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War Ballooning-Kismet Wireless "Eye in the Sky" (Rick Hill)

2008 Sep 22, 1:21Rick Hill, War Ballooning-Kismet Wireless "Eye in the Sky". Presentation notes from Rick Hill's DefCon talk on WarBallooning.PermalinkCommentshack balloon wireless warballoon defcon security

King of Wands - Christopher Shelton's Blog

2008 Sep 21, 11:30Chris's blog.|Christopher SheltonPermalinkCommentsblog chris-shelton friend

Party Movies Recommended by Netflix

2008 Sep 18, 10:31
Poster for 24 Hour Party PeoplePoster for Human TrafficPoster for The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down

Netflix has recommended three party movies over my time with Netflix and if you're OK with movies featuring sex, drugs, rock&roll (or techno) as almost the main character then I can recommend at least The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down.

24 Hour Party People is based on the true story of Tony Wilson, journalist, band manager, and club owner (not all at once) around the rise of punk and new wave in England. Like many true-story based movies it starts off strong and very interesting but gets very slow at the end like the writers got bored and just started copying the actual events. Unless you have some interest in the history of music in the 80s in Manchester I don't recommend this movie.

Human Traffic is fun and funny following a group of friends going out for a night of clubbing and partying. I had to get over seeing John Simm as not The Master from Doctor Who but rather as a partying youth. It felt like it was geared towards viewers who were on something like the totally odd techno musical interludes with the characters dancing for no apparent reason. Otherwise the movie was good.

The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down is done in the style of an old educational movie on the topic of clubbing and partying. It sounds like a premise that would get old but they do a good job. While demonstrating drinking and driving they have scientists push a mouse around in a toy convertible. Enough said. It was funny and I recommend it.

PermalinkCommentsparty movie netflix

Mr. And Mrs. Vader on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

2008 Sep 18, 11:33"This was just too funny and a great idea. The hand holding just added to the humor. It is good to see Vader in a relationship finally. Maybe he won't be so grumpy and short tempered from now on."PermalinkCommentsgeek humor starwars darth-vader

Sarah Palin's Hacked Yahoo Email Account Timeline

2008 Sep 18, 10:05Sarah Palin's Yahoo email addresses were hacked. I agree with the commenter: "I was just about to post how I feel bad for her despite disagreeing with most of her politics. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to attack her (or any politician), but this is clearly personal, not politics. From what I've read, this wasn't even the account she used for those communications she wanted to hide from subpoena, so the vigilante justice angle is BS. This is just plain mean." Although the last sentence of the following made me laugh: "A good samaritan in the /b/ thread reset the password account with the intention of handing it over to Palin, a process known on /b/ as "white knighting". This locked everyone else out of the account. The "white knight" posted a screenshot to /b/ of his pending message to one of Palin's contacts about how to recover the account, but made the critical mistake of not blanking out the new password he set."PermalinkCommentssecurity politics hack privacy government legal email yahoo

Xbox Achievements for Everyday Life

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...

PermalinkCommentsself-tracking data achievements

The J-Walk Blog: A New Way Of Telling Time

2008 Sep 16, 5:08"Today I invented a new way to tell time. ... it will revolutionize time-keeping as we know it.... time is based on the percentage of the day. 12:00 midnight is 0%, 12:00 noon is 50%, 6:00 p.m. is 75%, and so on." I imagine this would be the most depressing way to look at time. Good morning, you've already wasted 33% of the day unconscious in your bed! Every day would be a progress bar slowly counting down the time. I'd probably stop watching TV completely. Why stop at counting the percentage of the day, how about the year, or how about the percentage of your life expended based on average life expectency?PermalinkCommentstime humor

The Quantified Self

2008 Sep 16, 4:56All about self-trackers who track and graph all sorts of personal data. I suppose mycrocosm is like the self-tracker's twitter. "A quick overview of the emerging culture of self-tracking ran in the Washington Post the other day. Called "Bytes of Life: For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There's a Web Site to Help You Keep Track." The subtitle is a gross exaggeration, although in time it will be true."PermalinkCommentsprivacy data social personal kevin-kelly

Yahoo! Search Blog: Yahoo! Chats with Semantic Web Expert, Ben Adida

2008 Sep 16, 3:57Interview with Ben Adida on RDFa: "...RDFa is ready. It has just been approved by the W3C as a Candidate Recommendation, with the specific text of the specification and a brand new Primer published on June 20th. Y!: What can I do with RDFa? BA: You can tell the world what various components on your web page mean by marking up things like: The title of a photo Your name and contact information The license under which you're distributing your latest MP3 The ingredients of a cooking recipe The price of an item A gene on which you recently wrote a paper ... Anything that you want to make more machine-readable"PermalinkCommentsrdf microformats yahoo semantic interview ben-adida semanticweb via:felix42

mycrocosm

2008 Sep 16, 2:44Update via the web, email, or your phone, stats on day to day activities. For example send 'lunch time' to create a new time dataset named lunch and then send 'lunch' when you eat lunch and it will note all the times you ate lunch. I was tempted to use this to see a graph of when I add delicious posts but it doesn't support importing old data. Don't think I'll use it but it uses OpenID perfectly.PermalinkCommentsblog statistics openid social graph visualization tool

Radiohead Extends Remix Voting as Entrants Bellyache | Listening Post from Wired.com

2008 Sep 15, 1:50This just in: people on the Internet are complaining. Also Radiohead has a remix contest. Neat. "No good deed goes unpunished. After letting fans pay whatever they wanted for In Rainbows and releasing stem tracks via iTunes so that one of the songs on the record could be remixed, Radiohead is facing accusations that its "Nude" remix contest is unfair."PermalinkCommentsmusic wired radiohead remix contest

Eat the City - Munich - Google Maps

2008 Sep 14, 7:14Map of places to eat in Munich. "Eat the City - Munich, Some people like museums, others do walking tours, I get to know a city by eating it. By Megan D"PermalinkCommentsmap google munich germany travel restaurant

Register to Vote in Washington State

2008 Sep 11, 1:02Register to vote in Washington State online. "You must complete a voter registration form if you are registering for the first time in Washington or if you have moved to a new county. If you have moved within the same county, you may transfer your registration by completing a new form or contacting your County Auditor by mail, email, or phone. There is no registration by political party in Washington state."PermalinkCommentspolitics government vote washington elections registration

Inside the Large Hadron Collider

2008 Sep 9, 8:33Wired's excellent and awesome photos from CERN's LHC. "On November 27, 2006, the final superconducting main magnet was delivered to CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- the most ambitious physics experiment ever created."PermalinkCommentswired photos lhc cern science photo

Big data: Welcome to the petacentre : Nature News

2008 Sep 9, 8:29Article on the data centers that backup the Internet Archive and handle CERN's LHC's data. "CERN embodies borderlessness. The Swiss-French border is a drainage ditch running to one side of the cafeteria; it was shifted a few metres to allow that excellent establishment to trade the finicky French health codes for the more laissez-fair Swiss jurisdiction. And in the data sphere it is utterly global."PermalinkCommentslhc history internet cory-doctorow nature physics network hardware library science cern internet-archive

WebAIM: Blog - History of the browser user-agent string

2008 Sep 8, 7:00A brief history of user agent strings in web browsers, culminating in: "And thus Chrome used WebKit, and pretended to be Safari, and WebKit pretended to be KHTML, and KHTML pretended to be Gecko, and all browsers pretended to be Mozilla, and Chrome called itself Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13, and the user agent string was a complete mess, and near useless, and everyone pretended to be everyone else, and confusion abounded."PermalinkCommentshumor internet browser mozilla google chrome user-agent ie

Epeus' epigone: Fear of the new - the Internet, Tea, and MapReduce

2008 Sep 8, 10:26"This is what I call the "cup of tea" problem, after Douglas Adams: Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day."PermalinkCommentsinternet security humor douglas-adams via:sambrook

Studio Walljump Announces Liight For WiiWare - WiiWare World

2008 Sep 5, 1:56This is the game from the same person I linked to previously who has a son named Link: "I'm very excited to finally announce our first game, Liight, for WiiWare! So... what is it? Liight is a puzzle solving game where the pieces are colored lights and the goal is to make cool music! Anyone can play! Just illuminate all the targets in each puzzle with light of the matching color... but it's not always so easy! You'll have to mix colors, cast shadows and make the most of your limited resources to solve these brain teasers. Solve 100 challenging puzzles! Create your own puzzles, and Share them with your friends via WiiConnect24. Host a Contest to see who can solve your puzzle the fastest. If you're ready, take on Nonstop mode, a whole new way to play where arcade-style scoring meets split-second strategy!"PermalinkCommentsliight game videogame nintendo wii wiiware

Tech Tracks | Microsoft launching Windows ad campaign at 5:15 p.m. with spot on NFL season opener tonight | Seattle Times Newspaper Blog

2008 Sep 4, 6:08The new Windows ad campaign begins. I thought it was funny. I thought it'd be more directly aimed at the Mac ads and have something about Vista. I'm no ad expert though so what do I know? "The ad to air tonight is the first of a series and is meant to be humorous, said a company spokeswoman. She would provide no additional details about the campaign." Oh, jokes! I get jokes. Thanks for the tip company spokeswoman!PermalinkCommentshumor video advertising microsoft

Birthday Weekend

2008 Sep 4, 11:30

A photo of the Seattle skyline in the distance over water.This past weekend Sarah and I went to Salty's on Alki. I had never been down to the Alki area so that was fun and I took a few photos while we were there. It turns out they were the last few photos I'll be taking with that camera as it turned itself on in my pocket and the lens extension mechanism broke for the inner most lens. So now I'm looking for a new camera, preferably one that has a lock mechanism so I can't accidentally turn it on in my pocket. The dinner was good and Salty's has a great view. On an unrelated note, the next day we went to an Audi dealership and test-drove the new 2009 A4 which was fun. I'm happy with my car but Sarah's feeling antsy.

PermalinkCommentsalki rambling camera weekend birthday nontechnical
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