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A New Species Discovered ... On Flickr (npr.org)

2012 Aug 11, 9:17

Winterton, a senior entomologist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, has seen a lot of bugs. But he hadn’t seen this species before.

There’s no off switch when you’re the senior entomologist. If you’re browsing the web you find your way to Flickr photos of insects or start correcting Wikipedia articles on insects.

PermalinkCommentsflickr insect science photos

I'm an American and I want to watch the Olympics. What do I do? (iamnotaprogrammer.com)

2012 Jul 28, 12:05

One persons quest to watch the Olympics online.

The location requirements (guessed at via IP address) are irritating. The requirement that you have a particular cable subscription to view video online seems like not network neutrality.

Also this related article:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/27/nbc-olympic-opening-ceremony/

PermalinkCommentsolympics video internet web

wired: [via motherjones]: theweekmagazine: Sticking to an...

2012 Jun 7, 3:29


wired:

[via motherjones]:

theweekmagazine:

Sticking to an exercise routine takes dedication, and many fitness junkies swear that a running companion can be a huge help. That’s why researchers have developed “Joggobot,” a quad-rotor helicopter drone designed to motivate joggers by flying in front of them. 

The aerial robot uses its camera to spot a colorful pattern on a T-shirt worn by the jogger, and flies at a safe distance ahead. The runner can control Joggobot using a smartphone: In “companion mode,” the drone simply maintains the jogger’s pace; in “coach mode,” it pushes its human trainee a little faster.

Don’t worry, there’s a video

Science!

Maybe it should chase you instead?

PermalinkCommentshumor exercise robot future video

BoingBoing reposts this great Cyberpunk parody photo from 12...

2012 Jun 5, 4:17


BoingBoing reposts this great Cyberpunk parody photo from 12 years ago, and Motherboard has a What happened to cyberpunk article.

PermalinkCommentshumor cyberpunk history

Stuxnet Explained - Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

2012 Jun 1, 4:57

From his first months in office, President Obamasecretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

PermalinkCommentssecurity politics iran nuclear virus

(via Feature: Google gets license to test drive autonomous cars...

2012 May 7, 8:18


(via Feature: Google gets license to test drive autonomous cars on Nevada roads)

The coolest part of this article is that Nevada now has an autonomous vehicle license plate that’s red background and infinity on the left.

PermalinkCommentscar nevada google self-driving-car

The Blowholes - Summerbaby (Pete & Pete Reunion 2-24-12) (by...

2012 Mar 2, 4:48


The Blowholes - Summerbaby (Pete & Pete Reunion 2-24-12) (by matt00092)

Via http://www.avclub.com/articles/inside-the-adventures-of-pete-and-pete-reunion,70177/

PermalinkCommentsmusic pete-and-pete video

The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (chronicle.com)

2012 Feb 15, 5:13

Interesting article on an expert attempting to modify an article on Wikipedia.  Sounds like an issue when presented in this fashion, but looking at it from Wikipedia’s perspective, I don’t know how they could do better.

PermalinkCommentstruth wikipedia internet

Blackmail DRM - Stolen Thoughts

2012 Feb 13, 4:00

Most existing DRM attempts to only allow the user to access the DRM'ed content with particular applications or with particular credentials so that if the file is shared it won't be useful to others. A better solution is to encode any of the user's horrible secrets into unique versions of the DRM'ed content so that the user won't want to share it. Entangle the users and the content provider's secrets together in one document and accordingly their interests. I call this Blackmail DRM. For an implementation it is important to point out that the user's horrible secret doesn't need to be verified as accurate, but merely verified as believable.

Apparently I need to get these blog posts written faster because only recently I read about Social DRM which is a light weight version of my idea but with a misleading name. Instead of horrible secrets, they say they'll use personal information like the user's name in the DRM'ed content. More of my thoughts stolen and before I even had a chance to think of it first!

PermalinkCommentsdrm blackmail blackmail-drm technical humor social-drm

DRM is to publishing as science was to Stalinism

2012 Jan 30, 9:11

I hadn’t heard of “Social DRM” (described in this article). Sounds like my blackmail DRM idea.

PermalinkCommentsdrm publishing

Crushable has the video from the Cinefamily Pete and Pete...

2012 Jan 26, 12:03


Crushable has the video from the Cinefamily Pete and Pete tribute and panel. Also, AV Club is now inspired to have a Pete and Pete cast and crew reunion.

PermalinkComments

Copyright King: Why the "I Have a Dream" Speech Still Isn't Free (vice.com)

2012 Jan 17, 9:37

There’s weird stuff you’d think is public domain but isn’t including Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “I Have a Dream” speech. FTA: ”If you want to watch the whole thing, legally, you’ll need to get the $20 DVD.

That’s because the King estate, and, as of 2009, the British music publishing conglomerate EMI Publishing, owns the copyright of the speech and its recorded performance.”

PermalinkCommentscopyright mlk speech public-domain

They Might Be Giants 2012 tour across the US! | When Will You...

2012 Jan 11, 4:02


They Might Be Giants 2012 tour across the US! | When Will You Die? (OFFICIAL VIDEO) (by ParticleMen)

PermalinkCommentsvideo humor music they-might-be-giants

MPAA Boss: If The Chinese Censor The Internet, Why Can't The US? (techdirt.com)

2011 Dec 10, 8:31

FTA:

The MPAA is getting pretty desperate, it seems. MPAA boss Chris Dodd was out trying to defend censoring the internet this week by using China as an example of why censorship isn’t a problem. It’s kind of shocking, really.

“When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites.”

PermalinkCommentsmpaa technical censorship

JavaScript Array methods in the latest browsers

2011 Dec 3, 6:46

Cool and (relatively) new methods on the JavaScript Array object are here in the most recent versions of your favorite browser! More about them on ECMAScript5, MSDN, the IE blog, or Mozilla's documentation. Here's the list that's got me excited:

some & every
Does your callback function return true for any (some) or all (every) of the array's elements?
filter
Filters out elements for which your callback function returns false (in a new copy of the Array).
map
Each element is replaced with the result of it run through your callback function (in a new copy of the Array).
reduce & reduceRight
Your callback is called on each element in the array in sequence (from start to finish in reduce and from finish to start in reduceRight) with the result of the previous callback call passed to the next. Reduce your array to a single value aggregated in any manner you like via your callback function.
forEach
Simply calls your callback passing in each element of your array in turn. I have vague performance concerns as compared to using a normal for loop.
indexOf & lastIndexOf
Finds the first or last (respectively) element in the array that matches the provided value via strict equality operator and returns the index of that element or -1 if there is no such element. Surprisingly, no custom comparison callback method mechanism is provided.
PermalinkCommentsjavascript array technical programming

Replacing Google Reader Shared Feeds with Tumblr

2011 Nov 28, 7:36

Last time I wrote about how I switched from Delicious to Google Reader's shared links feature only to find out that week that Google was removing the Google Reader shared links feature in favor of Google Plus social features (I'll save my Google Plus rant for another day).

Forced to find something new again, I'm now very pleased with Tumblr. Google Reader has Tumblr in its preset list of Send To sites which makes it relatively easy to add articles. And Tumblr's UX for adding things lets me easily pick a photo or video to display from the article - something which I had put together with a less convenient UX on my bespoke blogging system. For adding things outside of Google Reader I made a Tumblr accelerator to hookup to the Tumblr Add UX.

Of course they have an RSS feed which I hooked up to my blog. The only issue I had there is that when you add a link (and not a video or photo) to Tumblr, the RSS feed entry title for that link is repeated in the entry description as a link followed by a colon and then the actual description entered into Tumblr. I want my title separate so I can apply my own markup so I did a bit of parsing of the description to remove the repeated title from the description.

PermalinkCommentsblog tumblr me technical google-reader

ViewText: Enter a URL to view its text

2011 Jun 5, 4:57"ViewText.org is a service provided to make reading content on the web easier, faster, and safer by extracting the main article content from news items, blog posts, RSS feeds, and PDF's." Includes API to extract the article text!PermalinkCommentsinternet web article html text api technical

THE FIFTY-NINE-STORY CRISIS, The New Yorker, 5/29/95, pp 45-53

2011 Jun 5, 4:56"What's an engineer's worst nightmare? To realize that the supports he designed for a skyscraper like Citicorp Center are flawed---and hurricane season is approaching."PermalinkCommentsarticle history design business engineering

IE9 Document Mode in WebOC

2011 Apr 4, 10:00

Working on GeolocMock it took me a bit to realize why my HTML could use the W3C Geolocation API in IE9 but not in my WebBrowser control in my .NET application. Eventually I realized that I was getting the wrong IE doc mode. Reading this old More IE8 Extensibility Improvements IE blog post from the IE blog I found the issue is that for app compat the WebOC picks older doc modes but an app hosting the WebOC can set a regkey to get different doc modes. The IE9 mode isn't listed in that article but I took a guess based on the values there and the decimal value 9999 gets my app IE9 mode. The following is the code I run in my application to set its regkey so that my app can get the IE9 doc mode and use the geolocation API.



        static private void UseIE9DocMode()
{
RegistryKey key = null;
try
{
key = Registry.CurrentUser.OpenSubKey("Software\\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\Main\\FeatureControl\\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION", true);
}
catch (Exception)
{
key = Registry.CurrentUser.CreateSubKey("Software\\Microsoft\\Internet Explorer\\Main\\FeatureControl\\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION");
}
key.SetValue(System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess().MainModule.ModuleName, 9999, RegistryValueKind.DWord);
key.Close();
}
PermalinkCommentsweboc fck ie document mode technical ie9

John Resig - ECMAScript 5 Strict Mode, JSON, and More

2010 Oct 6, 7:35Layman summary of ECMAScript 5 strict mode.PermalinkCommentsecma es5 strict js javascript json reference security technical article john-resig
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