CNET: Google’s Suez Canal Easter egg brings boatloads of fun. “Now that the Ever Given cargo ship has finally been freed after spending nearly a week stuck in the Suez Canal, Google has launched a celebratory Easter egg in its Search results. A search for ‘Suez Canal’ and ‘Ever Given’ pulls up an animation of little boats rolling across the top of the page. “
Gizmodo: The Boat in the Suez Canal Is Still Stuck, But You Can Now Stick It Anywhere You Want With This App. “For all who have been captivated by the Ever Given, the ginormous shipping container boat that has been stuck in the Suez Canal for days, we have some good news. Before you get excited, no, the boat’s still stuck. But you can now stick the Ever Given anywhere you please thanks to the clever people of the internet, specifically one Garrett Dash Nelson.” I believe by the time you read this the boat will be unstuck.
Mashable: See the growing Suez Canal traffic jam from space. “One of the largest ships in the world, Ever Given, is lodged in the relatively narrow canal, a major artificial waterway where some $9 billion in merchandise passes daily. Around 12 percent of global trade carefully navigates via the historic canal, which opened more than 150 years ago. Satellite images captured by the European Space Agency show the backlog of ships created by the accidentally stuck Ever Given, which is deeply lodged in the canal’s sandy floor.”
The Register: Ticker tape and a binary message: Bank of England’s new Alan Turing £50 must be the nerdiest banknote ever. “Due to hit circulation on 23 June, the design replaces the relatively short-lived incarnation featuring Matthew Boulton and James Watt. Instead, the update will show the scientist Alan Turing and the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) he developed….Also celebrating Turing’s imminent arrival on the note is UK agency GCHQ, which has created a set of puzzles that produce 11 words or names to be tapped into the agency’s Enigma machine simulator.”
Reddit: Fantasia Archive – The free, offline, world-building software with a unique spin. “Fantasia Archive (or FA for short) is an offline, free software that was created as a reaction to the lack of proper offline world-building and writing tools as most of such programs focus almost entirely on just writing instead of on the world-building and all intricacies it brings. This is what sets FA apart: The focus on the structure of one’s works and relationships of all parts of it to each other instead of solely focusing on the writing experience itself.” Windows-only, unfortunately.
Hackaday: Web Pages (And More) Via Shortwave. “If you are a ham radio operator, the idea of sending pictures and data over voice channels is nothing new. Hams have lots of techniques for doing that and — not so long ago — even most data transmissions were over phone lines. However, now everyone can get in on the game thanks to the cheap availability of software-defined radio. Several commercial shortwave broadcasters are sending encoded data including images and even entire web pages.”
Laughing Squid: A Visualization of the Space That Bytes on the Internet Would Occupy in Comparison to Real World Objects. “For example, using this ratio, a 100 MB would be smaller than a typical soda can, while 1 PB (Petabyte) would be taller than the Statue of Liberty. All information on the internet in 2001 would be represented by 1 EB Exabyte and one ZB (Zettabyte) in 2020. 1 YB (Yottabyte) of information would cover the better part of North America.”
Mail Tribune: Libraries to debut original animated series. “Ryan Bradley, marketing coordinator for Jackson County Library Services, has spent months leading development on an original animated series where that happens to the main characters — literally. And soon anyone with an internet connection will be able to watch it. The series, aptly titled “Lost in a Book,” concerns Daisy and Zak, two kids who get sucked into a book while visiting the library, resulting in an adventure through multiple genres, characters and stories as they try to make their way home.”
ReviewGeek: Lay’s Browser Extension Turns on YouTube Captions When It Hears You Eating Chips. “When artificial intelligence rises up to take over Earth, it will be because of browser extensions like Lay’s Crispy Subtitles. The new AI-powered Chrome extension from Lay’s taps into your microphone and listens for the sound of crunchy, crispy potato chips. If it hears you eating chips while you watch a YouTube Video, the AI will automatically turn on captions for your video.”
CNET: Hamilton’s entire first act stunningly recreated in Animal Crossing. “Hamilton was a huge success when it transitioned from the stage to Disney Plus last year, yet the musical film may not be the most impressive reimagining of the hugely popular play. That accolade may instead go to Guitar_Knight14, a YouTuber who meticulously recreated Hamilton’s first act in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.”
Mashable: Listen to deepfake Gucci Mane read classic literature. “Mark Twain once said that the mark of a classic is that everyone wants to have read it but not actually read it. It makes sense: Classics must provide some artistic or cultural value to be considered ‘classic’ — but they’re just so boring. MSCHF just made the Western canon more exciting with Project Gucciberg. It’s Project Gutenberg (a collection of public domain Western literature) meets the rapper Gucci Mane. Using Artificial Intelligence, MSCHF recreated his voice to read classics from Pride and Prejudice to Don Quixote.” And Little Women. I think you might need headphones to appreciate this completely.
Boing Boing: Neural net turns music from YouTube into cursed choral and string renditions. “Via Waxy, GAN.STYLE is a ‘cursed generator [that] resynthesizes audio from YouTube using a neural net trained on choral and strings recordings.’” Creepy yet interesting.
Mashable: NASA’s Perseverance has a little ‘family portrait’ Easter egg. “The Perseverance rover made its monumental landing on Mars on Feb. 18 and it has already sent thousands of raw images back to Earth. Hidden in photos of the rover itself is a ‘bumper sticker’ with icons of NASA’s previous Mars rover missions, Space pointed out.”
Boing Boing: A fascinating website with the source photos for the people on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. “Here’s a guy who, for the last several years, has been trying to track down the source photos of the people who appeared on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), The Beatles’ eighth studio album.”
