Month: May 2010
Boy That’s Big
Seagate is planning by year’s end to be selling 3TB (that’s 3000 gigabyte) hard drives. The problem? They won’t work properly with many operating systems.
Geekdom Reading Material
- I could see this being useful in many places: Can manure power data centers?
- Using distributed computing to power a search engine.
- Display myths debunked: How monitor and HDTV companies cook their specs.
- WordPress 3.0 Ultimate Guide To New Features.
- Steve Jobs offers world “Freedom From Porn“.
- Fanboys: A field guide.
- Just for kicks: webOS booted up on a PC.
- How to replace your iMac’s hard drive.
- The ultimate list of 50 free Mac games.
- Typekit and Google announce open source of the WebFont loader, which works nicely with the newly announcement Google Font API and Google Font Directory.
- Speaking of Google, they’ve announced a project to release the VP8 under an open source and royalty-free basis. An x264 developer weighs in with technical analysis.
- HTML5 and Flash: Why it’s not a war and why Flash won’t die.
- Happy birthday to todo.txt CLI.
- Newsroom saves money by using iPads in place of paper scripts.
- Elastic, a visual theme editor for WordPress.
- nixCraft FAQ collection available to all.
- Build your own video community with Lighttpd and FlowPlayer.
- A nifty URL shortener that I should’ve used when I ran sh.orty.
Thirty Years Later, and These Images Are Still Haunting
While I was only a couple years old when Mount. St. Helens blew its top 30 years ago today, I’ve heard loads of stories from family members who lived in the Portland-area when it erupted. These pictures bring those stories back into my mind.
Facebook Privacy Made Easy
To manage your privacy on Facebook, you’ll need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options. It’s a mess of options. There’s a bookmarklet you can run on your profile that will lock down a bunch of this for you.
After you adjust your Facebook settings, just make sure you don’t Facebook and drive.
Time Killers For The Evening
First off, for a few more days, you can get Portal for free. I started playing it a couple days ago (when they first released it for free, as I’d never played it), and it’s a stupidly innovative and fun game. Can’t wait until the sequel.
Secondly, if you’d rather just kill some time at work in your browser, Death vs. Monsters is a good way to do it.
Time Killer For The Evening
Pretty simple (in theory): Just blow up the building, but don’t hurt anybody. Play it after the jump.
Reading Material
- Nothing like an Apple IIe, an iPad, and somebody with far too much time on their hands.
- Google Android surpasses iPhone in U.S..
- Speaking of Android, HTC EVO 4G has a release date and price (finally), but it also has a mandatory plan that sucks for people who aren’t in 4G areas (like us). I’d love to get that phone next month, but not with that kind of plan (basically an additional $30/month on top of what I pay now). But it is really fast.
- You want fast wireless? The Wi-Fi Alliance is starting to look at the 60-GHz band and potentially 6 gbps speeds. Considering how long it took them to finally lay down ratification on 802.11n, I wouldn’t expect to see this any time soon.
- Five things MSIE9 is actually doing right.
- Speaking of future browser and Web specs, Tim Bray has some interesting opinions on the Web, HTML 5, and Flash.
- It’s a bug or a feature? In this case, it was a bug that ended up being a well-liked feature.
- If you haven’t heard about the dude that has far too much time on his hands and managed to get a six-million person city in Sim City 2000, read up and watch the video here.
- Sony decided to lock out the ability to install Linux on PS3s, and our military’s a bit miffed.
- A strange, strange man has been showing up on morning shows throughout the Midwest, claiming to be a yo-yo trick champion. He is not. He is actually terrible at yo-yo. Yet he keeps getting on the air. Genius!
- Eight web sites that you and everybody else need to stop building.
- Home Depot Called “Arrogant,” Must Actually Pay Inventor For Invention. The guy had a patent on the thing, yet Home Depot still said “Sue us.” So he is.
KTVZ Has A New Web Site
Personally, I think their new design is a helluva lot better than their old one. I’m glad they replaced the front page story rotation Flash and replaced it with DHTML, and it appears their RSS feed actually includes all the stories now. However, all the KTVZ.com stories I’ve linked to are now dead. Unfortunately it appears that all links to their old site went dead because of the new CMS. I personally think this is more of a big deal than most people believe, and did express that to Barney when he was talking to me about the new site last week. The 404 error page is mostly worthless, too, as it doesn’t include anything remotely useful to help folks get back to the front page now that every link to a non-front page from prior to today is now dead. When a CMS is changed on a major content site, I know not all URLs can be saved, but the 404 page should at least be useful to find the new site or old content. That’s probably my biggest gripe, as I typically use Google to find past news content usually linked to from blogs and such, and now I won’t be able to find anything on KTVZ.com without using their search engine. And since their search engine doesn’t include past stories (at least right now), then what happens? A good 404 with built-in search could help alleviate this problem.
Otherwise, the site is much faster loading and a much cleaner design. It doesn’t have a favicon in place like the last one did, and it could use some code tweaks here and there, but otherwise much better than before.
Their mobile URL doesn’t appear to work anymore (again, lack of useful 404), and mobile.ktvz.com is…well … weird. It looks like a default subdomain setup for the company’s clients, not something personalized for KTVZ. I did like their simple mobile news site for news updates on the go, so hopefully something useful will be implemented in the future.
What do you think? Likes, dislikes, gripes, etc…?
UtterlyBoring.com In Tibet
Kyle was loser of the latest UtterlyBoring.com NCAA Pick ’em, and in what has become a tradition among the losers he sent pictures of him wearing the shirt to some random places (two-time loser Dren took it to Wrigley Field and to the pool). Here’s Kyle…
From the loser:
The Mt Everest picture was taken just outside of Base Camp after four days of hiking through the mountains with altitude sickness, thus the happy look on my face
Thanks for joining in the fun, Kyle. If anybody else wants to buy an utterlyboring.com shirt and take a random picture in some random place, go ahead (you can buy the NCAA loser shirt, if you want, but only The Dren and Kyle are officially losers).