2007 Nov 14, 2:56News on recent privacy related matters with social websites and Donald Kerr's redefinition of privacy. Lots of good links.
privacy anonymity blog post article government politics donald-kerr steven-bellovin 2007 Nov 12, 4:28Excerpts and brief history of Army Man a zine by one of the original Simpson's writers from before The Simpsons. I like 'An Amusing Anecdote' and the Bride's heckling.
humor culture history simpsons blog article via:boingboing 2007 Nov 12, 1:48A guide to the why of various nerdy behavior. I find some of this applicable to me.
nerd humor article tips social howto via:swannman 2007 Nov 7, 1:53Link roundup and summary article on censorship in Pakistan since Pervez Musharraf suspended the constitution on November 3rd.
internet web censorship politics legal pakistan blog article 2007 Oct 30, 12:29DisneyLand is updating the Small World ride to support fatter passengers. That is so sad.
humor health article disney obesity 2007 Oct 22, 2:36How to create good headlines and subjects for webpages and email.
blog article design email howto usability tutorial language internet writing web 2007 Oct 22, 4:47
I purchased the
Orange Box off of Steam a bit ago and like
others before me who have
discussed elsewhere, I already owned two of the five games that come from the Orange Box. However, the combined price of
HL2E2 and Portal, the two games I actually wanted was supposedly equivalent to the price of the Orange Box bundle. Incidentally, if anyone would like HL2 or HL2E1 I can
gift them to you.
HL2E2 was excellent of course but the big surprise for me was Portal. (Mild spoilers follow) It has a sort of zen simplicity: there are a few simple game-play mechanics, a handful of textures and
objects, and a deceptively simple story all used well and tied together to produce an entertaining and polished game. It seems a bit short but its probably better to end with the gamer demanding
more. The humor and the sort of
play within a play aspect of the game is what really sold me though. It has the funniest
ending theme I've heard (also
blogged by the creator). The voices of the automated turrets are so adorable I would feel compelled to hug them if they weren't
always trying to kill me. Additionally the
weighted companion cube seems like an experiment in understanding gamers'
attachment to NPCs. In this case the NPC is a box and yet I still felt awful incinerating it. The whole time I was vaguely reminded of
Solitary the reality show
that sticks contestants alone in small rooms forcing them to endure various tests all the while being watched by a humorous computer with a female voice. Someone should sue...
RPS has articles on Portal including
a Portal review, a page
suggesting Portal is a tale of
lesbianism, and
others.
hl2e2 game hl2 solitary valve portal nontechnical 2007 Oct 19, 4:10FTA: 'This letter was sent to a Russian student by her French friend, who manually wrote the address that he received by e-mail. His e-mail client, unfortunately, was not set up correctly to display
Cyrillic characters, so they were substituted with diacr
encoding charset unicode language humor article 2007 Oct 17, 11:47A weighted companion cube you can make out of paper!
game games humor portal blog article 2007 Oct 17, 5:55Diego Doval expresses my thoughts on this topic very well and also likely well before I even had thoughts on this topic.
blog article history robustness-principle jon-postel internet tcp 2007 Oct 17, 5:17History of the various versions of Postel's Law or the Robustness Principle which paraphrased says: "In general, an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its
receiving behavior. That is, it should be careful to send
blog article history robustness-principle jon-postel internet tcp 2007 Oct 16, 12:22FTA: "Look at all those zero cents... there are data bits there, lying unused! It struck me that with every single restaurant transaction I could set the cents field to some number under my control,
thus allowing me to communicate with myself at a l
blog humor hack food article encoding restaurant via:ericlaw 2007 Oct 15, 1:33Info on a plugin for FireFox that gives GMail S/MIME support. This is a similar idea to the last but these folks have executed the idea in a different fashion.
article browser blog cryptography crypto mail mime mozilla pgp privacy security extension firefox gmail google 2007 Oct 15, 1:31This is a howto on using encryption with web based mail clients. This article suggests a FireFox plugin. I should look into doing this in IE.
email secure webmail google gmail pgp encryption howto article 2007 Oct 15, 11:30Raymond talks about false names used in math publications.
math humor raymond-chen blog article 2007 Oct 12, 10:04FTA: 'From just released Microsoft security bulletin: "..formerly known as Wang Image Viewer, handles specifically crafted images files.."'. Specially crafted eh?
humor article michael-kaplan blog wang msrc microsoft security 2007 Oct 11, 7:49A how-to on creating a bluetooth handset for your cell-phone. I want this but like a regular phone and without the DIY part.
howto bluetooth phone hack hardware article diy 2007 Oct 9, 5:12San Francisco has a free 311 number similar to 911 except not for emergencies. You describe a problem or question and they find the correct city agencies to help you. Sounds like a great interface to
public political agencies.
via:thedpshow blog article humor phone advice sanfrancisco 311 news 2007 Oct 9, 4:49List of website usability issues.
usability article blog ui webdesign internet howto reference 2007 Oct 8, 3:18More on Singularity the managed microkernel based Microsoft Research OS.
singularity os wikipedia article microsoft research microkernel
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