The content is no longer centered, but instead aligned to the left, and the left sidebar is styled differently, with different colors and icons. The header and search box have a grey background that clearly separates them from the search results. As far as these are concerned, the only visible change seems to be that the site URL appears right under the search result link, instead of after the site blurb.

Here’s the old interface, for comparison:

Note that the new-ish black menu bar is already on both versions.

Hey, Internet: What if We All Read the Same Book?

The idea was put forward by Jeff Howe last year, as a way to reinvent the book club concept and giving it a global reach, instead of being something you do with people in the neighbourhood (or city). So last summer One Book, One Twitter got around 12,000 people from all over the world reading and discussing (on Twitter) Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (great book, by the way, you should read it). And then it was over.

The same Jeff Howe is now trying to revive the idea, and the Twitter-based book club is back. The initiative has a new name – 1book140 – and it’s now monthly instead of a one-off thing. The book for this month is The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood, as chosen by “the crowd”, and the discussion is already going strong on Twitter, in tweets annotated with the dedicated hashtag for each part (#1b140_1, #1b140_2, #1b140_3, etc.). Here’s the reading/discussion schedule for June, and an FAQ for those of you who want to quickly get into it.

I’m joining the club myself, and might even start tweeting about it.

On a funny note, 2 weeks ago Sir Alex Ferguson has publicly criticized Twitter by saying it’s a “waste of time” and that people should instead “go to a library and read a book”. Well, there you go.

Allow me to explain. In this xkcd comic, this factoid about Wikipedia is stated:

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”.

Oh really?

So I headed over to a random Wikipedia article and landed in the page for Water Gun. Following the instructions above, and just after following 16 links, I landed in… the Philosophy page!

That’s xkcd being awesome again.

UPDATE: There’s a whole page on Wikipedia about this.

Forget about all the other announcements from Google in their I/O conference. All that matters is the announcement that Angry Birds finally made its way to Google Chrome.

It’s now available in the Chrome Web Store with 70 free levels. Chrome also gets some exclusive content: there’s 7 levels part of a so-called “Chrome Dimension”. This web version of Angry Birds will also soon support the new in-app payments system, so new (paid) content will probably make its way to this Chrome version.

As if I didn’t have enough time-wasters already…

This is not the first time Randall has used Google search results as the basis of his comics. Also worth checking are Google results for various phrases, frequency of strip versions of various games, and the trochee chart.

Our beloved Pac-Man just got an upgrade. The World’s Biggest Pac-Man is a patchwork quilt of user-generated levels, featuring 4794 mazes at the time of writing. Every maze has an exit point on each of its four sides, leading to its neighbours. It’s a virtually endless Pac-Man game. I pity those with gaming OCD…

Anyone can log in using Facebook and design their own levels, or just play for fun.

The game was unveiled at Microsoft’s MIX11 developer conference as a way to promote Internet Exporer 9 and its support of HTML5, but it should run well in any browser that supports the new standard, like Chrome and Firefox.

AlgoRythmics, a folk-dancing group from Romania’s Sapientia University, decided to show how data sorting algorithms work by showing them as dances. Bizarre, right? But strangely mesmerizing, and it sure does the trick of explaining how they work. Until now they did insert-sort, bubble-sort, select-sort and shell-sort. I hear that merge-sort and quick-sort are coming soon.

Check the AlgoRythmics’ Youtube channel for all their videos, and go and support them in their Facebook page. Because they’re just awesome.

(via TheNextWeb)

UPDATE: This was in fact part of a more elaborate April Fool’s joke pulled by LinkedIn itself. When accessing the ”People you may know” page, one would be presented with some unlikely connections, like Robin Hood, JRR Tolkien or Albert Einstein.

It’s here! It’s here! The iPad 2 is finally here! And it’s… yeah…

In a typical Apple gimmick, Steve Jobs took a break from his medical leave to get on stage yesterday and announce the new version of the iPad (aka Jesus tablet), the “revolutionary” product that sold 15 million units in just over one year. And what I have to say is “meh…” (and I’m not the only one). Apart from some nice little additions, there’s nothing too exciting about this iPad 2.

They did address some of the reasons I mentioned as to why the iPad is a useless device, though. The iPad 2 now supports multitasking (due to a newer version of iOS) and has a front facing camera to make it possible to make video calls using FaceTime. It allows for HDMI output, which is a no-brainer if you intend to do presentations on it, although it will cost you to get the adapter needed for it (in good Apple fashion). There’s some other stuff like a faster processor, and a reduction in thickness and weight.

And that’s about it. A few small tweaks here and there, a fancy video touting it as a magic device, and off you go, there’s nothing else to see. Wait, there’s also this, the magnetic cover:

Yes, that’s right, in what was supposed to be a major technology announcement, the thing that stands out is a fancy screen cover…

So what was left out? Well, there’s still no practical way to get stuff in and out of the device (except for using iTunes). No SD card slot, so forget about taking it on a trip and dropping the pictures you take with the camera into the iPad (unless you shell out some money for the adapter, of course). Yes, you can use the rear-facing camera to take photos, but besides being only 5MP, it’s just silly. I can’t believe that Apple, being always so minimalist in all they do, decided to add this completely superfluous feature. Also no USB, and any hopes of Apple introducing the new Thunderbolt in this version of the iPad (like it did in the new line of Macbooks) are gone.

But if you think I’m at all surprised with all this, let me tell you I’m not. This is what Apple has been doing for a long time (first the iPod, then the iPhone, and now the iPad). Start with something that looks impressive enough to sell a lot but with a lot of obvious things missing (and let me add that some of those things could have been included from the start, but were probably left on hold just to have more to show in the next version), and then keep releasing new versions with small improvements and more features, thus keeping the money machine working. And it has proven a great model, so why change? While people keep throwing money at Apple for every shiny new device they launch, they’ll keep doing it this way.

And that’s that. When’t the iPad 3 coming out?