I know this isn’t something new and can be done quite easily these days with the many video-to-ASCII converters. But hey, I believe it’s still pretty entertaining to watch The Incredibles in ASCII format. Although it’s only a very short scene.

The whole short clip was created by tonnes of images pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard in 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). If this movie clip was done by hand coding, that would have been hell of an achievement, right?

Watch The Incredibles ASCII movie now! The movie clip takes a while to download. Patience is a Virtue, my friend.

Can you believe this? Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) was seen with a MacBook at the podium while he gave his presentation. Not sure if he was actually seen using the MacBook though.

Haha… anyway, as some Flickr commenters pointed out Steve Ballmer didn’t actually use the MacBook for his presentation. The picture was real and authentic, and that was also his presentation slide which was most likely driven by another computer. That MacBook in the picture was left behind by some other people, perhaps the conference organizers or a previous presenter.

Too bad, I actually hoped that was his MacBook!

On another thought, even if he was using a MacBook for his presentation, there is nothing too surprising, right? Macs run Windows just like any other laptops, and also PowerPoint for Mac OS X. So, as long as he’s still using Microsoft Windows, there isn’t anything to shout about.

I believe most website owners and bloggers have RSS feeds to distribute their content to a wider audience. We have all heard of web directories for regular link submission, but do you know that there are many directories specifically developed for promoting your RSS feeds? And the good news is that almost all of them accept free submissions, and the even good news is that I have painfully went through the 100 plus RSS directories and search engines and stripped out the inactive, slow, poor quality ones.

The following are active directories and search engines that receive visitors and FREE submissions. Yes, they are all FREE and requires no payment and no reciprocal links. You do not need to register first also. Go to these sites and submit your feeds now to get more visitors and readers!

• 2RSS.com
• Add A Feed
• Blo.gs
• BlogDigger.com
• Bloglisting.net
• BlogPulse.com

Take a break.

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Ad funded mobile services were thought to be annoying and the pay-off uncertain. But a UK based mobile virtual network operator has come out with results that could give a major boost to ad-funded services.

An excerpt from BusinessWeek

Blyk—a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) which piggybacks on the Orange network and gives users 217 free texts and 43 free voice minutes per month in exchange for receiving no more than six targeted ad texts/picture messages per day—has reached its annual member target half a year ahead of schedule.

The key factor here is targeted advertising. Google has shown the potential of relevant content based advertising on the Internet. Now applying that same logic to mobiles but with more user specific information such as location, presence and etc makes for much more targeted advertising. The results from Blyk may well be a forerunner to what may be the next era of mobile services that are driven and supported by ads.

Considering that later this year we will be seeing the first handsets based on Google’s Android platform, ad-driven mobile services will be so much more interesting. Perhaps the catch here is that you don’t get a free phone supported by ads. Still, would you sign-up for a free mobile based service for receiving ads (annoying as they may be)?

We have been talking about 3G iPhone and perhaps some other cool features in the next version of Apple iPhone. But folks at Applicando couldn’t wait any longer and did a speed comparison between iPhone’s EDGE download speed and a mimicked 3G iPhone.

In the comparison video two Apple iPhones open up the same web page side-by-side.

The 3G iPhone is demonstrated by using a WIFI connection, sharing the internet connection of an iMac which was connected to the internet via HSDPA (Huawei E172 HSPDA modem).

Not surprisingly, the winner was the “3G iPhone” which took 16 seconds to load the web page while the EDGE iPhone took nearly twice as long! This comparison test is merely a likely experience of 3G/HSDPA surfing on a future real 3G iPhone.