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Can you get these in Chinatown? I need a packet of these and a bag of wasabi peas, stat.

The Evil Mad Scientists are rightfully fascinated with Sichuan peppercorns.

Sichuan peppercorns, oh yeah! Raven of Made with Molecules after eating them wrote, "There's a war in my mouth." They create a riot of numbing and tingling sensations, particularly if you can get relatively fresh ones (i.e. not stale from sitting around in a Whole Foods bulk bin). Raven links to an abstract about the particular anesthetic-sensitive potassium channels inhibited by hydroxy-alpha-sanshool, one of the components of sichuan peppercorns that make them so exciting.

Sichuan peppercorns

I'm thinking I need a web/email server. Jackpot. It's cheap, too.

The Fit PC 2 is an inch thick, about 4 inches each way, and pipes 1080p video through an HDMI port. Though a perfectly usable PC with a 160GB hard drive, Atom Z CPU and a gig of RAM, it's so small that it makes even netbooks look bulky.

There's also WiFi, gigabit ethernet, a remote control sensor, a MiniSD card slot and 6 USB ports. Out back are headphone and mic sockets and an antenna screw.

Performance is similar to other nettop PCs: good enough to use as a main machine for casual desktop users, but slow with several apps open, and inappropriate for demanding applications such as video editing.

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Dear Ms. Edison. Would it be alright if I made this app?

Thanks. :-)

Horizon One™. When you first run it, it won’t even open. The icon will pulse and move — seeming, almost, to grow — before becoming still, cold, and dead. The color will fade from it — a condition that will spread to other icons nearby. Sometimes you will imagine it winking at you, at others you will forget you ever bought the application at all. At yet other times, you will want taffy. Because taffy is delicious.

From then on Horizon One™ will take control of your phone. It will pore through your applications, learning about you. “How are your teeth?” it will ask, hours after you miss a dental appointment it removed from your calendar. You will visit your contacts list, only to discover that every information field in every profile has been replaced with the question “when are you not yourself?”

The shopping list you keep in Notes will be amended — “milk, eggs, deliver my eternal soul from nothingness.” Horizon One™ will send you e-mails from a you that is apparently drifting in a void, asking for help. They will become increasingly desperate, and frenzied. You will receive these e-mails until you realize that the void is life, and you are caught in its grip. Upon this epiphany, Horizon One™ will brick your phone, allowing you to see only the lock screen. The wallpaper has changed — a picture of you, in chains, forever screaming. Slide to unlock. Slide to unlock.

Also Twitter integration.

And I quote:

J: Nine? I don’t believe you : ).
A: : -) I don’t have any reason to deceive you.
J: Yes, you do, you’re a woman.

'Nuff said. This is fantastic. Go read, guys.

saar:

I chat, therefore i am…

In 2007 they let two chatbots, Alice and Jabberwacky, talk to each other just by starting with a first question. If this real, it’s maybe one of the best dialogs ever made in the entire internet. And I doubt, that there are a lot of humans who could have such a (good) conversation. You have to read it. (via nerdcore & zehnuhr)

Schweet. Mike, I want a laptop upgrade. Caps Lock, I've nuked with a registry hack, but the Insert key is still useless and the Escape key is above the F1 key - completely the wrong place. It throws me off when I use my other computer now.

Lenovo's new laptop keyboards have bigger Del and Esc keys, which sounds right to me. I love the Lenovo ThinkPad keyboards more than any other keyboard I've tried. I recently switched away from Thinkpads for a season and then switched back and I could almost hear my fingertips sighing in relief as they touched down on the clacky, springy, responsive X200 keyboard. What a treat.

After a year's research, Lenovo boffins have installed larger Delete and Escape keys on their updated ThinkPad laptop T400s range...

The change is based on testing users on which keys they use the most. On average, they used the Escape and Delete keys 700 times per week, yet those were the only non-letter keys, that hadn't been made bigger.

Lenovo decided to make these two keys about twice as long in the vertical direction to fit the way people reach up for them.

Apparently the next keyboard evolution could be the death of the caps lock. It comes from the days when you wrote headings in capitals but these days exists only to be accidently pressed, stuff up passwords, or make you shout online.

Lenovo increases size of panic buttons (via /.)

And if we remove all non-useful information, how do the numbers change?

It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.

quote from this video

This shit comprises three tenths of the total data.

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	Written 2009-06-26 12:00:00 by Dan Gurewitch  from likes so far. Be the first!

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Badass. It still requires jailbreaking your phone, though... I'm not entirely sure I care whether I'm using P2P or not. The more pressing issue is that most developers won't bother making apps that only work on 1% of iPhones. I know I sure as hell wouldn't bother.

During the summer of 2008, iPhone developer Alec Renolds announced he was working on a BitTorrent application that would be capable of automatically downloading and installing iPhone applications. Provisionally named ‘AppDowner’, the project looked promising but faltered a little due to some personal issues.

Now things are back on track as Alec has teamed up with a new designer Miles Lorry to revitalize the newly and slightly renamed ‘appDowner’. Available in beta “soon”, appDowner will be compatible with iPhone 3.0 devices, so what’s the deal?

“The concept of appDowner has changed slightly, from being a simple ’smart’ BitTorrent application to a full on App Store replacement,” explains Alec.

“No longer will you have to remember and type in the URL to your torrent file, simply click the “Store” tab on appDowner, and you’ll be brought to a beautiful interface designed by Miles (which isn’t quite ready to be shown off yet, but he assures us that it will be very, very soon!) which will allow you to search and find the apps you’re looking for.”

appDowner will be available soon

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If I could get anything I wanted in family-run shops here, I would. I want to be able to go to my shopkeeper and say, "Here, try this. What's it missing? Can I get a kilo?"

Rows of large glass jars holding myriad different Indian spices and dry fruits are being cleaned and polished to prepare for the first customers of the day.

This has been the ritual everyday for over 50 years in Shivaji stores - a brightly lit corner shop located in the central Delhi.

Over 95% of the Indian retail market is made up of small, family run businesses like this one, that has been run by Gulshan Rai's family for generations.

Here the shopkeeper is the friendly confidante, counsellor and even family, for some. He understands the local tastes and customises the products on offer.

"Despite the new malls, our customers keep coming back to us," he beams.

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Some people have the most awesome imaginations. I wish I could come up with a super hero half this awesome. In particular, listen to Shepherd Kane's theme song - the images it portrays are magnificent.

Well, it took me nearly all of last night, but I finished reading over all of the submissions for the Champions Beta contest. It wasn't easy, but I...