I used to wonder how big is the radius of atomic explosion would really be, if it were to be detonated over my home city. Take for e.g., the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima at the end of World-War-II, if it were to be detonated with the Petronas Twin Tower as the epicenter, how far would the heat wave reach ? The answer is, people living in as far as the Lake Garden, Sentul, Desa Pandan, Taman Maluri, etc, would suffer 1st degree burn! And that’s with that 1 atomic bomb from more than 60 years ago! Imagine what would happen with the largest hydrogen bomb ever detonated (for testing) – the Tsar Bomba (equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT). With just one of that piece of hell, all of the Selangor State with part of Negeri Sembilan and Pahang state, from Tanjong Malim, all the way down to one of Malaysia’s beach destination, Port-Dickson (90km from Kuala Lumpur) and beyond Bentong to the east will be affected, with whole of Klang Valley totally decimated! That could be, what, more than 5 millions people?!

Check it out from this new website called Ground Zero. Here, you can simulate how a nuclear blast would affect any place in the world.

1. Just key in the name of the place you would like to nuke, click Search to go to that place.

2. Next, select your weapon of choice and click ‘Nuke it’ to see the instant action!

Below are the meanings of the radius’s colors, with ‘1st degree burns’ means minor skin burn, and ‘Conflagration’ means you’re fatally screwed up with Great Ball of Fire all around you and inside of you.

You may have noticed that you can actually choose ‘Asteroid Impact’ as your weapon. I see this as just a ‘fun’ option, because the radius of damage would need to depend on the size of the asteroid, and no one is quite certain of its impact so far. Looking at the result it produces (where the whole continents are affected), it looks like it’s using the highest Torino Scale of 10 ? If we’re not killed by the initial impact’s blast, we will still be killed by the subsequent dust, debris, poisonous rain, draught, hunger, tsunami, volcanoes, etc; generally the end of civilizations as we know it.

Holy Cow!

Look at this photo collage below.

Do you believe that I created this in less than 5 minutes ? Absolutely! I did this using the free tools called Shape Collage 2.0. You can create photo collage using any of the provided shape, or  if you like, you can even use any text as the shape, or draw your own shape for the collage, very flexible!

The best part is, it’s dead simple. Just a few-clicks of a button and it’s done. Look at the screenshot below.

 

1. Just click ‘+’to add your photos individually, or the whole folder full of your photos

2. Set the shape of your collage, or type in text. Yes you can even use those special Unicode characters in http://www.rojakmee.com/2008/11/special-asciiunicode-symbols-you-can.html.

3. Set the size of the collage output. The default ‘Auto’ setting may create a very large image if you have a lot of photos, so you may want to set this to a smaller one, for e.g. your screen resolution size.

4. Go to the ‘Appearance’ tab to optionally set the background colors and border size, etc.

5. Click the ‘Create’ button to immediately generate the photo collage.

 

It’s always great to know that there are so many free tools available for almost everything we wanted to do on a computer!

Today is St. Valentine’s Day, and here’s to wish all a very Happy Valentine’s Day!

There are tons of websites out there offering you with Valentine’s day pictures, gift ideas, online greeting cards, etc. What I’ll offer here, is something a little bit different.

Valentine’s Day can be a bit of a sad day for some people – yes, to those of you who hasn’t found your special someone, or who has lost them in some ways. For those who is secretly admiring someone, and do not dare/do not want to let him/her know, here’s something which just might makes you feel better.

These special websites allows you to send out an email at later date! If you still can’t get what I mean, imagine this – you wanted to express your feeling, but not now, not yet. You want to let her know when the time comes. But somehow you fear the unexpected - what if you’re no longer here one of these days ? When that day comes, you want to be able to tell him/her, but how ?

The first website here is LetterMeLater. After registration, you can immediately compose an email and schedule it to be sent to anyone at a certain date/time. As depicted in the image, it shows a typical email composing page, where you type in the email address of your ‘someone special’, specify the date/time when you wish to have this sent out (may be another 50 years, who knows). In case you may regret this, it even has an option to send a reminder to you 3 days before the due date (check the ‘Remind’ option just before the ‘Schedule to be sent’ button’). Neato!

If you think this is not fail-safe, and want something better than this, try DeathSwitch. As the name suggests, the site will send out an email for you when you die. How does it do that ? Very simple and primitive I would say – it sends an email to you periodically (up to you), and you are supposed to reply to it. If you failed to reply after a few attempts to contact you by this service, you’ll be assumed dead, and the service will proceed to send your personal email (be it love or hate letter).

The free service allows you to send email to one recipients, or if you’re serious, you can pay for better options.

This kind of service are rare, so I’m going to list down 2 more here that I came across.

http://www.deferredsender.com/ – this is free as well, but I cant’ seems to make it work.

http://www.mylastemail.com/

http://www.deathbyemail.com/2007/12/email-after-dea.html

As you can see, these are actually tools for ‘online will writing’!

 

Valentine’s being Valentine’s, I wish you all the best and my advice is, Cherish what you have (or have-not). Lastly, my disclaimers: This blog post is not about someone I secretly admire; and neither is the blog.

p.s. Chet Hong loves His Techlog.

I use Twitter, though not quite as much as many people. One thing that bugs me is how limited the search capability is. For e.g. there was no way you could search for a particular Twitter user by name, and it’s a good thing that Twitter has finally added this search few months back. Yup, you can actually find people like Britney Spears and Obama there. For those who do not know yet – the Dalai Lama is there as well!

The other useful Twitter search is at NearbyTweets. You can use this to find Twitter users around your vicinity! This comes in pretty handy if you want to look for Twitter users around you with the same interest; or check out the latest tweets for local breaking news.

The site is very easy to use – just key in the name of the place you’re interested to check out (the name of your town, for e.g.). You can further short-list it with a keyword (for e.g. ‘iPhone’). And if you’re interested to include search for twitters from other cities/towns around your place, there’s an option to specify the search radius as well!