September 2006 – truk rambles

Curious about how evil you are but never had an automated way to find out? Well, check out the Gematriculator:

You can type in a website URL or just paste in some text and immediately find out just how evil that website or text is using the “infallible” methods of Gematria developed by Mr. Ivan Panin. Gematria is extremely complicated, but it involves searching for patterns throughout text that can be converted to numbers and then summing the “good” numbers to see how many there are in ratio to “bad” number.

Yeah, it’s pretty kooky. But it’s all in good fun.

Or is it? 😉

This “utility” was brought to you by the same folks that developed the Kill Everyone project. Basically, on that site, you click a button to kill people. Well, virtually. One mouse click = one dead virtual person. They are nearing the actual population of the Earth, and everyone is in a race to be the person to click, eh, kill the last person on Earth.

Previous Trivia Answer: Muhammad Ali.

Tired of finding the best website via user-submitted websites like Digg or Metafilter? Wanting more of a raw approach to finding sites that various people are visiting all around the world? Well, check out The Swarm:

http://www.swarmthe.com/go/swarm

This is a website where you can see what sites people are visiting at the time they are visiting them. An image of the site is provided so that you don’t have to click through to view the content unless you are really curious about a particular page. If you don’t like Flash, a text-only Swarm page is available.

Of course, there are a lot of lemons in there, as well as they occasional porn site, though Swarm browsers usually set those to be blocked pretty quickly. The more a site is visited, the closer it gets to the center of The Swarm and the more people see it. Go to The Swarm homepage to read more about it.

All of this works via a Firefox extension that anyone running Firefox as their web browser can load and use to contribute sites they browse automatically to the Swarm. (And you should be running Firefox for all web browsing if you use Windows, at the very least for your protection.) The more people that run the extension, the more sites they can find and rank, and the more interesting things we can find on the Web.

I’ve already found a site that I probably wouldn’t have found without it: Pjotro, the Man with the Musical Suit.