Thursday 2/28/02 §
Apple's iPod is not only a kick-ass MP3 player, it's also apparently a convenient piracy tool. Not just for music, but for software too. Ouch. Maybe Apple should add "or Software" to the "Don't Steal Music" sticker that comes on the iPod wrapper. (John Clark)
1 comment
Failure is a new online magazine dedicating to analyzing failures. What can we learn from the Edsel, the Hindenburg? The great thing is that things continually fail, so this magazine will never run out of material. (Larkfarm)
2 comments
Apple designed the Power Macintosh G4 Cube, a sweet, compact desktop machine. A PC manufacturer has taken the concept a step further with the Cappucino, which is an entire 1 GHz Pentium III system in a form factor about six inches on a side and only two inches tall. (Everything Burns)
3 comments
The IBM Glass Engine enables deep navigation of the music of Philip Glass -- more than 60 works in all. This is pretty cool: it lets you easily find works that share certain tempos or moods and quickly browse by title, year, work length, track, or other criteria. Of course there are MP3 samples of everything. Very nicely done, IBM Java folks. (paxtonland)
4 comments
Wednesday 2/27/02 §
Bob Sacha takes photographs under New York City for Atlas Magazine.
Comment?
Obey Fairey. "I appreciate advertising because it's really pure. It's pure in that it has no goal other than to get you to buy something." ... "Without a doubt it's the government [that is the American Big Brother]. It's really a spectator democracy." (meringue)
Comment?
Someone takes Dark Angel far too seriously. (wood s lot)
Comment?
What memes are you infected with? ToTL.net's Human Virus Scanner will tell you. Once you know, be careful not to cross the memes. (the null device)
Comment?
There's a very interesting discussion over at Kottke's about the nature of Weblogs, including whether the network of blogs is an emergent system. This is the sort of thing that keeps Kottke's site on my "must-read" list. He posts things sometimes that doesn't really interest me (after all, no two random people's interests are exactly aligned), but when he posts something I like, I usually really like it.
Comment?
You have to be a real type geek to not only be able to identify obscure typefaces at a glance, but to be able to identify them as anachronisms in films. (xBlog)
1 comment
Tuesday 2/26/02 §
In 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not long afterward, a Japanese man retrieved embers from the wreckage at Hiroshima; he and his grandmother fanned these embers into a flame, which they kept burning for years at the family's Buddhist altar. In 1968, it was used to start the Peace Monument Flame in Hoshino. A flame from that fire is now being carried from Seattle to New York City in a pilgrimage that began on January 15. The torch is currently in New Mexico. (dangerousmeta)
Comment?
Jon Konrath has organized his life as a glossary. Even a typical college life is somehow made more interesting when its pieces are ripped from context and sorted into alphabetical order. The A-Z sequence seems even more random than actual randomness, putting Houston next to "I pray for the souls of the dead." By the time you get to the end, all the fragments you've read will give you a holographic approximation of Konrath's life at Indiana University. (Preaching to the Perverted, which may be the best weblog name ever)
2 comments
Monday 2/25/02 §
Did you happen to catch curling on the Olympics and wonder "what the hell?" It was first added to the Olympics in 1998, though if you live close to Canada you might have caught it on television before then. The Canadian Curling Association is here to clear up the confusion, with the official rules of the sport. Obviously, a stone that bites a hog line is out of play. What else were you expecting? (Defective Yeti)
3 comments
Nothing goes together better than tires and beef! Mmmmm.
Comment?
Oddities in various Web browsers cause headaches for Web designers trying to create Cascading Style Sheets. Standards were supposed to eliminate these hassles, but obviously it's not enough to merely have a standard -- browsers have to support it correctly. Until they all do, some of these tricks may come in handy. Basically, these all exploit CSS parsing bugs in various browsers to avoid (more visible) rendering bugs. The proper reaction to this prospect is a slight queasiness, followed by a sigh of resignation. (Glish)
Comment?
Journalist David Pogue is an icon of the Macintosh community. Literally. (Macslash via rw.Xspot)
Comment?
A Soviet scientist, now working at Dartmouth, has been studying the electrical properties of ice, and has developed some fascinating technologies, such a de-icing system that can cause ice to "burst" from a windshield (or airplane wings) by electrolyzing the bottom layer of ice directly into hydrogen and oxygen, and a braking system for skis that causes a thin, gripping layer of ice to form continuously between the snow and the ski. (Follow Me Here)
Comment?
Sunday 2/24/02 §
Adobe has revealed Photoshop 7, but will not ship the Mac OS X native product until the "second quarter." Let's hope that means April, not June (CNet says it'll "go on sale" in April, which could mean either shipping or taking orders). New goodies include a "healing" brush and a patch tool for retouching, the file browser from Photoshop Elements, tool presets, a new painting engine, a "pattern maker" plug-in, an upgraded Liquify plug-in, Acrobat 5.0 security settings for exported images, a spelling checker, and the ability to print multiple images on a single page. Bundled with Photoshop is a new version of the ImageReady Web graphics application with variable quality settings for JPEG, transparency, and a new Rollovers palette for managing JavaScript-based rollover effects. Very cool.
3 comments
Saturday 2/23/02 §
Andrew Davidhazy is a Professor of Imaging and Photographic Technology at Rochester Institute of Technology. He says, "My long term interest has been the field of scanning or strip photography." In scanning photography, the film is moved past a narrow slit at a constant rate while the camera is moved around the subject or rotated about its axis to capture a panorama, all in a single image (no stitching required). It is possible to use an inexpensive photo scanner or hand-held scanner to create a digital scanning camera. He has a Web gallery of his work, much of which is interesting.
Matthias Wandel is another person who has made a digital scanning camera from a flatbed scanner.
Comment?
Friday 2/22/02 §
Take 3000 people hospitalized with a blood disease and divide them randomly into two groups. Then pray for one group and don't pray for the other, compare the outcomes of the two groups, and publish in the British Medical Journal. Would it surprise you to learn that the prayed-for group, statistically, had better outcomes? Would it surprise you to learn that the prayer occurred six years after the patients had already been released from the hospital (or died)? Heh. This guy has the right idea: pray for the control group now and see if they, too, retroactively get better... (interconnected)
Comment?
Funny statements from medical records. Most such lists turn out to be apocryphal, but I got a good chuckle out of this one anyway, since I hadn't seen it before. Richard Lederer would be proud. (Two Things at Once)
Comment?
David Gallagher wants to be the #1 Google search result for his name. He made #3 briefly but is now back down to #5. Since Google weights sites in its search results based on the number of sites that link to them, you can help simply by linking to www.lightningfield.com with the link text "David Gallagher." Cute, and he's the first person I've heard of to try to start a meme to boost his own ego-surf ranking, so what the hell, I'll do it. Whoops, already did!
Comment?
Say you're a PETA member, and you believe it is always a terrible thing to kill an animal. Say you're driving around with your PETA friends when your car hits and kills a deer. What should you do? Sue the state of New Jersey, obviously. (Thanks Pete)
Comment?
More than you ever wanted to know about Switzerland, including why its ISO country abbreviation is "CH." (From that, you can probably guess why the typeface Helvetica has the name it does, why the Mac's optimized-for-screen version of the font is called "Geneva," and why that general category of fonts is referred to as "Swiss.")
Switzerland's legislature has two houses whose membership is determined in much the same way as that of the U.S. Congress. The difference is, the Swiss are honest enough to give both houses (and their executive committee) names ending with "-rat." (BitStream)
Comment?
The original version of Chess has been criticized for its lack of character development, unintuitive rules, and slow play. (And when I say criticized, I mean widely.) Fortunately, many of these faults have been addressed in the sequel. (Speaking of memepool...)
Comment?
Can it be? A good Salon article in this day and age? Believe it. Losing the War on Patents brings you up to date on what happened to BountyQuest, the outfit founded by Tim O'Reilly, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and a patent lawyer to put up cash for "prior art" that can be used to "bust" bad patents. There are allegations of conflict of interest, the obligatory quotes from Richard Stallman and Lawrence Lessig, and a revelation of why the venture was doomed from the start. (Found at BrainLog)
Comment?
Items posted at Memepoool often have a ridiculous number of hyperlinks, sometimes as many as one per word. If you want to adopt the style for your own weblog, look no further than this page, courtesy of Shadowkeeper, he of the Defective Yeti.
Comment?
Wednesday 2/20/02 §
Installing a car stereo yourself? Check out The Install Doctor, a site that has all the information you need to do it. (Found at JOHO)
Comment?
The software that runs Orbitz and other travel sites is written largely in LISP by ITA Software and runs on Linux boxes, and is slowly but surely replacing the legacy software, written in assembly language and running on mainframes, that travel agencies have used for decades. But finding the best fare for a given trip is actually quite a hard problem. "Suitably formalized, it's not even clear that the problem of finding the cheapest flight is NP-complete." (Found at rc3.org)
Comment?
Shotgun squads were used in Houston as recently as 1992 and have been used to control crime in cities since the 1960s. A fascinating story -- I'd never heard the term. (Feel free to ignore the obviously pro-gun stance of this article if it offends you. It's not the kind of thing I usually read either.) (Found at Free-Market.net by way of Eternal Vigilance which I found randomly through Weblogs.com)
Comment?
The Pope has reportedly performed three exorcisms in his tenure, and one of the Catholic Church's leading exorcists has some colorful details about exorcism for Reuters. "The devil told a woman that he would make her spit out a transistor radio and lo and behold she started spitting out bits and pieces of a radio." (Thanks blackholebrain)
Comment?
Tuesday 2/19/02 §
Paul Lukas has a fetish for things that are well-designed and a flair for deconstructing marketing-speak. Combine the two and you get Inconspicuous Consumption, which is about... stuff, basically. Stuff and its small details. The site's pinnacle is probably this review of the Cavalier CSS-64 soda vending machine, but this whole site is a great place to lose an hour or so. (Props to the Boing)
Comment?
What's the most efficient way to deliver hydrogen to where it's needed for fuel cells and other "clean" reactors? It might just be sodium hydride (NaH) fuel pellets, also known as Powerballs™. Add water to one, and you get a predictable amount of hydrogen "on demand," plus sodium hydroxide (NaOH), which can be recycled by heating to produce more sodium hydride for more Powerballs. Or you could make soap out of it -- it's lye. I'm not really sure it'd be a great idea to carry around "waste lye" in your car, as it is quite corrosive and can generate a good deal of heat if it is allowed to come in contact with water, but it's a solid at temperatures below 318°C and so should be somewhat more manageable from a pollution standpoint than the gaseous waste products of internal combustion. You could even add hydrochloric acid (HCl) to it and end up with water and common table salt -- plus enough heat to boil the water. (Found at MetaFilter)
Comment?
You'll notice that the Gallery page is now split into multiple pages, because it was getting pretty big and taking too long to load. There's no database involved, just a modest ASP script that's called for each of the gallery images but only displays a thumbnail if it's within the range of images to be displayed on a given page. If there's any interest in this script, I'll write up an article on it.
2 comments
This story about the rise of weird news and the corresponding decline of real journalism marks the Bobbitt story as the turning point. (From Obscure Store... of course)
Comment?
You know you're incompetent at building bombs when a cleaning woman can defuse them. Accidentally. (Found at dangerousmeta)
Comment?
Monday 2/18/02 §
A new DVD standard will store 27GB worth of data per disc side, thanks to blue lasers. (Found at MacMinute)
Comment?
Merry President's Day. Don't click on Franklin, he wasn't actually a President. Unless you want to or something. (Courtesy of le Boing)
Comment?
aqua hydro discovers chat lines. Nice writing as Lauren encounters the freakier type of human being.
Comment?
In linguistics, "the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" refers to the idea that the language people speak influences the way they think. New research is revealing evidence for the hypothesis, albeit in small ways. (Found on top of spaghetti, all covered with cheesedip)
5 comments
Saturday 2/16/02 §
Wow, how did I miss the fact that the new computer-animated film Ice Age, due in theaters March 15, is being produced by Blue Sky Studios? I had assumed it was just a case of 20th Century Fox getting into the CGI game late and playing catch-up with Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks/PDI, but in fact, Blue Sky merged with VIFX, a division of Fox, in 1997. Blue Sky is the animation house that brought us Bunny, which won the 1998 Oscar for best animated short film. Using a rendering technique called radiosity, the film's soft lighting was so natural that many people didn't even notice that it was computer-generated. It was really a leap forward for CGI realism, as you can see in this short MPEG clip (4.5MB) from the film. Chris Wedge, the writer and director of "Bunny," is helming Ice Age.
Blue Sky also did the penguin from Fight Club. I just saw that film again last night and it never once occurred to me that the penguin wasn't real. Of course, Ice Age is more of a cartoon, but it still looks gorgeous in the trailers. Speaking of which, there's a new trailer available; why not start anticipating it now?
2 comments
Friday 2/15/02 §
R. Crumb's The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick. This certainly explains a lot. (Found at Fimoculous)
Comment?
Kenneth, what is the frequency? (Found at metascene)
Comment?
Convert an old water tower into a home with a view. (Found at Dane Carlson)
1 comment
Josh is lazy.
2 comments
Until today, I totally did not know that soteriology was even a word. Who would have thunk I'd learn it from a blogger's About Me page? (Thanks, Lauren)
5 comments
CNet's latest editorial about Apple just misses the point entirely. Apple's "digital hub" strategy, Charles Cooper says, won't work because corporate IT departments won't switch to Macs just because it's easier to manage their music on Mac. In the next sentence, he says that he "and lots of others" will be "only too glad" to switch. And that's the point: millions of people are not under the thumb of corporate IT departments, and these people make their own technology purchases. You know, individuals. Home users. People. That's why Apple makes their products sexy. It's why the company spends so much money on television advertising. There are much more effective ways of reaching the MIS wonks, if that's who you want to buy your product.
For years Apple hasn't had much of a foothold in the enterprise, because for years it hasn't had an enterprise-worthy product. You can be sure that Apple is aware of this and wisely refrained from trying to sell something it doesn't have. But now that Mac OS X, the most user-friendly version of UNIX ever sold, is just about baked (one or two more maintenance updates really ought to polish it up), you might expect them to start pushing in that direction. Especially if they can come up with faster processors and bring the rest of their machines' architecture up to speed. Imagine a 1U rack unit with four 1.5 GHz G4 processors in it, running Mac OS X and using less power than a box with a single Pentium. They'll be competing not with X86 boxes but with Sun servers. Now that's what I'm talking about.
4 comments
The Alphabet Synthesis Machine lets you "create and evolve the possible writing systems of one's own imaginary civilizations," which can then be downloaded as Windows TrueType fonts. (You can convert them to Mac format with TTConverter, although if you have Mac OS 8.5 or later, you don't actually need to -- the Mac OS has recognized the Windows font format for some time.) The evolution is fun to watch, and there are lots of tweaky parameters to play with. Warning: Java applet (works with Internet Explorer only, albeit on both Mac and PC). (Found at leuschke.org)
Comment?
Most of us have three kinds of color receptors in our eyes, sensitive to red, green, and blue, respectively. A very few women, however, may have four. The search is on for these mutants, who are known as tetrachromats.
2 comments
Thursday 2/14/02 §
Brian Eno expounds upon his theory of culture for Edge's John Brockman. (Found at wood s lot)
Comment?
The Justin Chapman story will astound you. Each page is freakier than the last, and it starts out freaky enough: a 6-year-old kid taking college courses for credit and scoring a 298 on an IQ test. Although I can't tell what's really going on with that "super genius" from a newspaper report, there are plenty of things that just aren't right about the story. (Found at MetaFilter -- 'ware the Cupids!)
1 comment
Staying Alive: a philosophical game of personal identity. Interesting and revealing. (Found at JOHO)
Comment?
glenn mcdonald, of The War Against Silence, has written what could be called an anti-Valentine for today, in place of his regular music column. If you've overdosed on the cloying saccharine sentiments of the day, this is an antidote. This is genuine emotion, even if it's not romantic bliss, and there's hope at the end.
Comment?
Some Christian Fundamentalists tell us that the Harry Potter books teach children real witchcraft complete with actual, honest-to-God spells that will damn them to hell for all eternity. And they've been saying the same thing about Dungeons and Dragons for decades. Now, some of the Potter and D&D spells sound as if they could be seriously useful in everyday life, so, taking the fundies at their word, The Escapist tries some of them out. The results are predictable, but no less funny for it. (Found at Flutterby)
2 comments
Make your own candy hearts for someone you love! Or someone will set you up the bomb.
Comment?
Happy Valentine's Day... the Something Awful way.
Comment?
Almost 400 photographs documenting the Wright Brothers' flight tests in North Carolina and Ohio are now online. The collection is searchable, or you can browse it by various criteria. Courtesy of Wright State University in Ohio. (Thanks to ResearchBuzz)
Comment?
Wednesday 2/13/02 §
Displaying photographs on the Web. (Found at february 7)
Comment?
The 2001 winners of the Visions of Science photographic awards have been posted. (2000's winners are also worth looking at.) This year's contest closes May 2002, but you've got to live in the UK to enter. (Found at Mr. Kottke's Place)
1 comment
Did you ever read the book Flat Stanley when you were a kid? It's about a boy who is flattened when a bulletin board hanging on his wall falls on him during the night. His adventures include being mailed to California, sliding under closed doors, and catching some art thieves. Eventually his brother figures out how to round him out again. (Personally, I would have stayed flat.)
In the twenty-first century, though, Flat Stanley is not just a book anymore -- he's a project too. (Found at I Must...)
Comment?
The official web site for Herbie Hancock's latest album, Future2Future, has a Flash sci-fi music video to go along wtih the song "The Essence." (Found at All About George)
Comment?
NBC has a homey fireplace on their Olympic set. Or at least that's what they want you to think. In reality, it's a fake.
Comment?
Tuesday 2/12/02 §
Bitchquick is the only Weblog I know of that has a picture of pancakes on the front page. Clever design, too. Oh, and here's MetaFilter's Matt Haughey enjoying a tasty breakfast. This is pancake enough for today, I believe. Back to our normal schedule tomorrow.
2 comments
While Fat Tuesday is the traditional date for Pancake Day, various sources also have September 25 or 26 as another celebration of our favorite flat breakfast food. There's a Waffle Day on March 25 (close to Maple Syrup Saturday, the third Saturday in March!), and we just missed National Blueberry Pancake Day on January 28. Back in Detroit, and in other cities with large Polish-American populations, they're all eating paczkis today -- another Lenten tradition.
Comment?
pancakeday.com is owned by the Liberal, Kansas tourism bureau. For fifty-three years, Olney (in England) and Liberal have competed in a race on Shrove Tuesday -- to see which town's women can run the fastest while flipping pancakes. A runner must flip her pancake at the starting signal, and again after crossing the finish line, to prove she still has her pancake. The score is currently 27 wins for Liberal and 24 for Olney; the traditional prize is a kiss. I could not make this stuff up if I tried, folks.
1 comment
National Pancake Day is the same day as Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of Lent. "In earlier times, the consumption of fat and eggs was not allowed during Lent, so families made pancakes to mark the start of Lent and to use up the 'forbidden' ingredients." More pancake facts courtesy of Aunt Jemima -- who else? Did you know that Finland's armed forces eat pancakes every Thursday after a starter of pea soup? (They really should have updated this page for 2002, though.)
Comment?
National Pancake Day: There's a science to making a perfect pancake. "You should aim to flip the pancake into the air at a speed of 10 miles an hour which will mean it will take less than half a second to reach the top of its trajectory." (Found at dangerousmeta)
Comment?
Alton Brown, creator and host of Food Network's Good Eats, has a Weblog, although he doesn't seem to post very often. Right now the top entry is an amusing but insightful (two Alton Brown trademarks) bit about Kitchen Performance Anxiety inspired by a study done in England. "The real joy of having people into your home doesn't have anything to do with impressing them, or living up to expectations. It is about being with people and sharing something of yourself." Preach on... (Found at randomWalks)
1 comment
The new iMac may be ideal for XP. Not Windows XP, but Extreme Programming, a development methodology that is very popular with small development teams. (My employer, for example, uses XP.) One of the practices of XP is "pair programming," where no programmer works alone but always works with another programmer on the same computer. This has the obvious benefit of encouraging knowledge-sharing and of bringing varying perspectives to bear on problems, along with the more subtle benefit of actually increasing productivity over programming separately because neither of the pair wants to be seen as a slacker. The iMac's small size and easily-movable screen are perfect for this methodology. Also, it runs UNIX and has state-of-the-art Java support. (Found in MDJ)
3 comments
Monday 2/11/02 §
Game designer Sean K. Reynolds has a fascinating account of his romantic relationship with a woman with multiple personalities. Of course, he seems none too sane himself...
Comment?
A handy list of concepts that are one word in other languages but require multiple words to represent in English. "My parking lot was coated with salogok this morning." Some of the examples are dubious, though, and many have already been borrowed into English (e.g. Gaia). I didn't realize, for example, that far secco qualcuno counted as a single word in Italian. The English translation of this phrase ("severe cutting comment") also happens to be three words long, so I'm not sure what utilitarian advantage Italian has in this case. I also found an honest-to-God mistake: bricoleur is is a person who does bricolage, while bricolage is the method of construction, although the latter definition is given for the former term. (Both are frequently used in the art world and may well qualify as borrowings already.) (Found at Interconnected)
Comment?
Foveon, a company headed by integrated circuit pioneer Carver Mead, has announced a new image sensor that reportedly produces full RGB color from each pixel on the sensor. Current digital cameras employ a matrix filter, which means that each camera pixel senses only red, green, or blue light. Software in the camera interpolates (a ten-dollar word for "makes up") no less than two-thirds of the image data in every digital picture. Foveon has a detailed explanation of why their "X3" sensor is better, as well as a gallery of sample images taken with a prototype X3-based camera. If you want some independent corroboration, Phil Askey has more samples at his Digital Photography Review site, taken with a prototype X3.
The sample photos are pretty damn fine-looking. They are also, every single one, static shots taken under plenty of light. Since the X3 sensor is layered, one wonders how much light it needs. Before I get all excited, I'd like to see some action shots and/or low-light photos. (From MetaFilter by way of Techdirt)
Comment?
Sunday 2/10/02 §
SliMP3 is a compact Ethernet-based MP3 player that lets you listen to the music stored on your computer elsewhere in the house (say, on your home theater system) -- all using open protocols. It's got a remote control, too. Only $249. (Found at Mr. Rogers)
3 comments
The Big Mac Index, a theoretical currency exchange rate tied to the average price of a Big Mac in various countries, is the keystone of Burgernomics. Since 1997, the Economist has been issuing currency prognostications based on this surprisingly accurate indicator. (Found at nutlog aka Plep)
Comment?
Friday 2/8/02 §
The developers of the trivia game You Don't Know Jack have come up with a series of rules for developing seamless "conversational interfaces" for computer software. The short version has all the important points, but the longer version (a PDF that you have to fill out a form to get) is better. (Found at brightlycoloredfood via Interconnected by way of matt jones... whew)
Comment?
Rooting your brain through lucid dreaming, at Kuro5hin. As usual, some of the comments on there are more interesting than the initial article; there are contributors who say they only need a couple hours of sleep per night, and one guy who claims to be able to sleep with only one half of his brain at a time (how very sci-fi). (Found at Jumpgate Alwin)
Comment?
What with this news report, the time is right for a new type of donation system. (Found at... hell, who hasn't linked to that report?)
Comment?
Thursday 2/7/02 §
I adore Malcolm Gladwell. The man can write about anything and make it interesting, even compelling. For example, spend a few minutes reading his recent New Yorker technology piece on disposable diapers, of all things. I susbcribed to the New Yorker primarily so I could read new Gladwell pieces as soon as they were available, though of course there is much else worth reading in the magazine. By now I'm sure everyone has read his The Tipping Point, but if you haven't, you should.
5 comments
Free pancakes! At least in my state, and maybe yours too. Mmmmmmm!
3 comments
They met on the Internet, two voices among millions. The odds were stacked against them: They lived on the other side of the planet from each other; he was old enough to be her father. Politically, they couldn't be more different. Yet they forged a bond, one that began to feel a lot like love. And then his country started bombing hers.
Somehow the feelings endured, and the relationship grew stronger as they wrote a novel about the war together. Eventually, she moved to the United States to marry him. Soon they will celebrate their second anniversary.
In a world where Internet romances are becoming ever more mainstream, this one stands out. It sounds like something out of a romance novel, but it really happened to people I know. (I have met Alma only once and Deck not at all, but I know them nevertheless.)
Just a little story for Valentine's Day, which, remember, is one week from today.
1 comment
Apropos of a recent MSNBC gaffe, MediaNews has an excellent collection of bloopers from news outlets large and small. (Found at MetaFilter)
2 comments
Wednesday 2/6/02 §
Fastap is a new compact keyboard for portable devices. The idea shows promise, but it needs a better-than-alphabetical keyboard arrangement. Frequently-used letters should be the most easily reached, and letter combinations that regularly go together (e.g., "th" and "qu") should be close to each other. A layout more like Fitaly or TapType would be better, I think. (Found outside CamWorld's box)
Comment?
Hosted in the Netherlands is the definitive catalog of album covers designed by comic book artists and albums inspired by or based on comic books. Here are Dave McKean's, for instance (yes, the "site" is partially hosted at GeoCities). (Waiter, there's a link in my Cheesedip)
Comment?
Tuesday 2/5/02 §
Urban legend gurus David ("Snopes") and Barbara Mikkelson are turning their collected folklore expertise into Snopes TV. If being an Internet superstar can get you a TV deal, suddenly anything seems possible. (Found at le Boing)
1 comment
If you want to set up a mail server on your Mac OS X system but don't want to brave the hairy sendmail, there are a number of other UNIX mail servers that should work well. Oceanwave Consulting has what looks to me like a good overview. The page also covers UNIX mail clients and other mail-related topics, such as blocking spam.
2 comments
If you live in an area where water conservation requires the use of low-flow (1.6 gallon) toilets, you might be interested in Terry Love's consumer toilet reports to find out which ones work and which ones don't. Love is a local (Bellevue) plumber and remodeler who really gets the Internet. Perhaps I'm just strange, but I found Love's tales of the ongoing innovation of toilet technology oddly compelling. I didn't know, for instance, that most pressure-assisted toilets use a Sloan Flushmate mechanism ("Note: Small children may be startled by the sudden action of the Flushmate equipped toilets"), or that a high bowl water level was important, or that prison toilets are engineered to withstand a 2.5-ton load. Terry likes Toto's Ultramax. Thanks, Terry! (Found at Backup Brain)
2 comments
You may have seen The Hacker FAQ before -- it's a tongue-in-cheek guide that explains to managers the hacker mindset. The same author wrote a similar document called The Manager FAQ, which is a tongue-in-cheek guide that explains to hackers the manager mindset. I didn't realize this latter document even existed, and has for at least a year now, but it's just as worth reading as the first one. Concerns addressed include "My manager seems to dress funny. Is there any way to impress upon him the pointlessness of corporate appearance?" and "My manager counts from one." (Found at #!/usr/bin/girl)
2 comments
Monday 2/4/02 §
The United States Postal Service has been auctioning off undeliverable merchandise for more than a century. Now they're doing it on eBay. The bulk lots of CDs, books, and videotapes will no doubt be tempting for owners of used CD and book stores. Personally, I'm planning to buy a hat for every week of the year. (Found at dangerousmeta)
Comment?
Optimizing JavaScript performance in Web browsers (especially Netscape). (Found at techno weenie)
Comment?
Ricochet may be coming back from the dead, thanks to new owner Aerie Networks of Denver. The good news, according to the interview with Mort Aaronson, is that it'll cost $40-$50 a month, not $70. The bad news: it'll probably be a while before they turn it back on in Seattle.
Comment?
Math geekery: Understanding how Fourier transforms work in one day. Fourier transforms are a mathematical tool for converting a series of samples (time domain information) to a series of frequencies (frequency domain information). The DFT is used in audio processing (including MP3) as well as image processing and all kinds of other applications. I've had a vague idea of what Fourier transforms are all about for a while, but this article really put the pieces into place for me. (Found at Joe Maller)
Comment?
Sunday 2/3/02 §
I didn't buy a new dual 1GHz G4 Power Mac, by the way.
3 comments
You can now get a wider version of my recent photograph "Lazy Maggie" on a mug via CafePress. (Here it is if you missed it.)
Price does not include any markup at this time (i.e., I make no money on the mugs), since I put it up mainly so I can buy a few for friends and family who adore the cat in question. But if anyone else wants one, I won't stop you.
Comment?
When your data backup regimen demands more storage than a single DAT can accommodate, a common solution is a tape loader that inserts a new blank tape whenever you fill one up. If you can't afford one, or your drive isn't designed to take a loader, maybe you'll just make one out of Lego. (Found at Antipixel)
Comment?
Saturday 2/2/02 §
A Los Gatos architect invents a new, easier, keyboard layout which he, in a move that will set men back thirty years, has branded the Guy's Keyboard. It's "for the hunt & pecker," wink wink nudge nudge say no more, and is advertised by a winsome babe with the keyboard placed strategically across her chest. Words fail me. And don't even get me started on the insult to Dvorak -- "bad and arbitrary," my ass! (Found at leuschke.org)
2 comments
Friday 2/1/02 §
A scary story about radioactive materials. And another one. If you run across any substance that glows in the dark or melts snow, don't play with it. (Both found at MetaFilter)
Comment?
If you use BlogSnob to promote your Weblog, like I do, you may be interested in a tip from Graham Leuschke for tracking the visits you receive as a result. Wish I'd thought of that... oh, wait. ;) Graham explains it like I would have, if I'd thought to do it.
Comment?
