17 June: Radar

On this date in 1935, Radar was tested in Orfordness, Suffolk, the first time radio-based detection and ranging was shown in Britain. The first target that was detected: a flying boat 17 miles (27 km) away. 10 things you might not know about radar.

1. The word radar is an acronym for "radio detection and ranging" which was coined in the early second world war.

2. Radar uses Radio waves to determine if something, like a ship, Submarine or aircraft, is out there when you wouldn’t be able to see it, how far away it is and how fast it is moving.

3. It does this by sending out short bursts of radio waves, or pulses. Some of these will bounce back if they hit something. The waves which bounce back are known as echoes. By measuring the time it takes for a pulse to leave the radar and return as an echo, the system can calculate the distance to the object. If the object is moving, the frequency of the returning waves changes slightly, which helps the radar figure out its speed. This is called the Doppler effect, which is the reason why a siren from an ambulance sounds slightly different when it’s moving away from you rather than coming towards you. Radar is similar to the echolocation that Bats use.

4. Physicists knew about the concept of radar as far back as 1886 when Heinrich Hertz  proved that electromagnetic waves (like radio waves) exist, and that they could travel through different materials and bounce off metal surfaces.

5. In the early 1900s, a German inventor named Christian Hülsmeyer created the telemobiloscope, a device which could detect ships in Fog up to 3km away. While it did help prevent collisions in poor visibility, it didn’t tell you exactly where the other ship was.

6. Radar technology grew very fast during World War II. Eight countries were secretly working on developing it: the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, the USSR, Japan, the Netherlands, France, and Italy.

7. Some historians believe it was radar, not the atomic bomb, which helped the Allies win the war.

8. After the war, other uses for radar were developed besides finding things to shoot at. It’s used for navigation and making air and sea travel safer; it’s also used in weather forecasting, tracking animals and Birds and in medicine. The flapping of a bird’s wings distinguishes it from aircraft, and it’s even possible to tell one type of bird from another using radar.

9. Police use radar guns to measure the speed of cars on the road. One person who was caught and fined using one of these devices was Sir Robert Watson-Watt, who was one of the people who developed radar in the early days of the war with the aim of collaborating with the United States to beat the German military.

10. The cathode-ray tube has been the preferred technology for displaying radar information ever since the early days. Radar displays have developed alongside computer and television screens so they keep getting better.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

6 May: Passwords

The first Thursday in May is World Password Day. Here are ten facts about passwords.

1. The first passwords were spoken words, used, often by the military, to distinguish between friends and enemies. People you wanted to allow into your base would know the word to say. Enemies would not. In the Roman Empire, soldiers were given “watchwords” to be spoken to the night watchmen.

2. In the 11th century BCE by soldiers of Gilead used the password “shibboleth”. They didn’t care so much if their enemies found out what it was, because they would give themselves away by pronouncing it differently.

3. The first computer passwords were used by American computer scientist Fernando Corbató in 1961 to control access to the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS), a general-purpose operating system.

4. Passwords that consist only of numbers may be called passcodes or personal identification numbers (PIN).

5. 59% of people use the same password for several platforms. 20% of employees share passwords with colleagues. A person usually changes the password every 2.5 to 3 years on average.

6. The most commonly used passwords include 123456, password, qwerty123 and iloveyou.

7. Research has shown that women are more likely to use personal names in their passwords, while men use words relating to their hobbies. People are 3 times more likely to use their pet’s name rather than that of a family member. Most of the sources I looked at for this one went on and on about how bad this is. That said, a famous hacker who was on the FBI most wanted list used his cat’s name as his password, followed by ‘123.’

8. The launch code for US nuclear missiles was ‘00000000’ for 20 years.

9. At one time those in the know could access any profile on Facebook by entering the password ‘Chuck Norris’ and on Hotmail using the password ‘eh.’

10. An eight-character password containing a combination of upper and lower-case characters has a total of 53 trillion billion combinations.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

10 March: Telephone Day

Today is Telephone Day, because it was on March 10, 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call, to his assistant in another room. The first words spoken were “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” 10 things you might not know about telephones.

1. The word telephone comes from the Greek words “tele”, which means far or distant, and “phone”, which means voice. So, the name of the device translates as “distant voice”. The device we know today wasn’t the first to be called by the name. The word “telephone” was first used in 1828 by Francois Sudre to describe a musical signalling device.

2. When we pick up the phone, we say, “Hello”, but that wasn’t the greeting proposed by Bell. He preferred “ahoy-hoy,” an old nautical greeting. It was Thomas Edison who popularised “hello”. According to legend, Bell refused to conform to this and answered his calls with “ahoy-hoy” until the day he died. It‘s also said that Bell refused to have a telephone in his house because he considered it a distraction from his work.

3. While Bell is usually credited with inventing the telephone, Antonio Meucci, an immigrant from Italy, first demonstrated a similar device which he called the “teletrofono” in New York in 1860, 17 years before Bell created his invention. As of 2002, Meucci was voted by U.S. Congress to be recognised as the inventor of the telephone.

4. The first payphone was installed in 1889 in Hartford, Connecticut. It was inspired by inventor Willian Gray, who was frustrated that he had to beg his neighbours for a phone to call a doctor when his wife was ill. While use of payphones is declining thanks to mobile phones, there are still about 100,000 of them still in use in the US.

5. All telephone service in the USA and Canada was suspended for a full minute in August 1922 – during Alexander Graham Bell’s funeral.

6. Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, made the first handheld mobile phone call on the streets of New York on April 3, 1973, using a prototype of the Motorola DynaTAC.

7. The first smart phone was made by IBM in 1994. It was called Simon and featured a touch screen, email capabilities, and a handful of basic apps such as a calculator and sketch pad.

8. There’s more gold in a ton of mobile phones than there is in a ton of Gold mine ore. On average, there are around 0.034 grams of gold in an average smartphone.

9. There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people. The number is is expected to reach 18.22 billion in 2025.

10. The longest long distance telephone call ever took place in 1969. It was between US president Richard Nixon and astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, who were on the Moon at the time. Nixon called to congratulate them on their achievement.

Beta

(Combat Team Series #2)

Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?

Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.

Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream. 

Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.

Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.

Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.

Paperback

E book

6 October: Instagram

Instagram was released on this date in 2010. Here are 10 things you might not know about Instagram:

1. The first photograph to be posted on Instagram was a picture of a Dog belonging to one of the co-founders.

2. The name Instagram is a combination of the words “instant camera” and “telegram.”

3. Initially, it was just for sharing photographs, but it became possible to share a 15 second video in June 2013.

4. On any given day, 80 million photographs are shared on Instagram. That’s about 700 a second.

5. Instagram gets 1.2 billion likes every day.

6. Instagram is the 8th most visited website in the world.

7. I’d like to be able to tell you who the most followed person is, but every source I looked at gave a different answer. Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and footballer Cristiano Ronaldo were all alleged to be the most followed person. No doubt they all have been at some point but it changes so often it’s impossible to say, I guess. Same for the most followed brand, which could be National Geographic, or Nike, or some other flavour of the month entirely.

8. As for people sharing pictures of food, the most popular cuisines are Pizza, Sushi and steak.

9. On the day it launched as an iPhone app, Instagram gained 25,000 users, and had reached a million by December. The Android version did even better – it was downloaded over a million times in less than 12 hours after its release in April 2012.

10. In 2012, Ellie Goulding released a music video for her song Anything Could Happen, which consisted entirely of Instagram photographs representing words or lyrics from the song.

Character birthday

Maive Addleson, an employee of the Innovian Government in Infinitus. She began working for The Party after university and worked her way up to being the deputy team leader of the President's Campaign and Analysis Team.

She was known for having a crush on the superhero Power Blaster, despite never having met him, for which her colleagues ribbed her mercilessly. Eventually, she worked out Powerblaster’s true identity, and knowing he was spoken for, was able to move on and married a man named Gilbert.

Secrets and Skies

Jack Ward, President of Innovia, owes his life twice over to the enigmatic superhero, dubbed Power Blaster by the press. No-one knows who Power Blaster is or where he comes from - and he wants it to stay that way.

Scientist Desi Troyes has developed a nuclear bomb to counter the ever present threat of an asteroid hitting the planet. When Ward signs the order giving the go ahead for a nuclear test on the remote Bird Island, he has no inkling of Troyes' real agenda, and that he has signed the death warrants of millions of people.

Although the island should have been evacuated, there are people still there: some from the distant continent of Classica; protesters opposed to the bomb test; and Innovians who will not, or cannot, use their communication devices.

Power Blaster knows he must stop the bomb from hitting the island. He also knows it may be the last thing he ever does.

Meanwhile in Innovia, Ward and his staff gather to watch the broadcast of the test. Nobody, not even Troyes himself, has any idea what is about to happen.

Available from Amazon or Amazon Kindle

18 February: Batteries

Today is Battery Day, so here are 10 things you might not know about batteries:

1. The word battery was coined by Benjamin Franklin to describe the multiple Leyden jars he used in his experiments. He took the word from the military term “battery”, meaning a group of weapons working together.
2. It's possible people were using batteries two thousand years ago. In 1938 some archaeologists in Iraq found a 5 inch clay jar containing a vinegar solution and an iron rod surrounded by a Copper cylinder. The device produced 1.1 to 2.0 volts of Electricity. Nobody knew what its makers used it for.
3. The first battery as we know it was invented by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta in 1798. It consisted of a stack of copper and Zinc plates, separated by brine-soaked Paper disks. He called it the voltaic pile. He didn't quite understand how the thing worked, that it was fuelled by chemical reactions and wasn't inexhaustible. However, the voltage of such early batteries wasn't constant enough for them to be of any practical use. It was 1836 before British chemist John Frederic Daniell invented a more reliable device called the Daniell cell, which could be used to power electrical telegraph networks.
4. Rechargeable batteries came along in 1859 after French physicist Gaston Plante invented the Lead acid cell.
5. The largest rechargeable battery in the world is located in Fairbanks, Alaska, where it is used as a backup source of power to be used during outages.
6. Batteries work best at a temperature of 20-30 degrees C. Extreme heat and cold are both damaging to them. On a related note, if you've ever wondered why smoke alarms seem to beep a lot at night, it's because the air has cooled and slowed down the chemical reactions, making the power lower than it would be during the day and more likely to trip the device's low battery detector. That said, storing batteries at lower temperatures when not in use can extend their life.
7. There is a battery-powered bell at Oxford University which has been continuously ringing for more than 175 years. No one knows what the battery is made of and no one wants to take the device apart to find out.
8. A common experiment in school science lessons is to make batteries out of pieces of fruit or vegetables, like Potatoes. They don't produce enough power to be useful, however. If you happen to have some nuclear waste and artificial Diamonds hanging around, it's possible to make a battery that will last centuries.
9. A battery is made from four main components: a positive electrode, a negative electrode, an electrolyte and a separator. This is true no matter how big or small they are.
10. While there will be an expiration date on a box of batteries, they can still be used after this date. They may be slightly less efficient but they can still be used.

Who's That Girl?

Matt Webster lives in a tower block and attends a failing school. He dreams of being a spy like James Bond. Little does he know that he is being watched by someone who can make him into even more than that – a superhero.

His first solo mission is to attend a ball at the Decembrian Embassy and discover who is planning to steal a priceless diamond. While there, he meets the mysterious Lady Antonia du Cane, and is powerfully drawn to her. It soon becomes clear, however, that Lady du Cane is not what she seems. Matt’s quest to discover who she really is almost costs him his career.

A modern day Guy Fawkes gathers a coterie around him with the aim of blowing up Parliament with a nuclear bomb. To achieve this, they need money. Lots of it. Selling the Heart of Decembria Diamond will provide more than enough. All that stands in their way is the Freedom League – but the League is beset by internal disagreements. Can the heroes put their differences aside in time to save the day?

Prime Minister Richard Miller and his wife Fiona grieve for their daughter, Yasmin, who has been missing for three years, and is presumed to be dead. Viper agent Violet Parker could hold the key to what happened to Yasmin, but Violet is accused of giving away the organisation’s secrets. She is to be executed without trial. Will she take her knowledge of what happened to Yasmin with her to her grave?

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-Book

9 December: The Computer Mouse

On this date in 1968 Electrical engineer and inventor Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the use of the computer mouse at a demonstration which came to be known as "The Mother of all Demos" because he demonstrated a whole raft of computer things at the same event, which went on to influence the creators of both Microsoft and the Apple Mac. Here are some thing you might not know about your computer mouse.

1. Should the plural of computer mouse be "Mice" or "mouses"? The Oxford English Dictionary says you can use either, but if neither sounds right to you, you could refer to them as "mouse devices".
2. That wouldn't have been an issue if they'd gone with an early name for the device - the Turtle. However, the cable attaching it to the computer made it look too much like a mouse and that was the name which stuck.
3. While the word for a mouse the creature is different in other languages, for the device, the word is the same in many of them, including French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian.
4. Douglas Engelbart experimented with a few ideas before coming up with the mouse. One was a device people wore on their heads which tracked head movements, but the hand-held mouse proved more practical.
5. Engelbart's patent on the device expired before the mouse became widely used on all computers, so he didn't make any money from it at all.
6. The first computer to come with a mouse as standard was the Xerox PARC in 1970.
7. The track ball in a mouse was invented over ten years before the mouse itself and was a top secret military project.
8. Mouse Rage Syndrome or MRS is a thing. Akin to road rage, it's when a person takes out their computer related frustrations on their mouse by banging it on the desk or throwing it against the wall. It's common among gamers.
9. There is a unit of measurement to calculate the speed and direction of movement of a mouse. It's called the Mickey Mouse.
10. What did people do before the mouse was invented? They'd have to type everything by hand, and correcting mistakes was a pain. Otherwise they'd need to use an object like a pen to point at the screen.

Golden Thread

Terry Kennedy is inexplicably and inexorably drawn to the small town of Fiveswood as a place to live and work after university. He is sure he has never visited the town before, but when he arrives there, it seems oddly familiar.

Fiveswood has a rich and intriguing history. Local legends speak of giants, angels, wolves, a local Robin Hood, but most of all, a knight in golden armour. Fiveswood's history also has a dark side - mysterious deaths blamed on the plague, a ghostly black panther, and a landslide which buried the smugglers' caves.

Terry buys an apartment in The Heights, a house which has been empty for decades, since the previous owner disappeared. Now he has finally been declared dead, developers have moved in and turned it into six flats. Terry has the odd feeling he has lived in this enigmatic house before. But that is not all. Since childhood, Terry has had recurring, disturbing dreams which have been increasing in frequency so that now, he has them almost every night. To his dismay, the people from his nightmares are his new neighbours.

Except, that is, for Eleanor Millbrook. She is refreshingly unfamiliar. After Terry saves her from a mysterious attacker, they become close. However, Terry's nightmares encroach more and more on his waking life, until they lead him to a devastating discovery about who he really is.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

Kindle

August 23rd: The Internet

August 23 is “Internaut Day” (from ‘internet’ and ‘astronaut’), the anniversary of the day in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee opened the World Wide Web to the general public. Here are ten facts about the internet.

1. We tend to use the terms "internet" and "world wide web" interchangeably but they are two different things. The internet is a network of computers; the World Wide Web is a way of accessing and sharing information across it.
2. 2.4 billion people use the internet, that's 20% of the population of the world. Over half of the world's internet users live in Asia - 1.7 billion of them. When you add up the number of PCs, laptops, phones etc. which are connected to the internet there are over 8.7 billion of them. So there are more machines connected to the internet than there are people on Earth. It's big enough even to have its own patron saint - St Isidor of Seville, who wrote a 20-volume encyclopedia in the 7th century.
3. Now for some words. The word "internet" first appeared in 1974 in a booklet called "Internet Transmission Control Program". It is short for "internetworking" or "inter-system networking." The term ‘surfing the Internet’ was coined by Jean Armour Polly in 1992. The term URL for a web address stands for Uniform Resource Locator.
4. It takes 50 million brake horsepower worth of electrical power to keep the internet running for a day. However, a physicist called Russel Seitz, who clearly had some time on his hands, calculated, using atomic physics theory, the weight of the billions of electrons buzzing around the system. According to his calculation the internet weighs 50 grams, or 2 ounces, which is about the weight of a strawberry. The stored data, all five million Terabytes of it, if taken out of the devices housing it, would weigh less than a grain of sand.
5. We use the internet for all kinds of things now, including webcams, which can show us what the snow is like in a Ski resort on the other side of the world, or someone's face when you Skype them. The first ever webcam was set up by a bunch of students in Cambridge to watch a coffee machine - so they'd know when their Coffee was ready.
6. Then there's email. The first ever was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, an American programmer, who also first used the @ symbol to show the mail was intended for a human and not a machine. And the message? It can't have seemed important or historic at the time, because he can't remember. Over 3 million emails are sent every second. That's 247 billion a day. It probably won't surprise you to learn that 81% of it is spam. That's been around since 1978 when DEC released a new computer and operating system, and decided to send a mass email to 600 users. Who didn't appreciate it at all. Why it's called spam nobody is entirely sure but one theory is that some people playing a text adventure game got bored with it and programmed their keyboards to type in "Spam spam spam spam spam spam", imitating the Monty Python sketch.
7. There's internet dating, too, which is now the most popular way of meeting a significant other. 20% of couples getting hitched today first met on the internet.
8. Ever wonder what would happen to the internet if there was a nuclear war, Asteroid strike or zombie apocalypse? If a major catastrophe ever shut down the internet, there is a plan in place. There are seven people (I don't know who they are - it's probably a closely guarded secret) who have "the key to the internet" and would be able to get it going again.
9. How many websites are there? About 637 million, including over 250 million blogs. The internet is theoretically available in every country of the world but in some places it's severely restricted by the government. Like in North Korea, and to a lesser extent, China. Each country has a suffix to use to identify its websites - for example, .uk for Britain, and .ca for Canada. When Montenegro declared independence from Yugoslavia in 2006, its Internet domain suffix changed from .yu to .me.
10. The web has been the fastest growing method of communication in human history. It took just four years to reach 50 million users. Television took more than a decade to achieve that. However, in the early days, not everyone believed it was going to take off. In 1995, Newsweek published an article saying there was no way people were going to use it to get information or buy things. The article is available to read. Guess where? On their website.

See details of all my books

Browse other topics I've covered in this blog - HERE.

Like my Facebook page for news of Topical Ten posts posts on my writing blog, a weekly writing quote and news of upcoming publications

3rd April: Bar Code Day

It's Bar Code Day. So here are ten things you may not know about barcodes:

1. The first barcodes were used to label railway cars.
2. The first barcode for groceries was invented by Bernard Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland, who'd been asked by the food chain, Food Fair, to find out if there was a way to read product information at the checkout.
3. The first item ever to be scanned was a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, in Ohio, in 1974. The gum is now in the Smithsonian museum.
4. In the UK, the first product to have a barcode was Melrose 100 Century teabags in 1978.
5. In China, all barcodes start with a figure eight, because it is pronounced the same way as the word for "prosperity" and is considered to be a lucky number.
6. Talking of numbers, conspiracy theorists have suggested that the Guard bars, the bit containing patterns at the beginning, middle, and end of a barcode, look like the coding for the number 6 and are therefore code for the number of the beast, 666. The developer of the UPC code, George J. Laurer made a statement to reassure people that there was nothing sinister about it, it was a coincidence, like the fact that all three of his names had six letters.
7. By entering personal information at http://www.barcodeart.com/artwork/netart/yourself/index.html you can get your own personal barcode which you can download, print, and scan to find out how much you are worth!
8. Five billion barcodes are scanned worldwide every day.
9. The first barcode scanners were the size of a Washing machine because they contained components that had to be water-cooled.
10. The world's smallest barcode has lines one thousandth of an inch wide. Why so small? Because they were attached to bees to monitor their mating habits.

4th February: Facebook

On this date in 2004, Facebook was founded. So here are ten things you might not know about Facebook:

1. 1 in every 13 people on Earth is on Facebook.
2. The man whose face appeared on the 2007 Facebook homepage behind a cloud of binary code is the actor Al Pacino.
3. Facebook’s library contains over 140 billion photos, which is about 100,000 times what the US Library of Congress has, and amounts to 4% of all the photos ever taken.
4. The "Like" button was originally going to be called the "awesome" button.
5. Facebook is predominantly blue because Mark Zuckerberg is colour blind and blue is the colour he can see best.
6. The most "liked" company on Facebook is Coca Cola.
7. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and spends 21 minutes a day on the site.
8. Adding numbers after the Facebook URL takes you to the personal pages of the founders. https://www.facebook.com/4, for example, takes you to Mark Zuckerberg's page. 5 gets you to Chris Hughes, 6 to Dustin Moskovitz and 7 to Arie Hasit.
9. Every 20 minutes, 1,000,000 links are shared; 1,484,000 event invites are posted; 1,851,000 status updates are entered; 1.972 million friend requests are accepted; 2,716,000 photos are uploaded; 2,716,000 messages are sent and 10.2 million comments are posted.
10. Your Facebook page can be translated into 70 different languages, including English (Pirate), in which friends are called "mateys", commenting is called "scrawling a mark" and so on. To try this out, on your page, scroll down to below the pictures of your friends where there is some grey text which will either say something like "select a language" or will display the language you're currently using eg "English (UK)". Click on this to get a full list of available languages, including "English (Pirate)". Follow the same procedure to go back to normal English.

23 October: iPod Day

iPod Day: The first ever iPod was released, this date in 2001. Here are 10 things you might not know about your music device:

1. There have been 25 different models of the iPod since its introduction. There are three current versions: the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle, the compact iPod Nano and the touchscreen iPod Touch.
2. The team of engineers commissioned to design the iPod included Jon Rubinstein, Tony Fadell, Michael Dhuey, and Sir Jonathan Ive.
3. The name iPod was suggested by Vinnie Chieco, and was inspired by the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in particular the line "Open the pod bay door, HAL!" It refers to the white EVA Pods of the Discovery One spaceship. Chieco saw an analogy to the relationship between the spaceship and the smaller independent pods in the relationship between a personal computer and the music player.
4. However, when Apple looked into it they found the name was already in use. Joseph N. Grasso of New Jersey had originally listed the name "iPod" for internet kiosks, but these were no longer in use and Grasso agreed to let Apple use the name.
5. As well as playing music, iPods have been put to work in the business and education worlds as a way of delivering training.
6. The volume can reach 120 decibels, but when in France, beware of cranking up the volume, because it is illegal there to play your iPod louder than 100 decibels.
7. Although the iPod was released in 2001, the iTunes Store didn't come along until 2003. Customers bought one million songs in the store’s first week. There are over 43 million songs available on the iTunes Store in over 119 countries.
8. By September 2012, about 350 million iPods had been sold.
9. The first iPod ever made had 5GB of capacity (about 1,000 songs). It cost $399 and only connected with Macs. The original iPod had the game Brick (invented by Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak) included as an easter egg hidden feature.
10. The world's most expensive iPod is the iPod SUPREME Fire, which costs over $200,000. The case is made of solid 24ct gold. The logo and navigation buttons incorporate flawless diamonds. Only about three of them have ever been made.

15th January: Wikipedia

Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on this date in 2001. Some things you might not know about Wikipedia.

1. The name "Wikipedia" is a "portmanteau word", a combination of "wiki", from the Hawaiian word for "quick" and encyclopedia. So it means "quick encyclopaedia".
2. The symbols on the jigsaw pieces on the globe in the logo represent the letter "w" or the sound "wi" in different writing systems.
3. Wikipedia is the seventh-most popular website (behind Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, Baidu and Amazon) with 500 million people visiting it each month (as of February 2014).
4. A 2011 survey found that the average age of these visitors was 36, and a roughly equal proportion of men and women. The picture for those who contribute to it is rather different - only 13% of editors are women and the average age is mid-20s.
5. In September 2007 the English version hit two million articles. This made it the largest encyclopaedia ever, a record that had been previously held by the Yongle Encyclopaedia for 600 years. (The Yongle Encyclopaedia was commissioned by the Chinese Ming dynasty emperor Yongle in 1403 and was referred to as the "Great Canon of Yongle".) Now, Wikipedia has over 4.6 million articles.
6. There are over 200 versions of Wikipedia in different Languages, although at the very start it was only available in English.
7. In the early days, anyone could edit an article and their changes would be immediately published; but this left the site open to vandalism - people could introduce irrelevant, inaccurate or blatantly false information very easily - leading to criticisms that Wikipedia was notoriously unreliable. Now, only registered editors can contribute, and some sensitive pages are further restricted so that only certain editors or administrators can make changes.
8. Despite these criticisms, a study by the journal Nature in 2005, which compared a sample of Wikipedia articles with their counterparts in Encyclopaedia Britannica, found that, for science articles at least, there was not a lot of difference in accuracy.
9. Every article has a "Talk Page" which is where unregistered people can make suggestions for changes to the page.
10. There is an award for particularly hard working or diligent contributors, called a Barnstar. Another user can place a star image on a contributor's talk page, explaining the reasons for the award. Barnstars, according to Wikipedia, are a kind of "warm fuzzy" and their purpose is to "promote civility and WikiLove."

10th March: Telephone Day

To celebrate telephone day, here are 10 telephone jokes:

1. Telephoning 0800 1800 didn’t get me through to National Rail Enquiries - turns out I was trying to ring the opening hours.
2. A bloke keeps ringing me and singing Stand and Deliver down the line. I keep telling him he’s got the wrong number but he’s adamant.
3. What do you get if you dial 666? The Australian police.
4. What do you get if you dial 18076493280? A blister on your finger.
5. Sometimes I wonder how long I would be on hold if my call wasn’t important to them.
6. One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone.
7. A man makes a phone call. he dials, waits a moment and put the receiver down. "She must be out with the dog," he said. "I didn't hear him bark."
8. Ask not for whom the telephone bell tolls. If thou art in the bath, it tolls for thee.
9. For people who like peace and quiet: a phoneless chord.
10. Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you. Fran Leibowitz

January 23rd: Longest domain name anniversary

On this date in 2000 a certain Welsh village claimed the world record for the longest domain name. Most sites on this subject say that the best anyone can do in terms of domain names is tie for first place because 63 characters is the largest legal domain name allowed. Here are 10 of the longest domain names around:

1. www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.co.uk/
Website for the Welsh village with the longest name in Britain. It means: Saint Mary's Church in the hollow of the white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio of the red cave. The website includes a tutorial on how to pronounce the name and lists local attractions and places to stay and eat.

2. www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com/

Web page claiming to be the one with the longest name; includes a link to an email from Guinness World Records explaining why it is no longer possible to break this record, and a message from God!

3. www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com/ 
an e-mail service. Claims that at no cost you can have the world's longest email address, but warns that some email software won't be able to cope with it, and neither will humans having to type it in. Also, people might just think your e-mail address is a joke....

4. http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/

A web site dedicated to listing the longest of everything. If you want to know what is the longest conga line, escalator, moustache, roller coaster, wedding dress train or just about anything else you can think of, this is the place to find out!

5. The owners of the above site found that a URL of 263 characters was possible:

http://www.thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/wearejustdoingthistobestupidnowsincethiscangoonforeverandeverandeverbutitstilllookskindaneatinthebrowsereventhoughitsabigwasteoftimeandenergyandhasnorealpointbutwehadtodoitanyways.html - which is their info page about the longest URL.

6. www.iamtheproudownerofthelongestlongestlongestdomainnameinthisworld.com

A site which exists purely to boast that it is the longest domain name on the Internet.

7. www.thisisthelongesteuropeandomainnameallovertheworldandnowitismine.eu

A website in German with links to two other long ones:

8. 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.eu/

A German website about pi.

9. http://www.arbeitsgemeinschaft-private-krankenversicherung.info/

A German health insurance firm.

10. http://www.thepersonwithanewideaisacrank-untiltheideasucceeds-by-marktwain.com/

Has a picture of Mark Twain and his quotation written out properly.