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.
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/
[via motherjones]:
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?
BoingBoing reposts this great Cyberpunk parody photo from 12 years ago, and Motherboard has a What happened to cyberpunk article.
“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.”
(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.
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/
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.
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!
I hadn’t heard of “Social DRM” (described in this article). Sounds like my blackmail DRM idea.
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.
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.”
They Might Be Giants 2012 tour across the US! | When Will You Die? (OFFICIAL VIDEO) (by ParticleMen)
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.”
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:
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.
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();
}