Category: Cool

Random Stuff Cleanout

Going through some of my old notes and links here…

  • Got this email from the Bulletin a few weeks back, and the archive is the interesting bit, to me:

    We’d like to introduce you to two great new features on our web site.

    Our historical archive dating back to 1907 is now available online. More than 600,000 pages are available today and another 1.5 million will be available in the coming months. To view this great resource go to www.bendbulletin.com and in the search bar at the top of the page type in a keyword search term, then select the “Newsprint Archive” button just below the keyword box.

    Just for fun, play our pro football contest game and you could win a Super Bowl party for 8 in a private room at Scanlon’s Restaurant, as well as great weekly prizes. You can even create a “private contest” and compete against your friends. Just go to www.bendbulletin.com/pigskinpayoff to enter. Be sure to enter before Sunday’s games to be eligible to be a winner this week.

    They’re missing some time in the mid-late ’90s until a few years back as I was in the paper dozens of times for high school-related stuff and they’re not there.

  • You thought you’ve seen everything,Then there’s animals with lightsabers.
  • Everything’s bigger in Texas, including Windows errors.
  • Nothing like a mushroom shaped like a boob (thanks Jen).

More later. Time to watch Monk and Psyche.

October 16, 2009

Amazing Photography Requires Some Risk — Or Really Good Software

I’m always amazed by photography that requires the photographer to take risks and make careful plans that allow the photo to be taken.

  • Exhibit A: A National Geographic photographer and his team wanted to make a seamless image of an entire redwood tree from top to bottom. The results (and the planning involved) are amazing.
  • Exhibit B: The planning and setup were involved and equipment was destroyed, but the results were totally worth it.

In the same veign, recent research is making it really easy to fake a composite photo with pretty convincing results. While it’s still obvious that they are fakes because the perspective is off, it’s a pretty impressive concept.

October 7, 2009

How To Rob A Bank

In a real-life story that seems made for Hollywood, this is one of the best parts:

Swedish police couldn’t pursue the thieves because a bag marked “bomb” had been placed outside the police heliport, and officers had to deal with the bag before they could enter the heliport. It is unclear whether the bag contained a bomb.

Needless to say, the bag didn’t have a bomb in it, but it kept the police occupied.

Links via kottke.

October 1, 2009

Quick And Dirty Web Site Fixes

Have five minutes? Have a web site? Here are 101 Five Minute fixes to incrementally improve your Web site.

So if you did all of them, and they indeed took five minutes each, it’d take you approximately 8½ hours. Not a bad work day for a much better site.

September 30, 2009

Want To Get As Far Away From The Golden Arches As Possible?

If you mapped all the McDonalds in the US and wanted to live the farthest away from one, it looks like a spot in South Dakota is the place to be at 107 miles from the nearest Big Mac.

September 23, 2009

“Missing” Wired Magazine Author Found

In the last Wired Magazine, Evan Ratliff wrote a great article about disappearing in the digital age. Part of the article was a contest: Ratliff would attempt to disappear for a month — you find him, you get $5000. His credit card transactions and IP addresses and other such stuff would be posted to a blog, where you could then analyze them and try to track the guy down (with $3000 going to Evan if he wasn’t found).

Just a few days before the 30 days were up, Ratliff was caught. Some folks at Newscloud managed to track down what city he was heading to, and notified some folks at New Orleans that he was going to be in town who subsequently, with a little competition with some other folks in town, managed to track the guy down, take his picture, give the codeword, and win the contest.

The whole blog and all its past entries are an entertaining read, especially the big clue that everybody missed that gave his itinerary pretty clearly.

September 14, 2009

Mapping The Seven Deadly Sins

It appears that folks the Dakotas, Iowa, and Nebraska are saints, with the sinners living in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Georgia, and that area of the U.S. in general (though lets not forget about California, which has its fair share of evildoers) . Full story.

September 14, 2009

Death To Acrobat Reader

Acrobat Reader is a constant sore spot for me. Thanks to the various security holes it has in older versions, I’ve had to clean up many a system that have been infected by hidden embedded PDFs that take advantage of those security problems. When I’m cleaning up a system, one of the most common things I’ll do it just flat-out turn off JavaScript in Acrobat or install another PDF reader. Just to be safe, I’ll still turn off JavaScript in FoxIt. Has anybody seen useful JavaScript in PDF files? I haven’t.

Ideally, PDF would be a browser-native format that wouldn’t require plugins or external programs to view them. But there are at least a few other ways to do things: Thanks to Waxy, I now know how I’m going to embed PDFs into pages: Use an undocumnted featured in Google Docs to stick it right on the page. That way hopefully nobody will have Acrobat Reader execute to view the file, which will cause much less trouble for everybody involved.

Apparently other services offer similar functionality, like PDFMeNot.

Sadly, though, if you try to print the embedded document, it still appears to open your default PDF reader, but it’s a step in the right direction.

September 13, 2009

Time Travel Essentials

If you’re going to do some time travelling, make sure to visit these 15 moments. I you want to make yourself rich and famouse, post this sign inside your machine and change the course of history — just like in Hollywood.

Updated…with correct link.

August 26, 2009

Typeface Encyclopedia

Identifont is great for typeface matching, but for typographic research, the new Typedia looks pretty slick.

August 25, 2009