Teapacks - Push The Button

For some inexplicable reason, this song, Israel's entry into the 2007 Eurovision contest, has been stuck in my head today:

Since you probably don't understand all of the lyrics (they're in English, French and Hebrew), here's another video. This one is a live performance, with English subtitles:

And if you want to own your very own copy, it's on iTunes

Enjoy!

Katamari #123: He Was Standing There The Whole Time

Sometimes I feel the same way...

Dry Bones: Popularity Contest

Yep. That's about right.

How A Hard Drive Works

Extreme Tech has a great article showing how a hard drive works. It includes a 5 minute video from Bill The Engineer Guy

South Koreans required by law to use Internet Explorer.

The Washington Post writes about how a 14-year-old law, intended to make internet commerce more secure has produced some really annoying unintended consequences.

Smell Ya Later

It's only available from the Japanese Amazon store right now, but Scentee is a hardware dongle for your iPhone that will allow scent-based communication. You load it up with a cartridge containing your favorite scent and then configure various app triggers to let the smell loose at appropriate times. Bundled apps include olfactory notifications when someone likes one of your Facebook posts, timers and alarm clocks.

There also a 10-minute video on the site that seems to be more like a b-grade soap opera than an ad for the product. Go figure.

Cheap international roaming, by hacking your SIM card

The Register writes about a (UK) long-distance carrier called BiBiTel with a novel product

The BiBiTel product is a decal with some embedded electronics. You remove your phone's SIM card, affix the decal, and put it back in your phone. The electronics in the decal passes through all communication used to place domestic calls. When you try to place an international call, or if you are out of the country, however, it intercepts the call and places it over the BiBiTel network instead of your normal carrier. The call is handled and billed by them at their discounted rates. (At least I assume they're discounted - I don't know what the rates are normally in the UK.)

Conceptually, it's not much different like land-line services in the past, where you would dial an access code or a toll-free number to place your call through an alternate carrier. Those methods (especially the toll-free number approach) would still work with a cell phone, but something like this is far more convenient. If it works as advertised, you no longer have to think about it - it will just redirect your calls automatically.

I never place international calls for myself (and work calls are on the company phone, which they pay for), but for someone who does, this is a great idea. I wonder when something similar will become available for customers of US carriers.

SQRL login system

Gibson Research has released a secure login system called SQRL (Secure (QR) Login - pronounced "squirrel") with a lot of very interesting and attractive properties.

The superbrief summary of SQRL is:

• You install the SQRL software on your smartphone
• When you visit a web site that supports SQRL, you will see a QR code next to the login form.
• Instead of typing in your user ID and password, you scan the QR code with your phone
• The SQRL app works some cryptographic magic (go read the web page for the details) and sends the results to the URL that's part of that QR code
• You click the login button without typing in any name/password
• You are securely and anonymously logged in:
  • The server doesn't know who you are (unless you provide that information separately)
  • The server will recognize you when you come back in the future
  • Other servers using SQRL will see different anonymous IDs, so you can't be tracked across multiple sites (unless, of course, you provide additional information as a part of using that site.)
  • The authentication process is out-of-bound (separate network connection, separate device, etc.) so a compromised web browser (like in a public terminal) won't see any of your login credentials

More convenient and more secure than a normal password-based login. What more could you want?

I need to read more about this (I've only read the first page of the site), but based on what I've read so far, and the fact that Gibson Research is a company that has earned a lot of trust over the years, I am very interested in this technology and would love to see it (or some similar concept) widely adopted all over the internet.

Atari 2600 Adventure

Today, I stumbled across the home page of Warren Robinett. For those who may be unfamiliar with the name, Warren was the Atari engineer who wrote the Adventure game for the Atari 2600.

This was a ground-breaking game for its time, and was the first adventure game ever made for a gaming console. Although incredibly primitive by today's standards, it becomes incredibly impressive when you realize that the Atari 2600 only had 4K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. Warren's home page has a page devoted to Adventure. In it is a PowerPoint presentation about the making of Adventure, including a quick summary of the Atari 2600's architecture. It is a great read if you're into legacy hardware/software platforms and the programming techniques needed to develop code for those platforms.

Interestingly, back in the 70's, when Adventure came out, my father and I found the Easter egg, learning all about Warren Robinett. We phoned Atari, hoping to be able to talk with him for a few minutes, but the receptionist claimed that no such person ever worked there. At the time, we assumed that he had been fired for wasting memory with the Easter-egg room which could have held another game room. In hindsight, I think it is more likely that we weren't the first to phone up, and Atari was trying to make the callers go away so their engineers could get back to work.

Dolphin intelligence has been seriously exaggerated

Der Spiegel reports (along with many others) about the recent findings and book by Justin Gregg that debunks many of the myths surrounding dolphin intelligence.

While dolphins no doubt are intelligent, the belief that it is second only to humans (including language, complex social structures, etc.) is simply not true.

Note that some media outlets reporting this are taking away the wrong conclusion. Gregg points out that some aspects of dolphin behavior (attributed to superior intelligence) are shared by many lesser life forms that nobody would consider intelligent (like goldfish and mealworms), leading some to conclude that he's placing dolphins among them on the intelligence ladder. I don't get that impression from the article, and Gregg himself has said that he does not hold this belief.

See also:

• Are Dolphins Really Smart? - Justin Gregg's new book
• Justin Gregg's Q&A about the book