There is an interesting twitter tool called twitter.grader.com in the web telling you how your twitter grade is. See on which position you are, compared with all the other twitterers in the whole world.

You even can divide the view by location and have a prying look, if you made it beeing under the top 50 twitterers in your city, region or country.

The rank is calculated by a lots of criteria such like how many followers you have and which power they have. Also your activity is defining a part of your ranking and quality.

This is also nice to find the best of the best and to get new interesting people of the community to follow.

My unique color

The amount of available colors is really huge, so it is possible that everybody can have his own color. Colors are mostly compound with the RGB color model. They are mixed out of three values, where R is red, G is green and B is blue. The shading is zero for none and 255 for full power. If you think in lights and mix all colors together you reach white equals RGB(255,255,255). Black would result in RGB(0,0,0).

When you are dealing with HTML, then hexadecimal codes are used to describe the colors. So white would be FF (255) and black 00 (0).

Combining all color shades together there are 255*255*255 = 16,581,375 single colors! Ok, there are more people living on planet earth than just 16 million. Coulourism had the idea to combine your name and birthday to find your unique color.

My unique color is a nice Purple (#9208A1).

So what is your color? Post it as a comment.

Bits in 60 seconds

If you are programming you will get in contact with binary digits sooner or later, well known abbreviated as bits. Then it is good to know what is, how it works, and to be able to calculate them without using a calculator. At the latest when doing a website with HTML or CSS you will have do deal with hexadecimal codes.

In the Nirwana Software blog I have found a very smart and quick explaination done with a flipchart and an easy example. In 60 seconds you will know, and if you are still at school, tell your informatics teacher, because most of them can not explain that clear and that short, I swear!

MacOSaiX

So often I have seen picture mosaics and I wanted to do one by myself, because I find them so amazing and fantastic.

A picture mosaic is one picture which is made of other pictures as like a screenshot is made with pixels.

Searching a short while lead me to the freeware tool MacOSaiX which does exactly that thing. In the screenshot I used a photo from a friend’s marriage. I have a collection of 500 pictures of this event and all of them are included to build this single one. If you zoom in you really can see every single photo clearly!

The program has many options and the export function lets you define really high resolution for professional poster printings.

Xaos fractal zoomer

Fractals are really amazing, and more fascinating when they are moving.

With Xaos you have a freeware fractal zoomer with lots of filters, effects and algorithms.

You really should have a look at this, because it is hard to describe with words.

If you love the Mandelbrot, you will certainly like this tiny and powerful realtime zoomer.

Have a nice journey into the world of visualized formulas.

Seti at Lazy town

Magnus Scheving is a great sports artist and my kids love his show Lazy Town on TV. Playing the role as Sportacus, he promotes fresh apples and other fruit as so called powersnacks to motivate the children eating more healthy food.

In that series is a guy called Pixel and he is something like a kid computer freak. His room is completely filled with lots of tech stuff and monitors. And guess what I detected running on one of them.

Pixel is running the classic SETI@HOME screensaver application searching for extraterristic intelligence (aliens) and crunching the digitized radio telescope data.

SETI is based on BOINC, a grid computing software, helping out scientist groups and universities solving huge problems, only can be calculated by supercomputers. It splits the tasks into small pieces, which can be done on almost every computer having a internet connection.

That great software is made for all common operating systems. It runs in the background and when the user is idle it does its work using the CPU and will transfer the completed results and grab new tasks.

Completed tasks will be actually granted with credits to honor your computers work and time. They can be viewed on several statistic pages in competition with other users and built teams.