2009 Feb 24, 9:32Of course Netflix is already available on the 360, but PlayOn lets you watch Hulu on the 360. So far so good with the trial software. "Windows only: Previously mentioned Windows utility PlayOn-which
streams popular online video to your PS3, Xbox 360, and HP MediaSmart TV-has officially left its beta phase in the dust"
hulu video xbox xbox360 mediacenter dvr windows tv 2008 Nov 22, 6:01"There is a commonly held belief that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system, a belief reinforced by Helvetica, Gary Hustwit's popular 2007 documentary about the
typeface. But it is not true - or rather, it is only somewhat true"
via:swannman nyc subway history font typography sign helvetica 2008 Sep 26, 2:22This made me laugh: "People think of goths as weirdoes who take vampires too seriously, and therefore they can't help being worried on some level that a crazy goth might, you know, want to make them
bleed. Whereas steampunks are - what? Weirdoes who take pocket-watches too seriously? What are they gonna do, vehemently tell you what time it is?"
steampunk article goth scifi geek via:ethan_t_hein 2008 May 19, 11:54Forged fake art: "After being released from prison in 1988, Kujau opened a gallery in Stuttgart where he sold 'authentic fakes'... In fact, his work became so popular that other forgers began to
create forged copies of Kujau's forgeries."
art fraud history via:boingboing.comments konrad-kujau 2008 May 5, 11:21"The Baudboys are an all-male a cappella group composed entirely of Microsoft employees. Risking the wrath of fellow employees by rehearsing in on-campus conference rooms, The Baudboys sing a variety
of popular and original music."
music baudboys microsoft 2008 Feb 26, 11:28An article about a fellows attempt to be anonymous in his daily life.
privacy article read popular-science 2007 Dec 24, 12:41These days it seems like there's a social sharing website for everything representable as bits. Like
Scribd for (mostly legal) documents,
SciVee for scientific research videos,
Wordie for words, and
Kuler for color themes. Kuler seems
like a ridiculous website (overkill) but I had been meaning to update my homepage's color design and Kuler has an
RSS based REST API.
The API lets you obtain things like the most recently added color themes or the most popular or all themes containing the color dark red, etc... So of course rather than update my website's design I
hooked up my css to the color themes coming out of Kuler. Select my main page's color theme from a
list of random Kuler themes. As I'm sure
the regular readers can guess I use
an xslt and blah blah blah... It looks OK with
Silver Surfer and
Happy Hipo but in general
changing the colors this way doesn't produce something pretty.
When reading about Kuler I found that they may have stolen the whole idea wholeslae from
ColourLovers. They discuss
the thievery in an article on their blog. I would have switched over to ColourLovers out of principle but
they don't have an easily accessible API.
colourlovers color xslt theme homepage technical kuler design 2007 Dec 23, 2:02purchase gift doll 2007 Nov 8, 11:38A Many Eyes visualization of URIs listed in an IRC chat.
statistics visualization graph uri url popular ibm many-eyes 2007 Oct 7, 7:33Interactive graph of name popularity over the years.
name statistics graph reference chart flash time visualization tool tools names 2007 Jun 19, 9:25Unfortunate versions of popular pickup lines.
comic xkcd pickup-lines relationship humor 2007 May 22, 3:22I've created an
update to the IE7 feed display.
After working on my
update to the XML source view I tried running my resourcelist program on other IE DLLs including ieframe. I found that
one of the resources in ieframe is the XSLT used to turn an
RSS feed into the IE7 feed display.
My first thought for this was that I could embed enclosures into the feed display. For instance, have controls for youtube.com videos or podcast audio files directly in the feed display. However, I
found that I can't use object or embed tags that rely on ActiveX controls in the page or in frames in the feed display.
With that through I decided I could at least add support for some RSS extensions. Thanks to
IE7's RSS platform which provides a
normalized view of RSS feeds it was really easy to do this. I went to several popular RSS feeds and RSS feeds that I like and took a look at the source to see what extensions I might want to add
support for.
For
digg.com I added support for
their RSS extension which includes digg count, and submitter name and icon. I
added the digg count in a box on the right and tried to make it fit in stylistically. For the
iTunes RSS extension
I add the feed icon, feed author, and descriptions. I was surprised by how much of the podcasts content was missing from the feed view. I also added support for a few other misc things: the
slash RSS extension's section and department, the feed description to the top of the feed display, and the atom author icon.
I wonder what other goodies lurk in IE's resources...
feed res slashdot digg resource itunes technical browser ie rss extension 2007 Apr 17, 11:45Opera (
the fifth most popular web browser) has a new feature named
Speed Dial (video of it in action). Whenever you open a new tab you get your Speed Dial view which consists of nine thumbnails of user-settable
pages. Its like a quick-favorites that appears every time you open a new tab. I think this is a neat idea and was considering how I might do that in IE7. The following is my hack-y and ugly but no
coding required version of Speed Dial for IE7. I like my hack and I'm about to expound upon it in unnecessary detail so skip to the last paragraph if you're afraid of losing interest.
By default in IE7, whenever you open a new tab you navigate to 'about:Tabs'. As noted in wikipedia the result of
navigation to 'about:Tabs' is determined by values in the registry. Specifically, values in the key in
"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs". Usually this fact is exploited by
malicious software to hijack
"about:blank" and show you ads but we can hijack it too in order to display our Speed Dial-ish page.
Of course since this is a code-less hack we've got limited options on what to change 'about:Tabs' to display. It should have the following requirements.
- Something local so that our 'about:Tabs' doesn't disappear when we go offline and so that its relatively fast.
- The user should be able to modify its content.
- Show links that the user uses.
- Show thumbnails of those links
- Provide easy to use drag and drop interaction and generally look cool.
Now, I use del.icio.us which allows me to store all of my favorites online and which provides RSS feeds that list my saved links. New in IE7 is an
RSS platform that will, among other things, cache RSS feeds locally. So, by pointing
about:Tabs to my del.icio.us feed 'http://del.icio.us/rss/sequelguy/quickreference' I get (1) from IE7's RSS support, and (2) and (3) from del.icio.us. Of course requirements (4) and (5) are missing
but hey, I said this was ugly.
In summary, if you change the registry value "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs!Tabs" to point to an RSS feed of your favorites you can get a hack-y version of Opera's
Speed Dial. I should note that although its referenced on pages such as wikipedia changing your 'about:Tabs' URI in the manner I describe is not documented and not supported by Microsoft. There could
be all kinds of horrible repercussions from this change of which I'm not aware. Yeah, actually you know what? Forget I said any of this. Pretend I never wrote it...
browser technical hack 2007 Mar 1, 1:01Wired reported pays a service to make his fake blog popular on Digg.com
article digg fraud bribe 2006 Nov 6, 6:51I've updated my webpage some more. I now have the onmouseover on the thumbnails in my photos section. So that's fun. I'm using the
flickr badge
script and then including a javascript file I made that finds the flickr imgs in my page and adds in onmouseover and onmouseout events. I've also got the whole thing validating on
W3C's HTML validator and
W3C's CSS validator.
The one thing I'd like to fix is the comments for my blog posts. They aren't included in the RSS feed. I'm shopping for a blog site that supports
comment counts in the RSS feed at least. If possible I'd like the actual comments to appear in
the feed but I doubt anyone does that.
css html script validator homepage flickr
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