Off you go… into the purple yonder!

My biggest problem with exercising is how boring it is. Enter the Google bike hack which allows you to ‘cycle’ through Google maps. Awesome idea.
Link via Hack a day.

I’ve never understood why it is common in the US to run power, telephone and cable on poles, rather than underground. Particularly so in areas with much more extreme weather than the part of Europe that I’m from – where most utilities run underground.
Sometimes, though, the pole-and-wire people get a little bit too creative. An [...]

Netcraft’s June 2009 Web Server Survey is very interesting. Check out the IIS line on this graph (red):

That sharp drop is a reduction from 29,049,223 (May) to 21,898,527 (June) active sites. Netcraft explains the drop like this:
A reduction in activity at Microsoft Live Spaces was responsible for the large drop in the number of Microsoft-IIS [...]

Flying from Boston to San Francisco right now on Virgin America. The plane is new, the entertainment system runs GNU/Linux, you can order food and drink (soft drinks free, the rest is sadly overpriced) right from the touch screen in front of you, and the wifi is rock solid and not too expensive ($12.99 with [...]

Every search result is returned marked as “This site may harm your computer”:

Click on a result, and you get this:

There goes my productivity…
Update at 10:18: they finally fixed it. Phew.
Update: here’s the official explanation from Google.

Maybe there’s more to my move to Massachusetts than I suspected. Check out this map comparing the GDP of US states with various countries around the world.

It’s clearly true. I think I might have to get one of these stickers:

This article is a very good read about power supply efficiency and what Google is trying to do to improve the quality of the average PC power supply. More power to them!
I’ve long wondered why we don’t have a centralized source of 12V or so in the average home. Electronics generally don’t require high voltage, [...]

So Dell now has 32GB solid state disks as an option on the Latitude D420 and the Latitude ATG. They’re still a bit pricey (almost $500 extra) and not very big, but that will change soon. I wonder what percentage of the PC market will be using solid state disks in a year or two…

This article on the Register’s development site is pretty interesting. To be honest I don’t really understand the whole web 2.0 hype – for me Ajax is just a tool to make web-based interfaces more user friendly. A future of distributed networked objects sure sounds cool though!