2009 Oct 18, 2:23TED video of Stewart Brand: "The book tackles three of today’s most profound transformations — climate change, urbanization and biotechnology — in a way that’s part practical guide to damage control,
part prescriptive inspiration for a more efficient society, part bold anthem of design-thinking. And if Brand’s track record is any sign at all, Whole Earth Discipline may well become one of the
(counter)cultural classics of our generation."
stewart-brand climate-change biology biotech urban ted video ecology 2009 Oct 13, 11:15
QFC, the grocery store closest to me, has those irritating shoppers cards. They try to motivate me to use it with
discounts, but that just makes me want to use a card, I don't care whose card and
I don't care if the data is accurate. They should let me have my data or make it useful to me so that I actually care.
I can imagine several useful tools based on this: automatic grocery lists, recipes using the food you purchased, cheaper alternatives to your purchases, other things you might like based on what
you purchased, or integration with dieting websites or software. At any rate, right now all I care about is getting the discount from using a card, but if they made the data available to me then
the grocery store could align our interests and I'd want to ensure the data's accuracy.
idea boring data grocery store 2009 Oct 5, 9:51"What if the logos we’re used to seeing in Helvetica were redone in Arial? Would you even notice if the next time you saw the American Airlines logo it was redone in Arial?" Quiz of 20 logos
presented in their original Helvetica along side Arial and you must determine which is which. I got them correct but only due to the Arial and Helvetica overlay poster from last week.
typography helvetica arial blog quiz logo font 2009 Sep 30, 4:07The hashing part makes sense, but not the 'why no URL query' bit: "But because victim=12345 has already been visited they satisfy condition 2 and they get the 404 page fooling them into thinking the
site has already been taken down. So query strings don't really work." You could implement the same thing in the path and even were that not the case there's no telling that removing the query would
get you the same page. What's described here is a general method to circumvent the AP filter not an explaination as to why it avoids the query portion of the URL.
phishing technical web browser http url hash 2009 Sep 28, 5:09Biker high fives folks hailing cabs in New York.
high-five video nyc new-york humor 2009 Sep 27, 2:28Poster demonstrating example differences between Arial and Helvetica. Love the end line: "my buddies [said] ... “a documentary about a font is as interesting as it sounds.” i could not agree more."
visualization font design helvetica typography arial poster 2009 Sep 25, 2:19
Irritatingly out of line with what their commercials say, in my area Comcast, under the covers of the national
broadcast digital switch, is sneaking in their own switch to digital, moving channels above 30 to their own digital format. Previously, I had Windows 7 Media Center running on a PC with a Hauppauge PVR500 which can decode two television signals at once setup to record shows I like. The XBox 360 works
great as a Media Center client letting me easily watch the recorded shows over my home network on my normal TV.
Unfortunately with Comcast's change, now one needs a cable box or a Comcast digital to analog converter in order to view their signal, but Comcast is offering up to two free converters for those
who'd like them. The second of my two free converters I hooked up to the Media Center PC and I got the IR Blaster that came with my Hauppauge out of the garage. I plugged in the USB IR Blaster to
my PC, connected one of the IR transmitters to the 1st port on the IR Blaster, and sat the IR transmitter next to the converter's IR receiver. I went through the Media Center TV setup again and
happily it was able to figure out how to correctly change the channel on the converter. So I can record now, however:
- I can only record one thing at a time now
- Changing the channel is slow taking many seconds (no flipping through channels for me)
- The Hauppauge card can't know if the channel change worked. So if it tries to change to HBO (I get it for free with one of the Comcast packages) which is encrypted and the converted won't show,
the channel doesn't change but the PC doesn't know it and ends up recording some other channel.
To fix (3) I need to manually go through and remove channels I don't have from the Media Center. To fix (1) I may be able to get a second IR transmitter, a third digital converter, hook it up to
one of the other inputs on my Hauppauge, and go back through the Media Center TV setup. There's no fix for (2) but that's not so bad. All in all, its just generally frustrating that they're breaking
my setup with no obvious benefit.
digital tv hauppauge mce cable windows media center comcast 2009 Sep 23, 7:56"I do understand that it would be annoying to warn users every time they run a bookmarklet, but I think it would be sensible to show a warning at least the first time a given bookmarklet is executed.
If you work for a popular web browser vendor such as Microsoft or Mozilla, you can think of this as my wish for the day! I'd love to hear your feedback if you are reading this!"
technical bookmarklet bookmarklets security web webbrowser javascript 2009 Sep 18, 5:52"We recently came across a series of colorfully decorated safety posts at the Standard Hotel in New York." The Knit Graffiti Crew strikes again.
humor knit graffiti new-york nyc cultural-disobediance photo 2009 Sep 11, 8:31Win7 commercial featuring ponies and bunnies and pink and the final countdown...
humor video windows win7 ad youtube microsoft 2009 Sep 10, 8:22Geoff Nunberg investigates issues in Google Books and in the comments Google Book's team manager responds in the comments. Apparently metadata is bad everywhere and not an issue new to the Web and
user generated content or tagging. Like finding Feynman lectures categorized as Death Metal on Napster back in the day.
language google library metadata catalog 2009 Sep 2, 4:36"Consider it, maybe, the souped-up Tiger/Game & Watch LCD version of Mirror's Edge, then: you have one goal, and one button, and the goal is to run, and the button is jump, and the game comes
from simply maintaining breakneck momentum as you leap from rooftop to randomly generated rooftop."
game flash mirrors-edge 2009 Sep 1, 4:39"...what effect does the large-scale structure of the JS output code have on the DEFLATE algorithm of GZIP which is used to serve up compressed script?" Another instance of using knowledge of the
specific file type to get gains in compression. Is there a web proxy running all this at which I can point my phone?
via:kris.kowal performance javascript gzip deflate compression web technical 2009 Sep 1, 4:25"Each unit has a stable URI, making it possible to link to it from your own domain models in a reliable way. For each unit, the ontology defines some useful metadata including abbreviation, a link to
DBpedia and a categorization of units into groups, such as length units."
semanticweb via:connolly web unit conversion uri technical 2009 Sep 1, 4:20"Grant says that PBS, CPB and the Department of Education put significant funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read — but that's not what Reading Rainbow was trying to do."
via:waxy history tv read reading-rainbow levar-burton pbs npr 2009 Aug 28, 9:12
sequelguy posted a photo:
Cookies and cupcakes mysteriously appeared in my office. (Actually not mysterious -- thanks Eric!)
birthday chair cookie cupcake 2009 Aug 26, 2:30"Being fair is not enough. In fact, sometimes what's fair is wrong precisely because it's fair. Oooh! A seeming paradox! One of the top three rhetorical forms for essays!"
technical internet david-weinberger net-neutrality web fair
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