- 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.
Category: Geekdom
Geekdom Reading Material
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.
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.
Mother’s Day Reading Material
OK, there is nothing here related to Mother’s Day (except for maybe this Calvin and Hobbes classic or these psycho movie moms), but here’s wishing all you moms out there a great day of well-deserved spoiling.
- For Airport Security, Size Matters.
- Yet another reason to get an Android phone: Google Goggles gets an upgrade to translate real-world text.
- ClearOS (formally ClarkConnect) looks like a great replacement for Windows Small Business Server.
- What Conan was really thinking during his 60 Minutes interview.
- Speaking of Conan, he paid a visit to Google.
- Speaking of Google, they’ve added an app gallery for Analytics.
- Speaking of Analytics…well, I’ve got nothing. But speaking of Google, did you notice they flattened their logo?
- When 4Chan Gamed the Time 100.
- How to hide your collection of risqué material.
- Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen: These guys can run for short distances on water.
- The Queen may get last word in UK election.
- 21 Essential Social Media Resources.
- If the original Super Mario Bros was designed in 2010.
- How To: Jailbreak any iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad..
- 5 Best Personal Landing Pages.
Reading Material
- If the Empire’s IT tech’s wrote a blog, it would look something like this.
- Really nice HDR wallpapers.
- If I’m ever old and have a disabled parking permit, I’m going to be just like this guy.
- 10 Things you Didn’t Know Google Maps could do.
- The hacks will always continue: CSS3 solutions for Internet Explorer.
- XKCD’s results from its color survey are in.
- Top 10 Reasons you should quit Facebook.
- After Steve Jobs ripped up flash, Adobe responds and confirms plans to move away from Apple.
- The Taco Bell Chihuahua is going on a beeg, beeg treep (thanks, Dren!).
- Somebody with far too much time on their hands: A DIY Lamborghini (thanks, Ben!)
- How Wired.com Tracked Down The iPhone 4G finder.
- 17 Tips Every Windows 7 User Needs To Know (related: 60 Tweaks and Hacks for Windows 7, Vista, or XP).
- The most clever ways to use Dropbox that you’re not using.
- What is everybody on Facebook “Like”-ing? Find out (though I still prefer popurls to see what everybody’s liking or linking to).
- TechCrunch hacker identified: Should they press charges?
- All newscasts could be better if their cutaways were accompanied by the Law and Order “chung chung” sound. Anybody want to over-dub a KTVZ broadcast and send it my direction?
- Bend is #4 in America’s top-10 cities for start-ups.
- Think an image might be photoshopped? Throw the URL into here, and it might help you find out.
- If you’re going to plagorize somebody’s art and win a huge chunk of money, the original artist is bound to find out.
Bend’s A Thriving iPad Market, Apparently
Quoting Fortune/CNN: According to Net Application’s May 1 report, the five U.S. market areas with the largest concentration of iPads — measured by its clients’ browser data — are as follows:
- San Francisco, Calif. (0.25% Internet share)
- Grand Junction, Colo. (0.23%)
- Santa Barbara, Calif. (0.19%)
- Honolulu, Hawaii (0.19%)
- Bend, Ore. (0.19%)
The author obviously knows nothing about the area and apparently forgot that you could get the iPad at places other than an Apple Store. They have the Internet over here in the sticks.
As Robert points out, however, the margin of error on the ±0.9%, which is nearly half of our percentage which is nearly five times our percentage (I mis-read the decimal point), so I wouldn’t take those numbers too seriously.
However, the best part of reading it is the comments. Many folks from the area have obviously found the story and are commenting on it (I saw it when it was posted, thanks to Barney, but didn’t have a chance to post/comment), and smacking the author around a bit for thinking we’re completely isolated morons out here. Robert and I share a favorite:
One came down on an ox cart from the Cascades with the Indian traders. i defrosted it by the campfire. i use it to kill rock chucks so there is food for dinner.
Let’s Party Like It’s 1996
The Geocities-izer will make any site “look like It was made by a 13 year-old In 1996.” I’m thinking about redesigning this site based on its suggestions (be sure to turn up the volume for full effect).
Steve Job Rips Up Flash
Rarely does the Apple founder come out and write something like this, but his open letter against Flash is well worth a read, and he makes a lot of valid points. I’d like to see Adobe’s response to this.
Personally, I see both sides of the argument, and while I typically don’t agree much with Jobs, I kind of have to on this. Flash is a resource hog in many cases, and holes in it (along with Acrobat Reader) have been the cause of many malware infections I’ve had to deal with. I can see why Apple doesn’t want it running on their phone.
More on the Gizmodo Stolen iPhone Police Raid
- Editors from LA Times, Salon, CrunchGear, Hot Air, and Mediaite weigh in on whether Gizmodo editor should be considered a “journalist”.
- One expert says that and invalid warrant was used in the raid.
- cnet posted a new story to follow up yesterday’s piece about this interesting mess.
Facebook Like Buttons with Dynamic URLs in PHP and JavaScript
Facebook Like buttons are popping up all over the Web as a way for people to integrate a little bit of Facebook into their site. I thought it’d be a fun experiment to try on my site here, but I wanted a dynamic URL to pass. There are a ton of blogs out there for putting a Facebook “Like” button your pages using a dynamic URL with a bit of PHP trickery. Here’s the code I ended up using for this site:
<iframe src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo 'http://'.$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];?>&layout=button_count&show_faces=false&width=80&action=like&font=verdana&colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:80px; height:22px" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>
However, on another site I’m working on getting this implemented on, I don’t have access to the raw code, and can’t use server-side scripting or variables. So I came up with a JavaScript solution that I’m sharing here as I couldn’t find an equivalent version online:
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
document.write("<iframe src=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/plugins\/like.php?href="+document.URL+"&layout=button_count&show_faces=false&width=80&action=like&font=verdana&colorscheme=light\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"border:none; overflow:hidden; width:80px; height:22px\" allowTransparency=\"true\"><\/iframe>");
</SCRIPT>
It’s probably not the cleanest/best code in the world (I would never consider myself a programmer) and there are probably 100 different ways of doing this, but this worked for me and hopefully that will help somebody out there on the InterWebs (and feel free to “Like” this post — the button’s on the permalinked URL — just to see if it works). You also might want to adjust the width of the frame and the code a bit. I personally just wanted a small button with just the number of likes (and am considering even getting rid of that, tightening it up a bit).
And for my future reference, these two tools were very useful in doing this — escaping the code for posting here, and creating that document.write statement.
Note: I’m now using the add-this.com service for this, as it provides me better tracking and features than my code above does, but I’m leaving this here for reference.