This is an attempt to get some great images from space, but without the costs involved by maintaining the Hubble telescope in space, which is great but hugely expensive.

This forms part of the NASA Origins program and by working with the DLR who are the German Aerospace Centre they have developed a flying telescope inside a Boeing 747SP. This will fly at 47,000 feet and should some really cool images from space.

This could be a viable alternative to the Hubble and the space used to maintain it, however we will need to wait for until around 2009to see if it works as good as hope, when it is fully operational.

Source [Oh Gizmo]

Well just in case your not fixed t TV and you do not happen to see the endless news stories regarding the election, then you may require a little prompting to remind you of when to vote.

However this little device takes some bold steps considering that she is not the only candidate at the moment and the company has decided not to produce them with the image of the other candidates in the run up to the election.

Priced at $13.95

Source [Nerd Approved]

http://nerdapproved.com/bizarre-gadgets//

With all the craze with Google whatever, here’s another useful Google tool you can use if you haven’t yet.

Try out the GoogleDocs where you can convert almost anything to and from anything including your Word document to PDF.

Google will probably take over Microsoft one day in this arena. I am rooting for Google even though they are getting so big, at least they convert past technology into the Web.

In the near future, you will be able to have a computer without any harddisks, meaning everything can be stored on the web.  Nice…

We’ve designed a new ad for Microsoft’s new operating system, the Microsoft XP Professional.  That right, you can “downgrade” to XP from Vista and benefit from the following:

- Driver compatibility

- Usuability

- Improved Productivity

- Save Time not having to search for new drivers

- Supports your old computer with less than 2GB of memory

P.S. You are free to spread this Ad around, maybe Microsoft might actually use it.

This is no ordinary joy stick as is comes with a four great games stored on the memory.

The games are a light sabre duel, assault on Hoth, flying an x-wing and finally the battle of Endor, plenty of action for any Star Wars fan.

Priced at $25

Source [Urban Outfitters]

With so much fake stuff around could you tell the difference between to real thing and the wrong thing?

In this image the fakes are pretty easy to spot, but with a bit of cosmetic sorting out then it may be impossible to tell for some people.

However these games consuls only work out at around $3 at wholesale, so they are hardly going to be of the same quality as the real thing anyhow and you only get what you pay for.

Source [Techna Bob]

Of course this is The Apple or indeed An Apple, but is a remote that can also be placed in a bowl where it would be mistaken as being a piece of art.

These remotes are all slightly different shades as an apple should be, after all you never get two the same.

They will come with a bowl that recharges them every time that they have been placed in it. This is a design in the concept stage, which quite possibly may hit the stores.

Source [Yanko Design]

Ever wondered what you could do with the old floppy disks? Well if you just look at the image below that gives you a little idea!

Clearly it is impossible to write data onto a floppy disk, but these CDR’s do look funny as floppy disks, it would be especially funny to someone’s face when you stick this disc into the drive of the computer at work!

Each disk will hold 200 MB, and come with blue, red, green and yellow old style labels!

Prices are funny, $14 for one, $32 for four!

Source [Geeked]

I have been reading the following book called, Linux Server Hacks, which shows you many ways you can hack your Linux server so your server doesn’t die.

This actually works since we just had a DoS attack about 5 minutes ago. (It seems like we are getting more and more DoS attacks these days. You can refer to the DDOS Deflate script also)

Here’s HACK #47 I read about last week in my bath room from the book and I just used it to prevent DoS attackers from bringing my precious Quad-CPU dedicated server down.

Enter the following commands and you will limit number of TCP connections to your server to 12 connections per second after 24 connections have been seen. (It means that no matter what, your server will not try to serve more than 12 visitors during one second of period when your server gets digged, farked, stumbled, or whatever)
iptables -t nat -N syn-flood

iptables -t nat -A syn-flood -m limit —limit 12/s —limit-burst 24 -j RETURN

iptables -t nat -A syn-flood -j DROP

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i $EXT_IFACE -d $DEST_IP -p tcp –syn -j syn-flood
I think you can increase the values steadily if your server can handle more. But it seems to have brought our server load from 33.00 somethin’ to under 1.0. Yey!

If you are a hacker, sorry dude. You are gonna have to try a little harder hacking Zedomax since we are hackers too.

P.S. You know what I try to do when I find out where the hackers are coming from, I do a DoS attack back on them. This usually pisses them off enough to DoS me more but I kinda enjoy the battle so bring it on! :p

OOhh.. check out this Google SketchUp for Dummies book. It might be the perfect free 3D tool you were looking for last month.

Remember when your high school English teacher explained that every word in the sentences you write needs to carry some meaning? While the rest of us missed that point, Aidan Chopra was paying attention. Google Sketchup for Dummies is a tightly written, fun to read book that gives a lot of byte for your buck. Aidan Chopra works at Google as the product evangelist for Google SketchUp and he’s the editor of the monthly SketchUpdate email newsletter. He knows SketchUp inside and out and uses plain English to show you the ropes.

Google SketchUp is a 3D drawing program that defies easy description. It’s fun, playful and at the same time very powerful.

via MakeZine