My favorite deal-of-the-day site Woot is getting bought up by Amazon, but will remain an independent subsidiary, like Zappos and Audible. Hilarious words from the CEO are here, and they produced a video for the occassion (that you need to be a Woot fan to really appreciate):
Month: June 2010
Reading Material
- Retro and new on one package: One side is vinyl, one side is a CD.
- How to cheat on video encoder comparisons.
- Fabrice Bellard is one smart dude.
- Worst Chart I’ve Seen All Day (or: Why you should never trust scary charts you see on Fox News, or any other cable news show for that matter).
- Even if you change the file’s extension, it doesn’t change the contents.
- Credit Card Number Generator for if you need to test submission forms on your site with credit card numbers that are in valid format.
- Like s**tmydadsays, s**t my girlfriend says (inspired by this Reddit thread).
- Building a distance finder with the Google Maps API.
- Why are tabs on the top in Firefox 4? Because it makes sense (but I’m sure there will an extension written to make it go back the other way).
- How to use photos to sell more online.
- 50 Time-Savers for Web Geeks (primarily geared towards developers, but there is some useful stuff here for everybody).
- One site from the above I’ve already found handy: Placehold.it is great when you just need a dummy image placeholder.
- Cheezburger Network is going after the Whitman campaign.
- The Patriot Act is a moronic law, and I’m glad this librarian fought it.
- A blog that has sucked up too much of my time today: A “Best Of” collection from the Young Me/Now Me site.
- iPhone vs. HTC Evo and HTV Evo vs iPhone (NSFW Language).
- Hulu is launching Hulu Plus. If they could just get it to work with my WDTV Live Plus HD box without using an external PlayOn server (though there’s a deal for WDTV users), I’d probably cut my cable (as Netflix works a helluva lot better on it than on my stand-alone media center).
- London’s twitter traffic mapped as a countoured landscape.
- Any geek should appreciate this .Net vs. Java movie trailer for Java4Ever.
- Something you don’t see everyday (for good reason): a public service announcement featuring a nearly-naked dancing man wearing a horse mask cooking wild mushrooms.
Time Killer For The Day
Crush The Castle 2 will kill off a ton of your time, especially if you visit the “People’s Empire” and start crushing those castles.
Use Scotch Tape To Fix Your iPhone Reception
So I reported last week that the iPhone 4 has signal problems if you hold it “wrong” — like with your left hand, for example. This was actually predicted as a potential problem before the release of the phone. It’s fixable by either buying a bumper case, holding it differently (that’s straight from Steve Jobs) or with a bit of scotch tape:
Note that if you own a Nokia, you can hold it however you want.
Five Minute Time-Killers
Need something to kill a quick few minutes? Enjoy.
- Orchestrated Death is a bit gruesome of a theme, but it’s a fun way to kill a few minutes.
- Easy Joe is another fun little five minute game, and is worth it for the background music.
Reading and Watching Material
Have some links and some videos (videos after the jump):
- Top free Mac apps for Graphic Designers (though there are a load of apps there that would be useful for non-designers as well).
- That fancy new iPhone4 has a glaring flaw with its antenna. It works great, as long as you don’t hold it wrong. More on Gizmodo.
- A lorem ipsum tool that generates readable text.
- Entertaining Facebook thread for text-adventure geeks.
- Remember that whole fiasco with Conan getting kicked off and Leno getting his time slow back? Hasn’t worked out so well, as his ratings are lower than Conan’s.
- If you’re prepping to launch a web site, you’d best go over these two checklists to make sure you’ve got everything covered.
- No idea how well it works, but here’s a quick tool to convert spreadsheets into HTML tables.
- Google Voice is now open for all (it will be tremendously useful to me when they get number portability).
- Five awesome tools for Freelancers for Time Management.
- The hilarious story of one woman’s attempt at running in the NCAA West Regional 5,000m race. As somebody’s who’s tried to run a race before when I was horribly sick, I feel her pain.
- That Steve Martin guy is high maintenance when he’s on tour.
- I just need a poster for my lost kitty. Why is that so hard?
- How to setup OpenID on your own domain (here’s how to do it with a fallback provider).
- YouTube gets a Vuvuzela button.
Videos after the jump …
Reading Material
- IBM’s Watson could kick your butt at Jeopardy!.
- This is just mesmorizing to watch: Live train map for London Underground.
- What it’s like to own an Apple product.
- Amazing invention: insulin that doesn’t need a fridge or a needle.
- 10 Facts You Didn’t Know About Google.
- Speaking of Google, they have a command line interface that does some pretty cool stuff.
- Want a high-definition Google streetview photo? Here’s a way to get it.
- How Xerox Helped Win The Cold War: Interesting story about sneaking cameras into copy machines.
- Soluto is Anti-Frustration Software for your PC.
- NYC (and the east coast in general) is full of all sorts of cool historical buildings and tidbits. Like this collection.
- Thinkgeek gets a cease-and-desist letter for Unicorn meat, which is obviously a fake product.
- If you’re a LOST guy (I’m not, but I’m looking at you, Jon), you might appreciate this island map.
- Six organizations that you didn’t know were secretely badass.
- Exploring the software behind Facebook.
- Better security whenever possible: HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extensions forces HTTPS requests on some major sites.
- Sexy tooltips with CSS.
- Create PDF files with JavaScript.
- A bunch of really good HTML5 and CSS3 frameworks.
- Related: CSS3 techniques you can start using today.
Time Killer For Father’s Day
Nothing like playing a stupidly annoying, oddly weird, but horribly addicting game to celebrate the day.
I’ve Had Dreams Like This
I was about eight years old, but I’ve had video game dreams before. But they were nothing like this one.