Author: John

Open Clip Art Library

Need some clip art and just don’t want to plow through the Office download site, or maybe you haven’t partaken in the Redmond Kool-Aid and use Open Office but still want pretty clip art to liven up that boring sales report or add some flair to the TPS reports. Over at Open Clip Art Library you can find thousands of clips that are just waiting to be used in new and exciting ways! It’s all Public Domain and Creative Commons here my friend so take what you want and if your handy with the art supplies maybe you can contribute to the site.

Open Clip Art Library :: openclipart.org :: Drawing Together.

Find Yourself on the Map of the Internet!

Have you ever wanted to visualize the entire layout of the IP addresses on the Internet and at the same time wanted to know just where you fit into things? If so this is just for you.  I never knew that the Internet looked like a hand drawn map. I’ve had my suspicions…

What? This site plots any IPv4 address on the map from last Monday’s xkcd comic. In other words, it shows where you lie in the structure of IP addresses — so your placement has more to do with the pecking order of the computing industry in the late 1980s than with actual geography.

How? The comic uses a 4th-order Hilbert curve to arrange /8 blocks, and within each of those I’ve assumed that the /16 blocks are arranged in similar Hilbert curves, just smaller.

This is the little patch of IPv4 that TeamDroid lives on. It’s got a nice view and the neighbors aren’t too loud.

Find yourself on the Map of the Internet!

Cool Water Jet Action Shots

Waterjet in actionThis has got to be one of the best stunts to advertise a moderately obscure service I have ever seen. What is a water jet? Remember how when you were a kid (or maybe you still do this) when you were told to water the lawn you inevitable ended up seeing how deep a hold you could make in the ground by blasting it with the finest setting on the nozzle? Ok, that’s called ‘hydraulic mining‘ but the idea is the same. Shoot ultra high pressure water through a super fine hole and you can cut through stuff. Sometimes a bit of grit is added to give the jet some better cutting action. Wood, plastic, metal, cloth… Just about anything can be cut this way. It’s better than a laser in some ways because there is zero heating. You could cut butter this way if you wanted to. Anyway, this is a link to a great FAQ on the process and some stunning photos on how to seriously void the warranty on your game systems.
[via fosfor gadgets]
Water jet pictures

Fishighway – Aquarium of the Future?

I saw this on Boing Boing today and I knew I had seen this a few years ago. With a bit of work I was able to find the original site. The fishhighway domain is gone but thanks to Wayback Machine it still lives on. (Make sure you check out the images on Archive and not the other site that is just serving up the photos and raking in the ad bucks). Apparently it’s based on an old patent from 1877, you can see an image of it here. It’s a clever idea but even if you can clean the tubes with a magnitized cleaner it would still be a pain. But as aquariums go it does look awesome.

fishighway.com (via Archive.org)

Weighing the Web

Quick! You need a factoid fast! Here’s one, what does the Internet weigh?

A statistically rough ( one sigma) estimate might be 75-100 million servers @ ~350-550 watts each.. Call it Forty Billion Watts or ~ 40 GW. Since silicon logic runs at three volts or so, and an Ampere is some ten to the eighteenth electrons a second, if the average chip runs at a Gigaherz , straightforward calculation reveals that some 50 grams of electrons in motion make up the Internet.

Thats the mass of a medium sized chicken egg.

[via eyebeam and collision detection]

Weighing the Web

Lego Magnets

LEGO and magnets… Perfect!!!

"…gave us a set of Magz for Christmas and i noticed that the small magnets in the bar component of the toy looked like the right size to fit in the cylinder in the bottom of Lego bricks. I have scads of Lego but was lucky enough to get a bit of new Lego as a gift also. Tonight i put the two together."

[via MAKE]

Lego magnets on Zieak’s Blog