Night Cap – December 15, 2008

This morning I woke up to the same story as the past few days. Dead car battery, and the cold. And I followed my routine of hooking up the autostarter and giving the car some juice.

Well, it turns out that the problem is just lousy batteries that the manufacturer put in the cars. People are having problems with them at around the same mileage that I have! Anyway, that’s how the day started.

Rest of the day went on as normal (read: boring)

Final act of the day:

note: This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but I forgot to do so.

iPhone 2.2 Jailbroken

This weekend I finally manage to jailbreak my iphone. The process is pretty painless, and is well documented on various sites; here, and here, for example.

The best part of doing this is that I can now unlock features of the iphone that would normally be closed to me. I can now record video with the phone, tether the phone to a laptop, and most importantly and ridiculously I can use the native terminal on the system. And a very cool side-effect is that I can now ssh to a remote host from my cell phone!

Dec 16, 2008 Update:I added a nicer screenshot of the terminal app to the above shots.

Google rolls out new goodies

Today I noticed a couple of new additions made by google. First, is the addition of themes into gmail. The theme feature is cool, especially considering that I had been using stylish firefox extension along with a nice theme. For people familiar with the cool ninja theme easter egg in the google reader. Even that’s available!

Second is ranking in google search results. With this google is stepping further into the crowd oriented internet a la digg and friends.

Science Friday

The other day I ran across this article while reading SciScoop. I found it worth a read. What’s more, it even explains some ideas in this post.

Quantum Entanglement

The quantum world is full of complementary variables such as position/momentum and wave/particle. The equations describing quantum mechanics are such that precise knowledge of one complementary variable precludes knowledge of the other–regardless of the measurement technique. Even if we could devise a way of accurately measuring position without affecting momentum, the momentum variable would still be imprecise. This is quantum uncertainty as defined by the Copenhagen interpretation, subject to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

[via Sciscoop]

When in Rome…

A guy sits down with a girl, takes out a cigarette and starts trying to light it. He has some extreme difficulty getting it lit, and has obviously never smoked before.

Girl (laughing): Hey, do you want some help with that?
Guy: No, no, I’ve got to practice smoking. Let me do it.
Girl: Seriously? You’re practicing how to smoke?
Guy: Yeah! It’s on my list of things to do. See? (takes out agenda) “Laundry, conference sign-up, smoke.”
Girl looks stunned.
Guy: I don’t want to look like an idiot when I go to Amsterdam!

[via Overheard At McGill]