Apr 20
The Easter egg—as in a hidden surprise or in-joke, not the chocolate treat—can be dated back to the last Russian imperial family who gifted people with jewel-encrusted Fabergé eggs containing additional surprises tucked away inside.
Apr 20
Why Weed Makes You… You… Huh?
Posted in: Today's Chili
Scientists have long suspected that THC somehow affects the hippocampus region of the brain, the bit responsible for controlling short-term memory, but they have never been able to prove it. Turns out that’s because they were looking at the wrong grey matter.
Feb 01
The legality of online sports betting exists in a sort of shrouded grey fog of possibly questionable behavior. However, there are still plenty of quality offshore operations that are willing to take your bets and pay out your winnings. If you want to know how to bet on sports online—like, say, for the Super Bowl—we’ll tell you.
Jan 14
Christmas may be over, but there’s always next year. And if it is treats under the tree and tweets on the tree that you want, you can prepare for next December right now. Instructables member Gelotology will show you how to make this Tweetball. That’s right. It’s an ornament that displays a stream of tweets from a certain username, hashtag or keyword.
It is especially handy if you are waiting for a tweet from Santa. Gelotology made it with an Arduino controller and two PHP scripts. If you want to make one for yourself, you can find step-by-step instructions at the link above. You’ve got plenty of time to get it done, so you have no excuse.
Santa will be very impressed with you next Christmas.
[via Hack A Day via Neatorama]
Sep 26
Some say that a picture is worth 1,000 words, but regardless of how you do the math, it’s fair to say that a good photo can say a lot more than 140 characters. With that in mind, Twitter is giving greater emphasis to photos within tweets by placing them front and center in the post, with the actual tweet serving as a simple caption below. Looking at it now, the decision seems an obvious one, but all photos were previously smaller and subservient to the short text. The visual redesign applies to both landscape and portrait photos, so regardless of how you frame your image, you can now let your shooting skills do the talking for you.
Source: Twitter
Aug 29
Remember the days when ticker tapes would continuously churn out stock prices? Unless you’re somebody’s great grandparent, probably not. People have gone paperless these days, rendering these machines pretty much useless. Or are they?
While they’re not being used to print stock prices anymore, they are being used to print tweets. At least that’s what British web developer Adam Vaughan is doing with the steampunk-looking contraption that he built from scratch called the Twittertape Machine. The machine has a microcontroller and a thermal printer hidden on its base and connects to a computer via Ethernet. It then checks Adam’s Twitter account every half hour.
Adam explains where he got the inspiration for the Twittertape: “I got the idea that I’d really like to have one on my desk, but of course they’re incredibly rare now and sell for huge amounts of money. Then it struck me that even if I did manage to get one it would just sit there gathering dust, doing nothing. So I had the idea that I would build one of my own, one that actually functioned… I was trying to think about what information it could produce, and of course Twitter is just a perfect fit – short succinct messages just like the stock movements of old.”
[via C|NET]
Aug 21
When Twitter placed user caps on third-party clients last year, IFTTT was one of a few services that decided to halt tweet integration, lest it run up against that cap and have to figure out an alternate solution. According to TechCrunch, however, it seems that the Twitter integration is back after extensive talks between the two companies. IFTTT, if you aren’t aware, is a handy internet service that lets you create custom actions between different apps and services with a set of triggers and actions — an example would be to send a picture to Picasa any time you upload it to Instagram.
So as you might expect, there are now new tweet triggers and actions. Examples of triggers include “New tweet by you” and “New tweet by you with hashtag” while actions could be “Post a tweet” or “Post a tweet with image” among others. Some interesting IFTTT Twitter recipes include the ability to automatically tweet a link once you post it to Facebook, a way to hook up G+ posts to Twitter and even a recipe that’ll bypass Instagram’s turning off Twitter cards. And since IFTTT works well with connected hardware like the Belkin WeMo and the Philips Hue, you could also send a tweet to turn those devices on or off. So if you’re hooked into Twitter and would love some automation in your life, head over to the IFTTT link below to get started on a recipe or just create your own.
Source: IFTTT, TechCrunch
Jul 20
You are what you wear. Sometimes, you can send the loudest of messages without saying a single word. You can let your clothes do all the talking instead.
For example, take the Twitter Dress developed by creative agency Deportivo. This isn’t the first dress that displays tweets, although it’s the first one that’s political in nature.
The dress was created to help Sweden’s youth get their voices heard at Almedalen Week, which is an annual political summit where thousands of politicians, celebrities, and PR people will converge to attend seminars, discuss issues, and talk politics. Deportivo worked with youth organization Crossing Borders in the creation of the dress, which you can see in action in the Vine animation below:
Crossing Borders recruited 30 “ambassadors” to wear the dress before the summit began. Their goal was to get the organization’s concerns out there by catching the attention of people who can actually do something about it – in this case, the people in attendance at Almedalen.
After the summit, Deportivo’s Stefan Ronge reported: “The Twitter Dress got a pledge from the minister of equality, Maria Arnholm, on addressing the issue of mandatory education on gender equality for Swedish teachers.”
[via The Daily Dot via C|NET]
Jul 01
It’s been possible for Twitter fans to embed posts and whole timelines for some time, but authors almost wouldn’t know it when they aren’t told that the sharing takes place. Users may not be in the dark for much longer — F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen noticed this weekend that Twitter was briefly listing the sites embedding a given tweet. We’ve asked Twitter for more details, but the quick disappearance of the feature suggests that the company was conducting field tests. If the addition becomes permanent, it would be consistent with Twitter’s desire to track major events — we’d know just which tweets get the web community buzzing.
Filed under: Internet
Via: The Verge
Source: Mikko Hypponen (Twitter)
Jun 16
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