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I used to play some jazz with my alto sax back in the days. Here’s a robot that can play an alto saxophone. He seems to be playing some cool jazz. Not TOO bad for a robot.

via thejapanesearecrazy

Check out this hilarious sideways room these guys made.

Here’s a cool Deer Repellent for those of you with deers on your front yard that eat up your plants. But just turn it off on Christmas so Rudolph the Raindeer doesn’t get scared.

My original “Deer Repellent/ Seismic Sensor” recommended using a speaker with a weight glued to the cone as a vibration sensor (see bottom of page) but it recently occurred to me that the speaker could supply the mass itself. By gluing a standoff to the center of the cone, an inexpensive 2″, 8 ohm speaker becomes a vibration sensor with a natural resonance below 100Hz which is quite good.

Okay, we are going to try some Web 2.0 news from now on…i think…

It looks like eBay is acquiring Stumbleupon for around $50 million bucks. Maybe they can make people stumble onto humorous ebay pages like a Sony laptop being sold for 10K. I am not exactly sure what their plan is but it seems like StumbleUpon is getting bigger and bigger than ever. Yeah, if you had a StumbleUpon site in countries that StumbleUpon doesn’t support, you’d make some big bucks…

High-flying startup StumbleUpon has been rumored to be in acquisition discussions since at least last November. Recently we’ve heard that talks have heated up again, with Google, AOL and eBay as potential suitors. A source with knowledge of the deal now says the company has signed a term sheet with eBay to be acquired. The price is somewhere between $40 - $75 million. (update: GigaOm is now reporting the price at a $40 - $45 million).

StumbleUpon lets users rate websites via a browser toolbar. At any time a user can click “Stumble!” and will be taken to a website highly rated by other StumbleUpon users who tend to vote in a similar way as the person “stumbling.” More often than not, it’s something almost serendipitously interesting to the reader. The company expanded into video referrals in late 2006.

via techcrunch

Check out these really large solar cookers you can use to cook some food. Maybe they will be able to commercialize this and let people cook some steaks on it instead of using up our precious earth resources.

One of the easiest beginnings for a parabolic solar cooker can be found in thousands of backyards across the United States-the satellite dish, from the large C-band to the small digital dish. What happens to these relics once they are discarded? They are large and awkward and not easily recycled. Building your own solar cooker is a great way to reuse these parabolic-shaped units while reducing waste in the landfill.

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Remember our post on Post-It Pixel Wall? Well, here’s some Post-It Super Mario and Donkey Kong from 10 UC Santa Cruz students. Great job guys!

Donkey Kong (Miyamoto, et. al.,1981) was the first appearance of the Itallian plumber we now know as Mario. While this game’s early ’80s arcade popularity predates most of today’s engineering students, it represents the amazing results that a small development team can produce. Today Donkey Kong is ranked as the 3rd most popular arcade game of all time, selling over 65,000 units.

Currently this work is visible at the E2 building at UCSC, it is scheduled to be removed on or before May 1.

via laughingsquid

Oooohhhh, check out this cool MP4 watch!

Check out the features:

• 2GB Built in Memory
• Supports MP3, WMA, WAV Music Formats
• MTV Movie Player (video conversion software included)
• JPEG format supported
• Text file Display
• Built-In Speaker
• High Speed USB 2.0 data connection
• FM Radio
• Voice Recording
• 6 Equalizer Settings
• 3.5mm Audio Jack - earphones supplied

via ministryoftech

Also check out the other MP4 Watches on the market today:

• Brando MP4 Watch

• Anlong MP4 Watch

• Thanko MP4 Watch

If you are a network manager or likes to mess with network stuff, you know what this localhost 127.0.0.1 Doormat is for. ( For your home, of course!)

For those of you non-network IT managers, 127.0.0.1 is the IP address of Localhost on a computer or server. You can do a test in DOS command line, “ping 127.0.0.1″, and see if your network card is workin’

Wikipedia has a good definition of Localhost and Answers has a good technical info on Localhost too.

via

Here’s how to decrease the load on your Wordpress blog by 5 factors! (if you are running a dedicated server)I was digging today for some stuff on digg and noticed this post about Wordpress performance.

Since Zedomax runs Wordpress, I decided to take a look.

Elliott was running only one server yet he claims that he can handle 1,000,000 hits a day on one server!

FYI, Zedomax is running 3 servers now and the load was at about 0.80 to 1.0 on an average day for the HTTP server and 0.60 to 0.80 for the MYSQL server. (The other HTTP server is for the other blogs)

So through Elliott’s suggestions at changing httpd.conf, my.cnf, php.ini, and installing eAccelerator, my load on the server dropped at least 5 times!

The load for the HTTP server is now at about 0.20 for the HTTP server and 0.15 for the MYSQL server.

Bottom Line

If you run Wordpress blogs, make sure to do the suggested changes and you will definitely notice the increased speed of your website loads.

Here’s some additions to the Elliott’s HOWTO for installing eAccelerator.

When I’m trying to execute phpize, I got this:

/usr/local/php/bin/phpize: line 57: aclocal: command not found

This means you don’t have phpize installed on your Fedora. You can install the php-devel which has the phpize in it like this:

“yum install php-devel”

I got this error when I was trying to install the above:

“Check that the correct key URLs are configured for this repository”

So you gotta do this:

Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo and replace the line

gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

with:

gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY

Then when you do “./configure”, if you get an error, you need to install some more tools. (which wasn’t documented)

So I installed Autoconf and Automake by using:

“yum install autoconf”

and

“yum install automake”

This might be basic for an experience linux-er but it took me couple hours to get it so hopefully it will help ya.

Then you can follow the rest of the directions.

Hey thanks Elliott for sharing the information with the world. I really appreciate this, you made my websites run faster!