Introducing the multi-mini roundabout

Digger thommykno: That's incredible. How could that improve traffic flow?
Digger Blackmane: It doesn't, it annoys people so much that they take a different route and complete avoid the situation.

Lol, and I thought normal four lane roundabouts were bad.

Source: Digg

Some fun with Who's Amung Us

If you are somewhat observant and have been reading this blog, you would have noticed that I've just added a widget from Who's Amung Us.

A slightly interesting quirk that I found was that the widget was not really dependent on anything other than http referrers. This actually makes it quite unreliable since referrers can

1. be turned off easily esp. in Opera, F12 -> Enable referrer logging. This would reduce the number of visitors to your site, but who's counting? :)
   
2. be modified/faked/manipulated with little effort. Essentially this would inflate your website stats, but who's checking? :)
   

Another point to note is that you do not have to use the widget link generated by Who's Amung Us website. In fact you can make up your own! And how is this useful? It has absolutely no use at all except to make your widget link easier to remember. Before you start, there are some important things you need to know:

1. The part you can customise is where the x's are: http://whos.amung.us/show/xxxxxxxx.
2. Doing this may cause your widget to be shared by others, since fixing your widget link to something memorable increases the chances that it will match someone else's choice. This may not have a negative effect, since referrers are taken into account.
3. The part which you can customise, i.e. the very last part of the url, has to be at least eight characters long. It can be longer than 8 characters but only the first 8 are taken into account. As far as I can tell, you can only insert alphanumeric characters into the url. For example, mine is http://whos.amung.us/show/tkhereblog. However, this is equivalent to http://whos.amung.us/show/tkherebl.
4. Remember to change the image url AND the anchor link for the image. Example: My image url is http://whos.amung.us/widget/tkhereblog. My anchor link for the image is http://whos.amung.us/show/tkhereblog.

I think that's all you need to know about customizing the Who's Amung Us widget link. Have fun!

Microsoft boosts Hotmail space after Google and Yahoo

In my last post, Google introduced some new paid storage options for Gmail and Picasa. Now Microsoft has also followed suit in increasing storage space for email. In the blog entry, other than the increase in space for free users to 5GB, new features were also introduced mainly to fight spam as well as to improve user experience. And yet, Yahoo seems to have the edge over Microsoft and Google in email space even after these updates. Not that it really matters, as some have commented on Digg, "2.8GB ought to be enough for anybody" (I don't think any digger said that, but they've said similar stuff).

Source: Digg

Google demands money for more space but Yahoo already has free unlimited storage!

Google has just unveiled its latest paid plans that currently cover Gmail and Picasa but will soon encompass other Google apps as well. The prices can be found here.

• 6 GB ($20.00 per year)
• 25 GB ($75.00 per year)
• 100 GB ($250.00 per year)
• 250 GB ($500.00 per year)

Unfortunately for them, Yahoo has already offered unlimited storage to users of its email. And if I recall Flickr (which offers unlimited space for your photos) is now owned by Yahoo, which makes the current offer by Google not very attractive (in fact very unattractive). Sure, Yahoo doesn't really offer any other webapp with unlimited space (except Flickr) but hey, I'm sure an email with unlimited space allows you to store more than just email :).

In the mood for free food?

"They eat food they find in bins and are driven by conscience, not financial need. Meet the freegans."

Apparently there are some people out there who think supermarkets dump too much food and so they grab it for themselves to reduce food wastage. And it looks like its true according to them (at least in the UK). The practice is generally fine with me but some diggers pointed out that feeding (possibly) expired and (likely to be) unsafe food to their children is probably not a wise thing to do. For what it's worth, I heard that a certain fast food company throws out their fries if no one buys them within a certain period of time. That definitely sounds like quite a waste to me. If you're in the mood (and possess a lot of patience) maybe you can join them in "dumpster-diving".

Source: Digg