Most people who make a lot of rice swear by rice cookers, but food blogger Darya Pino (and me, actually) have had mixed experiences. So, instead of relying on inconsistent rice-cooker results, Pino set out to find how to cook perfect rice without a rice cooker. More »
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Cook Perfect Rice Without a Rice Cooker (and Store It for Quick Reheating) [Food]
Microsoft today released Service Pack 2 for its Exchange mail, calendaring, and contacts server. In addition to the usual bug fixes and stability improvements, the service pack introduces new support for “hybrid deployments”: Exchange 2010 installations that are partially on-premises, partially in the cloud.
Hybrid deployments were first introduced with the RTM release of Exchange 2010. They allow companies to migrate from on-premises Exchange installations to cloud-based ones in a piecemeal fashion. In a hybrid deployment, mailboxes, calendars, and contacts can reside locally or in the cloud; Exchange will ensure that messages are routed appropriately and shared data is available to users of both systems.
Service Pack 2 introduces a new configuration wizard to ease the configuration and creation of these hybrid deployments. The wizard enables the relevant hybrid features, such as mailbox migration between cloud and on-premises installation, and performs the necessary configuration to connect the local Exchange to the cloud one.
Such features are all part of a broader Microsoft strategy to get customers migrated into the cloud. As ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley reported last month, Microsoft is building the tools to help customers both build private clouds, with improved virtualization and management facilities, and migrate from private installations to public clouds.
These developments are in turn making sense of Steve Ballmer’s oft-repeated claim that Microsoft is “all-in” on the cloud. Cloud offerings such as Office 365 and Azure are not some mere afterthought: they’re central parts of Microsoft’s platform offering, and it wants to make it as easy as possible for customers to migrate to them.
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Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 2 streamlines cloud migrations
The iLIDmk1 is the first Kickstarter (and, as of this weekend, Kickstarted) project by a Darren Inglis and Simon Dunn-Vaughan, a couple of Aussies who were looking to reduce their “everyday carry“—despite the fact that their product is, indeed, yet another iPhone case, which would ostensibly add to the contents of your pockets (à la George Costanza).
The twist? The iLIDmk1 allows an otherwise overburdened fellow to shed the weight of his wallet: it’s a hybrid iPhone case and wallet, which holds a couple pieces of plastic, some folded slips cotton and a small piece of metal—a.k.a. credit cards, cash and a key. In the interest of forgoing leather trifolds and keyrings, Darren and Simon have devised a polycarbonate iPhone case with a hinged compartment, measuring in at a mere 17mm thick and 30g.
Designed for a payload of two cards, key, cash and the ability to serve as a kickstand. The iLID-mk1 met with international interest after being featured in Macworld on the strength of rapid prototypes.
Bearing the MK-1 embossed on the front as a nod to the Apollo missions and aerospace pioneers such as Chuck Yeager.
See the pitch in full on their Kickstarter page and pre-order one for $30.00 ($9.95 off the $39.95 MSRP at launch).
Still, I’m sure there are some people who have reservations about a sort of 2-in-1 solution for all of their valuables… any thoughts?
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A Step Towards Mobile Payment & Keycard for the iPhone, Sort Of
SharkLaser writes “Mozilla’s future looks uncertain. Last week Chrome overtook Firefox’s position as the second most popular browser, the new versioning scheme is alienating some Firefox users, and now the advertising deal between Mozilla and Google, the one that almost fully funds Mozilla’s operations, is coming to an end. One of Firefox’s key managers, Mike Shaver, also left the company in September. ‘In 2010, 84% of Mozilla’s $123 million in revenue came directly from Google. That’s roughly $100 million in funds that will vanish or be drastically cut if the deal is either not renewed or is renegotiated on terms that are less favorable to Mozilla. When the original three-year partnership deal was signed in 2008, Chrome was still on the drawing boards. Today, it is Google’s most prominent software product, and it is rapidly replacing Firefox as the alternative browser on every platform.’ Recently Mozilla has been trying to get closer with Microsoft by making a Firefox version that defaults to Bing. If Google is indeed cutting funding from Mozilla or tries to negotiate less favorable terms, it could mean Mozilla’s future funding coming from Microsoft and Bing.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Take the Stroop Test: Look at the 1st set of words and say aloud the color of the letters that spell out each word. Now look at the 2nd set of words and say aloud the color of the letters that spell out each word. It takes longer for most people to complete the 2nd task, because the words spell out a different color than the actual color of the words. (This image is from Wikipedia.)
I’ve known about the Stroop Test for long time, and I expect many people are familiar with it. But here’s an interesting use of the Stroop Test that I learned about last night while reading an interesting book called Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney: “the Stroop task became a tool for American intelligence officials during the cold war. A covert agent could claim not to speak Russian, but he’d take longer to answer correctly when looking at Russian words for colors.”
Wikipedia has an article about a related test called the emotional Stroop test: “depressed participants will be slower to say the color of depressing words rather than non-depressing words. Non-clinical subjects have also been shown to name the color of an emotional word (e.g., ‘war’, ‘cancer’, ‘kill’) slower than naming the color of a neutral word (e.g., ‘clock’, ‘lift’, ‘windy’).”
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How to find out if someone who claims not to speak Russian really can speak Russian
Anthony Bowyer-Lowe created Techno Is The Word, which generates techno loops based upon the text you feed it. [via Metafilter]
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Enter a word, get fresh techno
From the Rosetta Stone to a Charlie Chaplin film, not all amazing discoveries were actually intentional. Cracked has a great list of shocking discoveries that were complete accidents.
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Amazing Discoveries People Stumbled Into
An anonymous reader writes “If you used Ticketmaster’s website to buy tickets between October 21, 1999 and October 19, 2011, you’re in for a windfall. Well, a $1.50 per ticket order windfall. Because of a proposed class action settlement, Ticketmaster is being forced to credit $1.50 per ticket order (up to 17 orders) to customers because they profited from ‘processing fees’ without declaring as much. And despite the reparations, Ticketmaster can continue to profit off transactions — they just have to say they’re doing so on their website.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ticketmaster Customers, Get Ready For Your (Tiny) Class-Action Payout
It sounds insane, but DARPA recently laid down a challenge to computer scientists: work out how to reconstruct shredded pages of paper. The winning team has finished — two days ahead of schedule. More »
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DARPA’s Almost-Impossible Challenge to Reconstruct Shredded Documents: Solved [Darpa]