India's answer to Bruce Lee (or is it Li?)

Bruce Li is no match for our very own Dharmendra in a kurta-pyjama. very funny

Source: here and here

Smallest Wifi device?

Eye-Fi today announced a 2GB SD memory card that includes wifi. The advertized application is to upload photos from your digital camera to the internet. Presumably it works with other devices such as handhelds also. But
the more interesting aspect is the size of the wifi radio. Arguably it is the smallest form-factor for a 802.11 device (at least the commercially available ones). I can imagine that we can come up with many more uses for such radios e.g. a home network, wifi-enabled cellphones, etc. The spec says the range of the radio is a modest 90ft outdoors and 45ft indoors.

11 weird cricket dismissals

Tipping a postman

The full details of the experiment are found here. Surprisingly the mail was delivered!

Low minimum mutual funds

Recently I started exploring options for investing the (little) amount of money that I have. Mutual funds seem to be a reasonable option - no hassle of tracking individual stocks and trading etc. However the better (and the best) funds usually have high minimum investment requirements - high for someone like me: limited risk taking ability.

There are some funds that have a more affordable (again for people like me) minimum investment requirements.
A couple of articles that talk about this are here and here.

I wonder if we can list mutual funds sorted by their minimum investment requirements.

Resourcefulness

What do you do when you are short of a few digits ? Turn to math :)

Noise canceling headphones

I had a set noise canceling headphones (Creative HN 505) and mainly used them at my workplace to drown the hum of computers. Recently I took them during a flight and then realized their true value - the experience was amazing. I know they are not as good as expensive noise canceling headphones from, say, Bose or Sony. In fact, the cheapest Bose headphones cost 20 times what I paid for my creative headphones. Anyway, all the engine noise was gone and it was as if I was travelling in a quiet car. The noise cancellation works even if you turn off music from your ipod.

Today I saw a Kensington product that looks just like the ones I have. And Creative apparently has stopped making the ones I have. Maybe they sold their technology to Kensington.

Parasites

Heres a cool flash-based animation/simulation:
"http://www.footloosemoose.com/michael_wp/2007/04/12/experiment-parasites/"

The simulation starts with all these bugs of different random colors and sizes. The bugs move around in a random direction and when they encounter each other one of them takes a bite off the other and grows. After reaching a certain size, the bug splits into two smaller ones. The most surprising part of it is that eventtually there is only one type of bug left in the whole screen.

Internet is the new TV

After several years of fighting P2P networks and trying to prevent online circulation of TV shows, TV networks have started to provide their own offering. They have finally realized that the Internet is not a threat to their revenue, but instead it is a source of a new stream of viewers and revenue. A few networks that have started to offer full episodes online include CBS, NBC. These episodes do include ad-clips - different from the live broadcast version. (However I suspect most people wouldn't mind a couple of ads.) Such an offering may actually reduce the P2P distribution of TV series episodes.

TV shows are different from music and even movies in terms of the online audience. Putting up TV shows on the web helps people who normally wouldn't watch the show because the airing time is inconvenient can now watch it. In addition, there may be viewers who are impressed with what they see and tune in to see it on regular TV. So it might actually lead to increased viewership for a show.

Height of joblessness: from an IRC chatroom

tag> Ouroboros- lets play Pong
Ouroboros> Ok.
tag> | .
Ouroboros> . |
tag> | .
Ouroboros> . |
tag> | .
Ouroboros> | .
Ouroboros> Whoops

Source: http://www.opendonor.org/kwotes.pl?action=list&s=0&ss=&minr=2000&maxr=10000&o=random&so=forward&m=25&mr=100

perils of a password

Until recently, I had a method of creating passwords for different websites: one for accounts that have sensitive financial information: banks, credit cards etc, one for websites with my credit card information, address information, one for my Gmail account, one for my Yahoo account and one for accounts with no sensitive information. Now the stupid thing that I used to do was this: many websites use my email address as the login handle. To keep things simple, I used the same password as the email account for the website as well. E.g: accounts with my gmail Id had the same password as my Gmail account. (I felt so stupid when I realized what I'd been doing all these years.) The fundamental issue here is that I put this information in the hands of third-party people, who I don't necessarily trust to the same degree as I trust Google. Gmail login initially was just for an email service. Now the same ID is used for all Google services including Checkout, AdSense , etc which contain sensitive information.

Since this realization, I've revamped my password strategy: different passwords for different accounts, except for those without sensitive information. I'm prepared for the additional headache of millions of passwords. But I've definitely become paranoid.

Time to rethink the login-password paradigm? biometrics?