

Xbox, on a Phone

I’ll admit, I very nearly needed to change my pants when I saw the Xbox tile on the phone for the first time. Obviously, you’re not going to be playing Halo 3 on your smartphone (at least not this year), but yes, Xbox Live on a phone! It’s tied to your Live profile, and there are achievements and gamer points for the games you can play on your phone, which will be tied to games back on your Xbox 360.

If Microsoft’s got an ace-in-hole with Windows Phone 7, it’s Xbox Live. Gamers have talked about a portable Xbox for years—this is the most logical way to do it. The N-Gage was ahead of its time. (Okay, and it sucked.) The DS and PSP are the past. The iPhone showed us that the future of mobile gaming was going to be on your phone, and now that just got a lot more interesting. The potential’s there, and hopefully the games will be plentiful and awesome enough to meet it.

Browser and Email

Yes, the browser is Internet Exploder. And yes, the rumor’s true: It won’t be as fast as Mobile Safari. Not to start. But it’s not bad! Hey, least it’s got multitouch powers right out of the box. Naturally, you’ve got multiple browser windows, and you can pin web pages to the Start screen, like any other decent mobile browser.

The Outlook email app makes me question how people read email on a BlackBerry. It is stunning. I never thought I’d call a mail app “stunning,” but, well, it kind of is. It’s the best looking mobile mail app around. Text is huge. Gorgeous. Ultrareadable. Of course, it’s got Exchange support too.

Apps, Office and Marketplace

Remember what I said earlier about Windows Mobile being dead? So are all the apps. They won’t work on WP7. Sorry Windows Mobile developers, it’s for the best. Deep down, we all knew a clean break was the only way Windows Phone wasn’t going to suck total balls.

Apps will have some standardized interface elements, like the app bar on the bottom for common commands. But here’s a question: Will they multitask? Um, that depends on your definition of multitasking! When we asked Joe Belfiore, the guy running Windows Phone, he alluded to live tiles and feeds as some ofthe ways that third-parties will be able to “bring value to the user, even when their apps aren’t running.” Which sounds to us like a big ol’ “shnope,” but we’ll see more next month at Microsoft’s developer event MIX.

The Marketplace is where you’ll buy apps. Since we’ve got like 6 months ’til Windows Phone 7 launches and people should be excited to develop for it, hopefully there’ll be plenty of stuff to buy there on day one.

Naturally, Bing and Bing Maps are built into the phone as the default search and maps services. They’re nice, smartly contextual, and very location-oriented. Bing’s also used for universal search on the phone, via a dedicated Bing button. (There is no search but Bing search, BTW.) Bing Maps is multitouchable, with pinch-to-zoom. It’s rich, with built-in listings with reviews and clever ways of searching for stuff. And yeah, Office! It’s connected to that cloud thing, for OTA syncing and such. Business people should be happy.

Hardware and Partnahs

Another way the old Windows Mobile is dead is how Microsoft’s handling partners and hardware situation. With Windows Mobile, a phonemaker handed Microsoft their monies, and Microsoft tossed them a software kit, and that was that. Which is why a lot of Windows Mobile phones felt and ran like crap. And why it took HTC like two years to produce the HD2, the most genuinely usable rendition of Windows Mobile ever.

Microsoft’s not building their own phones, but they’re going to be picky, to say the least, with Windows Phone 7. Ballmer phrases it as “taking more accountability” for people’s experiences. There’s a strict set of minimum hardware requirements: a capacitive, multitouchable screen with at least four points of touch; accelerometer; 5-megapixel camera; FM radio; and the like. There are serious benchmarks that have to be met. And only chosen OEMs get to build the phones now, not like before, when anybody with $20 could get a license. The OEMs that Microsoft’s announcing they’re working with at launch are: Qualcomm, LG, Samsung, Garmin Asus, HTC, HP, Dell, Sony Ericsson, and Toshiba. AT&T’s their “premiere partner” in the US (dammit). (Take note people! Premiere does not mean exclusive!)

Every phone will have a Bing (search) button and a Start button. Custom skins, like the minor miracles HTC worked, are now banned. The message to hardware makers is clear: It’s a Windows Phone, you’re just putting it together. Basically, phonemakers get to decide the shape of the phone, and whether or not there’s a keyboard.

One other word on hardware, in a manner of speaking. Hardware it won’t work with? Macs. Which is kind of stupid to us—a lot of the people Microsoft wants to use Windows Phone 7, like college students, have been going Mac in droves. You wanna lure them back Microsoft? Let them use your phone with any OS.

The Big Picture

Windows Phone 7 Series is, from what we’ve seen, exactly what Microsoft’s phone should be. It’s actually good. It brings together a bunch of different Microsoft services—Zune, Xbox, Bing—in a way that actually makes sense and just works. But there’s a real, lingering question: Are they too late? The first Windows Phone 7 Series…phone—goddamn that is a stupid name—won’t hit until the end of this year. That’s more than three years after the iPhone, two years after Android, hell, even a year after Palm, the industry’s sickly but persistent dwarf.

History is on Microsoft’s side here—we know what happened the last time Apple had a massive head start. (Update: To be clear, in computing.) Microsoft is, if nothing else, incredibly patient. Remember the first Xbox? Back when it was crazy that Microsoft was getting into videogames? It’s cost them about a billion dollars and taken nearly 10 years, but now, with Xbox Live, Project Natal and their massive software ecosystem, they arguably have the most impressive gaming console you can buy. That was a pet project. Now, mobile is the future of computing. What do you think Microsoft will sink into that?

The mobile picture is now officially a three-way dance: Apple, Google, and Microsoft. The same people who dominate desktop computing. Everybody else is screwed. Former Palm CEO Ed Colligan famously said a few years ago: “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” That’s precisely what’s just happened. Phones are the new PCs. PC guys are the new phone guys.

[Microsoft]


34 Inappropriately Sexy Gadget Ads

Posted by on Tuesday, 28 July, 2009

For this week’s Photoshop Contest, you created a bunch of ads for decidedly-unsexy gadgets that use our basest instincts to draw us in. And you know what? Some of these are better than real ads that are out there.


First Place – Levi Sell


Second Place – Cobra Commander


Third Place – Mark Majdanski

































How to Beat Online Casinos at Their Own Game

Posted by on Friday, 3 July, 2009

As an online casino player, would you want to lose money by using those so called “winning systems”? No doubt there might be some winning systems that might work. But not in the long run. The fact is that the player will eventually lose due to the percentage house edge which favors the casino. Online gambling can still be fun!

I won’t use any winning systems but will instead use my programming knowledge to profit from the online casinos due to one main advantage to a player. That will be the ″bonus″ given upon deposit for new players.

The 1st thing you need to remember about my strategy (not craps strategy) is that your earnings will depend on how dedicated you are to following the system and not your instincts. Understand that the odds are in the casinos favor, but by following my strategy to perfection you will decrease the casino’s edge. Treat your blackjack gaming like a part-time job and you will make an average of $90 or more per casino you play. You should easily be able to play one casino a night.

The basic idea behind the strategy is bonus hunting. Bonus hunting is basically where you take advantage of all the bonus money the casino’s give away to attract players to their online casinos. Most casinos will match your deposit dollar for dollar up to to a certain amount. Play your favorite game – slots, roulette etc. – courtesy of good bonus hunting.  There is no shortage of online casinos that offer (sometimes highly attractive) deposit or first deposit bonuses.  This type of casino is typically called a deposit bonus online casino.  So take advantage of them and be on your way to earning some good dollars today.  There are also a number of no deposit online casinos available and these casinos offer no deposit online casino bonuses as well.