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 13, 5:08Paper investigating chicken soup as a "remedy for symptomatic upper respiratory tract infections." Under methods is the recipe they used: "Traditional chicken soup was prepared according to a family
recipe, which will be referred to as “Grandma’s soup” (C. Fleischer; personal communication; 1970). This recipe is as follows..."
soup humor science medicine chicken paper 2009 Oct 8, 4:59A brief introduction to Hadoop, its history, subprojects, and current status
via:pskomoroch hadoop introduction google yahoo facebook database technical 2009 Oct 7, 8:10Quirksmode does a chart comparing the differences in various versions of WebKit: "There’s iPhone WebKit, Android WebKit, S60 WebKit (at least two versions each), Bolt, Iris, Ozone, and Palm Pre, and
I don’t doubt that I’ve overlooked a few minor WebKits along the way. All 10 mobile WebKits I’ve identified so far are subtly or wildly different."
compatibility web development browser webkit apple google android iphone safari technical via:mattb 2009 Oct 5, 8:44Brief history of the Luddites. "Are we all Luddites now? ... If you are reading this essay on your laptop or iPhone, chances are that you aren't an unemployed weaver staring starvation in the face."
Also: "The Luddites didn't oppose technology; they opposed the sudden collapse of their industry, which they blamed in part on new weaving machines." So the TV and newspaper associations and Rupert
Murdoch are Luddites.
history technology luddite 2009 Sep 29, 10:54How Firefox and IE7&8 perform feed sniffing
rss feed atom mime mime-sniffing sniffing mimetype web browser html5 technical 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, 12:14"Phil Elwood presents the complete recordings of two concerts organized by John Hammond and given on the Christmas Eves of 1938 and 1939 at Carnegie Hall; featuring the best Swing, Blues, and Gospel
musicians of the day. Performers include Charlie Christian, Lester Young, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Bill Broozy, and many others"
music cc swing concert 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 24, 3:58"Put more constructively, if GCF mentioned application/xhtml+xml AND intercepted it, my site would “just work”. But that wouldn’t be an “opt in”, a concept that Ian Hickson once described as yet
another quirks mode switch."
chrome google web browser extension webbrowser mime xml xhtml technical 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 17, 10:38"an augmented reality system for teaching the science of pool."
video pool augmented-reality game cheat youtube 2009 Sep 11, 8:39"In the W3C Media Fragment Working Group (MFWG) we have had long discussions about the use of the URI query (”?”) or the URI fragment (”#”) addressing approach for addressing directly into media
fragments, and the diverse new HTTP headers required to serve such URI requests, considering such side conditions as the stripping-off of fragment parameters from a URI by Web browsers, or the
existence of caching Web proxies."
fragment uri via:connolly media url query http http-header 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, 6:42"Although HTML and XHTML appear to have similarities in their syntax, they are significantly different in many ways."
html html5 xml xhtml whatwg wiki technical 2009 Sep 10, 6:11Google Documents can render any PDF on the web simply via an URL API. Step 2, implement HTML5. Step 3, call registerContentHandler('application/pdf', 'http://docs.google.com/gview?url=%s')
pdf google web internet html5 technical via:waxy 2009 Sep 9, 5:35The FTP spec's section 3.5 'ERROR RECOVERY AND RESTART' describes how to resume an FTP download.
ietf reference ftp rfc resume download internet technical
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