Lifestyle

Can I Lick It? A Periodic Table Guide

I saw this on a t-shirt and had to know whether the verdicts hold up. I did what any responsible nerd in 2026 would do. I asked AI to fact-check the lickability of every element on the periodic table. Hover any cell for the why.

Please do not actually lick any elements. Not even the green ones. Yes, the chart says gold is fine. Yes, you can technically eat gold leaf. But “technically safe to lick” and “a good idea” are two very different categories, and this blog post is not a permission slip.

My private little G1/Android wish and hit list

First of all, I have to say that I like the phone a lot. While you may get an impression from the rest of the post that I have a lot of beef with the phone, that’s really not the case. The very fact that I can compile a short, coherent list of things that I think could be improved upon, made me realize how little there is to be wishing for. And none of the problems is a deal breaker. It’s not like the phone is missing Copy&Paste or MMS ;). It does almost all I expected it to do (even in version 1.0), but since a few of my colleagues is looking forward to get one I thought I’d throw in a list of the little annoyances that I have faced using it, so they might verify how important the drawbacks might be to them. I am not sure how many of those can be addressed with third party applications but, for sure not all of them can, and I would definitely love Google to step in and provide a system-fix for them at some point.

Merged contacts in gmail rendered uneditable - the fix

Long story short. Bought G1 lately so I’ve decided to bring peace to my tormented contact list once and for all. Editing in Gmail is… adequate. I’ve been able to import most of my contacts - naturally countless of those were duplicates as I integrated my mail contact list and my phone contact list. Where gmail contacts list editing excels is at allowing you to merge those.

It’s incredibly convenient:

Is it Yeti? Is it a magazine? I sense disturbance in The Force

There’s been a great link to an article forwarded to me today to a Newsweek’s Apple PR division Technology columnist Steven Levy. Where he claimed that he has lost (although he is not sure (LOL) ) his MacBook Air. blogosphere is throwing their hands up in the Air ;), but really… it’s so funny on so many levels that people are all about the story (ironically so am I with this post). The article is such a great example of the Apple hype machine at its best. Let me elaborate

Silicon Valley says: Do what Cognifide does!

There is a really heartwarming article (if you’re from Poland) on Silicon Valley Watcher about the skills of Polish engineers, the low turnover and the general satisfaction from Polish employees by international companies something that UK as a country discovered and Cognifide in particular have noticed quite a while ago. And I really can fully relate to that, I would bet any money to stand the competency of any person in my crew against any of the top professionals out there. It definitely is a good time to be in the IT business in here. A small excerpt - worth noting:

Nokia N95 - Just because I'm cheap!

Some time ago, with a little help of TDI some time ago I’ve successfully switched all my outgoing calls to Voipdiscount, while at the same time moving my incoming calls’ number to mobile provider through a Sagem base station, all of this nicely integrated in a Linksys SPA3102 gateway in a way that a regular person grabbing a phone at my desk cannot realize that at the current moment it’s a hybrid not really having much in common with the POTS, they expect to be using. All of this effectively reducing the monthly phone spending to a negligible monthly fee, just in time when my eldest starts to spend hours on the phone - great!

The Wiki Family

Writing user documents for our company, I ’ve been using our corporate wiki a lot recently. Confluence is incredible. I can honestly say I’ve not been impressed by a piece of software to that degree for quite a while. I really like how it provides me with the possibility for creating small pages like “format specifications” and “installation info” which I can then assemble into e.g. “User’s manual” simple and seamless:

Skype GeoLocation Tool

Download source files - 103 Kb Download the Skype Geo Location tool - 52 Kb

Introduction

It’s a real joy to work in a international company, the problem we face are hardly ever matched by some locally based endeavours… As some of our friends here at work, you may choose to reveal your current location to your skype buddies. This is nice and easy since you can just put it in your name or description and everyone will see where you are.This poses a problem should you really travel frequently, it is more likely than not, that your location tag will be out of sync. As this is a something that happens for them once in a while I found it an interesting concept, fun enough to be worth solving it :) So how does one establish his location? Short of installing a GPS on your machine, I would suggest checking your IP address and translating it based on one of the available databases. The thought process goes as follows… [Read about the technical guts of the application in my article at Code Project]

Jingle Bells...

Just so you know… when you’ll notice a Father Christmas sitting on a chair in the local mall, it might have never crossed your mind that is’t a hard and dangerous job of many people that leads to these short moments of joy and happiness that you and your children experience.

Fortunately the Woodpecker Film has taken the risk and the courage to document the process for you. But beware! Precautions must be taken…

New week, new toy

I’ve just found this cool app that allows you to post to blogs, including our own one.

http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/

go ahead and try it! I’m writing this article in it! As cool as WordPress is, it’s writing editor sucks. I don’t tend to write often, but when I start, my articles usually take more than a page and if in the process I accidentally press the shortcut for the browser go-back… I’m crying! I also wonder if you’ve ran into the 1000 miles long line bug in the WordPress editor? It seems to sometimes make all spaces in the line non breakable, there is a solution to this, which is to press enter and then go back to the line again and delete and re-insert all the spaces again… which makes me cry some more! I am also just not a big fan of Web interfaces for something so interactive as creating documents or calculations (hint, hint Google). I think Web is more suited for presentation whereas desktop is for creation.

It’s the era of XBOX 360. Is Playstation 3 stillborn?

Those that met me more than once know what a geek I am, my eyes basically glow on a sight of a cool new gadget. My wife on the other hand, couldn’t care less, she is as far from a geek as it gets. An email? Something needs to be found on The Web? Why learn anything when you have a guy next to you doing it all for you when you need it, and being hapy about it too!

Spying upon myself

I’ve not been to the site for a while, so I figured I’ll check if I have not written anything new in the mean time? Nope, it does not look like I did. Nothing to see here? Move along?

Birthday cake for a geek

How to make a nerd happy for his birthday.

Originally posted on Wincustomize.com

So Saturday was my birthday. I’d rather not think about which one (it was round). And today I’ve gotten a little late email from my sister with 2 photo’s of a neat hardware she’s found on the Internet … (I think she actually got them through email)

I was tempted to post it in “Gadgets & Electronics” category, but finally decided against… I think they actually pre-date their era and may be too revolutionary for our times. We all know what happens to products like that developed by some unknown startups… they become absorbed by the market leaders and disappear in their bowels without any trace.

We need to remember , not to let the horror ever happen again.

60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

Originally posted on JoeUser.com

Today is the 60th anniversary of liberation of the Auschwitz concentation camp. Probably the last round anniversary with so many witnesses still alive. Auschwitz was a German Nazzis’ camp of mass murder which took the death toll of about 1.5 million people. Most of them were Jews from Poland and surrounding countries, Poles, Gypsies and homosexuals and Soviet POWs. The leaders of 30 countries gather in Krakow, POLAND (near Oswiecim - polish name for German Auschwitz) today to honor the death of the innocent victims of the sick ideology that some humans are somehow inherently better than others.