Petition to make “Hella” the prefix for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Carl sez, “A petition to make Hella- the official SI prefix for 10^27, for measuring things bigger than Yotta- (the prefix for (US) billion trillion). For instance: ‘the sun (mass of 2.2 hellatons) would release energy at 0.3 hellawatts.’ It would also come in handy for eventually measuring Internet traffic and US national debt.”

via Petition to make “Hella” the prefix for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – Boing Boing.

When Is A Pool Not A Pool? When It’s Got A HydroFloor.

hydrofloor

The system is near invisible, flexible, rapidly adaptable and safe, being in compliance with relevant national safety standards. The concept is that the floor height of the pool may be elevated to set at any pre-selected water depth such as wading depth for children or a depth suited to those with special needs. This makes the pool itself diverse and multifunctional.

via If It’s Hip, It’s Here: When Is A Pool Not A Pool? When It’s Got A HydroFloor..

Underfull Table Cloth by Kristine Bjaadal

tablecloth

Norwegian designer Kristine Bjaadal showed her Underfull Table Cloth at the 2010 Stockholm Furniture Fair and since then it has been getting quite a bit of press. This special table cloth features a simple damask pattern, yet hides a secret. When colored liquid — like red wine — is spilled on its surface, it reveals a hidden butterfly pattern. Still a concept, Kristine is working on getting these into production.

via Underfull Table Cloth by Kristine Bjaadal | Design Milk.

The moral high ground?

Had an interesting situation work the other day. When you work in retail, it always seems to start with customers, so that’s where I’ll start…

Customer comes in store, wants to connect his phone to his laptop to use it as a modem – and there’s only one catch – it’s some Samsung piece of technology. It’s certainly no iPhone – clunky, menus are horrible, but it seems to work just fine.

Now, bear in mind this isn’t the first time he’s come in asking for the same thing. The last time he came in store, I’m pretty sure he was running 10.4 Tiger, and there was a little more hackery required to get it going. Of course, being the genius that I am, I did manage to get it working that time – but not without some serious Google-fu on my part…

Anyway, he comes in, and wants the exact same thing done again. Evidently, he must have had a hard drive failure somewhere between the last time he left the store and right now, else he wouldn’t be asking for my help (nor would he be running 10.5 Leopard).

For those of you who don’t keep up-to-date with the intricasies of the OSX operating system, 10.5 introduced generic modem connection scripts for many different types of dialup/3G/UMTS/HSDPA modems, including mobile-as-modem ones. This affected me in two ways: one, it made it (theoretically) easier to connect to networks using bluetooth dial-up networking, and two, it negated the use of third party generic modem scripts to connect. You’d think that these two facts would make for an easier connection, but you would be oh-so-wrong… So wrong indeed…

Continue Reading →