November 17th, 2009

The weirdest Easter egg ever seen on Facebook

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 4:58 pm

Categories: Social networking, University fun, Weird and wonderful

Tags: Facebook, Arrow, Easter Egg, Keyboards, E-mail, Web Browsers, Hardware, Peripherals, Online Communications, Internet

I am truly stunned and baffled. How many times do you get emails or messages which say something along the lines of, “if you press Alt+F4 then you get a secret menu”, or similar?

This was exactly the case when I saw a friend’s status message on Facebook. I’m still struggling to cope with this as the sheer surprise of it actually working has taken my breath away. But what’s more peculiar is to why it is even there in the first place.

Here’s what you do.

1. Go to any Facebook page and click once in a white area just to get a blank timeline to do this with.
2. Press up arrow, up arrow, down arrow, down arrow, left arrow, right arrow, left arrow, right arrow, B, A, then the Return key.

For those who are confused, the key layout is below:

If you left-click or right-click, scroll or push any keyboard key after that, a strange shining set of circular rings will appear on your screen. To get rid of it, simply refresh the page or failing that, close the browser and start again.

Why? I have no idea. How this was even found? Perhaps this is the stranger mystery.

Digg this post. Tweet this post. Comment on this post?

November 10th, 2009

Size zero devices: How thin is too thin?

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 12:42 pm

Categories: Hardware, Mobile computing, Next-generation technology, Weird and wonderful

Tags: Phone, Device, Laptop Computer, Notebooks, Telecom & Utilities, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Zack Whittaker

I don’t have the thinnest laptop in the world. If anything it’s quite chunky and quite sturdy, with the exception of the 180° rotating screen, but even then it’s a hearty bit of kit. My BlackBerry is wide and deep in size, fitting my hand quite nicely and the keys are big enough to tap away on quite comfortably.

But I only really noticed this today in comparison with other devices. The fashion at the moment seems to be “the thinner, the better”, as if we would starve our technology in vain effort to slim them down. It’s like this crazed fashion stint we have at the moment is focusing on “size zero technology”.

Why?!

Take the Motorola Razr. The phone is incredibly thin which seemed to be the “killer feature”, besides the simplicity yet expandability of the features within the operating software. The name, stemming from the phone having a similar look to a cutthroat razor. Thin, stylish and incredibly popular with over 100 million being sold.

But for some, strange reason, if I was to be given one, the first thing I would do is stress test it: I’d flip open the phone and push the screen back and see how far I could stress it before it snaps. Perhaps it’s a standard “want” to do; if something seems flimsy or so thin it could break easily, I’d be tempted to give it a go.

Ultra-thin devices like these do seem to be a trend that is spiraling forward and sees no sign of subsiding. But if you were to look at other progressions in technology:

• Mobile phones started out huge, then got smaller, then got slightly bigger and thicker - where they seem to have stayed.
• Televisions started out with small screens but huge in design, then the screens matched the size of the design, and now the bigger they are the better they are.
• Laptops were initially small but chunky, and now they’re thinner and wider.

Maybe through time, the “size zero” phase will wear off. There may be a time where consumers (and therefore manufacturers) will realise that devices need to fit quite a bit of stuff in there. With the MacBook Air, it lacked FireWire and an optical disk drive because they would have thickened out the laptop too much.

I’ve never seen anyone with a MacBook Air. Perhaps those considering buying one realised the importance of an internal optical drive.

My personal opinion? I’d say try and make devices proportionate, but don’t aim for a specific thin design. Fit everything else you can in there first, and then figure out if you can slim it down a bit.

I don’t like my partners to be stick thin. I like a bit of chunk on them, along with the vast majority of English men. Just as technology should be; you know,  something that you can actually feel in your pocket, excuse the innuendo.

So, how thin is too thin? Do you prefer skinny or chunky? Strange question, perhaps, but I hope it’s at least in context.

November 9th, 2009

10 technological changes in 10 technological years

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 4:39 am

Categories: Cloud computing, Discussion, Events, Hardware, Major breakthroughs, Multimedia, Social networking, Uncategorized, Weird and wonderful

Tags: TV, Computer, Internet, Productivity, Text Messaging/SMS/MMS, Cellular Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Online Communications, Zack Whittaker

My goddaughter is now of an age where she can talk, understand, and learn pretty well. She’s six, so she’s pretty on the ball with things already. The things that she experiences and sees are so different to mine, and she’s only 16 years younger than me. Times change quickly, I know, but it hit me like a wave of elderly welfare benefits disguised as a petrol tanker last night.

The differences between her generation and mine, even though separated by a few years, are stark and somewhat terrifying in hindsight.

1. There were nine planets in the solar system.

For years it was always nine planets and then one day, they decided it was either going to be eight, or about twenty. They chose eight. After seven years of primary education, the world I knew it was, well gone actually; they had just declassified it as a planet.

2. A BlackBerry was a fruit, and so was Apple.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if people heard either “blackberry” or “apple” and genuinely thought of the fruit. But I cannot seem to shake the association now built with my mobile device. People say, “have at least one of your five a day”, whilst I have my BlackBerry in my hand making a call. I’d say that counts, right?

3. To load up a program, you’d have to slam in a cassette tape and wait 20 minutes for it to load.

My first computer, a CPC-464. It was so heavy you could have used it as a concrete block in a mafioso novel. A ten year gap is a bit of an exaggeration but I knew people still word processing back then on green-screened computers. When the 5″ floppy disk came out, we saw that as a mini-revolution in itself.

4. You had to dial into the Internet.

You couldn’t just have the Internet flowing in and out of the computer like an out of control waterfall. No, you had to tell it to dial another computer and information would be sent to and fro through, what was essentially a computer-to-computer phone call. What’s even more weird is that it’s still available, even today.

5. A single gigabyte hard drive simply couldn’t be filled, through no will of trying.

My first computer bought for the family at Christmas 1996 (yes, it had Windows 95) had a 64MB memory and a single gigabyte of storage. My dad said, “we will never, ever fill that”.

6. Video tapes the size of Bibles would be the only way to record a television programme, and even then it’d only be able to record an hour and a half at best.

Even though I’m far too young to remember the Betamax vs. VHS war, I most certainly remember hoping to watch back an episode of The Simpsons which I’d recorded on the oldest VCR in the world, and it failing miserably with tape lodged and jammed in every bit. It was heartbreaking.

7. The only porn we could find was the shredded remains of a dirty magazine under a bush in the local park.

This generation of Internet kids has seen more porn than any other generation of children, ever. When I was a lad, one morning you’d be lucky enough to find a shred of it near where the local dirty old man sleeps in the evening. “Kids having kids… blame the parents”: no, blame the Internet.

8. There was only one computer in the house, and if there were more, only one would connect to the Internet at a time.

No such things as wireless back then. The only wireless you’d know of was the radio, and that would have been a main source of entertainment. It may sound like wartime England, 10 years ago wasn’t that far away. Windows XP hadn’t come out yet, I was still in a school uniform and the computers we used were running Windows NT.

9. There were no such things as flat screen televisions.

At least commercially, anyway. I come from a generation where our eyes are slightly closer together yet facing slightly the opposite way from being transfixed by a CRT television for all these years. And I laugh now at the “radiation warnings” from the sticker on the side of the box…

10. Twitter was called “text messaging” and the “tweet” only went to one other person.

Yes, a new phenomenon which many don’t realise that was basically text messaging. While sending a text is still far more popular than Twitter, the days where news would slowly seep its way through a friendship group (nowadays a “social network”), whereas now you can update literally anyone and everyone in the space of 160 characters.

A lot can happen in ten years.

November 6th, 2009

Facebook profile privacy: Take control, student style

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 1:25 pm

Categories: Careers, Discussion, Multimedia, Security, Social networking, University, Weird and wonderful

Tags: Facebook, Advertisement, Privacy, E-mail, Online Communications, Zack Whittaker

A question arose in one of my seminars yesterday, asking whether universities spy on students through Facebook.

Yes, they do in many cases. But then the discussion evolved into another topic and this got me thinking. I get emails all the time asking about Facebook privacy settings and those who are worried about certain things being discovered, and the employment problems for future reference.

With the multitude of settings, and more often than not rather confusing and somewhat contradictory, how do you effectively lock down your photos, notes, profile and information, to not only certain people but everyone else outside your close-knit networks?

There are articles already on how to lock down your Facebook through the in-built settings, and this one is particularly good. However there are tricks and subtleties I’ll mention here which you may not have considered before.

Feel free to leave verbal heckles, but in the meantime - are you sitting comfortably? Shall we move on?

Network hacking to avoid staff/student snoopage –>

November 4th, 2009

Google Maps and the mystery of the non-existent town

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 12:05 pm

Categories: Google, Security, Space, University fun, Weird and wonderful

Tags: Google Inc., Google Maps, Argleton, Document Management, Internet, Blogging, Branding, Enterprise Software, Software, Finance

A small village in the north of England, Argleton, has been causing confusion with an air of mystery. The simple reason is, is that the village simply doesn’t exist except in the world of Google.

The above image is from Google Maps, displaying the village of Argleton, Lancashire, in the north of the UK.

The above image is from Bing Maps, displaying the exact same area but without any reference to Argleton in the map.

The above image is from the birds-eye view from Bing Maps, which shows an aerial, high-resolution image of the area, which I have stitched together (click to enlarge into full scale; warning: 7MB). As you can see, there is nothing but a load of fields and certainly no buildings, let alone a whole village in the area.

So why does Google display this village - which I’ll point out now, categorically does not exist - and other mapping services don’t?

Some believe that the added name is due to a measure to prevent copyright violations, but Tele Atlas provide the imaging and name data and have said they provide accurate information and Google deny that they have altered it in any way. It seems in this area, Google Maps is the looking glass to external information.

The local blogosphere is already taking advantage of this “Internet sensation” with this spoof site. Yet even after months of knowing about it plus users reporting it as an error, it still hasn’t disappeared — branding Google’s mapping service as potentially inaccurate.

Mike Nolan, head of web services at Edge Hill University, wrote:

“I grew up in the area and spotted on the map one day that it said ‘Argleton’,” he says. “But it’s just a farmer’s field close to the village hall and playing fields. I think a footpath goes across the field, but that’s all. The name ‘Argleton’ is similar to ‘Aughton’. Maybe someone made a mistake when keying in the name?”

Yet the president of the Society of Cartographers, Prof. Danny Dorling, suggested that perhaps this was an additional element to a map to hide secret locations, as some may well be forced to do.

The only thing I can think of, and after trying out the name in an anagram solver which provided little except slight amusement, is that it’s a tiny Easter egg which has taken all this time to discover.

What’s your theory? Surely it can’t be as crazy as, say, a fictional village existing only within the realms of Google, can it?

November 4th, 2009

Best use for touch hardware yet? FarmVille

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 6:13 am

Categories: Hardware, Mobile computing, Multimedia, University fun, Weird and wonderful

Tags: Mouse, Multi-touch, FarmVille, Mice, Games, Hardware, Peripherals, Personal Technology, Zack Whittaker

Day in and day out here I write articles spanning all kinds of relatively boring topics to the untrained eye. Today, after my previous article analysing the business model (yawn) of online game phenomenon, FarmVille, I discovered a rather interesting twist to the gameplay.

FarmVille is grid based, similar to SImCity in the way that every item uses up a number of squares on the canvas you have. A chicken will take up one square, a plantation patch will take up 4×4 squares, and buildings take up far more.

Considering the game is so hefty on the computer’s resources through Flash consumption and CPU usage, even with scaling the graphics down a notch, even moving the mouse can be laggy, slow and sluggish.

But throw in the multi-touch capabilities of my laptop, I can simply tap away using multiple fingers at a time and plough, plant and harvest my entire canvas of crops in a fraction of the time simply by not using the mouse cursor.

Flash doesn’t support multi-touch just yet, but perhaps with the help of the iPhone popularity, it will soon be around the corner. But for gaming purposes, a single finger at a time is still far quicker than the mouse.

Is this the only practical use I have found for multi-touch computing? Perhaps so, yes.

November 3rd, 2009

Google Wave: Has potential, but let loose too soon

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 4:12 am

Categories: Cloud computing, Google, Multimedia, Next-generation technology, Productivity, Skills development, Social networking, University, Weird and wonderful, e-Learning

Tags: Google Inc., Google Wave, E-mail, Corporate Communications, Online Communications, Marketing, Zack Whittaker

Google Wave has annoyed me so far. Because I am set in my ways and stubborn enough to brandish anything new, exciting and radical to my everyday routine as “a giant waste of my time”, I saw Wave as more of a challenge than anything else.

At the moment the only real factor it has in its favour is the real-time collaborative space, and of course I see this as a positive from a students’ perspective in a university enterprise arena. But besides that, it has very little substance. Sure it has the avatars, the ability to change the colour of certain items here and there, and it’ll give you a contacts list. Besides that? Mostly unfinished features and no obvious end-game.

One of my favourite features so far is the “Sign out” button in the top right hand corner. This has been particularly useful when pulling out my own hair, trying to work out what the hell is going on, and becoming confused as to what is being said.

Read the rest of this entry »

October 28th, 2009

Facebook freezes deceased person's profiles

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 5:03 am

Categories: Breaking news, Security, Social networking, Weird and wonderful

Tags: Facebook, Page, Person, Zack Whittaker

Facebook for some time adopted a policy which allows profiles of the deceased to stay as they are. With the importance of online identities and many more people than before using the online space as a communications tool, when people pass away, the impact can be more obvious than a few years ago.

But now as the world’s largest community and social network, the company recognises that a number of users will die each and every day and that their online identities and pages should be memorialised - primarily for others to preserve their memory. Read the rest of this entry »

October 14th, 2009

Double slash in Web addresses 'a bit of a mistake'

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 10:42 am

Categories: Research, Web 2.0, Web development, Weird and wonderful

Tags: Web, Protocol, Channel Management, Marketing, Zack Whittaker

The creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has admitted that the double slash we see in every website address was a mistake, and that if he could go back and change things, it would be to remove this oblique double punctuation.

The British scientist according to the BBC News says that the double forward-slash is “pretty pointless”, with:

“[t]yping in // has just resulted in people overusing their index fingers, wasting time and using more paper”.

The rest of the address is relatively important for the browser. Back in the “olden days” of the Internet, there were http protocols, gopher protocols and ftp protocols - and all followed with a colon and a double forward-slash. Now we have more protocols which are used, such as Skype and AIM to initiate a VoIP call or an instant message.

But there is practically no reference to the double forward-slash on the web, or as to why it is even there. In an interview with The Times of London, he could have easily redesigned URLs not to have the double forward-slashes in. Perhaps as a result, it would have reduced initial frustration, confusion over web addresses and saved on paper.

Perhaps along with the evolution of Web 3.0, we may well see the end of the double forward-slash. Anybody fancy visiting http:news.bbc.co.uk or http:www.zdnet.com today?

October 7th, 2009

Next-gen operating systems: Facebook on steroids?

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 10:33 am

Categories: Cloud computing, Discussion, Google, Next-generation technology, Productivity, Research, Social networking, Web 2.0, Weird and wonderful

Tags: Facebook, Operating System, Operating Systems, Software, Zack Whittaker

The conversation I had with Mozilla Labs UX chief, Aza Raskin, last week has made me think about the future of the web. He envisions a future when the vast majority of things in the cloud are combined with a social web, and “something” where the two overlap. Stick with me on this one for a minute…

Readers of the ZDNet “All About Microsoft” blog should be aware that in the next decade, Windows will be phased out and replaced by a next-generation operating system, “Midori”. My guess is that it will run as a Software+Services model where the client machine will do processing but the vast majority of the “workings” will be run from the cloud, including applications.

It’s just a guess, mind you. There’s nothing definitive yet, and even the Queen of Redmond herself isn’t entirely sure, due to the tight-lipped nature of the Singularity/Midori teams. This is at very least my vision of the future operating system.

So based on this thinking (and I am keen to stress that this is purely conjecture), isn’t this to some extent what Facebook could turn out to be if it was stuffed full of electronic uppers and poppers, and poked very hard with an ingenious stick?

The very nature of Facebook is that of a social experience. You interact with others - friends, family and colleagues - in a way which has gotten modern sociologists wetting themselves with excitement. The psychology of the whole thing is blowing the minds of these radical professors into new ways of thinking, and technologists are seeing this sort of platform as the potential for the future.

Read the rest of this entry »