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YouTube - HTML 5: Features you want desperately but still can't use

2008 Sep 29, 1:39Demos some of the working HTML5 features now available in recent builds of FireFox, IE8, Safari, and Opera. "Speaker: Ian Hickson. As the HTML5 effort reaches its first big milestone -- feature completeness -- browsers are starting to implement it. It will be years before you can rely on HTML5 support when writing Web pages and applications, but you can start to experiment today to get a feel of what the new standard offers. This talk will explore some of the most recent implementations of HTML5 features."PermalinkCommentshtml5 ian-hickson html google video browser ie8

Fantasy Magazine - Guest Column: Five Thoughts On The Popularity Of Steampunk

2008 Sep 26, 2:22This made me laugh: "People think of goths as weirdoes who take vampires too seriously, and therefore they can't help being worried on some level that a crazy goth might, you know, want to make them bleed. Whereas steampunks are - what? Weirdoes who take pocket-watches too seriously? What are they gonna do, vehemently tell you what time it is?"PermalinkCommentssteampunk article goth scifi geek via:ethan_t_hein

Facebook | Help Center

2008 Sep 24, 6:37Info on how to get at what RSS feeds Facebook provides. "Facebook allows you to subscribe to a variety of rapidly updating content on the site. You can easily keep track of all of your friend's status updates, posted items and notes." I'd like a RSS feed of my news feed please.PermalinkCommentsrss facebook reference help

Anecdotes from Work

2008 Sep 23, 2:15

Diveristy in NumbersThe names in the following anecdote have been changed. Except for my name (I'm Dave).

I got a new laptop a while back. I had it in my office and Tim came in to ask me something but paused when he saw my laptop. "Oh, is this one of those new touch screen laptops?" he asked, the whole time moving his hand towards my laptop and punctuating his sentence by pressing his finger to the screen. "No" I responded.

Walking down a hallway I heard Winston, one of our managers, say, "Hey Tim!" Winston catches up to me and asks, "Are you almost done with the XYZ bug?" I realized Winston was talking to me and got my name wrong but I figured I'll ignore it and perhaps he'll realize his mistake. Winston continued "I just talked with some people who say they're blocked and waiting for Tim to finish the XYZ bug." "Dave" I said helpfully attempting to diplomatically correct Winston since he apparently hadn't realized his error. "No, it was Jeremy and Bill." Winston said naming the people he had talked to who were waiting for me to fix the XYZ bug. At this point I decided it would be easier to just answer his question and end the conversation than to get into this whole thing. As far as I know, Winston has not gotten my name wrong at any other time.

PermalinkCommentswork nontechnical

Bailout Satire

2008 Sep 23, 1:19The economic bailout program written as 419 spam. "I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you."PermalinkCommentshumor politics economics satire spam via:boingboing

Street Corner Science with Leon Lederman Pt.1 | ScienCentral | Science Videos | Science News

2008 Sep 23, 1:11"...a film crew and a renowned scientist are plunked down on a busy city street corner, and an impromptu Q&A session with the public ensues." I like the concept. Two videos on the topicPermalinkCommentsvideo science education physics nyc via:boingboing

de-Tor-iorate Anonymity, DefCon, (Nathan Evans and Christian Grothoff)

2008 Sep 22, 1:21Nathan Evans and Christian Grothoff, de-Tor-iorate Anonymity. The presentation notes for a DefCon talk about an attack on Tor in which the attacker may discover Tor nodes used in a session.PermalinkCommentstor anonymity privacy security network defcon

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

Feltron Eight

2008 Sep 16, 4:25I'd seen the previous year's Feltron Annual Report but not the rest of the portfolio. Great stuff.PermalinkCommentsblog art visualization statistics data portfolio design

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

Musopen - Free Public Domain Classical Music

2008 Sep 15, 1:23A repository of free public domain classical music. I'm enjoying 'Pictures at an Exhibition - I. Gnomus' right now. The site makes it easy to download, play in place, or copy HTML for embedding a particular piece.PermalinkCommentsclassical music public-domain copyright free mp3

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

Re: [DNSOP] Public Suffix List

2008 Sep 10, 1:32Discussion on IETF DNS mailing list about Mozilla's Public Suffix list and what they should do ultimately. "I'm inclined to suggest: Gather and hard-code your list into Firefox, and also provide a mechanism by which domain authorities can publish information which overrides your list for their domain."PermalinkCommentsidn domain firefox publicsuffix ietf mozilla tld
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