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Downloads: PlayOn Streams Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and More to Your Xbox 360 and PS3

2009 Feb 24, 9:32Of course Netflix is already available on the 360, but PlayOn lets you watch Hulu on the 360. So far so good with the trial software. "Windows only: Previously mentioned Windows utility PlayOn-which streams popular online video to your PS3, Xbox 360, and HP MediaSmart TV-has officially left its beta phase in the dust"PermalinkCommentshulu video xbox xbox360 mediacenter dvr windows tv

The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway: Voice: AIGA Journal of Design: Writing: AIGA

2008 Nov 22, 6:01"There is a commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system, a belief reinforced by Helvetica, Gary Hustwit's popular 2007 documentary about the typeface. But it is not true - or rather, it is only somewhat true"PermalinkCommentsvia:swannman nyc subway history font typography sign helvetica

Fantasy Magazine - Guest Column: Five Thoughts On The Popularity Of Steampunk

2008 Sep 26, 2:22This made me laugh: "People think of goths as weirdoes who take vampires too seriously, and therefore they can't help being worried on some level that a crazy goth might, you know, want to make them bleed. Whereas steampunks are - what? Weirdoes who take pocket-watches too seriously? What are they gonna do, vehemently tell you what time it is?"PermalinkCommentssteampunk article goth scifi geek via:ethan_t_hein

Hitler's Diary and Hermann Goering's Yacht - FRONT PAGE - How Markus makes $15k a day from free dating site Plentyoffish

2008 May 19, 11:54Forged fake art: "After being released from prison in 1988, Kujau opened a gallery in Stuttgart where he sold 'authentic fakes'... In fact, his work became so popular that other forgers began to create forged copies of Kujau's forgeries."PermalinkCommentsart fraud history via:boingboing.comments konrad-kujau

The Baudboys: Microsoft's Finest A Cappella

2008 May 5, 11:21"The Baudboys are an all-male a cappella group composed entirely of Microsoft employees. Risking the wrath of fellow employees by rehearsing in on-campus conference rooms, The Baudboys sing a variety of popular and original music."PermalinkCommentsmusic baudboys microsoft

The Anonymity Experiment | Popular Science

2008 Feb 26, 11:28An article about a fellows attempt to be anonymous in his daily life.PermalinkCommentsprivacy article read popular-science

Theme Options

2007 Dec 24, 12:41These days it seems like there's a social sharing website for everything representable as bits. Like Scribd for (mostly legal) documents, SciVee for scientific research videos, Wordie for words, and Kuler for color themes. Kuler seems like a ridiculous website (overkill) but I had been meaning to update my homepage's color design and Kuler has an RSS based REST API. The API lets you obtain things like the most recently added color themes or the most popular or all themes containing the color dark red, etc... So of course rather than update my website's design I hooked up my css to the color themes coming out of Kuler. Select my main page's color theme from a list of random Kuler themes. As I'm sure the regular readers can guess I use an xslt and blah blah blah... It looks OK with Silver Surfer and Happy Hipo but in general changing the colors this way doesn't produce something pretty.

When reading about Kuler I found that they may have stolen the whole idea wholeslae from ColourLovers. They discuss the thievery in an article on their blog. I would have switched over to ColourLovers out of principle but they don't have an easily accessible API.PermalinkCommentscolourlovers color xslt theme homepage technical kuler design

UGLY DOLLS | Unique, Cute, Huggable and Cuddly Colorful Popular Stuffed Toys | UncommonGoods

2007 Dec 23, 2:02PermalinkCommentspurchase gift doll

Many Eyes : mefi chat: Popular URLs

2007 Nov 8, 11:38A Many Eyes visualization of URIs listed in an IRC chat.PermalinkCommentsstatistics visualization graph uri url popular ibm many-eyes

NameVoyager

2007 Oct 7, 7:33Interactive graph of name popularity over the years.PermalinkCommentsname statistics graph reference chart flash time visualization tool tools names

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

2007 Jun 19, 9:25Unfortunate versions of popular pickup lines.PermalinkCommentscomic xkcd pickup-lines relationship humor

IE7 Feed Display Update

2007 May 22, 3:22I've created an update to the IE7 feed display.

After working on my update to the XML source view I tried running my resourcelist program on other IE DLLs including ieframe. I found that one of the resources in ieframe is the XSLT used to turn an RSS feed into the IE7 feed display.

My first thought for this was that I could embed enclosures into the feed display. For instance, have controls for youtube.com videos or podcast audio files directly in the feed display. However, I found that I can't use object or embed tags that rely on ActiveX controls in the page or in frames in the feed display.

With that through I decided I could at least add support for some RSS extensions. Thanks to IE7's RSS platform which provides a normalized view of RSS feeds it was really easy to do this. I went to several popular RSS feeds and RSS feeds that I like and took a look at the source to see what extensions I might want to add support for.

For digg.com I added support for their RSS extension which includes digg count, and submitter name and icon. I added the digg count in a box on the right and tried to make it fit in stylistically. For the iTunes RSS extension I add the feed icon, feed author, and descriptions. I was surprised by how much of the podcasts content was missing from the feed view. I also added support for a few other misc things: the slash RSS extension's section and department, the feed description to the top of the feed display, and the atom author icon.

I wonder what other goodies lurk in IE's resources...PermalinkCommentsfeed res slashdot digg resource itunes technical browser ie rss extension

Opera Speed Dial Code-less Hack for IE7

2007 Apr 17, 11:45Opera (the fifth most popular web browser) has a new feature named Speed Dial (video of it in action). Whenever you open a new tab you get your Speed Dial view which consists of nine thumbnails of user-settable pages. Its like a quick-favorites that appears every time you open a new tab. I think this is a neat idea and was considering how I might do that in IE7. The following is my hack-y and ugly but no coding required version of Speed Dial for IE7. I like my hack and I'm about to expound upon it in unnecessary detail so skip to the last paragraph if you're afraid of losing interest.

By default in IE7, whenever you open a new tab you navigate to 'about:Tabs'. As noted in wikipedia the result of navigation to 'about:Tabs' is determined by values in the registry. Specifically, values in the key in "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs". Usually this fact is exploited by malicious software to hijack "about:blank" and show you ads but we can hijack it too in order to display our Speed Dial-ish page.

Of course since this is a code-less hack we've got limited options on what to change 'about:Tabs' to display. It should have the following requirements.
  1. Something local so that our 'about:Tabs' doesn't disappear when we go offline and so that its relatively fast.
  2. The user should be able to modify its content.
  3. Show links that the user uses.
  4. Show thumbnails of those links
  5. Provide easy to use drag and drop interaction and generally look cool.
Now, I use del.icio.us which allows me to store all of my favorites online and which provides RSS feeds that list my saved links. New in IE7 is an RSS platform that will, among other things, cache RSS feeds locally. So, by pointing about:Tabs to my del.icio.us feed 'http://del.icio.us/rss/sequelguy/quickreference' I get (1) from IE7's RSS support, and (2) and (3) from del.icio.us. Of course requirements (4) and (5) are missing but hey, I said this was ugly.

In summary, if you change the registry value "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs!Tabs" to point to an RSS feed of your favorites you can get a hack-y version of Opera's Speed Dial. I should note that although its referenced on pages such as wikipedia changing your 'about:Tabs' URI in the manner I describe is not documented and not supported by Microsoft. There could be all kinds of horrible repercussions from this change of which I'm not aware. Yeah, actually you know what? Forget I said any of this. Pretend I never wrote it...PermalinkCommentsbrowser technical hack

I Bought Votes on Digg (Wired News)

2007 Mar 1, 1:01Wired reported pays a service to make his fake blog popular on Digg.comPermalinkCommentsarticle digg fraud bribe

More Homepage Updates

2006 Nov 6, 6:51I've updated my webpage some more. I now have the onmouseover on the thumbnails in my photos section. So that's fun. I'm using the flickr badge script and then including a javascript file I made that finds the flickr imgs in my page and adds in onmouseover and onmouseout events. I've also got the whole thing validating on W3C's HTML validator and W3C's CSS validator.

The one thing I'd like to fix is the comments for my blog posts. They aren't included in the RSS feed. I'm shopping for a blog site that supports comment counts in the RSS feed at least. If possible I'd like the actual comments to appear in the feed but I doubt anyone does that.PermalinkCommentscss html script validator homepage flickr
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