Tag Archives: boing boing gadgets

Using the Earth as a hard drive?

Where Google gets all that Gmail hard drive space.

★ The Joy of Tech! ★.

…and somehow, it’s probably possible within the next decade or so.

From Boing Boing Gadgets:

BLDGBLOG does some fascinating navel gazing on the subject of hard drive storage on the planetary scale: if ferromagnetically charged minerals can be arranged to make hard drives, what’s stopping us from turning Earth into one giant binary storage capsule, short of the technology?

I kid you not. In years to come – we might be using the earth as our hard drive. I’m not talking about terabytes here, not even petabytes – nope, if we used the earth as our hard drive, I couldn’t even begin to imagine the amount of data a hard drive of that size would hold.

If a 1.8″ drive can hold a quarter of a gigabyte, then the earth, measuring 6371km in diameter, would hold a hell of a lot more – obviously.

Good luck with those seek times, though. You random access times would be shot to pieces (unless you had heads that travelled at the speed of light). 😛

Cool, huh?

8 Videos That You Won’t Regret Watching

Well, it’s about time I did one of these… so here it is.

You know how you sometimes watch a Youtube clip that you think could be good, but it’s completely sucky and leaves you in tears? Well, I’m here to put a stop to that. I’ve complied a tiny list of videos that I missed out on while I was away on holidays – so if you’ve already seen some of these, I apologise. Now, let the show begin!

  • Four Chords, 36 Songs (Today’s Big Thing)
    This is actually amazing. Whatever happened to originality? Sure, we love our epic riffs, but seriously? 36 songs based on variants of a 4 chord progression? You’ve got to be kidding me.
    Sure, the singing isn’t that top notch. But it conveys the message well, so enjoy.
  • Sleeping Girlfriend Eyebrow Waxing (Today’s Big Thing)
    Ouch. I can only assume that the guy doing the waxing doesn’t want to be with his girlfriend anymore, or he’s a professional joker – and his girlfriend loves him for it… Either way, it’s funny to see how he keeps saying “I love you baby” and stroking her while putting on the wax…
  • Verizon Operator Gets Math Lesson (Today’s Big Thing)
    Can you please tell me the difference between $0.002 and 0.002c? It’s an oldie but a goodie (it’s from 2006) as a Verizon customer tries to educate two remarkably ignorant Verizon operators on things called “decimals”. Everyone should know basic math like that, right? Right?
  • Enter Kazoo Man (YouTube)
    Heard Metallica’s Enter Sandman? Yeah, I though so. Heard Metallica’s Enter Sandman played solely on the kazoo? No? Well, this vid is perfect for you, then. He gets a little quirky at some stages, but still impressive nonetheless.
  • David After Dentist (YouTube)
    Ohhhhh – now I get it. All the teenage kids in America want to recreate scenes from after the dentist, when they’re completely high on some strange medicine, so they try various drugs to get that feeling again. No wonder they have random locker searches… Hilariously funny.
  • Sony Releases New… (Boing Boing Gadgets, via The Onion)
    Yet another excellent big-company parody by the same people who bought you the MacBook Wheel a couple of weeks ago. All the details are pretty much spot-on – everything from the interviews, video overlays, advertising, and more. They really put effort into these productions, and it shows. Probably NSFW – contains copious amounts of swearing.
  • Imperial March Scraped Across Hard Drive (Boing Boing Gadgets)
    So someone’s pretty much revived the “using a hard-drive as a speaker” revolution again. This time around, though – it’s the Star Wars Imperial March being played, and damn, does it sound awesome. Read the comments on this one, folks – #10 is particularly funny, in my opinion…
  • How To Mount A Tyre On A Wheel With Explosive Gas (Boing Boing Gadgets)
    This is actually a collection of short clips that demonstrate that it’s possible to mount a tyre (rubber bit) onto the wheel (silver, middle bit) using nothing but explosive gas. As one intrepid commenter points out – it’s not the vacuum effect that pops the tyre back onto the rim, but pressure from the expanding gases. Still impressive.

That’s it – hope you enjoyed them as much as I did.

Comments below, thanks.