Breaking Mentos News: A world record was broken recently by 1360 Belgium students all creating a Diet Coke and Mentos fountain at the same time. The previous record was set in Cape Girardeau, with 973 fountains last October.

Video from BBC News

I just upgraded to a Blu-ray player (another post is coming) so I went in and switched my Netflix account to send me BD movies instead of DVD movies. In doing so, I’ve been digging around my account more and am really not impressed by the recommendations they provide.  I’ve had an account for about two years now and the movies that Netflix thinks I’ll love… really aren’t. First I thought it was because I haven’t rated enough movies for it to get an idea of my tastes, but with a little under 900 ratings, that can’t be true any more… can it? I don’t think there has ever been an instance where Netflix recommended a movie to me and I added it to my queue. If it has happened, I could probably count the times on a single hand. I know that they’re working on the recommendation system with their Netflix Prize contest, (side note: Wired had a great article on this contest a couple months back) but don’t know if any improvements gained from this contest have made it to the site yet or not. So here’s my question: does anyone else have this issue with their Netflix queue? Does Netflix recommend nothing but gems for your viewing pleasure? If so, how many movies have you rated in your account? Let me know… maybe Netflix just doesn’t like me.

I think these are easily the geekiest pants I’ve ever seen. They’ve got a keyboard on the front, a mouse on the back, and speakers on the knees. How many double-entendres can you think of for these?

Just when you thought they couldn’t get any smaller, this guy (blog in French) mods an entire old school Nintendo Entertainment System to fit into a Super Mario Brothers Cartridge. Sweet!

Picasa opened up their button API a few weeks back paving the way for Picasa2Flickr to work once again. I first started using this handy little app while back. Then, after a random Picasa update, it stopped working. After waiting anxiously for several months, Picasa2Flickr is one again functional! The new version does require you have Flickr Uploadr 3.0 installed, but that’s what I was using in the interim anyway. So now, all I do is select the photos I want to upload in Picas, hit the new handy-dandy little “Send to Flickr” button and the photos are sent off to the Flickr Uploader, saving me a few steps.

With one single application, you can consolidate IM, e-mail, and social networking. That one app, is Digsby. In the past, I have used Pidgin on Windows, and Adium on the Mac for all my instant messaging needs. I’ve been happy with how they handle all the protocols I use (or rather all my buddies use) pretty well. Along came Digsby late last month with a piece of software that does all that and more. Not only does it include just about every instant messaging protocol out there (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Chat, ICQ, Jabber), but it also notifies you when you receive new e-mail (from just about every popular webmail client + pop and IMAP). On top of that, it hooks into several social networks as well (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace) and lets you know when folks contact you via those protocols. Don’t get me wrong, I love Pidgin, and Adium, but Digsby adds those little extras that take it a step further. Plus, I like the skinning and theming that Digsby allows, making it a little nicer environment when compared to Pidgin.

It is missing a few things though. I’d like to be able to hook up to Skype with it, but there aren’t that many IM apps that do that now, so it isn’t that big of a deal. It is also missing message encryption which is built in for Adium, and available as a plugin for Pidgin. Digsby is still in beta though and at the frantic speed they’re adding features, I can only hope that those aren’t too far away. I haven’t totally uninstalled Pidgin or
Adium, but I find myself using Digsby for longer periods at a time. If those few extra features get thrown in, there isn’t much holding me back from going 100% Digsby.

This is nothing short of impressive. Nihilogic has written a partial level of the original Super Mario Brothers game in 14kb of code entirely with javascript! This is the technology that makes your websites work being used to write a game that was pretty cutting edge when it was released. Give it a try!