There are some awesome videos floating around on the Internet, but few are as unique as getting to watch the last minute of a satellite’s life before it crashes in to the moon.

There have been a lot of Google “Doodles” over the years for various different holidays, anniversaries, or events. The following depicts what, at least in my opinion, have been the best of the best based off the creativity and originality in the alteration of their standard logo.

1. Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss! – March 2, 2009
2. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Birthday – June 8, 2005
   
3. First Day of Spring – Design by Eric Carle – March 20, 2009
   
4. 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick – January 28, 2008
   
5. VOTE – November 2, 2004
   
6. Leap Year – February 29, 2004
   
7. Happy Halloween! – October 31, 2003
   
8. Earth Day – April 22, 2008
   
9. Louis Braille’s Birthday – January 4, 2006
   
10. Google’s 10th Birthday – September 27, 2008
    

I love my iPhone 3G. It’s fun, it’s useful, and it continually amazes me that Apple was able to enter a market it previously had zero role in and instantly cause the rest of the industry to start playing catch-up. Anyone who who has one will tell you that the absolute best part about it is the variety of applications, or “apps”, that are available for it, both free and paid. Having used it for several months now, I’ve compiled a top ten list of free iPhone Apps that every single user should have. I attempted to organize them in order, but they’re all great in their own regard, so, without further ado and in no particular order:

1. Urban Spoon & AroundMe
   I’m clumping these two together because although they are very different in many aspects, their basic purpose is the same: Help you find what you need nearby. Urban Spoon is obviously focused entirely on food and has everything from lowest rung fast food through five star restaurants. It can randomly offer you selections or allow you to scroll through options narrowed down by location, type, price, or whatever else. AroundMe, however, shows you a nice neat list of whatever is near you. Restaurants, banks, hospitals, bars, gas stations, the list goes on. Using the GPS, it will essentially offer you a radius of things nearby in whatever category you choose and has a very extensive list. If you’re ever in an unfamiliar area or just looking for something new, both of these are mandatory.
2. The Weather Channel
   Sure, the iPhone comes with a basic weather app. The Weather Channel puts it to shame. In-depth current, hourly, 36 hour, and 10 day forecasts as well as radar, severe weather alerts, and even local weather video clips can be a true life-saver.
3. Shazam
   You’re listening to the radio and a song comes on that you like. You’d download it or go buy the CD, but you’ve got no idea who sings it, what album it’s on, or even what it’s called. In comes Shazam. You’ve seen the commercials for it and it is exactly as awesome to use as it looks. Just open up the app, tap on “Tag Now” and you’ll know the artist, title, album, year, and (if available) the music video on YouTube. It even keeps track of what you’ve looked up in the past so you can remember it later. Excluding the iPod app itself, this is my favorite music-themed app available.
4. ShopShop
   For some twisted reason, Apple has yet to see the iPhone as an ideal shopping list tool. Until the day that they do, though, ShopShop is filling in. There are dozens of different shopping list apps out there, some are free, most aren’t, but this was the one that really stood out to me. It’s basic, it’s easy to use, you can have multiple different lists at once, it keeps a memory of what you’ve typed in before, and it it makes trips to the grocery store a breeze.
5. Sol Free Solitaire
   Offering six different variations of solitaire games, this is easily the best solitaire game available for the iPhone. It has a lot of great features, good statistics tracking and, of course, is free.
6. Dictionary.com
   Install this and you can keep the Random House Unabridged Dictionary in your pocket. If that isn’t enough, it also contains Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, keeps track of recent words you’ve searched for, and even offers you a “word of the day” to help expand your vocabulary. To top it all off, it downloads the entire database on to your phone, so you don’t need to be connected to a 3G or WiFi network for it to work.
7. Flashlight
   Plain and simple, it opens up to a bright white empty screen to help you find stuff in the dark. Seems almost too obvious, but it works quite well. If white isn’t your color of choice, you swipe across the screen to easily change it to red, green, blue, black, or set your own custom color. I initially installed it more as a joke app, but I’ve found myself using it to find something at night more often than I ever imagined.
8. Now Playing
   Read movie reviews, find nearby theaters, view show times sorted by theater or movie title, get info on upcoming movies, buy tickets if it’s available for your chosen theater, see all recent DVD releases, and even manage your Netflix account (if you have one). If there are any other features you could possibly want in a movie application, I can’t think if them.
9. Amazon Mobile
   This is the ultimate shopping companion. Any time you’re at a store and looking to buy something that you think Amazon might carry, open this up and search for it. Even if you’d prefer to buy it in a good old fashioned brick and mortar store, this app will let you easily read reviews, see competitive pricing, and see comparable products. This free little app has helped me save money countless times and I’ve even dodged a few bullets from crappy items which I might have otherwise purchased.
10. 9-Toolbox
    I couldn’t decide whether or not to list this one, because it’s only free for a limited time. It is, however, awesome. The second this was released, there were about four other apps that got immediately axed off my phone. This single app offers you quick and easy currency conversion, a “days until” calculator, a “days until” reminder, every holiday ever for just about any religion or country, an inclinometer, a loan calculator, a menstrual cycle calendar (less exciting for us guys, but I’m sure the ladies would find this useful), a tip calculator, and all types of unit conversion. With a list like that, how can you not install it while it’s still free?

Is this list the definitive collection? Certainly not. Do you love an app that you don’t see on this list? Please feel free to reply and tell me about it.

This is the first of what I can probably guarantee you will be several posts about the Apple iPhone 3G, now that I am lucky enough to have what is easily the best cell phone currently on the market.

3G service has been touted as fast (at least by cell phone standards) for a long time now, but I’ve always been curious as to exactly how fast it is and haven’t really taken the time to actually look it up or test it – until I installed Speedtest from Xtreme Labs. To be honest, I was surprised. I figured it was a few times faster than 56k, but I didn’t think it would actually qualify as broadband. Here are my results:

If you are privy to the major experiments going on within the scientific community, or if you’ve listened to any of the main stream media over the last few days, you’re probably aware that today was the day that the Large Hadron Collider was turned on. This is the largest, most powerful, and most energy consuming particle accelerator ever. So powerful, in fact, that conspiracy theorists everywhere and even some scientists were convinced that when it would be turned on, tons of microscopic black holes would be created, expand, and consume the universe as we know it. Well, guess what nut jobs: We’re still here. It was powered up this morning and is so far working better than expected without any issues. It will likely take several months before the scientists operating it can really get it up to its full potential, so I suppose the universe could still end when they do that, but I’m feeling confident that we’ll be just fine.

Growing up, I always had macs. From my first MacSE sporting the lightning-fast 8mhz 68000 processor to college when I had a Power Mac running a 200mhz PowerPC 603e processor, I was always a Mac person. Even after that last Power Mac died, when I was exclusively running PCs, I still considered myself a Mac addict while I secretly longed for the day that I would once again have a nice shiny new Mac. Well, several months ago I got a nice new iMac and I love it. Although not new to Mac OS X, I had never owned a computer that ran it, so its taken me a while to feel out what software I like and I have some recommendations. So, without further ado, here’s my top 5 list of freeware applications every Mac user should have:

1. Adium
   This is easily the absolute best chat client for Mac OS X. I’m way more fond of it than I was Trillian on my XP machines and I swore by Trillian. Adium supprts just about every chat platform ever right out of the “box”, with the exception of IRC and video chat (supposedly coming soon). I’m pretty sure some of the platforms it supports went extinct along with the dinosaurs, but it still would work with Adium. The dock notifications are awesome, it integrates extremely well with Growl, and the styling, sounds, icon, and just about anything else are extremely customizable, which is fun. Sure, Mac OS X comes with iChat, but this just embarrasses it.
2. ClamXav
   Sure, there aren’t many viruses out there for the Mac, but you can never be too safe. ClamAV is an open source anti-virus solution for *nix-based operating systems. ClamXav is the Mac OS X front end for it. Its easy to install, easy to configure, works well, and is well supported. What more can you ask for in virus protection?
3. VLC
   I was debating whether or not to list this, because it is available on just about any operating system, but its just too good pass up. It’s a video player that can be both extremely basic to use and extremely advanced to configure, depending on your needs. It plays just about anything and that’s what makes it great.
4. Transmission
   Hands-down the best torrent client for Mac OS X. It’s fast, it’s simple, and it’s easy to configure. If that’s not enough, it also has an extremely small footprint. I’ve tried at least a dozen different torrent clients over multiple platforms over the last few years and this is certainly my favorite thus far, no matter what the operating system.
5. MagiCal
   This innocent little application does two incredible things that should by all means just be built in to the next version of Mac OS X. It displays a small icon with the month and date next to the clock on the menu bar and when clicked, it displays a small calendar that even allows you to flip through the months. Why this is not just a part of the OS is beyond me, but thankfully MagiCal is available to help.

Honorable Mentions: Firefox, Thunderbird, Stuffit Expander, and Fetch.

All of the buzz on the Internet today is zeroing in on a new potential Google-killer called Cuil. Sure, there have been plenty legitimate attempts to dethrone the search king in the past, but none of the start-ups have been run by Google alumni. I’ve had a chance to play around with it and see what it is offering, so here’s the breakdown.

The Good

• It looks great. The main page of the site is extremely simple, just like it’s big brother Google, but its dark design really helps it stand out in a crowd of other wannabe Google competitors.
• Right on the front page they are brutally honest about the number of sites that they currently have indexed (121,617,892,992 at the time of this post), which is refreshing to see.
• Finally, someone rethought how search results are displayed. No more generic-looking list of websites from one to infinity. Pages are listed in columns almost looking like a news paper or magazine. You can adjust it to display 2 or 3 columns and next to many of the listings and image related to the site appears along side the description of the site.
• Search suggestions are in-place to help you find what you’re looking for, but I haven’t yet noticed much difference between what Cuil offers and Google’s parallel feature.
• Unlike the Big Brother search engines we’re all used to, Cuil supposedly tracks absolutely none of what you do. This is great to hear for those that love their Internet anonymity.

The Bad

• Where are the key features that keep me coming back to Google? If they want to become my primary search engine, they’re going to have to integrate image and product search features.
• I mentioned earlier that along side most of the search results appears what is supposed to be a relevant image. Problem is, most of the images are in no way relevant or even taken from the site listed.
• Allow more columns! I really like how the search is displayed, but for those of us with a wide screen and high resolution, three columns still leaves a huge chunk of white on the right hand side of the screen when I’m searching. I can probably fit 4-5 columns of search results on my 20″ iMac.
• Speed. This one’s a throw-away complaint. It’s a bit sluggish thus far, but it’s also presumably getting completely pounded with traffic, so that’s to be expected. To be honest, I’m surprised it hasn’t crashed, so I guess this belongs somewhere inbetween the good and the bad. We’ll see how they hold up once the initial rush dies down.

The Ugly

• The algorithm needs desperately to be tweaked. Earlier today if I did a search for “Primakow” a few pages of this site would show up, but not the main page, whereas a search for “Evan Primakow” yielded no results. Already a few hours later “Evan Primakow” brings up a few pages of this site, but mostly random posts and not the main page.

Ultimately, it has a ton of potential. In my opinion the only thing really holding it back is the algorithm. New features will presumably be added and I’m sure even now they’re tweaking the algorithm as traffic flows through. This is the first new search engine in a very long time that really has the potential to compete with the big boys – and I hope it does just that. The industry needs a fresh look and fresh ideas, so hopefully Cuil can live up to the Internet’s expectations.

That’s right, the long awaited Firefox 3, which I have previously encouraged you to download and install, comes out tomorrow. I’ll be sure to write up a formal review of it once I’ve really had the chance to use it. Can’t wait to play around with the new interface, new features, and enjoy the performance increases.

If you haven’t heard yet, the awesome folks over at Mozilla are attempting to set a Guinness world record for the number of software downloads in a single day. That day being the release of the highly anticipated Firefox 3.0. The absolute only thing you have to do is download Firefox 3.0 on the day of its release. The official release date has not yet been announced, but it will be soon. To find out more or get on the “Download Day” mailing list, swing by Spread Firefox and sign up!

I decided that I needed to geek out a bit this weekend and called Time Warner Cable to upgrade our standard 7 Mbps (512 Mbps upload) cable Internet access to Road Runner Turbo, which is instead capped at 15 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. Sure, there’s plenty of stuff that this will have absolutely no impact on, but I noticed an immediate difference in online gaming as well as certain mainstream websites which I frequent. Uploading to the ftp servers for the websites I run has also doubled in speed, which is great. On top of those reasons there is, of course, always the geek bragging rights associated with having the fastest available Internet access available in Wisconsin and among the fastest in the country.