Wow – nothing but randomness today:
- Fox announced this week that the producers of Bones will solve the mystery of the canceled show Vanished in an episode this season. This is, as you might guess, somewhat unusual. Characters and plot lines from spin-offs sometimes intermingle with the original show, but as you probably know Bones and Vanished are completely unrelated. It’s nice of the Bones people to wrap up the loose ends from Vanished, though. Read all about it here.
- Sad news: the Weekly World News will cease publication in August. I used to read the WWN in high school; it was unparalleled in sheer entertainment value. I haven’t bought it in years, and the times I flipped through it in the stores, it seems that the “quality” has dropped off greatly in recent years. Oh well… Ed Anger, we’ll miss you!
- Bricklehampton, England is the longest isogrammatic place name in the English speaking world. An isogram is a word in which each letter appears only once.
- What’s the latest craze sweeping the Internet? Stateris, a version of the perennial favorite game Tetris, this time based on a map of the United States. At the “easy” level, the 50 states are labeled and fall from top of the screen; your job is to put them in the right place. At the “Medium” level, the states are still labeled, but they now rotate 360 degrees as they fall. At the “Hard” level, the states aren’t labeled at all. It’s pretty fun… check it out!
- Ming Fendi’s new “Ring” concept is one of the sexiest (and most practical!) designs I’ve seen in years. It’s a dual alarm clock that features ring. You set the alarm and put one of the rings on your finger. When it’s time to wake up, the ring vibrates your finger to wake you up, leaving your significant other undisturbed. Of course, the images from the Engadget link are simply a mock-up, but if the actual product looks like that – including the e-ink display… man, that would be a geek sexay product, for sure!
- Bored Japanese people are putting gold in their coffee.
- Lastly, did you now that it’s easy to have Microsoft Outlook automatically identify email from people in your Contacts? This post over at Productivity Portfolio shows you how. In short, the post shows you how to create a rule that will automatically categorize incoming email from people in your address book. You can then filter your inbox (or do what I do and add the category to your Favorite folders). If you’re like me and you get hundreds of emails\RSS feeds a day, this is a great way to make sure that mail from important people gets seen quickly!