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Note to self… next time I’m cranky, start making some major choices about important things!

In a bad mood? Don’t worry – according to research, it’s good for you.

An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.

Feeling grumpy ‘is good for you’

Posted by richardyoo on Natuba

So sad for the American car makers…

Paying more for a new car doesn’t guarantee better reliability. As a group, inexpensive small cars and midsized family sedans are the most reliable. That’s one of the findings of our 2009 Annual Auto Survey, based on our subscribers’ experiences with 1.4 million vehicles.

New Cars

Posted by richardyoo on Natuba

My favorite part of this article is where it says that there’s no hope of a new single plug that will work everywhere in the world… funny… and sad. :/

Ok, maybe not every country, but with at least 12 different sockets in widespread use it sure as hell feels like it to anyone who’s ever traveled. So why in the world, literally, are there so many? Funny story!

Giz Explains: Why Every Country Has a Different F#$%ing Plug

Oh man – you’d think that modern fork-lifts would have rear-view cameras or something. 😀

Posted by richardyoo on Natuba

The hard drive on my old 20gb iPod died and I figured I’d just upgrade it to flash instead of throwing it away.

I bought a 32gb CF card and a CF card to 1.8″ ide converter.

The toughest part was opening up the iPod (which wasn’t all that hard – plenty of how-to’s on the ‘net). After getting the card in the adapter, and the adapter into the iPod, I closed up the case and plugged it into my PC for its sync. After it re-sync’ed my music all was well.

32gigs of solid-state space on my oldie-but-goodie iPod! 😀

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This would have saved me hours back in my bachelor days… 😀

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The amount of effort to get this to work must have been insane… it uses a video camera to watch the screen to decide what to hit on the guitar – crazy

This is a HUGE time saver when installing… not only is it faster to install, but its easier to carry, and silent!

Apparently this is how Google Streetview is done:

I’m glad someone did the research on this – I had a hunch but wasn’t sure… those new 4-watt LEDs run super hot!

Let’s start this off with a quick clarification. When I say “LED light”, I’m not talking about the nifty, little blinky things that are frequently part of the ingredients list in Make projects. I’m talking about the Big Show: An LED light that can replace the incandescent bulbs and/or CFLs you have lighting up your home right now. To do it right, you don’t just need a single LED that works, you need an array of them…and you need them to produce enough light, and the right color of light, reliably enough that people can buy an LED bulb and know what they’re getting into.That ain’t easy. But it is getting easier.

Trouble is, they’re being oversold, like whoa. For about two-and-a-half years, I’ve been reporting on LED lighting for a trade magazine called Architectural SSL*. During that time, I’ve watched mainstream press and enviro blogs tout LEDs as the green energy miracle light. Often, with a level of enthusiasm seldom seen outside rooms full of puppies. Don’t get me wrong. LEDs are pretty cool. There are places where they’re useful now, and places they probably will be soon. But if you’re just hearing about the awesome, you aren’t getting the full story. And, as more LED products start showing up on store shelves, that really starts to matter.

LEDs: Throwing Some Light on the Hype

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The original:

The parody:

I can’t believe that more that 80% of all medical facilities still use paper records… ouch

Watch CBS News Videos Online

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Oh boy… RAID is dead, now this?!

A two-and-a-half year study of DRAM on 10s of thousands Google servers found DIMM error rates are hundreds to thousands of times higher than thought — a mean of 3,751 correctable errors per DIMM per year.

DRAM error rates: Nightmare on DIMM street

So what do we do now?!

The concept of parity-based RAID (levels 3, 5 and 6) is now pretty old in technological terms, and the technology’s limitations will become pretty clear in the not-too-distant future — and are probably obvious to some users already. In my opinion, RAID-6 is a reliability Band Aid for RAID-5, and going from one parity drive to two is simply delaying the inevitable.

The bottom line is this: Disk density has increased far more than performance and hard error rates haven’t changed much, creating much greater RAID rebuild times and a much higher risk of data loss. In short, it’s a scenario that will eventually require a solution, if not a whole new way of storing and protecting data.

RAID’s Days May Be Numbered

Oddly, no cities in California…

This year we partnered with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to find the 50 most business-friendly communities in America. With help from Robert Fairlie, an economist and leading scholar of entrepreneurship at the University of California, Santa Cruz, we developed a methodology and sifted through data on factors such as per capita income, hourly wages, workforce quality, crime rates, taxes and foreclosures.

We also looked at population size. While some entrepreneurs prefer to locate near major cities, others opt for the intellectual spark and intimacy of college towns and other small, close-knit communities. One size doesn’t fit all, so our list is divided into three tiers: small, midsize and large metro areas.

Then we turned reporters loose on the top places. Over the course of several months, we spoke with hundreds of entrepreneurs and economic development officials about the pros and cons of metro areas throughout the U.S. Using those findings, we adjusted our rankings and picked this year’s winning places.

Best Places to Launch

Posted by richardyoo on Natuba

Posted by richardyoo on Natuba

Posted by richardyoo on Natuba