- You know that volcano that blew ash all over Europe and wrecked havoc all over the place? You can blame the guys at Top Gear for that. (By the way: If you’ve never seen Top Gear, it’s hilarious. Watch some.)
- The iPhone can now run Android.
- Protection from double jeopardy doesn’t exist if the federal government tries you.
- Chatroulette: Batman vs. Random Couple (watch it at full screen so you can read the text).
- High-tech underwear for adventurous geeks.
- Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Liberal, Maren Tarro’s account of the D.C. Tax Day tea party protest with her rightwing dad.
- Mensa Selects Its Favorite Brainy Games of 2010.
- WhiteHouse.gov releases Open Source Code, as does the Bank of Canada.
- Yet another reason to avoid McAfee software: a patch they put out borked thousands of Windows PCs.
- Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad caused quite a stir when he (basically) said that women showing any skin increases the earthquakes in the world. So to see if he’s right, some folks are organizing a Boobquake to see if they can cause the Earth to move by showing more skin. This may be one of those cases where a POIDH is called for.
- Need some background textures for your web site? Here are some great sources.
Category: Geekdom
Reading Material
Adobe Gives up on Apple, Welcomes Android
Adobe says farewell to the iPhone. Yet another reason that my next phone will not be an iPhone, or a Windows Mobile phone (though I like the latter far better than the former) but an Android phone — ideally this one, but I can only imagine how much that’s going to cost.
Reading Material
- 11 Brilliant Arrested Development Shout Outs To Its Actors’ Past Roles. For example, I had no idea that was Buster in that VW Mr. Roboto commercial, and they made reference to it. I have the whole series on DVD, need to finish watching them all.
- Tweets may be 140 characters (at the most) but there is a lot of data behind them.
- Photoshop CS5 looks pretty sweet — too bad I just got CS4.
- Australia is pissed, and I can’t say I blame them.
- There have been some really amazing pictures that have some from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption, but I honestly believe this is probably the best (more from the photog).
- Infographics seem to be all the rage lately — and most of them are just useless.
- The best performing media player for 2010.
- Expect this to be implemented sometime on here, since I always seem to miss something: Crowd-sourced copy-editing.
- Interesting selections/reviews on remote access software. I’m in the process of (finally) upgrading from a Citrix terminal network to full-blown computers at the office, but will still occassionally need to get access to desktops at the office.
- Top 10 Free Antivirus software of the year.
- jQuery is going to get implemented on some site I manage someday. There are just all sorts of sexy plugins and useful bits of code that I just don’t know how I could go without when I finally redesign this site or Bend Blogs.
- Since nobody here seems to ever go to my band concerts, you can get on YouTube and watch some of them.
- Collection of local Web cams.
- Olivia Munn Pranks Lovelorn Asylum Intern.
- Have a PalmPre? Tether it.
Apple Wants Its Secret iPhone Back
I mentioned yesterday about Gizmodo having Apple’s new iPhone. Looks like Apple’s a bit miffed and wants it back.
Gizmodo Has An iPhone 4G, And Paid Big For It
They reportedly have the new phone, and apparently paid a cool $10,000 for it. There’s apparently more to the story, the Gawker editor foretells. So this could get interesting, and they could pay bigger.
Update: Giz profiles the guy who lost the phone.
US government finally admits most piracy estimates are bogus
Not that we didn’t already know that, but it’s nice they finally admit it.
Link Dump
Been dealing with some malware-infected computers of family members and friends, and have also been a tad under the weather, so blogging hasn’t been a priority the last few days. But I have too many links sitting here that need to be disposed of, so here ya go:
- Conan O’Brien is moving to TBS. Speaking of Conan, Team Coco billboards are popping up all over the place. All this is probably timed with the start of his tour, which started in Eugene last night (anybody go? It looked like fun.).
- Columbia University will soon offer a soon offer a combined engineering and journalism degree, something I would have totally applied to get into when I was in high school, had it existed.
- Maps in modern web design.
- prettyPhoto is a jQuery-based lightbox clone.
- MFCMAPI “uses Microsoft’s published APIs to provide access to MAPI stores through a graphical user interface. Its purpose is to facilitate investigation of Exchange and Outlook issues.”
- A new Harry Potter trailer, and Hermione has a stalker (NSFW, depending on liberal your boss’ view is on a brief naked bum and some naugtly language).
- Great guide to building an HTPC.
- The periodic table of imaginary elements.
- Steve Jobs’ response to the Section 3.3.1 of the new SDK terms of service, and existing apps that are breaking the new TOS.
- jQuery HTML table toolbox.
- Exploiting a linux kernel NULL dereference.
- iPhone users now have an alternative browser now that Opera Mini for the iPhone has been approved. Here are a couple quick reviews. I use Opera Mini on my Touch Pro with Sprint, and it works great compared to Pocket IE.
- Speaking of Apple products, Gizmodo has some essential iPad apps, as well as a full review.
- Why you should never trust photos you see: Britney Spears, before and after photoshop.
- The season finale of House (one of my favorite shows) was filmed entirely with a Canon 5D Mark II.
- How I ran an ad on Fox News.
- 5 different movies, all completely different, but with the same lines of dialog.
- ZeuApp is a nifty little app to easily install a bunch of different software.
- Things overheard in a newsroom.
- A new database devoted to people who lived in Oregon prior to its statehood.
- Somebody needs to make this for Oregon: A pronunciation guide for everything Wisconsin.
- The Star Wars Sound Effects Quiz.
Reading Material
- Google didn’t have an Easter doodle logo, everybody panics.
- You should never pay more than $10 for HDMI cables. I just got a three-pack of them from Meritline a month or so ago for $8, and the Wal-Mart here in town is selling them for $40 each. Those cables are a rip-off and there’s NO reason to buy the expensive cable.
- The real question everybody’s asking about the iPad: Will it blend?
- Bendite Ashton Eaton nearly sets collegiate decathlon record, but thanks to confusing wind-rating rules, it didn’t happen. Meanwhile, UO student population doesn’t give a rip.
- Five ways to identify that song stuck in your head.
- Deleting files older than N days via the Windows command line.
- Internet Explorer UA Style Sheets.
- jQuery plugin for crashing IE6 (though some of us are stuck with it).
- Top 10 Password Crackers.
- Ultimate Guide to Cloning in Photoshop.
- The Best Free Software of 2010, according to PC Magazine. Which I find odd, as 2010 isn’t even halfway over yet, but whatever.
- Ultimate Windows Tweaker is basically like a TweakUI for Windows Vista/7.
- Want free publicity? Help a reporter find you.
- Gmail Becomes an App Platform, adding OAuth support.
- Remember when you’re in a flamewar or decide to send a scathing e-mail to somebody that there’s a real human being on the other end.
- J.D Shapiro apologizes for making the suckiest movie ever.
- Upload your videos to one site, and have it automatically upload to several video and social networking sites automatically.
The iPad Is Here
Personally, I think the iPad is “meh” at best and if I was going to get a tablet, I’d get something else. That being said, there were folks lined up at Best Buy this weekend to get one (thanks Michael at StandAloneCode for the vid):
Best Buy apparently started with 10 units of each of the models: 16, 32, and 64 GB. Then UPS dropped off another 20 of each. So by the time they opened, they had 90 to work worth. Any idea if they sold out?
They still don’t support multi-tasking, but there’s a reason for it.
Robert played with the iPad for a bit and posted a quick review on it, based on one he saw over at Connecting Point.
And 24 hours after it was released, the iPad has already been Jailbroken.
In other local Apple news, this was also the same weekend that the iPhone was officially available. I was over at the Mountain View Mall Cascade Village Shopping Center the day it opened on a completely unrelated matter, and the new AT&T store was absolutely packed. Did anybody here pick up one? Personally I’m waiting for my contract with my phone to run out before I decide what I’m doing, but it probably won’t be an iPhone, because AT&T’s plans are ludicrously expensive compared to Sprint’s.
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.