2009 Dec 1, 9:40Wow: 'The fact that federal, state, and local law enforcement can obtain communications "metadata"—URLs of sites visited, e-mail message headers, numbers dialed, GPS locations, etc.—without any real
oversight or reporting requirements should be shocking, but it isn't. The courts ruled in 2005 that law enforcement doesn't need to show probable cause to obtain your physical location via the cell
phone grid. All of the aforementioned metadata can be accessed with an easy-to-obtain pen register/trap & trace order. But given the volume of requests, it's hard to imagine that the courts are
involved in all of these.'
privacy security gps phone cellphone government politics 2009 Nov 29, 1:58Phone booths get makeovers: "For Your Convenience Super-Hero Changing Station", "Coming Soon, improvements and upgrades to this public urination facility", and more.
humor phone-booth cultural-disobediance graffiti new-york photo 2009 Nov 23, 1:24"This week Bell Labs plans to roll out the Telephone, the first viable Telegraph alternative, but reports indicate they may not be ready."
via:waxy humor telephone telegraph internet 2009 Nov 23, 11:47'Bill Gates is being taken on a guided tour of the product support department's new office building...Bill puts on a headset, sits down, and answers the phone. "Hello, this is Microsoft Product
Support, William speaking. How can I help you?"'
humor microsoft bill-gates raymond-chen support history 2009 Oct 27, 9:47"We're excited to announce that you now have the choice to get Google Voice with your existing mobile number OR with a Google number." You can use their voicemail features with your existing phone
number.
via:connolly google voice phone cellphone voicemail blog 2009 Oct 7, 8:10Quirksmode does a chart comparing the differences in various versions of WebKit: "There’s iPhone WebKit, Android WebKit, S60 WebKit (at least two versions each), Bolt, Iris, Ozone, and Palm Pre, and
I don’t doubt that I’ve overlooked a few minor WebKits along the way. All 10 mobile WebKits I’ve identified so far are subtly or wildly different."
compatibility web development browser webkit apple google android iphone safari technical via:mattb 2009 Oct 5, 8:44Brief history of the Luddites. "Are we all Luddites now? ... If you are reading this essay on your laptop or iPhone, chances are that you aren't an unemployed weaver staring starvation in the face."
Also: "The Luddites didn't oppose technology; they opposed the sudden collapse of their industry, which they blamed in part on new weaving machines." So the TV and newspaper associations and Rupert
Murdoch are Luddites.
history technology luddite 2009 Sep 1, 4:59"...toy and apparel designers Kid Robot (with the help of creative ideas studio We Are Plus) have organized a mobile phone-based scavenger hunt in Manhattan centered around scanning QR codes."
qrcode phone scavenger-hunt toy advertising 2009 Sep 1, 4:39"...what effect does the large-scale structure of the JS output code have on the DEFLATE algorithm of GZIP which is used to serve up compressed script?" Another instance of using knowledge of the
specific file type to get gains in compression. Is there a web proxy running all this at which I can point my phone?
via:kris.kowal performance javascript gzip deflate compression web technical 2009 Aug 18, 4:19
Before we shipped IE8 there were no Accelerators, so we had some fun making our own for our favorite web services. I've got a small set of tips for creating Accelerators for other people's web
services. I was planning on writing this up as an IE blog post, but Jon wrote a post covering a
similar area so rather than write a full and coherent blog post I'll just list a few points:
- The first thing to try is looking for developer help for the web service, specifically if there's a REST-ful URL based API. For example, Bing Maps has great URL API documentation that would
be enough to create an Accelerator.
- The Accelerator XML is very similar to HTML forms. If you can find an HTML form for the web service for which you want to create an Accelerator, you can view the HTML source and create an
Accelerator based on that.
- I created the FormToAccelerator extension based on the previous idea. You can
use the extension to create an Accelerator from an HTML form, or just use it to create the start of one and edit it manually after.
- If the page doesn't use an HTML form, you can start up an HTTP debugger like Fiddler, use the web service from the normal web
page, and then in Fiddler see if you can find a REST-ful looking URL you can use.
- When looking to create a preview for your Accelerator, see if the web page for the web service has a mobile version or a version that's intended to embed in other web pages via an iframe. On
this same line, iPhone apps make great Accelerators usually with lovely previews.
- If there's no mobile or embeddable version and the only thing wrong with the normal web page for the web service is that the useful information doesn't fit in the preview window then see if you
can find an HTML tag with a name or id near the useful information, and stick a '#' fragment pointing to that tag onto the preview URL template.
- Without a reasonable REST-ful API you can use a combination of Google's "site:" and "I'm Feeling Lucky" to find the most relevant page on a particular site.
- The value of a name and value pair need not consist of only a single Accelerator variable. You can get creative and put other text in there. For instance, I implemented a Google currency conversion by setting the query to "{selection} in US Dollars".
technical accelerator ie8 ie 2009 Aug 11, 8:18Choose Your Own Adv. classics on your cell! "But in 2006, the brand was reborn when Chooseco, LLC relaunched the series with reprints of classic adventures as well as new stories. They have also
expanded into new areas ... adventures on the iPhone ..."
chooseyourownadventure iphone wired book interactive if 2009 Aug 11, 7:35Lovely Dandella looks like an electric scallion and it "... works with GPS enabled mobile phones to track physical locations. Dandella bends and points toward the targeted location."
design technology cool wishlist shopping cellphone gps 2009 Aug 3, 9:37"If you have T-Mobile USA, you can program the time your phone rings before it rolls to voice mail, but it isn't at all intuitive."
tmobile cellphone phone voicemail howto 2009 Jul 1, 6:21"The QR code, used to store and decode small bits of data via printed symbol, received an artistic rendering by SET as part of its campaign for Marc by Marc Jacobs." I like the idea although in this
case its not very subtle or different from a regular QR code IMHO. Also, I was surprised that my phone could still read the QR code in this form.
qr qrcode marketing art internet mobile technical 2009 Jun 25, 11:45"Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now is the Creative Commons comics adaptation of six short stories by Boing Boing editor and science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow... The result are
eight Creative Commons mobile comics specifically designed for iPhone, iPod touch and Android devices."
cory-doctorow comic android iphone mobile download book free 2009 Jun 19, 8:07
The weekend before the previous, Sarah and I moved our belongings into the
new house and spent a lot of time packing and unpacking, and now we're officially living there (interested Facebook friends can find my
new address or just ask me). The Saturday of the previous weekend Sarah's family came over for a half house warming and half Sarah's birthday celebration which was fun and served to force us to do
more unpacking and forced me to take trips to Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond, etc. On Sunday, Sarah and I went out to her favorite restaurant and she opened her gifts that I had to hide to keep
her from opening before her birthday. Happy Birthday Sarah!
While at Home Depot I had trouble finding what I was actually looking for, but I did find everything I needed to terminate the Cat5e cables that are wired in the house. Each room has a wall plate
with two RJ45 sockets, both sockets wired to Cat5e cable. One of the cables per plate was already hooked up to a standard phone service punchdown board and the other cables per plate were all
hanging unterminated next to the punchdown board. So now I've terminated them all with RJ45 connectors and hooked them up to my hub, wireless router, cable modem, etc. I had the same sort of fun
setting all that up as I did playing with model train sets as a child. Hopefully no therapy will be required to figure out why that is.
personal2 train address sarah house new-house birthday 2009 Jun 1, 11:07
When I heard that
Live Search is now Bing one of my initial thoughts was how'd they get that domain
name given
the unavailability of pronouncable four letter .COM domain names. Well, the names been used in the past.
Here now, via the
Wayback Machine is a brief, somewhat speculative, and ultimately anticlimactic
history
of bing.com:
-
2003 July: The first archived version of bing.com features "bing! is a small device (e.g., possibly even a small
Band-Aid(R)-like sticker!) that vibrates when a person's cell phone rings." I can't recall 2003 cell phones, were they big enough to require this device?
-
2004 August: Site for the same device is rewritten and looks much better, IMHO.
-
2006 June: The domain is now parked by easyDNS. I guess the "bing!" device didn't work out?
-
2006 November: Its now "BING*" and they won't say what they're working on ("we're still in stealth mode") but they are
hiring C#/.NET developers.
-
2007 January: And they're gone. Without even exiting stealth mode. Too bad, I liked their logo. Their domain is now for
sale...
-
2007 February: Looks like EasyMail buys the domain and offers a physical mailing service in Australia: "By simply clicking
a button on your computer, mail is beamed electronically to a bing post office. Your mail is automatically printed, folded, enveloped and dispatched into the Australia Post network the very same
day."
-
Present: Now its the new home for Live Search of course.
The new name reminds me of the show Friends. Also, I hope they get a new favicon - I don't enjoy the stretched 'b' nor its color scheme.
microsoft technical domain history search archive dns bing