That website where you upload a picture of yourself and it tells you which celebrities you look like is fun, but what if you could do the same thing in reverse? Microsoft’s latest image-based face search has just that application, allowing you to potentially upload a picture of a celebrity and find matches on dating sites depending on how close he or she looks to the shot you picked. That’s right, you can pick a date based on their likeness to Angelina Jolie or Evangeline Lilly. Plus, if you’re having a hard time getting over a breakup, you can pick a woman that looks as close to your ex as possible, ensuring that your relationship will be long and healthy. [Dialaphone]
Remember the US Military ray gun that makes people feel like they’re on fire? Well, 60 Minutes sent out a reporter to see if he could take the heat. Standing in plain view of the ray gun made his body feel like “scalding water,” so David Martin attempted, with little success, to hide behind a piece of plywood and later a mattress. Some claim they can only take the heat ray 4 – 5 seconds, so when David tried it we think he only made it 2 seconds, even if he did say, “ONE ONE THOUSAND TWO ONE THOUSAND THREE ONEEEAAHHHHRRHHR” [CBS via TechEBlog]
Having an air conditioner running during the summer while we’re sitting naked on our leather chairs is luxurious enough, but an air conditioner that also kills germs? That’s just plain opulent. Samsung’s Vivace Shadow and Neo-Forte (black and white) air conditioners do just that, using their Micro Plasma Ion technology to kill 78 percent of fungus and 58 percent of bacteria within 30 minutes in a closed environment. It may look like a printer, but when’s the last time you hung a printer on the wall? [Crave Asia via Unpluggd via DVice]
If you’ve just updated your iPhone to the 1.1.4 firmware and have been awaiting an easy jailbreak and unlock process, iNdependence v1.4 beta 5 is out and brings “jailbreak, activation, SSH installation and ringtone/wallpaper/application.” The Mac-only software is still beta and as it goes with any iPhone hacking, you must use caution, especially with the SDK coming next week. [iNdependence]
If you’re both cheap and enjoy losing your eye thanks to a flying CD shard, take a look at this home-made USB Cooler. All you have to do is take an old CD, cut it up like a fan, melt it down so you can twist the shards, stick a cork in the middle, hook up a few wires to a little motor, hook that up to a USB port, and you’re good to go. If you’re really lucky, nothing will happen and you’ll get a nice breeze. If you’re unlucky, however, say goodbye to your corneas.
Expert rendering Of my Geocities page. You had a good run. [BBC]
We’ve been fiddling with Time Capsule since it arrived this AM, and so far it works as billed, clean and easy. The star of the show is really the new AirPort Utility software, which now comes with some neat tricks for the network-phobic. Most of all, we’re learning the ins and outs of adding external drives, using networked printers, and setting up that potentially nasty initial data dump.
iLounge says they’ve gotten an inside look at the iPhone SDK and came up with a few interesting details, one of which is the limitation imposed on developers that they won’t be able to use the dock connector to interface with accessories. That means no third-party GPS connector (or other similar devices). What supposedly will be accessible is the camera, the Wi-Fi, and the “phone” itself, which is slightly more permissive than we thought Apple would be.
IBM’s new prototype 48-way optical databus takes up just 3 mm of width on a PCB, and is capable of a truly ridiculous data rate of around 8 Tbps. That’s roughly 5,000 high-definition video streams per second, even if better has been done on fibre. Even better, this “green optical link” is a hundred times more power efficient than conventional electronic connections, so the environment benefits too.
These Mobius Climbers are super-sweet playground equipment inspired by Mobius strips, bending and curving all over the place with grips and bars for climbing. It’s the type of thing I would have killed to play on as a kid but would be forbidden to by my reasonable parents, who would see these things for what they are: high-concept kid manglers, inviting slippery-fingered first graders to take a head-first spill into a piece of sheet metal with grips protruding from its concave surface. Awesome. [Product Page via Neatorama and BornRich]
