2008 Dec 31, 2:14Art on boxes: "the rules are quite simple: rearrange a box to make any kind of figure or object. make the most of least."
art box design diy paper gallery sculpture doodle illustration 2008 Nov 17, 12:58Sarah was driving around in her new car while I was trying out Google Map's Street View on my new phone. I found my car on the phone but not in reality and it was a strange feeling.
me google maps car 2008 Nov 16, 10:13"Imagine my mild surprise when I discovered that the woman who terrorized me in my final days in high school is the face of Proposition 8. Sonja Eddings Brown is everything you would expect a
Proposition 8 supporter to be: someone with misplaced values and a knack for being a big bully. Yes, a middle-aged mother of three went out of her way to threaten to kick a high school senior out of
her valedictory speaking position simply because the student refused to have (strange) words placed her mouth and to be used as a propagandistic advertising vehicle."
politics education california sonja-eddings-brown high-school via:kris.kowal 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 Sep 8, 6:51Neil prints out brain cross sections from an MRI and pastes them onto a set of wooden cubes forming a model of his brain. "Last month I took a left-right MRI scan, reconstructed it, and rerendered
top-bottom and front-back scans... Another method to visualize a complex 3D object is to build a model. The dimensions of the MRI data cuboid are almost exactly 3x4x5. Accordingly, I obtained 60
one-inch cubes ... arranged them appropriately, varnished the 94 outside faces, printed nine carefully selected cross-sections and their mirror images, sliced the prints into 266 squares and glued
them to the correct internal faces."
art design brain toy model wood 2008 Jun 18, 4:39A former coworker tried to cut an orange with a plastic knife from the cafe and the knife melted. This is the resulting email thread.
jeff-davis orange microsoft humor email 2008 Jun 15, 7:57
I just installed vmcNetFlix which lets you watch your on demand NetFlix movies via your Vista Media Center or any Media Center
Extenders like the Xbox 360. It works well but fails poorly with some cryptic error messages and long timeouts. Be sure to get NetFlix on demand movies working in your browser before installing
this plugin. Once I did that everything worked very well.
To test it out I watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior in which Ting must travel from his country village to Bangkok where he works with his cousin in
the city to recover his village's stolen religious artifact. Its a mix of Perfect Strangers, Street Fighter and Pad-See Ew. Martial arts movies, like porn and video games, aren't required to have a
strong plot but Ong-Bak has a fine plot line and enjoyable Thai martial arts. I saw the Tiger Knee in there several times. An enjoyable movie that
reminded me of watching martial arts movies with my friends in high school.
media-center thai netflix ong-bak vista 2008 May 2, 1:55Avoid sniffing using the HTTP range header: "...if we have an application...which protects against FindMimeFromData XSS attacks by searching the first 256 bytes for certain strings, then we can
simply place our strings after the first 256 bytes and get Fl
via:swannman http http-header range xss security 2008 Apr 16, 6:42A working group devoted to getting fragments to ID pieces of images or time positions or ranges in audio and video.
mime w3c standard uri fragment 2007 Dec 27, 3:36Mark Liberman suggests the paper on which recent articles like "Humor Develops From Aggression Caused By Male Hormones, Professor Says" was a joke. The paper is based on determitologist's notes on
reactions to his unicycle riding.
article blog language language-log mark-liberman sam-shuster science unicycle humor bad-science 2007 Nov 21, 3:54An April Fools RFC about the Y10K problem. FTA: "Y10K compliant programs MAY choose to limit the range of dates they support to those consistent with the expected life of the universe. Y10K compliant
systems MUST accept Y10K dates from 10 ** 12 years in
humor date reference rfc time y2k y10k future internet 2007 Oct 22, 4:47
I purchased the
Orange Box off of Steam a bit ago and like
others before me who have
discussed elsewhere, I already owned two of the five games that come from the Orange Box. However, the combined price of
HL2E2 and Portal, the two games I actually wanted was supposedly equivalent to the price of the Orange Box bundle. Incidentally, if anyone would like HL2 or HL2E1 I can
gift them to you.
HL2E2 was excellent of course but the big surprise for me was Portal. (Mild spoilers follow) It has a sort of zen simplicity: there are a few simple game-play mechanics, a handful of textures and
objects, and a deceptively simple story all used well and tied together to produce an entertaining and polished game. It seems a bit short but its probably better to end with the gamer demanding
more. The humor and the sort of
play within a play aspect of the game is what really sold me though. It has the funniest
ending theme I've heard (also
blogged by the creator). The voices of the automated turrets are so adorable I would feel compelled to hug them if they weren't
always trying to kill me. Additionally the
weighted companion cube seems like an experiment in understanding gamers'
attachment to NPCs. In this case the NPC is a box and yet I still felt awful incinerating it. The whole time I was vaguely reminded of
Solitary the reality show
that sticks contestants alone in small rooms forcing them to endure various tests all the while being watched by a humorous computer with a female voice. Someone should sue...
RPS has articles on Portal including
a Portal review, a page
suggesting Portal is a tale of
lesbianism, and
others.
hl2e2 game hl2 solitary valve portal nontechnical 2007 Sep 12, 6:54I'm visiting
Wikipedia more and more recently but I always find myself reading the referenced webpages to get the full context of quotes and for
more info. Basically I use Wikipedia as an introduction and a place to look for links. For times when I'm looking for opinions rather than facts I like to use
Everything2. No need to check references there.
There's the much hyped
WikiScanner tool which reports who has been making anonymous (thought to be anonymous at the time anyway) edits to
Wikipedia. Its humorous and interesting in a few cases, but in general I think its stretching to say that because an IP address range is owned by a corporation and someone edited Wikipedia on an IP
in that range that you can attribute that edit to that corporation. If I edited Wikipedia I'd probably do a bit of that during my lunch break, but that wouldn't mean that Microsoft wants the
Wikipedia pages for Weird Al, Dave Risney, URIs, or whatever else I would edit on Wikipedia changed.
Also, via
Everything Is Miscellaneous I found the tool
Wiki Dashboard. Wiki Dashboard proxies
Wikipedia and on each page shows a timeline view at the top with who made edits and when. Its nice to see a gentle curve down from an initial spike at the beginning for topics you don't imagine to be
controversial. As the canonical test page for this service I looked up 'Elephant' the
Wikipedia page Stephen Colbert
suggested folks vandalize on his show on 2006 July 31st. If you look at the
Wiki Dashboard Elephant page you can see a very large spike
in edits on that date. That's all I need to see.
As a side note, for the link on Stephen Colbert suggesting folks vandalize Wikipedia I linked to a Wikipedia article. Is it inappropriate to provide info about Wikipedia being vandalized and thus
incorrect via a link to a Wikipedia article?
wikidashboard stephen-colbert wikality wikipedia wikiscanner colbert-report 2005 Mar 28, 10:26humor unix development
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