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, 5:32Smithsonian sponsors a free museum day with free admission to museums across the US tomorrow (2009-09-26)
free magazine museum 2009 Sep 25, 5:18"The closest the organization comes to stating its actual intent is in the wording of the print ad they’re running. Hmm. On the open medium of the Internet the organization hides its purpose, but in
the controlled medium of print, they come close to stating it. How unexpected!"
net-neutrality network-neutrality network internet broadband isp cable humor 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 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, 5:46Artist sells NYC garbage wrapped in lovely designed packaging to prove the correct packaging can sell anything.
humor art design new-york nyc trash gift shopping 2009 Sep 16, 4:48"German SSDeV member Ray is known all around the world for his impressive collection of handcuffs and his fun ways of opening most of them. ... At HAR he pulled another stunt: He used a 3D printer to
print handcuff keys. And not just any ordinary handcuff key … no, it’s the official handcuff key from the Dutch police!" Plus at the bottom a story on the legality of possessing handcuff keys.
legal security printer 3d key handcuff police 2009 Sep 14, 4:36Facebook makes a 'Fax This Photo' button but only lets TechCrunch employee's see it... Also, enjoyed the 'Oh my god this guys arm!' AD reference.
humor prank facebook journalism fax photo 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 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 10, 6:26Typekit's protections for their hosted fonts include referer header checking, and various obfuscations: "Our intent is only to discourage casual misuse and to make it clear that taking fonts from
Typekit is an explicit and intentional act."
via:kottke font typekit internet web security legal technical 2009 Sep 10, 5:52Just in time for Comcast switching channels above 30 to digital only. My current Windows Media Center setup will not function soon. How much do you think I'm going to have to spend to get it working
now...
cablecard cable tv windows mediacenter media technical 2009 Sep 3, 7:17"This specification defines a lossless compressed data format that compresses data using a combination of the LZ77 algorithm and Huffman coding." Also see RFC 1950 zlib, a wrapper compression format
that can use deflate, and RFC 1952 gzip, a compressed file format that can use deflate.
technical rfc ietf compression http deflate gzip zlib 2009 Sep 2, 4:44Humorous Nintendo/Ghostbusters t-shirt.
humor videogame nintendo ghostbusters shirt 2009 Sep 1, 4:59"...toy and apparel designers Kid Robot (with the help of creative ideas studio We Are Plus) have organized a mobile phone-based scavenger hunt in Manhattan centered around scanning QR codes."
qrcode phone scavenger-hunt toy advertising 2009 Sep 1, 4:57"Protect the wonderful convenience of RFID enabled cards with the Flipside Wallet." Looks like the Jimi but does RFID shielding and looks fat enough to hold US paper money folded once
vertically.
product wallet rfid 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 Aug 31, 4:41"The Morph and the Mandelbrot animation are all real-time ASCII and done via JavaScript code. The "Shark-like" Skylined logo looks like 3D and really cool. I was amazed when I saw it for the first
time." Is this the Skylined that I know? That's some hardcore ASCII animation.
skylined javascript ascii via:waxy animation
Some rights reserved