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Filed under: Mozilla, Browsers

Mozilla Jetpack contest winner harnesses GPU power to process data

Mozilla Labs has announced a winner of the Jetpack .5 contest. While Jetpack is known primarily as a framework for allowing coders with a web development background to put together add-on type enhancements for Firefox, the winner 's project wasn't your run-of-the-mill sidebar hack.

Alex Miltsev's submission was jetpack-to-CUDA, and it provides Jetpack developers with a simple way to offload intense processing tasks to GPUs. CUDA (demo video above) is NVidia's parallel computing architecture - and with CUDA-capable chips in more than 100 million PCs, Miltsev's handiwork could enable some seriously cool (and powerful) Jetpack add-ons to be developed.

The runners up (not to take anything away from them) were much more standard Jetpack offerings - a Google Translate extension, link shortener and sharer, and Twitter client.

Kudos to Miltssev for his creative entry! Here's hoping we see some truly awesome things in future versions of Firefox and Jetpack as a result.

Filed under: Fugly Friday

Fugly Friday : Aiseikai Hospital has no opthamologist on staff


With all the hullabaloo over medical reform in the U.S., you might wonder what health care looks like in other parts of the world. At this hospital in Japan, your care comes with a healthy side order of flashing, blinking Lucky Cats, and a prescription strength dose of animated gifs.

Warning: If you're epileptic, we take no responsibility for what may happen if you click to view this Fugly Friday. And, for once, we're really not joking.

Granted, I don't read Kanji, but I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to say that this site is in need of some time in the emergency room. Even if the visible text were eloquent and poignant -- and I could read Japanese -- the overwhelming and incredibly inappropriate use of crazy color combos, frames and the dreaded solid black background of doom makes this a Fugly Friday to remember -- and avoid.

Filed under: Fun, Social Software, iPhone

Balloons: launch a balloon from your iPhone, see who finds it

If you ever let a helium balloon float away when you were a kid and wondered where it eventually ended up, you already know what Balloons for the iPhone is all about. This cute little app lets you launch a virtual balloon with a message and a photo attached. Anyone with the app installed call pull down balloons near them -- Balloons uses the iPhone's location services -- and read messages.

I grabbed a few balloons to see what it was all about, and it was more addictive than I expected. My first balloon was an ad, launched by some marketer near my city (Boo! Hiss!), but then things started getting interesting. I caught a balloon that had drifted from London to Texas to Arizona, picking up new notes along the way. Balloons reminds me of the message-in-a-bottle feeling of the early days of the Internet -- "Hey, who else is out there?"

I tested the Lite version of Balloons, which is free. There's also a $2.99 version that adds the ability to track your balloons, in case you get really serious. TUAW interviewed the developer at this year's WWDC.

Filed under: Internet, Macintosh, Blogging, Web services, Yahoo!, Shareware, web 2.0

Viewfinder brings powerful Flickr search to your Mac

Every now and then I find myself working on slides in Keynote and writing Download Squad posts - and struggling to find a suitable image. Of course, Flickr is the best way to find images - their clear licencing and Creative Commons support makes finding images fairly straight forward. However, getting the image into Keynote isn't entirely painless. The workflow of browsing search results, viewing the image and then finding it at a suitable size (if it exists) takes time - however that's where Viewfinder steps in.

A native Mac OS X application (requiring Mac OS X Snow Leopard), Viewfinder allows you to search Flickr from the desktop apply filters to show only Creative Commons images, and specify a particular image size. Then, once you select an image you can download the image, set it as your desktop background - and most importantly - send images straight to Keynote for your slides.

If you're a heavy keynote user (or blogger) who frequently needs to find Flickr images for your work Viewfinder is indispensible. I've been testing it since early September and found it an incredibly convenient tool to have at hand. A licence costs £15 (roughly $25) and a free demo is available for you try from the Viewfinder webpage.

Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters

Number Ninjas is an addictive, equation-solving Time Waster


Everybody loves a good Time Waster. Everybody loves ninjas. And everyone loves solving mathematical equations, right? Number Ninjas is all this goodness rolled up into one slick little Flash game!

You play the number one, armed with a ninja's favorite projectiles: throwing stars. And by "stars" I mean +, -, /, and *. To complete a level, you've got to defeat enemy numerals using the correct operator to satisfy the equation in the bottom right corner.

Sure, nailing this eight with a + would do the trick, but who knows what other numbers lurk around the next corner? Perhaps there's a two waiting to pounce? Who knows how many other nasties this guy brought to the fight. Getting the correct mix may take you a few tries on some levels, but I didn't find the process frustrating.

If you want a good way to keep your brain limber for a few minutes, Number Ninjas is a good way to do it.

Ten gadgets to make Google Wave more productive - and fun!

digg_url = 'http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/11/06/ten-gadgets-to-make-google-wave-more-productive-and-fun/'; It's still early days for Google Wave but already there are a large number of Gadgets and Robots being developed. If you don't know the difference, Gadgets are local, client-side (as in they run on your computer), Javascript and HTML. Robots run remotely on another server. ...

Game on, Microsoft: Google Chrome shipping as default browser on some PCs

The EC might be content with Microsoft's browser ballot screen, but that's not stopping Google from getting OEMs to turn away from Internet Explorer on their own. Google already has deals with several OEMs to include their software, of course. They've been shipping Google Desktop on OEM pcs for quite some time now, and their plans to drop Google Chrome on new users have come to fruition as well. ...

Boxee media center to hit beta next month

Media center application Boxee has grabbed a lot of headlines over the past year or two, and for good reason: Boxee provides Mac, Linux, and Windows users with an excellent solution for watching internet video on a TV. While web browsers were generally designed for viewing text and images with video thrown in as an afterthought, Boxee was designed to look and feel more like a consumer electronics ...

Twitter plans to cut the noise out of trending topics ... but how?

Have you ever actually clicked on any of Twitter's trending topics? I don't want to sound like the old guy telling whippersnappers to get off his lawn, but trying to read almost any Twitter trend gives me a headache. There's so much spam with popular hashtags attached that even people who care about the trends aren't getting a great user experience. Twitter realizes this, and they're going to do ...

Skype lives on, reaches settlement with Joltid

A few months ago there was talk that a lawsuit could bring down the popular VoIP client Skype. That's because Skype was involved in a dispute with Joltid, a company that Skype was licensing technology from. Today Skype announced that the company has reached a settlement with Joltid. The net result is that Skype now owns the technology and Joltid founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis ...

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

View more Time Wasters

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