2009 Jan 15, 9:41"Russell and I thought it would be interesting to take some stuff from the internet and print it in a newspaper format. Words as well as pictures. Like a Daily Me, but slower. When we discovered that
most newspaper printers will let you do a short run on their press (this was exactly the same spec as the News Of The World) we decided to have some fun."
blog internet design art newspaper typography print publishing via:mattb 2008 Nov 21, 3:47"In order to conserve energy, President-elect Barak Obama wants to eliminate daylight saving time."
energy politics obama dst time date datetime 2008 Sep 30, 12:11"Before he was on The Daily Show, before he was the PC in the Mac commercials, John Hodgman wondered, just like you, about the very special world of famous people. Now he explains why being one of
America's best-known minor celebrities is even better than you imagined"
john-hodgman humor article apple tv fame 2008 Sep 16, 7:54
I just upgraded to the Zune 3.0 software which includes games and purchasing music on the Zune via WiFi
and once again I'm thrilled that the new firmware is available for old
Zunes like mine. Rooting around looking at the new features I noticed Zune Badges for
the first time. They're like Xbox Achievements, for example I have a Pixies Silver Artist Power Listener award for listening to the Pixies over 1000 times. I know its ridiculous but I like it, and
now I want achievements for everything.
Achievements everywhere would require more developments in self-tracking. Self-trackers, folks who keep statistics on exactly when and what they eat, when and how much they exercise, anything one
may track about one's self, were the topic of a Kevin Kelly Quantified Self blog post (also check out Cory Doctorow's SF
short story The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away featuring a colony of self-trackers). For
someone like me with a medium length attention span the data collection needs to be completely automatic or I will lose interest and stop collecting within a week. For instance, Nike iPod shoes that keep track of how many steps the wearer takes. I'll also need software to analyze, display, and share this data on a website like
Mycrocosm. I don't want to have to spend extreme amounts of time to create something as wonderful as the Feltron
Report (check out his statistic on how many daily measurements he takes for the report). Once we have the data we can give out achievements for everything!
Achievements for Everyday Life
|
Carnivore
Eat at least ten different kinds of animals.
|
|
Make Friends
Meet at least 10% of the residents in your home town.
|
|
Globetrotter
Visit a city in every country.
|
|
You're Old
Survive at least 80 years of life.
|
Of course none of the above is practical yet, but how about Delicious achievements based on the public Delicious feeds? That should be doable...
self-tracking data achievements 2008 Aug 6, 1:43"Paris Hilton Responds to McCain Ad An ad for The Paris Hilton Presidential Campaign. Paid for by Funny Or Die". Found this just after I saw the McCain Ad mocked on the Daily Show.
paris-hilton humor politics video mccain 2008 Mar 7, 7:20
Internet Explorer 8 has made my plugin Feed Folder obselete in functionality and implementation -- which is good!
I made Feed Folder for IE7 because I wanted the Live Bookmarking feature from FireFox. The Feed Folder plugin for IE7 would allow you to
display your feeds as virtual folders in your Links Bar. When your feed is updated the virtual folder is updated as well with the new feed items. I use del.icio.us to store all my links so I could
add virtual folders of my daily links, my friends blogs links, quick reference links, etc. etc.
My plugin relied on shell folders to implement the virtual folders I described above, but IE8 doesn't support shell folders in the Favorites Bar. But I'm OK with Feed Folder not working in IE8
since there's a much better implementation already there. IE8 does better than my plugin on a number of points: First, there isn't the horrible perf. issue that my plugin had on Vista. Second, when
a feed is updated the virtual folder flashes to note the change in status. Third, unread items are bolded and the bolding bubbles up from feeds contained in subfolders. And lastly, the middle click
button is supported to open items in a new tab.
Accordingly, I don't plan to work on Feed Folder anymore unless someone comes up with a good reason. Instead I mark Feed Folder deprecated and suggest you use Internet Explorer 8 instead.
To use this feature in IE8 simply drag a feed from your feed list in your Favorites Center onto your Favorites Bar. Or, when viewing a feed, click on the 'Add to Favorites' Star Plus icon thing in
the upper left, and select 'Monitor on Favorites Bar'. A .url Internet Shortcut file is produced as usual, but if you open up the .url file you'll see there's some additional info about the feed.
ie8 feed feedfolder plugin technical browser ie rss 2008 Feb 26, 11:28An article about a fellows attempt to be anonymous in his daily life.
privacy article read popular-science 2008 Jan 26, 12:32Another hilarious Internet video generated from the writer strike. Yay for the strike!
via:boingboing wga writing writers-strike video youtube tv daily-show colbert-report 2007 Nov 28, 1:23One of the new Zune features that had me the most excited was the claimed improved Windows Media Center integration which unfortunately turned out to simply mean support for the Win MCE video format
(
with an exception for HD). I wanted to be able to pick shows recorded by my Win MCE and have the Zune automatically sync up the
latest episodes. However, with the improved podcast support in the Zune software one can easily create a ridiculous hack to accomplish this.
The new Zune software has podcast support which does everything I'd want to do with a
Win MCE recorded TV series so the goal is to shoehorn a TV series into a Zune podcast. An overview of the steps: Create an XSLT that converts Win MCE data to a podcast, run the XSLT as a scheduled
task every few hours per TV series, setup a Web server pointed at the resulting podcasts and the Win MCE Recorded TV directory, and subscribe to the resulting podcasts in the Zune software.
- Reading through the Win MCE data stored as an XML file in "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml" and the spec for podcasts I created an XSLT to convert a series from Win MCE data to a podcast.
- I added a new task to the Scheduled Tasks to run my XSLT using my xsltproc.js script. The task runs a handful of commands that look something like the following:
C:\windows\system32\wscript.exe C:\users\dave\bin\xsltproc.js C:\Users\Dave\Documents\trunk\development\mce-zune\mce-to-podcast.xslt
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml --param title "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" --param max 4 --param baseURI "http://groucho/" --param thisRelURI "tds.xml" -o
"D:\recorded tv\tds.xml"
For each TV series I run a command like the above and that outputs a podcast for that series into my "D:\Recorded TV\" directory.
- Zune only allows http URIs for its podcasts so I installed a web server on my Win MCE server. I'm running Vista Ultimate so it was quick and easy for me to install IIS7 but any Web server will do. Then I pointed it at "D:\Recorded TV\".
- Once all the above was done I just subscribed to the resulting podcasts via my Web server and viola! Since I'm forced to use a Web server I can even run the Zune software on a machine other
than my Win MCE server. You can see a screen-shot above of my Zune software showing my Colbert Report podcast.
technical xml mce hack windows media center zune windows xslt podcast 2007 Oct 12, 11:50Daily news to replace Digg
daily blog boingboing news 2007 May 17, 1:04I've seen several humorous kitty related stories recently and then happened upon the whole
lolcat scene. Rather than post all the links to humorous
kitty lolcat photos to delicious I figure I'll roundup the links here.
A cat in England enjoys
riding the bus and does so regularly (
associated lolcat commentary).
A cat
trees a bear (also with
lolcat
commentary).
xkcd has a
comic on the topic of lolcat commentary. xkcd also had a
non-lolcat cat related comic recently that I found
funny.
And now I'm out of commentary so I'll just... "X cat is X":
interested,
aggressive/defensive. VG related:
SF,
Zelda. Other:
cookie,
sad.
roundup comic kitty personal cat humor nontechnical 2007 Mar 14, 7:56Awesome mohawk. That's all there is to say about that.
hair humor photo article 2006 Dec 28, 2:09A humorous nerdy webcomic.
comics humor comic math science nerd daily language 2006 Dec 19, 1:41John Hodgman (Daily Show correspondant and The PC in the Mac commercials among other things) has his book available for free as an audiobook on iTunes.
humor john-hodgman itunes download free audio audiobook book books