Description from National Geographic:

May 6, 2008—After 9,000 years of silence, Chile’s Chaitén volcano (pictured on May 3) is erupting with lava, ash—and lightning.

Since the volcano awoke on May 2, it has continued erupting intermittently, blanketing the area in ash and forcing more than 4,000 people to flee.

The mingling of lightning and ash seen above may be a “dirty thunderstorm.”

The little-understood storms may be sparked when rock fragments, ash, and ice particles in the plume collide to produce static charges—just as ice particles collide to create charge in regular thunderstorms.

Found via DD32’s blog.

Back in the day, I used to just use the same password (well, a couple really, but still) on all sites I had to register on. This made it easy to remember, but the problem is that if one of my accounts was compromised, that password could be used to get into all of my other accounts.

So, for a while, I used a random password generator extension for Firefox, but it was slow and relied on Firefox remembering all my passwords (what happens if my hard drive died?).

Enter the ingenious SuperGenPass. It combines the two solutions I used previously. From the FAQ:

A bookmarklet is a chunk of JavaScript code stored in your Web browser as a bookmark or favorite. There’s no software to install, so you can use SuperGenPass across all platforms and in any modern Web browser. It also makes it easy to use on public computers where access rights may be restricted.

How it works

SuperGenPass uses your master password and the domain name of the Web site you are visiting as the “seed” for a one-way hash algorithm. The output of this algorithm is your generated password. If either your master password or the domain name of the Web site changes, even by one character, the generated password will be drastically different.

For example, let’s say that your master password is “cornflakes”. If you use SuperGenPass at yahoo.com, your generated password will be “r9AQeOhBgU”. If you use SuperGenPass at amazon.com, your generated password will be “zcbEm1t32B”. SuperGenPass doesn’t need to remember this or store it anywhere, because it’s just a (very complex) math problem: the result is the same every time. And because SuperGenPass uses a one-way hash function, no one will be able to reverse-engineer your master password from your generated passwords.

Simply put, you come up with one password and SuperGenPass will generate a unique, re-creatable password for any domain name you visit. It even fills in the password fields for you. I’ve dragged it up onto my top toolbar in Firefox, so I just click it and bam, I’m done.

No more having to remember more than one password or worry about your password being stolen and used on multiple sites.

It’s only available in 6 cities so far (mine included of course — we are the leading city in public transportation in the US after all), but more will be added soon apparently. :)

(Here is the previous post and video if you missed it of a F1 car playing “God Save The Queen”)

Thanks go to my forum for the link. :)

There’s also a similar (but not nearly as good) one from Saab, also from the 1980’s: (larger version)

Thanks to all those that posted and pointed out the above videos to me on my FinalGear.com Forums. :)

For everyone else, I discovered a great site today — the Homestar Runner Wiki! It’s got literally EVERYTHING you ever wanted to know about Homestar Runner, the site, etc. as well as a ton of stuff your probably didn’t even know you wanted to know. lol

If you’re a fan, make sure to check it out. :)

Shame they didn’t release it as a plugin for Google Earth though. It woulda so very cool to fly around Mars in 3D. :(

This post was originally posted on March 7th, 2006 at 4:17 PM. However, I busted my blog by upgrading to the wrong version of WordPress and had to revert to a database backup. That resulted in the loss of this post.

I was watching a Discovery Channel show that I downloaded today called “Ultimate 10 Military Machines” and it featured this crazy plane called the Airborne Laser (ABL) for short (see right).

It flies around above the clouds in friendly skies looking for enemy missles. It then locks onto them with a bunch of low power lasers and then uses a bigass chemical powered laser that’s 1000 times as powerful as the sun to basically burn a hole in the missle.

How futuristic and crazy is that?!

You can find out more about it at Boeing’s website.

This photo mosaic of Dick Cheney in full hunting garb is comprised of screenshots of several hundred news websites covering the story of his February 11, 2006 shooting of hunting companion Harry Whittington.

It’s pretty cool and you can find it here: http://www.urlyart.com/gallery/cheney-hunting

So I built a funky alarm clock out of an old Nintendo console. Why? Because I was at Value Village with my girlfriend and my sister, and while they were browsing through miles of clothing the only thing of interest I could find were two broken Nintendo units without paddles, and I had to do something with them.

Check it out here: http://www.mavrinac.com/projects/nesclock/

Read the story here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10038326/

For those who don’t know what TVTAD is, it’s a auto-downloader for torrent RSS feeds. You add as many torrent feeds to it as you want, pick some favorite TV shows, and it watches the feeds for your favorite shows and then automatically downloads the torrents and gives them to your BitTorrent client to download. It’s an awesome program.

Check out this thread if you’re looking for some TV torrent feeds: http://www.tvtad.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=10

Check it out here: http://reader.google.com/