We’ve all seen those cool movies with endless lines of toppling domino bricks. However, there is way geekier stuff you can use instead of domino bricks…

1. Actual PCs

What do you do if you have 86 extra PCs lying around? You can either give them away, perhaps to poor kids or something. Or you can do this, which gives a new meaning to “my server is down”.

2. Everything but the kitchen sink

Only in Japan… We don’t understand a word, but this is awesome.

Cool Domino – The funniest home videos are here

3. Diet Coke & Mentos

Think of it as… Fountain Domino! Yes, there’s been lots of Diet Coke and Mentos experiments, but this one is fantastic. Check it out.

4. XBOX hard drives

The original Xbox console has an 8 gigabyte hard drive with a hardware lock. Once removed it’s useless. Unless you have too much time on your hands, of course…

5. Apple Newton modems

Newton was Apple’s old PDA. It seems like Apple had some modems left over. Hmmm… What to do with 4,000 Newton modems…?

6. Maxtor hard drives

Someone just tipped over 22 terabyte of storage, worth €14,500. We really hope these were already broken…

If you get hold of large quantities of hardware, now you know what you can do. All you need is some creativity and inborn geekness.

And how does this relate to uptime monitoring, you may ask? Well, we guess this is another way of handling downtime (though not the downtime we usually speak of).

(How did this post come about in the first place? This Christmas our graphic designer, David, decided to play around with falling patterns of domino bricks. Obviously he didn’t have 1,500 hard drives lying around, as some people… but he wanted to see what people had done and found these.)

There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.

So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.

Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.

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Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!

For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.

Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.

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Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.

As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.

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In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

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The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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