Find Your Digital Twin on Facebook

Find Your Digital Twin on Facebook: "

If novelty is your thing, then you’ll be pleased to discover that Coca-Cola has finally launched their Coke Zero Facial Profiler.

As you may recall, we covered the announcement of the facial experiment back in October, and were intrigued by the application’s premise: using Facebook to find your digital double.

Now that app is live, we put it to the test and found that it works as promised. Once you connect your Facebook account with the Coke Zero Facial Profiler, the app will scan your photos (you can also use your webcam to snap a beauty shot) and use facial recognition software to match your face against others in their database.

Once the matching process is complete, voilà, there’s your digital twin staring back at you. You can then share your match on Facebook or Twitter or grab a URL to share with your friends (here’s my match). Should you be so bold, you can also contact your match on Facebook.

While the premise itself is kitschy, the application experience is pretty slick and some of the matches are surprisingly so dead-on that you might even do a double take. Try it out for yourself, and let us know your thoughts.

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Reviews: Facebook, Twitter

Tags: coca cola, coke zero facial profiler, trending

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Italian Police Wrecked a £150,000 Lamborghini Patrol Car (13 pics)

Italian Police Wrecked a £150,000 Lamborghini Patrol Car (13 pics): "The accident happened near the city of Cremona. An Italian police officer wrecked a £150,000 Lamborghini Gallardo (560bhp). He crashed into parked cars after he swerved to avoid a vehicle that was pulling out of a petrol station.
Luckily, no one was hurt in the crash, only the two officers who were in the Lambo got minor injuries.
What a shame to destroy such a car!

"

Italian Police Wrecked a £150,000 Lamborghini Patrol Car (13 pics)

Italian Police Wrecked a £150,000 Lamborghini Patrol Car (13 pics): "The accident happened near the city of Cremona. An Italian police officer wrecked a £150,000 Lamborghini Gallardo (560bhp). He crashed into parked cars after he swerved to avoid a vehicle that was pulling out of a petrol station.
Luckily, no one was hurt in the crash, only the two officers who were in the Lambo got minor injuries.
What a shame to destroy such a car!

"

C'mon Man! Week 12 2009

Diet Chromium OS — Less Filling, Works on Most Everything

Diet Chromium OS — Less Filling, Works on Most Everything: "

Chrome OS has only been “out” a short while, but due to its open-source roots, folks are already making it available for those hardy souls who want to give it a try. Dell has already put it out there for Mini 10v owners, but others were left to their own designs. No more, as a distribution, dubbed Diet Chromium OS, has been released, and reports have it working on just about everything out there.

The first noticeable change is the 300 MB download, down a far cry from the 8 GB that “real” Chrome OS consumes. That makes Diet Chromium OS much easier to get hold of as the download is quite manageable. This explains the distribution’s name. The real magic of Diet Chromium is that driver support has been extended for all sorts of systems. Users are reporting already that Diet Chromium works on everything from netbooks to quad-core powerhouses.

Our buddy Brad at Liliputing has put together a good tutorial for getting Diet Chromium running on a system near you. Brad’s method installs Diet Chromium on a USB drive, so no local system installation is required. You build the USB stick, boot from it, and off you go. I’m definitely going to give this a try.

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Close Encounters of the Redneck Kind

Close Encounters of the Redneck Kind: "

Filed under: Humor, Videos, Music, Movies, Mash-Ups

This is a mash-up that takes the classic 'talking to the aliens with flashing lights' scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and replaces the repeating tones with 'Dueling Banjos.' The structure of the song is a perfect fit for the back-and-forth nature of the scene, and after some nifty editing by Marc Bullard, who created the video, the tempo of the song seems to match the blinking lights perfectly. Watch and enjoy:





Thanks for the tip, Jason B!

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

"

22 Cufflinks for Techies

22 Cufflinks for Techies: "Not a whole lot of exposition to offer here. If you’re under 30, there’s a solid chance you work online. If you’re under 60, you use a computer ever day. If you’re 90, you’re not reading this post, and if..."

Nuclear fusion: Coming to a basement near you soon

Nuclear fusion: Coming to a basement near you soon: "

Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Inc. debuted their Focus-Fusion-1 dense plasma focus research reactor in mid-October, after nearly 8 years of research and building. In the blink of an eye, this freezer-sized nuclear fusion demo machine can push more than 100 gigawatts of power through a space smaller than a pin point. By comparison, the entire U.S. uses about 430 gigawatts of electricity every hour.

Unlike standard nuclear fission — which involves bombarding a fuel, like plutonium or uranium, with neutrons to break it up into isotopes and releasing massive amounts of energy — the Focus-Fusion-1 bombards boron atoms with neutrons, turning it into helium and even more massive amounts of energy.

Then there's the price. A new nuclear fission plant costs billions, and requires a community willing to have one. Focus-Fusion-1 costs several hundred thousand dollars, and could shrink the land footprint of typical power plants from acres to basement-water-heater-size, while reducing the cost of electricity to 1/10th of our cheapest available power today.

And the end-products are way better. While the waste from fission will make the lab techs glow in the dark and die horrible deaths if exposed, Focus-Fusion-1's waste products will just make them talk funny.

Via FocusFusion.org and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Inc.

"

225 Extra: Menu Guide

225 Extra: Menu Guide: "menus and digital issue"

Bacon Pop

Bacon Pop: "

Getting ready for movie night at home? You may not be able to beat the local cineplex's huge screen or THX-certified sound system, but you can best them on drinks...

Visit Uncrate for the full post."

Awesome and Most Beautiful Garages for Super Cars (54 pics)

Awesome and Most Beautiful Garages for Super Cars (54 pics): "I am just speechless… I don’t know what I want more now: a super amazing garage or a pair of super cars. I guess it should go together, otherwise, it’s not the same effect anymore.
Well, enjoy viewing them :)

"

Google Latitude Now Tracks Location History, Alerts You to Nearby Friends

Google Latitude Now Tracks Location History, Alerts You to Nearby Friends: "

One of the hottest trends right now is the rise of location-based services (LBS), which helps friends network and find each other based on their location. Foursquare and Loopt are prime examples of these growing networks.

Google has its own LBS service as well: Google Latitude. Today, the search giant announced some major additions to Latitude that bring it in line with its fast-rising competitors. Primarily, Google Latitude has added location history and location-based alerts.

Location history is fairly straightforward: Google will store all of your past locations and will use that information to create visual histories of your trips and adventures via Google Maps. If you take a bike ride across Indiana for example, you can track the route you took along with the times in which you arrived.

The other feature is Google Location Alerts, which sends you notifications when your friends are nearby via email or SMS. To make sure you don’t get a text every time you go to work and see your Google Latitude-using co-workers, Latitude utilizes your location history to eliminate notifications when you’re in a location you regularly visit. It even incorporates time, so if you’re at work but at 3 AM, you’ll get notifications once again.

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Google Needs to Push Apple for a Latitude App

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Both features are good additions to Latitude, but we can’t help but feel that Google’s coming short in the LBS space. While Latitude has an Android app, it doesn’t have an iPhone equivalent, just a mobile site. This leaves Latitude without the ability to send push notifications, a major reason why Foursquare has been a red-hot product.

For Latitude to make deeper inroads, we believe that it needs an iPhone app. There is a complete difference to the user when they download an app versus opening it up in the mobile web. It could even automatically send your location utilizing the same method that Loopt is testing. Google could turn into an even stronger competitor in the LBS space.

Whether Apple would cave into Google pressure is, of course, another matter. They’ve told Google that they didn’t want a Latitude app, and the search giant complied. Things have changed though, especially in the relationship between the two companies. Thus we wonder if Google should now try to force Apple’s hand, especially in light of the Google Voice debacle.

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Reviews: Android, Foursquare, Google, Google Maps

Tags: Google, lbs, Location Google Latitude, location-based service

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