2008 Feb 15, 4:29FTA: "The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth."
via:swannman neal-stephenson 2008 Feb 12, 12:51A webpage that requires no clicking. Interesting design.
via:ldandersen web design ui clickless dontclick 2008 Feb 11, 7:49Thanks Itrasbiel! FTA: "The site must be marked. Aside from the legal requirement, the site will be indelibly imprinted by the human activity associated with waste disposal. We must complete the
process by explaining what has been done and why. "
via:Itrasbiel future science time art nuclear government nuclear-waste 2008 Feb 8, 12:52FTA: "Quantum mechanics has a number of weird consequences... In trying to come up with a classical conceptual model in which to capture these non-classical phenomena, we eventually hit upon using
the idea of using computer games as an analogy. ...let us
humor nerd science quantum-mechanics tomb-raider game gaming 2008 Feb 8, 11:21FTA: "I was quite troubled to realize today that I couldn't list ten major differences between Sweden and Norway. All my best Livejournal pals lent a hand and we came up with this
not-entirely-comprehensive list."
map humor via:boingboing norway sweden europe geography information visualization 2008 Feb 7, 2:36To summ up the last Q&A, the one I was interested in: "Is there any way to escape the characters " and ' in an XPath expression...". And their answer is no. Lame. I thought XPath folk would have
defined this.
microsoft msdn xpath xml article 2008 Feb 1, 9:27These two shirt's heart's light up when the shirts get near one another.
geek led thinkgeek shirt humor zelda game valentines-day gift 2008 Jan 30, 1:15Turns photos into 3D environments.
via:swannman 3d photo tool standford 2008 Jan 28, 2:42Use this option with cl.exe (the Visual Studio C/C++ compiler) to see what your files look like after all the #define macro magic occurs. Useful when debugging crufty or organic macros.
microsoft msdn reference c++ cpp preprocessor tool compiler cl 2008 Jan 28, 10:39Name your computer an HTML string to inject that HTML into the target wireless router's HTML configuration page.
via:swannman security xss injection dhcp 2008 Jan 25, 1:54Research paper suggests location aware cellphones ask their owners to charge them when the phones see they're at home.
article newscientist research cellphone battery power microsoft 2008 Jan 24, 9:49Last.fm now lets you play entire tracks and albums on their site.
via:molly last-fm blog article free music 2008 Jan 22, 9:56
More ideas stolen from me in the same vein as my stolen OpenID thoughts.
Fast
Pedestrian Crossing on Four Way Stops. In college I didn't have a car and every weekend I had weekly poker with friends who lived nearby so I would end up waiting to cross from one corner of a
traffic lit four way stop to the opposite corner. Waiting there in the cold gave me plenty of time to consider the fastest method of getting to the opposite corner of a four-way stop. My plan was
to hit the pedestrian crossing button for both directions and travel on the first one available. This only seems like a bad choice if the pedestrian crossing signal travels clockwise or counter
clockwise around the four way stop. In those two cases its better to take the later of the two pedestrian signal crossings, but I have yet to see those two patterns on a real life traffic stop. I
decided recently to see if my plan was actually sound and looked up info on traffic signals. But the info
didn't say much other than "its complicated" and "it depends" (I'm paraphrasing). Then I found some guy's analysis of this problem. So I'm done with this and I'll continue pressing both
buttons and crossing on the first pedestrian signal. Incidentally on one such night when I was waiting to cross this intersection I heard a loud multi-click sound and realized that the woman in the
SUV waiting to cross the intersection next to me had just locked her doors. I guess my thinking-about-crossing-the-street face is intimidating.
Windows Searching
Windows Media Center Recorded TV's Closed Captions. An Ars-Technica article on
a fancy DVR described one of the DVRs features: full text search over the subtitles of the recorded TV shows. I thought implementing this for Windows Media Center recorded TV shows and Windows
Search would be an interesting project to learn about video files, and extending Windows Search. As it turns out though some guy, Stephen Toub implemented Windows Search over MCE closed captions already. Stephen Toub's article is very long and describes some
other very interesting related projects including 'summarizing video files' which you may want to read.
stolen-thoughts windows search mce windows traffic closed captions four-way-stop windows-media-center 2008 Jan 21, 8:49
This past weekend Sarah and I went to
Laughs Comedy Spot in Kirkland and saw
Doug Benson who frequently appears on
VH1's Best Week Ever. Doug Benson seemed drunk or high and messed up a couple of jokes but otherwise was at times very funny. There were
three comedians on before him sorted from least humorous to most. The place was smaller than I thought it'd be and required a lot of work to flag down a waitress to obtain a drink.
personal doug-benson humor 2008 Jan 18, 1:17A documentary on the vanishing of honey bees. Need to add this to my list.
bees documentary biology movie video environment 2008 Jan 16, 3:55FTA: "A bunch of men launched a whopping half million balls down the stairs of Holy Trinit on Pincio Hill in Rome."
art video culture cultural-disobediance humor via:boingboing 2008 Jan 14, 4:03FTA: "CinematicTitanic picks up where MST3K left off -- much of the original cast are back, along with some new voices, except this time, it's direct-from-net distribution of DRM-free DVDs and (soon)
DRM-free downloads."
via:boingboing mst3k video product purchase 2008 Jan 14, 10:24Alarm clock that donates money to a charity you dislike when you hit the snooze button.
alarm clock humor geek gadget gift thinkgeek wifi wireless product alarm-clock 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 12, 2:26If you're like me you need to serialize an object that contains an
HIMAGELIST via IMarshal for COM's marshalling. I could
use
ImageList_Write to actually write the HIMAGELIST to a stream for IMarshal::MarshalInterface, but I needed to know the
size of the data that I was going to write for IMarshal::GetMarshalSizeMax. I thought I'd use
HIMAGELIST_QueryInterface to
get an IPersistStream pointer which works, but alas its implementation of IPersistStream::GetMaxSize just returns E_NOTIMPL. Ultimately I called ImageList_Write on a special stream that ignores the
data passed to it and just records how much data is written to it. In this fashion I could get the size the HIMAGELIST would require when written to a stream.
technical himagelist boring serialize imarshal com
Fast
Pedestrian Crossing on Four Way Stops. In college I didn't have a car and every weekend I had weekly poker with friends who lived nearby so I would end up waiting to cross from one corner of a
traffic lit four way stop to the opposite corner. Waiting there in the cold gave me plenty of time to consider the fastest method of getting to the opposite corner of a four-way stop. My plan was
to hit the pedestrian crossing button for both directions and travel on the first one available. This only seems like a bad choice if the pedestrian crossing signal travels clockwise or counter
clockwise around the four way stop. In those two cases its better to take the later of the two pedestrian signal crossings, but I have yet to see those two patterns on a real life traffic stop. I
decided recently to see if my plan was actually sound and looked up info on traffic signals. But the info
didn't say much other than "its complicated" and "it depends" (I'm paraphrasing). Then I found some guy's analysis of this problem. So I'm done with this and I'll continue pressing both
buttons and crossing on the first pedestrian signal. Incidentally on one such night when I was waiting to cross this intersection I heard a loud multi-click sound and realized that the woman in the
SUV waiting to cross the intersection next to me had just locked her doors. I guess my thinking-about-crossing-the-street face is intimidating.
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