2009 May 29, 9:28"During nighttime patrol, persons or vehicles using the entire NightMarker Detection Portocol can illuminate areas from distances of at least 100 meters out and look for disturbances in the road or
guardrails. Long Lasting IR Paint and Aerosol Spray is guaranteed to last at least 6 months in direct sunlight."
ir ir-paint military 2009 May 29, 9:13"Developed in the late 1960s by Dutch physicist J. R. J. van Asperen De Boer, infrared reflectography (IRR) is a technique used to look through the paint layers. ... Many paints will appear partially
or completely transparent while others, such as black, will absorb the infrared radiation and appear dark."
art history science ir ir-reflectography 2009 May 27, 3:01"The Microsoft Connect service is a web-platform for communication between Microsoft Software Engineers and their developer community... Unfortunately the sign-up and feature request process is a
little confusing, and long-winded, so I have put together a guide to help people get to the right place."
microsoft internet ie ie8 ie9 html5 canvas humor reference screenshot 2009 May 25, 10:19"Wallace and Gromit return-this time as purveyors of the Top Bun bakery, despite the fact that 12 other local bakers have disappeared in the previous year. Now it's up to Gromit to solve the mystery
while Wallace woos new love interest Piella Bakewell."
humor movie wallace-and-gromit animation claymation for:hellosarah 2009 May 8, 8:23
I watched the new Star Trek movie Thursday morning, along with many others who work on Windows. Microsoft rented out a theater and played the movie on all screens. I greatly enjoyed the movie!
Spoilers follow... I'm obviously not the biggest Star Trek nerd (or at least TOS nerd) since I didn't even pick up on the fact that Kirk's dad being dead was a discrepancy from the TV series. I
only figured out the alternate time-line stuff when they killed most of the Vulcans. I was just surprised they didn't set right what once went wrong by the end of the movie with some more time
travel magic to bring back Vulcan. On that note, I'm pretty sure the Spock-Spock conversation at the end, is Nimoy Spock sending Sylar Spock off to school so that Nimoy Spock can get freaky
repopulating the Vulcan race. Although at first after his 'two places at once' comment I thought he was saying... something else. Also, was the main evil guy a random miner turned psycho? And his
crazy looking spaceship that destroys the Federation fleet was just a mining vessel from the future? Once they invent time travel anybody can get drunk, go back in time, and conquer Earth.
personal2 nerd movie star-trek spoliers time-travel 2009 Apr 29, 1:06More than three decades after the Clean Water Act, iconic American waterways like the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound are in perilous condition and facing new sources of contamination.
todo via:jen video pbs environment 2009 Apr 14, 9:26
I've made a QR Encode accelerator around Google Chart's QR code generator. QR codes are 2D bar-codes that can store (among other things) URLs and have good support on mobile
phones. The accelerator I've written lets you generate a QR code for a selected link and view it in the preview window. In combination with the ZXing
bar-code scanner app for my Android cellphone, its easy for me to right click on a link in IE8 on my desktop PC, hover over the QR Encode accelerator to have the link's associated QR code
displayed, and then with my phone read that QR code to open my phone's browser to the URL contained inside. Its much easier to browse around in the comfort of my desktop and only send particular
URLs to my cellphone as necessary.
technical boring accelerator android barcode ie8 google qr code 2009 Apr 13, 10:17If the face drawn onto the robot hadn't been as cute I doubt as many people would have helped =). "Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they
encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to
reach their goal."
tweenbot video social map robot cute nyc society humor 2009 Apr 7, 5:29"In response to the overwhelming demand for this made-up product, ThinkGeek has posted the following: ATTN Tauntaun Fanatics! Due to an overwhelming tsunami of requests from YOU THE PEOPLE, we have
decided to TRY and bring this to life."
humor starwars thinkgeek awesome 2009 Apr 7, 11:58
This past week I finished Anathem and despite the intimidating physical size of the book (difficult to take and read on the bus) I became very engrossed and was able to finish it in several orders of
magnitude less time than
what I spent on the Baroque
Cycle. Whereas reading the Baroque Cycle you can imagine Neal Stephenson sifting through giant economic tomes (or at least that's where my mind went whenever the characters began to explain
macro-economics to one another), in Anathem you can see Neal Stephenson staying up late
pouring over philosophy of mathematics. When not
exploring philosophy, Anathem has an appropriate amount of humor, love interests, nuclear bombs, etc. as you might hope from reading Snow Crash or Diamond Age. I thoroughly enjoyed Anathem.
On the topic of made up words: I get made up words for made up things, but there's already a name for cell-phone in English: its "cell-phone". The narrator notes that the book has been translated
into English so I guess I'll blame the fictional translator. Anyway, I wasn't bothered by the made up words nearly as much as some folk. Its a good thing I'm long
out of college because I can easily imagine confusing the names of actual concepts and people with those from the book, like Hemn space for Hamming distance. Towards the beginning, the description
of slines and the post-post-apocalyptic setting reminded me briefly of Idiocracy.
Recently, I've been reading everything of Charles Stross that I can, including about a month ago, The Jennifer Morgue from the surprisingly awesome amalgamation genre of spy thriller and Lovecraft
horror. Its the second in a series set in a universe in which magic exists as a form of mathematics and follows Bob Howard programmer/hacker, cube dweller, and begrudging spy who works for a
government agency tasked to suppress this knowledge and protect the world from its use. For a taste, try a short story from the series that's freely available on Tor's website, Down on the Farm.
Coincidentally, both Anathem and the Bob Howard series take an interest in the world of Platonic ideals. In the case of Anathem (without spoiling anything) the universe of Platonic ideals, under a
different name of course, is debated by the characters to be either just a concept or an actual separate universe and later becomes the underpinning of major events in the book. In the Bob Howard
series, magic is applied mathematics that through particular proofs or computations awakens/disturbs/provokes unnamed horrors in the universe of Platonic ideals to produce some desired effect in
Bob's universe.
atrocity archives neal stephenson jennifer morgue plato bob howard anathem 2009 Apr 3, 11:40"'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information." The page
is a lot easier to read with styling turned off. Actually, skip the text just watch the TED video.
visualization design research mit hci mobile interactive ted 2009 Mar 26, 2:24"Yesterday's remix challenge -- to mock the ridiculous new "anti-terrorism" posters the London police have put up that tell you to spy on your neighbors -- was a smashing success. I've collected the
25 or so that came in to date below". I enjoyed: "A bomb won't go off here because people tend to be quite nice really." "Terribly convenient, isn't it? Incriminating evidence left right out where
you'll spot it and call it in..." "A bomb won't go off here because the true likelihood of you being the victim of a terror attack is really very low, especially when compared to other causes of
death or injury."
humor politics poster paranoia security via:boingboing.comments photoshop privacy 2009 Mar 25, 4:03"...we can look at the contemporary screen virus as a transitional phase - a growing pain, if you will, of the information age. Tiling our environment with screens is an extremely literal, and on top
of that rather unimaginative, way to introduce virtuality into the physical world: simply piling it on where seamless integration was what was wanted."
via:infosthetics visualization information architecture culture design art 2009 Mar 25, 1:03Finally more storage for all those virtual console games I download: "What is going to interest gamers, however, is the expanded support for storage on the Nintendo Wii. The new update for the Wii
Menu allows you to download and launch content straight from an SD card, and there is now support for SDHC cards, meaning you can cheaply add as much storage to your system as you'd like. A game was
shown launching from a memory stick, with only a short loading time."
nintendo wii videogame storage 2009 Mar 20, 6:18
IE8, the software I've been working on for some time now, has finally been released at MIX09.
As I mentioned previously, I worked on
accelerators (previously named
Activities) in IE8. Looking at the
kinds of things I blog about on the IE Blog, you might also
correctly guess that I work on the networking stack. Ask me about what else I worked on during IE8 development. The past few months were very busy for me and I'm happy this is finally out.
technical internet explorer ie8 2009 Mar 12, 2:17
I've made an extension for Internet Explorer 8, FormToAccelerator which turns HTML forms on a web page into either an accelerator or a search
provider. In the design of the accelerators format we intentionally had HTML forms in mind so that it would be easy to create accelerators for existing web services. Consequently, creating an
accelerator from an HTML form is a natural concept and an extension I've been meaning to finish for many months now.
This is similar in concept to the Opera feature that lets you add a form as a search provider. The user experience is very rough and requires some knowledge of accelerator variables. If I can come
up with a better interaction model I may update this in the future, but at the moment all the designs I can come up with require way too much effort. Install IE8 RC1 and then try out FormToAccelerator.
activity html accelerator ie8 internet-explorer activities formtoaccelerator extension 2009 Mar 10, 9:22Justin Frankel (Previously Winamp/Nullsoft guy) makes a designated graffiti box on his garage with the note: "All are welcome to express themselves in the box below. Printing within the above box is
hereby expressly permitted and shall not be considered 'graffiti' in accordance with article #23 of the San Francico Municipal Code." Before graffiti: , And with graffiti:
graffiti cultural-disobediance legal san-francisco nullsoft justin-frankel blog 2009 Mar 6, 5:36"The Moth, a not-for-profit storytelling organization, was founded in New York in 1997 by poet and novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate in New York the feeling of sultry summer
evenings on his native St. Simon's Island, Georgia, where he and a small circle of friends would gather to spin spellbinding tales on his friend Wanda's porch."
moth podcast humor rss story nyc community 2009 Mar 6, 1:21"BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That the Washington State Senate honor Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik for their hard work and dedication to improving the lives of hospitalized children worldwide through
their creation and continued work with Child's Play Charity"
comic charity videogames penny-arcade goverment washington senate 2009 Feb 2, 11:52"Chessboxing: Created in 2003 by Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh, chess boxing has 11 rounds of alternated boxing and chess. In first round, which lasts four minutes, contestants initiate the chess match.
A two-minute boxing round follows. Rounds alternate until one of the players gets a checkmate or a knockout."
humor art chess boxing sport via:boingboing video youtube
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