Category: Interesting

Mass Link Dump

Something old, something new, all in one big pile. Enjoy!

September 11, 2012

I Think We Should Charge The Crazy Nut Job With Murder

At latest count, 99,135 illnesses and 895 deaths have been reported from the CDC since 2007 on vaccine preventable illnesses, as reported on the Jenny McCarthy body count. Quoting the site:

Is Jenny McCarthy directly responsible for every vaccine preventable illness and every vaccine preventable death listed here? No. However, as the unofficial spokesperson for the United States anti-vaccination movement she may be indirectly responsible for at least some of these illnesses and deaths and even one vaccine preventable illness or vaccine preventable death is too many.

July 2, 2012

Reading Material

Few oldies but goodies here (new for me, at least…)

The Transparency Grenade makes the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.
Teller gives “his bastard son” a few tips on saving his career.
How Web browsers work behind the scenes.
escapes.js allows you to relive your BBS days. Its a small JavaScript library for rendering ANSI art.
Boss breaks cover during “Undercover Boss” episode, shuts down restaurant.
Great montage of Flash preloader graphics.
Everyone’s trying to track what you do on the web. Here’s how to stop them.
A hack you can perform (at your own risk) on Western Digital Green Drives to make them a bit less green but more server friendly.
Kickstumbler allows you discover Kickstarter projects you’d never see.
Will Slovaks walk all over Chuck Norris to Austria?
Entypo is a set of 100+ carefully crafted pictograms available as an OpenType font, vector EPS and web font. All released for free.
Tumblr Architecture: 15 Billion Page Views a Month and Harder to Scale than Twitter.
If I didn’t like the bullet-proof nature of MovableType’s static-page-building model, some of the plugins for WordPress are pretty dang cool. Latest example is WP Remote which is free and provides easy ways to monitor and backup your WordPress site.
Download 128 pre-made Windows 7 shortcuts (finally getting a full-time Windows 7 PC for my self here soon — more details soon).
Clever ways to secure your home from intruders.
Five great tricks to get the most out of Wireshark.
Nearly a year later, and the before and after pictures of the Japan Earthquake are amazing.
Think you’re a good hacker? Play a bit of capture the flag.

February 23, 2012

Web Archive, Reddit, Wikipedia, Mozilla, WordPress, etc… to Go Black Tomorrow in SOPA/PIPA Protest

In an anti-SOPA protest, Reddit, the Web Archive, WordPress, Wikipedia and many, many others are going to go black tomorrow. Google is going to protest on their home page and OpenDNS is going to censor some results. I’ve considering blacking out my site, but am stupid busy at the moment (and have been for weeks) and would need to do some tweaks for things to not break. But you can easily black out your site by putting some JavaScript on your site from SOPA Strike or use the index.html file here or this WordPress plugin.

If you’re wondering what the fight is all about, from a technical standpoint, this is a great write-up that I’m hoping stays up tomorrow. If you need a simple explanation of why SOPA/PIPA is bad, here’s a good one:

Sopa is all encompassing enough to include almost any site capable of hosting user content, from Reddit to Dropbox. This means that the government can and will enforce the law very selectively, which is the entire danger of the bill: it’s a blank check.
They could remove wikileaks because some article they link to has copyrighted material, or take down the site of some political watchdog group because one of their videos has music playing in the background.
The lack of due process also allows the possibility that if a site hosts something the government doesn’t agree with, all it would take is an intern uploading a random mp3 to said site to shut it down.
Very dangerous s**t here.

January 17, 2012

Reading Material

The best indie games of 2011.
The 20 best Android games for 2011 from the Android Market.
Top YouTube videos for 2011, straight from Google.
While a lot of these I knew (and use frequently), many I didn’t: Environment variables in XP and Vista/7.
30 Best Sources for Linux/*BSD documentation.
It’s time to end the war on drugs.
Study links winning football and declining grades (done by economists at the University of Oregon, which is an appopriate place for that study).
Why (and how) we’ve switched away from Google Maps. If I could convince one of these map providers to use the home-numbering data that I helped put together for a local Sunriver map, getting guests to units would be a lot easier, as the numbering scheme is a bit weird on some of the streets.
Six writers, four producers, and the lyrics still suck.
Death to .DS_Store.
10 More Common Misconceptions Dispelled.
Great idea, might do this for the geek keys I have at the office: RJ-45 key chain and rack.
Scheduled sending and email reminders in Gmail.
The Hassle-Free Guide to Ripping Your Blu-Ray Collection. I have a Blu-Ray player now, just need a Blu-Ray drive for my HTPC to rip some of these things on.
How NES Games (specifically, Super Mario Bros. 3) are made, in Japanese picture-book form.
Tens of millions of HP LaserJet printers vulnerable to remote hacking.I can’t seem to find a list anywhere of the printers that are actually vulnerable, so I have no idea of the old HP 4100s I have here at the office need upgrades. I don’t have any of them attached to the internet, so I’m not too worried, but if anybody has a list, please share.
Disney females brought to life (original artist is here).
Using computer science to solve Where’s Waldo (“Where’s Wally” if you’re outside the US).
Great list of online learning centers (my oldest daughter has been playing on Khan Academy now and again, but the list here is good for everybody).
Automate your Dropbox with Dropbox Automator. Now that I have nearly 20GB of space on my Dropbox account (using my COCC.edu e-mail address, the ol’ Dropbox/Adwords referral game, the getting started tab, the Dropbox 2011 Quest, plus the social-media freebies) I might have to start using it more often for larger files and collections.

January 1, 2012

I Had Nearly Forgotten About Apple’s Rainbow Logo

But this Apple gift catalog from 1983 shows the rainbow Apple was on everything from coffee mugs, t-shirts, race cars, carpeted wall-hangings, and kites.

October 27, 2011

Does Anybody Else See This As A Really Bad Move For Netflix?

You can read the official word from Netflix here, but it just seems that their plan to spin off their DVD-by-mail service into a new entity (Qwikster) is going to kill their hard-earned brand. Nevermind the other hassles that come along with maintaining two similar, but different, accounts on two different sites (I’m sure somebody will create a browser extension or Greasmonkey script to make things easier by pulling content into one or the other).

Personally, this comment is probably the best explanation of all this I’ve seen:

This is great news! My dentist just did the same thing. It’s so much better. Now when I have cavities on my top row of teeth I go to one dentist, and when I have cavities on the bottom row, I go to the other dentist across town. Sure it’s frustrating that sometimes they can’t access my dental records that used to all be in one place, and yes I admit that it seems strange that they now charge me almost twice as much for the exact same dental care I received six months ago…but they are innovators! Besides, what choice do I have? They’re the only two dentists around. Well done Netflix! If it ain’t broke then don’t fix it. Simply hike the price, alienate your customer base and complicate your user interface under the guise of “progress”. Kudos.

That all being said, if it gets me incredible streaming service, I’ll drop my DVD-by-mail service in a heartbeat. If they had their entire DVD library digitized, then I wouldn’t even have to worry about this whole mess. But Netflix’s recommendation engine has found me some cool shows, and I hate to lose that when I have to maintain two separate queues and rating systems that won’t communicate with each other.

September 19, 2011

Category: Interesting

Mass Link Dump

I Think We Should Charge The Crazy Nut Job With Murder

Reading Material

Web Archive, Reddit, Wikipedia, Mozilla, WordPress, etc… to Go Black Tomorrow in SOPA/PIPA Protest

Reading Material

I Had Nearly Forgotten About Apple’s Rainbow Logo

Does Anybody Else See This As A Really Bad Move For Netflix?

Idaho Has Some Nice Areas…

9/11: The Photographers’ Stories

What Ever Happened To Steve From Blue’s Clues?