Crazy Tech News Countdown: ChatRoulette Panks, Linux terminal made, easy voting machines that run Pac-Man and more!
How has your week been? Hopefully you’re ready for this week’s edition of Crazy Tech News Countdown, the ongoing series that goes ever the craziest, weirdest or just plain insane robots, Linux tricks, gadgets and more in the tech world. This has been an insane week, so let’s count ‘em down.
5- Can you pull a table cloth fast enough? – Table cloth pulling is a great social stunt when you’re not comfortable talking to someone and want to try to break the ice. And it’s even more embarrassing when you completely fail to pull off the trick and you ruin a hundred-dollar dinner. Thankfully, this arcade game at a Japanese Taito station gives you the chance to try to yank out a real cloth fast enough to win the game. That’s it. Definitely provides some entertainment and thankfully people are already over the swine flu hype, or else…
4- Don’t you wish the Linux terminal had manuals? – If you like to play with Linux from time to time, you’ve probably learned a few commands over the years, but these days it seems a GUI does just what people want more efficiently. That said, sometimes you just want to brush up your Linux skills or do something quickly when the GUI isn’t letting you: sometimes using the terminal is the best option. If you agree, be sure to give CLIcomapnion a try. It acts just like any other terminal except it gives you a searchable list of commands and a description of what they do so you can get typing like a pro in no time. Definitely a must-have for aspiring Linux power users!
3- Is this what the Mac Mini should have been? – What if you combined the MacBook Air’s internal components, an Apple keyboard and a brand-new shiny Magic Trackpad? Aside from dumping huge $$$ into your free time modding projects, you’d also be making the best machine ever: a single box with all the needed ports and a state of the art keyboard and trackpad on top, running Mac OS X. You hook it up to a monitor and there you have it: the most compact mac ever with a keyboard and mouse built-in.
2- You take the most boring voting machine ever and make it run Pac-Man – With a lot of states phasing out certain voting machines, a lot of people have wondered what to do with them other than dumping them into a landfill and letting them rot. It turns out these machines have pretty much the same specs as a 15-year-old computer, which are also good enough to run Pac-Man. After wiping out its proprietary OS and installing DOS along with the game, two university researchers have turned this pursuit into reality. I bet bankrupt states could make quite a bit of money by selling these machines off to geeks for far more than they’re worth and still boost their geek ego.
1- Yet another ChatRoulette prank. Don’t go away yet, this one is good
And I’ll just leave it at that.
Thanks for reading this week’s Crazy Tech News Countdown. Be sure to comment and let me know what you think as well as suggest stories you’d like to see covered next week. Until then, geek out!
