It’s a nice day outside, but you didn’t want to get anything done today, right?
Category: Cool
Reading Material
- Before you start mouthing off about Hitler, you’d better know your Nazis.
- If it’s Condition 1 weather in Antartica, you want to stay indoors.
- Open *.eml files in Outlook.
- The Virtual Choir is an amazing compositional and technological work.
- The question everybody is asking, with the iPad’s release coming up, is whether they should buy one.
- And everybody wonders why folks have less respect for the GOP vs. The Democrat party — just look at their Web sites.
- ChatrouletteMap is disturbing and fascinating in so many ways.
- Schlinder’s List is for sale.
- An alarm clock that had better wake you up.
- NASA’s photos have nothing on this guy (and he did it a lot cheaper).
- Speaking of outer space, vintage postcards, invaded.
- 2,015 in a single Scrabble move.
- New Research Suggest That Government May Fake SSL Certificates.
- Geek Dream Girl: Woman who balances book on her head while solving a Rubik’s cube and counting Pi to 100 places. That’s hot.
- pwnat is serverless NAT-to-NAT — UDP hole punching for
- Google Contact Sync with Facebook.
- Funambol, Soocial, and Thunderbird Sync.
- Good collection of independent, unbiased, news sources.
- Dear Texas: Please shut up. Sincerly, History.
- f.lux is better lighting for your computer.
What Web Site Do You Wish Existed?
This is why I love reddit: wish it, and they will come.
For The Firefly Fans Out There
One of the biggest mysteries of the Firefly TV series was the history of Shephard Book. That mystery will be finally revealed in a new graphic novel, set to be released later this year.
Reading Material
- If I was the EU…
- Pick and browse for flickr photos based on color.
- Profs should rethink banning laptops from the lecture halls.
- How Blogs are Becoming More Like Newspapers.
- Pirate a video game, and your desktop and personal information get sent out on the Web.
- I’m sure there’s somebody out there that could use this: Top 20 Blogs about Knitting.
- 11 Things You Should Never Do Online.
- Top 10 Things That Annoy Programmers (oldy, may have seen/linked before, but still good).
- A look back at 12 years of hell we call the DMCA.
- URL Shorteners Slow Down The Web.
- Really fun series from Slate: The Secret Language Of Signs.
- Google Apps now has a marketplace — unfortunately none of it (that I can find) works on Google Apps free edition.
- If you have a Philips DVD player, there’s a good chance there’s a firmware hack here for it.
- Making amazing posters and desktops from Google Maps.
- 10 Annoying Habits of a Geeky Spouse (I’ll be the first to admit that a few of these describe me).
- Amazing Life Lessons You Can Learn From Albert Einstein.
- A creative way to setup a laptop in a car so the back-seaters can watch DVDs. A similar product at an ugly site.
- The “No Dashes or Spaces” Hall of Shame — or why your credit card forms on your site suck. My day-job’s site has this issue, too, but considering that our reservation software is barely online capable and DOS-based, I’m not about to monkey with it as I’m afraid I’ll break something.
- It should be easier to contribute to open source projcts, so somebody’s trying to make it easier.
- Paris in 26 gigapixels.
- 10 Geeky Items You’re Embarrased to Admit You Want.
- Search and Share, and interesting add-on for a site, but it effectively disables right-click, which I hate.
- Why new, big hard drives might really suck for Windows XP users.
- 8-bit Austin, a map of the city in 8-bit graphical form.
The First Weekend Of The Pick ’em Is Over
The first two rounds of the pick ’em are over, the spreadsheet’s been updated, and this tournament could still be won by anybody. I’m right back in the middle of the back, where I rightfully belong, but “Canadian Invaders”, “winner winner chicken dinner” and “Spencer Dahl” have the top three spots, but there are still many folks who are contention, with “Club ED” still having potentially 105 points out there to win, which is more than anybody else. There are still people that are down in the 24th-place area that have a bunch of potential points on the table, so there could be some shaking up of things next weekend when the action kicks back up again on Thursday.
LIke mentioned yesterday, the two last-place prizes have already been decided, and I have e-mailed both of them — and am awaiting a reply (two weeks starts today).
This will be the last pick ’em post for a few days, but this certainly the most competitive tournament we’ve had in a while.
Local High School Grad Now Owns World Track and Field Record
While it was impressive that the Oregon women won the NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championships (and the men placed second), the most impressive performance of the weekend was Mountain View HS graduate Ashton Eaton breaking the world record in the heptathlon, with a score that would have won him the world championships (which also occurred this weekend). If he would’ve competed just by himself as an individual, he would’ve scored in a bunch of events as well, and probably would have won a few indoor meets this year single-handedly.
In short, the guy is a stud.
The Tournament Field Has Been Set — Fill Out Your Brackets and Win!
The field has been set, and it’s time to fill our your brackets in the UtterlyBoring.com annual pick ’em. You have until early Thursday morning to get things filled out, so get crackin’!
Reading Material
- How to increase conversions on any Website in 45 minutes.
- Why is Oprah replacing David Attenborough as narrator of Life? Personally, I think it’s stupid, too, as I’d much rather listen to David Attenborough than Orpah (yes, I spelled that right — look it up). But one redditer has a theory: “I’m sure Oprah loves nature. She’s certainly eaten her fair share of it.”
- If you have an extra $20,000, you can buy yourself the ultimate chick magnet/repellent (be sure to read the reviews). Thanks Greg for that one.
- Twilight is crap because it isn’t bacon.
- Why ad blocking is devistating to the sites you love. Hopefully none of you are blocking ads on this site and are helping me feed my family by supporting our advertisers clicking on an ad or two or 12.
- Resume in Google Maps. Probably would be worthless for me, since most of my jobs have been in Oregon.
- NewEgg selling fake Intel CPUs, though obviously not intentionally. Just the same, everybody’s in a dither, even though I’ve never had bad luck with the Egg, and just recently discovered their business section.
- The 12 biggest rip-offs in America.
- What does Google suggest?
- Yikes…RSA 1024-bit private key encryption has been cracked by fluctuating with the power.
Reading Material
- I’d buy this as a poster.
- Remember the Sega 32X that never really took off? It could still do some cool stuff for its time.
- Calling all Romantics: Chatroulette has its own missed connections area like craigslist. Except with craigslist, you don’t have to actually see the crazy people. If you actually want to have decent luck chatting with people, it really helps to be an attractive woman.
- The competition is fierce at the Naked Co-ed Shopping Spree.
- Domain By IP, kind of like myIPneighbors, will help you find our who you’re sharing a server with (if you didn’t already know).
- Resource Expert Droid for checking headers when you don’t have Firefox and LiveHTTPHeaders.
- Looking to conceal a few weapons? This guy has some great ideas.
- Unix command line tools for Windows.
- Build yourself a network rack with Ikea side tables.
- The future of CSS Typography.
- Run your own free proxy through the Google App engine.
- 15 Best Web sites that can make you a Web Designer.
- Run a total background check on yourself.
- This site is creepy, but I can’t stop listening or wathing.
- Your logo is not your brand.
- Like, Python.