There is a secret movement sweeping San Francisco McDonalds. It’s an elusive beast akin to our own McGangBang 2.0. Unlike our aforementioned gastrointestinal delicacy, this mashup of a sandwich can only be obtained once every day. Once every day! How could this be!
Imagine for a moment, it’s mid morning and you’re standing in a McDonalds wracked with guilt. Do you appease your intestinal lusting with a piece of midday sustenance or do you pounce upon a breakfast bite to better remind yourself of what could have been had you slept in? Desperate you look at the clock, time is running out. If you wait too long your decision will be made and breakfast will have died by the wayside. But dammit, you still yearn for the comfort a breakfast sandwich brings even as you acquiesce to the sustainability of the ubiquitous burger. And then it hits you: the Mc10:35!
This magnificent piece of culinary composition is at its core a McDouble and an Egg McMuffin. It’s creation is even simpler. Once both items are procured, you carefully extricate the egg and canadian bacon from the McMuffin and add it to the top of the McDouble. It’s bliss in a bun giving you that last little bit of morning sunshine coupled with a nice meaty kick to get you through the day rest of your day. Now, seeing as it’s 10:20, I for one am off to the Golden Arches.
[via Consumerist]
*Picture courtesy of Consumerist since I work for the Man and have no access to a camera.
We can add another item to the long list of amazing things that I wish I thought of and yet have no time to ever accomplish. Patrick Acton of Iowa has completed an incredibly detailed match stick model of Minas Tirith. His labor of love began in April of 2007 and culminated last week on the 15th of February. He used 420,000 matchsticks to create the city and another 24,000 wooden blocks for Mount Mindolluin (the mountain the city is built into). You can catch more pictures of the model over at Matchstick Marvels and I must say, they’re pretty awesome.
[via Nerdesque]
In an effort to compete with Google, Microsoft recently released a Bing search application to the Apple App Store. Similarly to Google’s Mobile App, the Bing app provides access to all the Bing features including a voice search. According to Microsoft, Bing is the “Mobile decision engine that is always by your side” and that it should be used for ” quick answers, Web searches, product lookups, and local listings”.
After reading mostly good reviews of Microsoft’s app I was interested to see what all the hullabaloo was about, but I haven’t been able to and there’s a good reason for that. I can’t install the damn thing. Why you ask? It’s because my iPod touch is so ancient it doesn’t have a microphone. Yes that’s right, it won’t install because I failed a mic check. But wait, take a look at Microsoft’s own screenshot below:
Bing Mobile
Yup, you saw that correctly. That’s a search box. Whoever is using this app to find thai restaurants in Boston isn’t speaking into their phone or newer iPod. They’re doing it the old fashioned way. The web 1.0 way. The same antiquated way I would on my iPod touch. They typed it.
What makes matters worse is that Google’s mobile app, which Microsoft is attempting to thrust out of the limelight with Bing, doesn’t have this problem. In the settings section of Google’s app, the option for voice search is grayed out with a message stating that it is not available and the app is still 100% effective. It’s just missing a few bells and whistles.
The question now is why did Microsoft couple the voice technology so closely into their app that it can’t work on the mic-less iPods? It seems once again that Microsoft is striving too hard to battle Google without fully thinking out the solution to the problem. As a direct result, they’ve failed a basic tenet of software engineering: KISS, or “keep it simple, stupid!” and that’s what really grinds my gears.
That’s approximately the length of time Han Solo had to set up the shelter on Hoth before Luke died of hypothermia. Don’t believe me? Well, Wolfie over at Wolf Gnards has done a wee bit of fact finding to come up with that answer:
In a normal environment, a carcass gets cold in 8 to 36 hours losing an average rate of 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit per hour. However, the ice world of Hoth is not an average environment. The Star Wars database lists that Hoth reaches nightly temperatures of -60 F. In a frigid, sub-zero environment, body heat can be lost almost 32 times faster. This means a Tauntaun’s body heat could drop almost 51.2 F every hour. Considering that Han Solo’s Tauntaun died of severe hypothermia even before it was cut open with Luke’s light saber, one could assume it’s core body temperature was already well below normal. The problem for Luke is if the Tauntaun’s body temperature reaches freezing point those once toasty guts, blood, and assorted alien goo, will in fact become a frozen coffin. If the Tauntaun died of cardiac arrest due to hypothermia with an average body temperature of 75 F (23 C), and if Tauntaun blood freezes at 28.4 F (-2 C), then Han has roughly 56 minutes to set up a shelter before Luke once again is in danger of losing his life in the barren wasteland of Hoth.
If you’d like to read the whole article, you can find it here.
In case you haven’t noticed, the tech and programming worlds are abuzz about Google’s newly announced programming language, Go. It’s a systems programming language that’s been billed as simple, fast, safe, concurrent and best of all open source. There is just one minor problem. They’ve already received an informal cease and desist.
Yes, that’s right. Go hasn’t even been out to the public for more than a day and there’s already someone taking credit for it. Unlike the absurd claim that was just made against Steve Jobs and Sarah Jessica Parker, this one may actually have some credence. A user calling himself fmmcabe created issue #9 on the Go google code page in which he says:
I have been working on a programming language, also called Go, for the last 10 years. There have
been papers published on this and I have a book.
I would appreciate it if google changed the name of this language; as I do not want to have to
change my language!
A quick google search brought up his book, “Lets Go!” on the self publishing site, Lulu and a perusal of the ACM digital library brings up several hits as well including “Go! for multi-threaded deliberative agents”.
The biggest issue at hand seems to be the semantics between the two names. Google’s new language is named Go whereas McCabe’s is a more emphatic Go!. Go is already a fairly common word and I can attest to the difficulties of using it as a parameter within a Google search. Even a day after the announcement, a quick search for ‘go programming language’ returns hits entirely about Google’s Go including a rudimentary wikipedia article. With the immense popularity of Google, I can easily see McCabe’s language (which is already obscure) being pushed even further into the depths of the internet.
I’m not surprised that Google didn’t know about the previous usage of the name, but I hope Google follows their corporate motto of “Don’t be evil” and let McCabe be the sole user of Go. I’ll even suggest that they fall back on GoLang. Not only is it the official url, but it allows them to retain all the quirky uses of go within their language (ex goroutines ) and puts them in league with another concurrent language, ErLang. Problem solved.
So, you’ve got a few secondary GMail accounts as part of the Google Apps suite and you want a way to consolidate your email under one account. Currently, there are only 2 ways to do this with GMail: forwarding and POP3. Forwarding is the easiest way to solve this problem, but requires you to log into each of your accounts and configure them so that they forward all their emails to your primary account. It’s not a bad solution, but what happens on the off chance you change your primary address. Well, you’d have to log back in and change all of the forwarding addresses. A much better way would be to configure your primary GMail address to periodically check each of the accounts and download any mail directly. This is where POP3 comes in.
1 ) Log into your Google Apps mail account (mail.your-domain.com)
2 ) Navigate to settings and in the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” section enable POP3
3 ) Log out of your Google Apps mail account
4 ) Log into your main email address
5 ) Head to the “Accounts and Import” section of GMail’s settings
6 ) Scroll down to the “Check Mail Using POP3″ section and click “Add POP3 email account”.
7 ) In the subsequent dialog box, enter your google apps email account (you@your-domain.com) and click next
8 ) In the next window, fill out the following fields accordingly:
Username: you@your-domain.com
Password: password for you@your-domain.com
Pop server: pop.gmail.com (NOT mail.your-domain.com This is where I kept having problems)
Port: 995
I’d also recommend checking “Always use secure connection” and “Label incoming messages” along with using your-domain as a label. After that, hit next and everything should be all set to go.
Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like when I set up pop3 for my Sector930 account:
I’m sure the readers of the Sector know exactly what RAID is and the intricacies of each variant, however, not everyone is tech savvy enough to follow either the Wikipedia article or the even easier Gizmodo primer. I’ve found the best way to explain RAID to the masses is by using the image below. While it doesn’t cover all possible variations, it not only hits the most commonly used ones but does it in an easy and concise manner. I’m not even sure how I came across the image (I think it was flickr or digg or somesuch) but I’m hoping there’s a repository of awesome explanatory pictures just like this one. If you have any other tools to easily explain tech topics to the masses, feel free to share them in the comments.
If you’re a regular reader of the Sector (and not one of those high faluting RSS users) you may have noticed a change to the site as you’re reading this post. What’s that? You didn’t notice? Take a second look….
OH SNAP, there’s a FAVICON! But wait, what’s a favicon? Well it’s a16×16 image which serves as a visual cue for a particular website and tends to show up in the address bar, browser tabs and next to any bookmarks. In the Sector’s case, our favicon is the lighter half of our infamous longcat banner. The screenshot below is Firefox using the Faviconize Tab Add-on and in it you can see (from left to right) gmail, google reader, a blank tab (and as such has no favicon), devmaster.net and lastly our own illustrious Sector.
Adding a favicon to your own site is incredibly easy. Simply create a 16×16 icon (.ico) using your favorite image editor or pretty much anything that shows up in a quick google search. Upload the image to wherever your site lives on the web and add
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/path-to/favicon.ico”>
to your site’s header or if using wordpress to your theme’s header. If you aren’t incredibly web savvy, the header is the section of your site that exists between the <head> and </head> tags. With that, you should be set. So go forth and happy updating.
I was doing a little housecleaning today and discovered that my 87 year old future self pulled a Marty McFly and played a little Fallout 3. I’ve noticed problems with this window before, but it’s been limited to things showing up that have already been uninstalled or having no access date while being used fairly frequently. Needless to say I’ve submitted a bug report, but couldn’t add a whole lot of meat to it. If anyone has ideas, throw them my way so I can see if I can reproduce it with other programs.
I also had a problem including the image in still keeping it readable, so I went on a search for a good Wordpress Gallery plugin. After a few attempts at failed Google-fu, I decided to search the blog of the foremost Wordpress Guru the Sector knows: Jim Groom. It’s probably not surprising to note that he had an answer in the form of NextGen (which you can download the plugin here). Simply unzip the archive into your wp-content/plugins and you’re good to go. Rather than trying to use the readme or a faq, just head to the NextGen Gallery for simple examples of every kind of image or gallery the plugin offers.
