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And for those of you who don’t know what to get me for my next birthday…

Kyocera's flexible, folding phone concept

Kyocera’s EOS folding concept phone incorporates a flexible OLED screen, changing its form factor from a clamshell into something more closely resembling a wallet or clutch-purse.

I always get the craziest ideas for combining gadgets, but this one is already done for me!

Just think: wallet-phone.

Since the whole thing is flexible already, why not actually INTO a wallet? That way, when I lose it, not only will I lose all my sensitive data, but also all my money and credit cards! The up-side is that it would most likely have a GPS tracker.

But seriously, this takes the cake for the cool gadget of the day, even if it is still a concept. If they make this thing iPhone-like in the least bit, I’m sold. Sorry Apple.

via Core77 via Gizmodo

I was driving to a party the other day and saw this bad boy on the freeway: a Ford GT. Sorry about the crappy iPhone video quality. I’m not sure which year it is, but I do know that these things go for $200k MSRP and are sometimes marked up to around $300k.

According to the Wikipedia article on the car:

The Ford GT is a mid-engined sports car and is the world’s 11th fastest production car. It was built by Ford Motor Company from 2003 to 2006. It began as a concept car designed in anticipation of Ford’s centennial year and as part of its drive to showcase and revive its “heritage” names such as Mustang and Thunderbird.

and then

Of the 4,500 GTs originally planned, approximately 100 were to be exported to Europe, starting in late 2005. An additional 200 were destined for sale in Canada. When production ended in 2006, the full planned lot of 4500 were not produced. Approximately 550 were built in 2004, nearly 1900 in 2005, and just over 1600 in 2006, for a grand total of 4038; however, the final 11 car bodies manufactured by Mayflower Vehicle Systems were disassembled and the frames and body panels sold as service parts.

As with many highly desirable new vehicles, when the Ford GT was first released, the demand severely outpaced supply, and the cars initially sold for premium prices. The first private sale of Ford’s new mid-engine sports car was completed on August 4, 2004, when former Microsoft executive Jon Shirley took delivery of his Midnight Blue 2005 Ford GT. Shirley earned the right to purchase the first production Ford GT (chassis #10) at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance Auction after bidding over $557,000. Jay Leno, host of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, took possession of his private sale Red 2005 GT (chassis #12) a week later.

Other early cars sold for as much as a $100,000 premium over the suggested retail price of $203,599. Optional equipment available included a McIntosh sound system, racing stripes and forged alloy wheels adding an additional $13,500 to the MSRP. By June 2005, retail sale prices had dropped to around $10,000 to $20,000 over MSRP, and in August 2005 several new GTs were sold on eBay for no more than the suggested retail price.

Needless to say, it’s a pretty decent car. The funny thing was that I didn’t know it was expensive until we actually looked it up later on. I just thought it looked cool.

Oh yeah and once the guy noticed me taking video/pictures with the phone, he hit the gas and was gone. I’m sure he’s used to it by now though.

So I’m guessing you’ve seen this picture comparing Antares to other giant stars, as well as our own sun:

And you’ve probably seen this picture comparing the sun to the various planets in our solar system (and pluto):

Well, today I decided to figure out how big Earth is in comparison to Antares, which meant I had to find out how big Earth is in comparison to the Sun and the Sun to Antares, because I couldn’t find the information.

As it turns out, ~1,000,000 Earths could fit inside our solar system’s Sun [1]. Wow. Then I found out that about 350,000,000 suns could fit inside the large Antares super giant [2]. That means (350,000,000 X 1,000,000) is how many Earths would fit inside Antares — 350,000,000,000,000 or three hundred and fifty trillion Earths.

That just blows me away. We are very tiny indeed.

Sources

1. Earth and Sun size (nasa.gov)
2. LEO DELIGHTS (souledout.org)

I found this on Gizmodo this morning.

That is a robot fish, my friend. Very smart people at the University of Essex developed these babies for “seeking out pollution.”

Nice cover, but I don’t buy it. You release an army of these things into the ocean and suddenly, you’ve got eyes and ears globally.

Well played, England.

As a measure against spam bots and things of that nature, I’ve seen a site or two displaying e-mail addresses as images.

So to make things extremely simple, I made a very quick script to do this dynamically-

/***********************************************
* Email Address Image
* by Scott Weaver
*
* Last updated: February 27th, 2009 @ 2:30pm
*
* Converts an e-mail address to an image to
* prevent spam bots and scrapers from stealing
* it.
*
***********************************************/

/*
Requires two inputs:

u : is the username part of the email address
d : is the domain part of the email address
*/
if( !isset($_GET['u']) || !isset($_GET['d']) )
die('Please enter a valid e-mail address.');

$email = $_GET['u'] . '@' . $_GET['d'];

/*
For this font, the width is 6X the character length,
plus 1 for padding.
*/
$width = (strlen( $email )*6)+1;

// Create image w/ color
$im = imagecreate($width, 14)
or die('Cannot initialize new GD image stream');
$white = imagecolorallocate($im, 255, 255, 255);
$black = imagecolorallocate($im, 0, 0, 0);

// Write email address to image
imagestring($im, 2, 1, 0, $email, $black);

// Output & destroy
header('Content-type: image/png');
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);

Of course, you’ll notice that anyone who mods a script to look for email addresses matching the script’s parameters would be able to circumvent this little trick, but overall it should work.

What’s cool is that the script will auto-adjust the image for the width of the e-mail and it doesn’t take up much space by itself (just enough to display uppercase and lowercase letters).

Instructions

Just name the file something like ‘emailimg.php’ and upload it to your server. Once uploaded, you can reference it just like so:

<img src=”emailimg.php?u=johntheripper&d=hacker.net” />

That’s it. You’re done.

Demo

Here’s a working example:

Requirements

The only required functions are: imagecreate(), imagecolorallocate(), imagestring(), imagepng() and imagedestroy(). Basically, you just need the GD library enabled for PHP.

Improvements

I think the only improvements you could add to this script would be the ability to use different fonts, and to change the background/foreground colors. Well, that and a way to better hide the email address parameters. Maybe you can think of some that I can’t.

Just a short note. I finally launched BeeMedia, after much debating on the topic.

In an effort to use my new-found knowledge of SEO for purposes of good awesome, I decided to finally go for the gusto and let BeeMedia set sail.

The basic idea is that it will be a collection of reviews for affiliate products, each one of them given some decent backlink power to rank individually for their keywords.

It will be a slow, tedious build but at least it will have been indexed by Google from this point on.

Scrabble Word of the Day

Don’t believe me? Click the image.

Wii Fit

The other day, Sarah went to Target while she was waiting for me to finish work. While she was there, she spotted a Wii Fit and surprised me with it.

We’d been looking for one for a while, and they aren’t easy to find.

So for about a week, I’ve been checking in each day to weigh myself, get a BMI reading and do some exercises. I do push-ups, boxing, super hoola-hoop, yoga, the whole nine. It’s actually pretty exhausting.

The major benefit I’ve noticed is that I haven’t had a single headache since I started using it. In a regular week, I’ll get between five and seven headaches (sometimes two in a day). This could be attributed to the Wii Fit or to the fact that, coincidentally, I began taking a multivitamin a week ago. There’s really no way to tell but I do feel much better overall.

This is the first workout routine (besides riding my bike to and from work) that I’ve actually stuck with over a few days. I usually dread any kind of strenuous workout but with the Fit — number one, I get points and number two, I can see my progress up on the screen with the handy built-in calendar.

A while back, Sarah and I decided to start going to the gym but, well, that didn’t pan out. The $90 this thing costs was nothing compared to that; we can bust it out at any time, bust a move and not bust our asses getting to the gym and back.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with it so far. I used to be able to do over 100 push-ups in a set. Right now, I’m struggling with twenty.