2009 Dec 11, 5:13"A real true history lesson: Before there were laptops, everyone had to carry entire desktop computers to class. Before there were desktops, they had to lug typewriters. Before that, everyone just
tried real hard to remember stuff. Ask your grandparents!"
humor typewriter satire laptop college 2009 Dec 9, 1:32"We're not always aware of it here in the USA, but there are many ISPs out there in the world who do things quite differently than what we're used to. Some of these ISPs ideas are even really good.
Ars surveys the global ISP landscape and paints a picture of what a dream ISP might look like."
technical internet isp web article 2009 Dec 8, 12:02"This illustration, from the September 10, 1910 New York Tribune, imagines the rooftop burglars of the future. 'BURGLARS LEARN TO HANDLE THE AEROPLANE WITH PRECISION AND SILENCE: Our artist takes a
look into the future and foresees the time when roofs must be secured as carefully as any other part of the home.'"
humor history burglar crime newspaper news 2009 Dec 8, 8:45"And then there’s Mysterious Letters, a Kickstarter project from two artists — Michael and Lenka — to mail everyone in the world a personal letter. It began in April with a small village named
Cushendall in Northern Ireland, where the letters caused quite a stir"
humor art letter mail 2009 Dec 8, 1:56More good gift ideas just in time for the holidays: "The Invision LD 3D-Modeler printer has been discontinued and is being sold off for $5,000 a throw -- it uses Laminated Object Manufacturing to
produce low-rez 3D models"
3d printer purchase gift wishlist 2009 Dec 8, 1:54'As crowds rushed to find deals at the Emeryville, CA IKEA store, one of them had a plan other than shopping. Michelle Pred was actually placing her artwork, complete with working IKEA barcodes, into
the inventory, an act she calls “shopdropping.”'
cultural-disobediance shopdropping art ikea barcode 2009 Dec 8, 1:53Supervillain Richard Branson narrates his Virgin Galactic video in which he describes his future domination of all of space.
video science richard-branson virgin-galactic space tourism transportation 2009 Dec 7, 5:15"Yahoo isn’t happy that a detailed menu of the spying services it provides law enforcement agencies has leaked onto the web." ... "Cryptome also published lawful data-interception guides for Cox
Communications, SBC, Cingular, Nextel, GTE and other telecoms and service providers. But of all those companies, it appears to be Yahoo’s lawyers alone who have issued a DMCA takedown notice to
Cryptome demanding the document be removed."
privacy security copyright yahoo dmca internet web surveillance 2009 Dec 7, 3:25Cool, I've been waiting for this: "Twitter creator Jack Dorsey’s Square application, which is like a smartphone PayPal for credit cards, attracted lots of warranted attention for its potential to
enable peer-to-peer and merchant credit card transactions in the real world far beyond what’s capable today in most countries." Oh, never mind... "As a customer, all you need to buy from a Square
merchant is a credit, debit or pre-paid card"
credit-card money via:louis cellphone square 2009 Dec 4, 10:24Flickr dev. blog on the accept-language HTTP header: "It’s true that the Accept-Language header has a troubled history. Because of this, many developers regard it the way medieval villagers might
have regarded a woman with a warty nose and a pet cat – it should be shunned, avoided and possibly burned at the stake." And this great anecdote: "In two and a half years of running as an
international site, we’ve only ever had one case where it didn’t work. Helio, a cellphone company, had a browser was custom-built for them in Korea, and had its “Accept-Language” header hard-coded to
always request Korean, something which led to much confusion for the Flickr users amongst their American customers."
flickr internationalization language accept-language http http-header development technical web 2009 Dec 3, 4:52Having replaced HTTP with SPDY, Google digs deeper into the Web stack providing their own DNS servers. Also, as Waxy noted, you can't argue with the most memorable IP addresses I've seen: "Configure
your network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers". Also check out their DNS server's DNS prefetching in the performance notes.
google dns internet network security performance dns-prefetching technical 2009 Dec 3, 2:39"Android 2.0 comes with a bevy of refinements to its connectivity features. These include VPN support, multiple account support, exchange support, HTML5 support, bluetooth 2.1, and quite a few more
which can best be found in the Android Platform Highlights document."
android review droid motorola cellphone 2009 Dec 2, 3:00"These are tough questions, but the horrific problems of the "Victorian Internet" suggest that government overreach isn't the only thing to fear. In 1876, laissez-faire "freedom for all" meant (in
practice) the freedom for Henry Nash Smith to read your telegrams if he didn't like who you supported for President. It meant freedom for Associated Press to block criticism of Western Union, and
even to put potential critics and competitors out of business. And it meant freedom for a scoundrel to hijack the system at his leisure."
net-neutrality internet government politics communication telegraph technical 2009 Dec 1, 9:40Wow: 'The fact that federal, state, and local law enforcement can obtain communications "metadata"—URLs of sites visited, e-mail message headers, numbers dialed, GPS locations, etc.—without any real
oversight or reporting requirements should be shocking, but it isn't. The courts ruled in 2005 that law enforcement doesn't need to show probable cause to obtain your physical location via the cell
phone grid. All of the aforementioned metadata can be accessed with an easy-to-obtain pen register/trap & trace order. But given the volume of requests, it's hard to imagine that the courts are
involved in all of these.'
privacy security gps phone cellphone government politics 2009 Dec 1, 5:55A cross browser javascript implementation of SVG, XUL, portions of HTML5 and more. Check out their demos. "Ample SDK, a must-see: cross-browser (Gecko, Webkit, Opera, Chrome, and even IE 5.5+ !!),
XInclude 1.0, XML Events 1.0, XML Schema, SMIL 3.0, REX 1.0, XBL 2.0 (!), SVG, XUL (cross-browser !), HTML5, XForms, ..., superb demos (SVG-based @shepazu in IE, wow...), dual MIT/GPL licensing
terms, open-source"
technical browser svg xul webkit opera ie javascript web html5 2009 Nov 30, 6:31"At Mozilla Labs, we’ve been working on some potential integrations of identity directly into the browser. Note, this is an extremely rough draft." Looks pretty!
firefox browser identity web mozilla security authentication openid 2009 Nov 29, 1:53Fictional characters with beards. "Bearded: Brock Samson, Bearded: Robocop, Bearded: Hellboy, Bearded: Boba Fett, Bearded: Black Mage, Bearded: Wario, Bearded: Clint Eastwood, Bearded: Batman"
humor art beard facial-hair hero brock-samson robocop batman boba-fett 2009 Nov 29, 1:43Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" accompanied by 4 games of a hacked Super Mario World level. The matching of the background images between the four plays is what gets me.
humor videogame video youtube mario queen music dont-stop-me-now via:waxy 2009 Nov 29, 1:32
Sarah and I had Thanksgiving dinner at our house the Sunday before.
Sarah's parents and siblings came as well as my parents who came up for the a handful of days. It was our first time hosting Thanksgiving so I was a little nervous, but my parents helped us setup
and get ready so of course it went well! I cheated a bit: I ordered a turkey online from Whole Foods where you can just tell them when you want to pick it up, they have it cooked and ready
including garnish and you just need to warm it up. When we moved in together Sarah and I each had slightly different small dining room tables. Thankfully they're roughly the same height and width
and we could put them together end to end and seat everybody with no room to spare. On actual Thanksgiving day we went over to Rachel & Anson's lovely new place for Thanksgiving and the annual
game of Trivial Pursuit.
turkey whole foods thanksgiving holiday 2009 Nov 28, 3:50The downside of the placebo the nocebo: "This is the amazing world of the nocebo effect, where negative expectations can induce unpleasant symptoms, in the absence of a physical cause.", "In two of
them, the consent form contained a statement outling various gastrointestinal side effects, and in these centres there was a sixfold increase in the number of people reporting such symptoms and
dropping out of the trial, compared with the one centre that did not list such side effects in the form."
nocebo placebo science medicine ben-goldacre
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