Category: cool stuff

Free VoIP Phone List

My VoIP Provider – VoIP Services – – Free VoIP Phone Service
We have identified 13 VoIP providers offering free VoIP services to a few selected countries and have displayed them in a matrix for an easy overview. Click the My VOIP link above for the list.

The first generation of VoIP services — Vonage, Skype and others — used computer and Internet technologies to make voice communications cheaper (and often free). Now a second generation of services is integrating VoIP with mobile and POTS handsets and services as they try to find ways to compete with their more established big brothers. Click to read more

And now The Electric Tablecloth

LumiGram.com
This French Company is selling Luminous Fabric, based on Fiber Optics, wich emits a colored light along the full length of the fibers, producing a stunning luminous effect.

Unlike other light sources like Neon or Electroluminescence, the light coming from the Luminous Fabric is subtle and mysterious, allowing to create amazing, stylish and wonderfully original clothes and fashion accessories.
As for our decoration items, they use the luminous fabric for creating a very unique and dazzling atmosphere.

Repel Sharks Magnetically

Kayak CompanyOceanMagnetics Home

We featured SharkDefense a year ago. Shortly thereafter, as is often the case in discoveries, they accidentally discovered that certain rare-earth magnets repelled sharks. So they started this sister company. Click on the link above to see their video page. Randy Marks pointed out a recent Wired article on this research.

The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss

Review: The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss by Claire Nouvian – New Species From Underwater – New York TimesCheck-out

We know more about the moon than the depths of our Oceans. Check-out the stunning pictures in this new book are in a slide show in this NY Times Book Review. Thanks to Potter at Island Resources. Check the Island Resources Web Site at http://www.irf.org/

22deep-600.jpgThe images arrayed here come from “The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss” (University of Chicago Press, 2007), by Claire Nouvian, a French journalist and film director.

Hydrogen On-Demand Discovery

New process generates hydrogen from aluminum alloy to run engines, fuel cells
A Purdue University engineer has developed a method that uses an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water for running fuel cells or internal combustion engines, and the technique could be used to replace gasoline.

“I was cleaning a crucible containing liquid alloys of gallium and aluminum,” Woodall said. “When I added water to this alloy – talk about a discovery – there was a violent poof. I went to my office and worked out the reaction in a couple of hours to figure out what had happened. When aluminum atoms in the liquid alloy come into contact with water, they react, splitting the water and producing hydrogen and aluminum oxide.

“Gallium is critical because it melts at low temperature and readily dissolves aluminum, and it renders the aluminum in the solid pellets reactive with water. This was a totally surprising discovery, since it is well known that pure solid aluminum does not readily react with water.”

The waste products are gallium and aluminum oxide, also called alumina. Combusting hydrogen in an engine produces only water as waste.

Dance of the Oscar Nominees

If you haven’t seen acrobatic dancers creating symbolic motifs for this this year’s Oscar nominations, then you missed the best part of the Show. Here is your chance to still see them. Go ahead and name the movies to which they refer to. Thanks to Xavier Cantenot for forwarding this compilation. to.

How Your Mouse Moves Your Cursor

1-click Award by 株式会社リクルートメディアコミュニケーションズ

Ever wonder how the cursor moves on your screen, when you move your mouse?

Well, this link will reveal the secret. It will take a while to load, after you move your mouse over it and click. But were talking about some pretty sophisticated micro-technology here, so it is worth being a little patient to expand the limits of our knowledge.

After the image loads, slowly loads move your mouse’s cursor over the light gray circle in the middle of the screen and all will be revealed. Thanks to Chip Welfeld for bringing this technological marvel to our attention.

How to use the Same Password Safely

PwdHash

Face it, most of us can’t remember all of those paswords, so we tend to use the same ones ovr and over. THe problem is if someone gets hold of it and knows where you bank or goes to E-Bay with it… wel you get the idea. Well some boys from Stanford brought us Google. Now that Stanford Security lab has posted this simple free tool, which you can download to use.

PwdHash is an browser extension that transparently converts a user’s password into a domain-specific password. The user can activate this hashing by choosing passwords that start with a special prefix (@@) or by pressing a special password key (F2). PwdHash automatically replaces the contents of these password fields with a one-way hash of the pair (password, domain-name). As a result, the site only sees a domain-specific hash of the password, as opposed to the password itself.

Scientists create ‘plastic’ blood

BBC NEWS | England | North Yorkshire | Scientists create ‘plastic’ blood
the artificial blood is light to carry, does not need to be kept cool and can be kept for longer.

The new blood is made up of plastic molecules that have an iron atom at their core, like haemoglobin, that can carry oxygen through the body.

The scientists said the artificial blood could be cheap to produce and they were looking for extra funding to develop a final prototype that would be suitable for biological testing