Interesting Links for 15-02-2013

• 17 Mesmerizing Before & After Photoshop GIFs of Celebrities
  (tags: celebrities photoshop )
• How the NHS avoids transparency
  (tags: transparency nhs )
• Facial structure may predict endorsement of racial prejudice
  (tags: dominance testosterone behaviour psychology prejudice racism )
• We're emotionally distant and that's just fine by me: Closer relationships aren't necessarily better relationships
  (tags: emotions relationships )
• Timelapse of a ridiculous amount of snowfall
  (tags: snow video )
• You'll soon be able to claim unfair dismissal over political views, even if you haven't been employed for two years.
  (tags: freespeech uk employment rights )
• Neural basis for benefits of meditation
  (tags: neuroscience psychology meditation )
• 5 Hilarious Reasons Publishers Rejected Classic Best-Sellers (How many others never made it?)
  (tags: epicfail publishing )
• The village with 9,000 years of history.
  (tags: history uk archeology )
• Building the World's Longest — And Smartest — Floating Bridge
  (tags: technology architecture )
• Declassified: America's Secret Flying Saucer
  (tags: technology secrecy usa military )
• Peter Dinklage is going to be in X-Men: Days Of Future Past!!!!!!! EEEEEEEEeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!
  (tags: xmen Yay PeterDinklage )
• Love of musical harmony is not nature but nurture
  (tags: music )
• National Popular Vote -- Electoral college reform by direct election of the President
  (tags: usa voting )
• Tax havens: The missing $20 trillion
  (tags: tax )
• If you can build a website just like Amazon, only better, for $1000 then I have a job for you!
  (tags: epicwtf web design OhForFucksSake )

Mobile apps for reading websites need to die.

Ever wanted to see a meteor?

Loads more here, from numerous people capturing the meteor as it went over Russia. The shock-wave is damned impressive too - a couple of the videos capture the sound as it sets of car alarms and shatters windows.

Microsoft are rubbish

I downloaded Tera* because the idea of an MMO where you had to have a little bit of skill for the combat intrigued me**.

It's 27GB in size, which meant leaving it downloading overnight, but it was happily there this morning, and I could have a play in-between swearing about how Javascript is the worst language in the history of mankind.*** It's turned out to be quite good fun, even if the tutorial section was, if anything, more confusing than the opening levels of the real game.

Anyway, Julie thought it looked pretty neat, but it seemed pointless to copy the entire application down from the internet all over again, so I checked and it seemed entirely possible to copy the installation folder from one computer to another. And, theoretically, we're both on the same network, we're both running Windows 7, the whole "Homegroup" functionality seemed designed to allow just such a thing.

No such luck. My computer told me I was part of a Homegroup, but wouldn't tell me the password, or let me leave it. I spent 45 minutes googling for support of any kind, and finding all sorts of things that told me that the Homegroup Client Service wasn't starting up, and here's a list of things that might cause it to start working again. None of which did.

So in the end I copied it up to the NAS and back down again. And that worked just fine****. That ^&*^&* for Gigabit ethernet meaning that it only took about twenty minutes!


*

**You can dodge blows, and hitting monsters from behind does more damage, etc. Also, it just went free-to-play, so I can try it out without spending any cash.
*** Worse than Brainfuck, not quite as bad as Malbolge.
****I tried to just find Julie's machine on the network, and that didn't work either. Although I discovered, just after the copying had finished, that going direct to the UNC path of her machine worked just fine. Oh well, next time...