Schwippy

Blender Defender

I put up a page detailing my latest project.

Have a cat that won’t stay off your counters? I do. I finally got fed up with it enough to do something about it: scare the crap out of him with a motion-detecting blender (while recording the results for my own amusement, of course).

Check it out at www.plasma2002.com/blenderdefender

Blender Defender via Me!

Hampster Prance

Finally! Put your hamster to some REAL use! Make him work for his own well being. Load a sheet of paper into the shredder, and your little buddy just does his thing, running his little butt off, and presto; a few gear reductions later, an instant hamster bed made from purely recycled credit card applications and unfiled TPS reports.

This is artist Tom Ballhatchet’s design, which he plans to put on display in Milan, Italy.

Check out his hanster shredder and his site below.

Tom Ballhatchet [Via Gizmodo]

Fake Photo Detection Software

When journalists are writing for a newspaper, they know the rule: no digital photo manipulation. In other words, no using that beloved stamp tool in Photoshop to take out that pedestrian that ruined your perfect shot of the president.

But sometimes, the temptation is just too much for the reporter and they decide they have enough Photoshop experience and talent to get away with changing some elements in their shot.

This is becoming such a problem, that the Associated Press actually has a third party help them out with it. They contract the help of Hany Farid. Hany has made special software that analyzes photos to determine if it is genuine or not automatically. The software looks for certain red flags about the photo that the normal eye just wouldn’t catch without a magnifying glass. Things like repeating pixels patterns, or unnatural shadows, pixel patterns due to rescaling, and especially the pupil reflections of multiple people in the shot.

It make sense when ya think about it. What is reflected in one person’s pupil should also be reflected in another person’s, to an extent.

Forgery has been around ever since… well…. authenticity. Theres no way to eliminate it. But even so, things need to be done.

“This is an arms race,” Farid says. “I can already tell you how it’s going to end: We’re going to lose. It’s always going to be easier to create a forgery than detect a forgery. But we’re going to take the power to create forgeries out of the hands of amateurs. We will raise that bar up until you have to be very, very good to do it.”

Computing Photographic Forgeries [Via Boing Boing]

Top 10 used passwords

ModernLifeIsRubbish has obtained an up-to-date top 10 list of currently used passwords online.

I’m willing to bet that you’ve used one or more of these passwords online before. I know that I have used ‘qwerty’ on more than one occasion for throw-away accounts or for shady sites that I fear I may be in danger of personal information theft.

Just one more note, the list was compiled across the pond, so obviously, there are going to be different numbers if we were to take a poll here in the states. For example, our favorite team probably wouldnt include Liverpool

Click the link to check it out

Top 10 Most Common Passwords