2008 Feb 3, 11:01FTA: "Like Klein, EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston had spent much of the previous December reading press accounts of the administration's secret surveillance program. "It was all I thought
about over the holiday," he remembers. In fact, at his bos
via:boingboing eff article law privacy government history 2008 Feb 2, 5:49A story of a program to bury nuclear waste that remains dangerous for 24k years and the associated challenges.
future science time art nuclear government nuclear-waste 2008 Jan 31, 10:47
![[Many books in large bookcase. Photo creator http://flickr.com/people/babblingdweeb/]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/18/23816128_d4acb70b2d_m_d.jpg)
I use my recently added
books feed from LibraryThing, a site I've mentioned before where you track, review, recommend, and share your books, and I put the recently added
books on my page. I thought it might be nice to include the book covers so I suggested adding book covers to RSS feeds in
LibraryThings 'Recommend Site Improvements' group. The next day I had a response from the founder and lead developer Tim Spalding who
had started implementing the feature. I noticed a few bugs, reported them on the same thread, and he fixed them soon after. Fantastic! It makes me want to upgrade to a paying account.
Incidentally, if you notice the Ghost in the Shell book appear multiple times in my RSS feed its due to the previously mentioned iterative bug fixes. The same item appeared multiple times slightly
differently with each bug fix and your RSS aggregator may have picked them up as distinct items.
tim-spalding librarything rss homepage 2008 Jan 25, 1:35GPDE team has a tool to help find memory leaks for JavaScript running in IE.
via:kris.kowal microsoft ie javascript blog article tool free memory-leak programming 2008 Jan 24, 8:55A software kit for phishers that, unknown to the phisher, messages any stolen info back to the originators of the kit.
fraud article phishing 2008 Jan 21, 2:13FTA: "This article describes the command-line switches for REGEDIT.EXE."
microsoft reference regedit registry editor windows command 2008 Jan 13, 11:07
Sarah and I got an exercise bike on sale and when attempting to put it together found that it was missing a bag of about ten different screws. The manufacturer website said we could order
a replacement bag for thirty dollars (!!) but since the instructions listed the various kinds of screws we needed I figured we could just go to a hardware store and buy them.
We started at Home Depot because I didn't know better. The screws are all listed in metric sizes which is apparently uncommon and a helpful senior worker forwarded us to McLendons whose stock was better but we were again redirected this time to Tacoma Screw Products.
Tacoma Screw Products is great! See them for your hardware needs first! The store has a back area with every kind of screw ever. I felt a little out of place as as all the customers looked like
contractors. The employee who helped me explained the various options I had in screws as the bike instructions weren't as explicit as they could have been. In the end I bought all my screws for
only one dollar (much better than $30!) and they all fit correctly.
screw bike personal tacoma screw products nontechnical 2008 Jan 5, 11:34Cory Doctorow's book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom available free via Creative Commons. More traiditional singularity style scifi. I liked this much better than Someone Comes to Town.
cory-doctorow scifi disney literature project-gutenberg book books singularity 2008 Jan 5, 10:41Project Gutenberg's listing for Cory Doctorow containing all of his CC books in readable HTML formats.
cory-doctorow gutenberg scifi writing free literature book books 2008 Jan 5, 10:39Project Gutenberg is a directory of public domain literature.
archive books fiction database directory literature writing free gutenberg public-domain 2008 Jan 2, 5:49Cory Doctorow's short stories from 'A Place So Foreign and Eight More' that are licensed under Creative Commons in HTML.
cory-doctorow books literature html download free 2008 Jan 2, 4:41Cory Doctorow the always entertaining and informative speaker talks on new business models, DRM, etc. FTA: "Cory Doctorow is an activist, a writer, a blogger, a public speaker, and a technology
person. He speaks about "Digital Rights Management" at LIFT0
video cory-doctorow drm music piracy 2007 Dec 31, 1:18A short short story titled 'The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution' by CHRISTOPHER CHERNIAK. A classic (apparently) from the early 80s. No spoilers here. If you liked Snow Crash just read it.
read scifi story literature free fiction short-story rainbow 2007 Dec 26, 5:45Miscellaneous thoughts I had that would have been relevant many months ago:
- A History Channel program had a reenactment of a 1920's archaeologist discovering a stone tablet, sending the tablet to a warehouse, etc. all behind the voice over giving the dry facts. The
reenactor hammed it up a bit and I would have rather had clips from Indiana Jones in the background. If they're already not showing me the archaeologist who discovered the tablet, they may as well
show me one who will be entertaining.
- There are many parodies of the Get a Mac ads and so when I saw a UK Get a Mac ad I payed attention to see what the joke was. I was
disappointed by the 'parody' because it was a conventional Get a Mac ad with different actors. Apple localized their Get a Mac ad campaign in this fashion in the UK and in Japan. I've got a
playlist of the US, UK, and Japan's version of the Piechart ad. Ranking the lovable bumblingness of the PC I give the order
UK, Japan, then US and ranking the sumgness of the Mac I give the order UK, US, then Japan. But don't take my word for it, view
the ads for yourself.
-
Yahoo Pipes lets users generate an RSS feed altering service that runs on Yahoo's server using a GUI. This is very different from Microsoft's Popfly which allows users to component-ize and share javascript utilities that run client side on a webbrowser. Both have the awesome power of buzzword associations
like 'Web 2.0' and 'Mashup' but in my mind Yahoo Pipes is for server side RSS feed modification and Popfly is about client side javascript webpages. And neither will allow me to run an arbitrary
XSLT =).
popfly apple personal history-channel indiana-jones pipes mac technical microsoft mashup yahoo nontechnical 2007 Dec 23, 8:46Banksy replaces Paris Hilton CDs with his own satirical music and cover art in stores.
art article culture graffiti hack humor music parody prank streetart paris-hilton bbc 2007 Dec 19, 10:37Social website for sharing color schemes... Useful?
via:swannman design color webdesign web generator gallery social 2007 Dec 17, 9:25Johnny Lee has a couple of projects involving the Wii remote. In the first he uses his fingers as his pointers Minority Report style and in the second he uses an LED pen and a projector to create a
whiteboard system.
blog bluetooth wii wiimote remote free hardware hack ui howto interactive johnny-lee 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
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