It looks like it is, but it’s not.
Category: Interesting
Ladies and Gentlemen, Billy Joel!
His greatest hits — played at once:
You can use YouTube Downloader (alternate link) to convert this work of art into an MP3, should you desire.
How Far Could A Home Run Be Hit?
We’ll probably never see it, as it requires a bunch of perfect situations (and a lot of luck), but the theoretical maximum distance for a Major League home run is around 748 feet.
The Internet Is A Bunch of Pipes
I want to talk about bandwidth, throughput, latency, and capacity, and how each of these items relates to one another.
Let me start all folksy with analogies. For simplicity’s sake, let’s consider a medium-sized city that serves water to all its residents through one central reservoir. The reservoir’s capacity represents the total pool of water it can deliver at one time to residents through pipes of varying sizes and at different distances.
It’s actually a great explanation on how network bandwidth, latency, capacity, throughput and such work for folks who wouldn’t otherwise understand.
Download A Piece Of History
If you have an extra 900GB+ of free hard drive space sitting around, you can download the entire Geocities archive. I’m sure 90% of that is “Under Construction” GIFs and obnoxious MIDI files, but it’s still an important piece of Internet history (and there where a few useful reference sites here and there).
More commentary here and background of the project here.
Reading/Watching Material
First off: Cheap plug. I’m playing with the Central Oregon Symphony this weekend, and I’d encourage you to come out and see the show. The piano soloist we have coming to play with us is phenomenal, and it’ll be a great show. Concerts are free, click here for ticket info.
OK, enough of the plugging, let’s get down to business (videos are after the jump).
- “A law suit will be filed for the obvious decrease in revenue from my ads last month, totaling $7.34.”
- You can’t get good Internet access in many parts of the US, but it’s good to know that Mt. Everest is networked.
- Tourism posters from Star Wars.
- 10 Ways to get more from Google Voice.
- Type-a-file gives your web typography a head start.
- I might have to dig out my old Diablo II disks and play this amazing mod.
- These subtle antimated GIFs are some of the most well done I’ve seen.
- Did somebody just try to buy the British Goverment?
- How I Became A PC: Five Steps from Mac to Microsoft.
- The days of a browser being 2-6x faster than another are gone.
- Why is there a USB drive sticking out of the wall? Good question.
- Make your Websites run faster, automatically, with mod_pagespeed.
- Nice infographic comparing educational spending to spending in other segments.
- Useful tips on building a mobile website.
- Using Google Contacts as a Unified Address Book.
- Google sues the United State of America.
- Flash vs HTML5 in a game of pong.
Party Of The Decade
Everybody clear you calendars next week: On Wednesday, October 20th, it’s time to celebrate World Statistics Day.
Hat tip to Barney for the news.
Reading Material
- Ben Heck creates another masterpiece: A Xbox 360 Slim Portable.
- CC&Rs are really obnoxious. This is a great way to fight back.
- In case you hadn’t seen it (watch here or here), the Banksy-created Simpsons opening http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/the-simpsons-explains-its-button-pushing-banksy-opening/.
- TechSpaceBend is running an UnConference this week and it looks like a load of fun.
- Why I love Reddit: A little girl who has a terminal disease is picked on by jackass neighbors. 4Chan makes the neighbor’s life a living hell (which I support, as the folks were jerks), but Reddit responds by spoiling the little girl rotten for which the girl was grateful.
- Apple trademarks “There’s an App For That.” I guess to avoid getting sued, I should put ™ when printing that here. Or not.
- Entitifier will quickly convert and escape any nasty characters that should be entities.
- If you need to create a quick-and-dirty 16×16 icon, here’s a simple site to help you do it.
- Subway.com had some hideous code that amazingly rendered (see the ugly HTML source here). Subway fixed the problem, thanked Reddit. It’s still ugly code, but not nearly as much as before.
- Finally, a use for all those unneeded phone books: walls for a shed.
- Thanks to the Army and a bunch of scientists, we may have found out why honeybees are dying.
- gmapcatcher is a great little tool for offline map reading.
- Do-it-Yourself Doodler produces some interesting results.
- Using Photoshop channels to remove backgrounds from images.
- Put this on the list of things I didn’t know Photoshop could do: Multi-object editing with Smart Objects.
- A breakdown of all the various fees that airlines charge.
- A site dedicated to Web Apps and how to use them: NothingToInstall.
- How many computing cores is too many?
- VideoEgg acquires Six Apart and creates SAY Media. Six Apart created MovableType, the software running this site. Despite this news, the product is not dead and here’s a great several part write-up as to why you should use Movable Type.
- Modern gamers are pansies compared to classic hardcore gamers.
- If a file exists, there’s a torrent of it. If not, Burnbit will create it.
- Everything you wanted to know about computer keyboards but were afraid to ask.
- I was playing with Fedora on a laptop the other day, and this installation guide came in handy.
- I wasn’t aware such an event existed, but a local windshield repair guy won the Windshield Repair Olympics.
- Use dropbox to trigger torrent downloads.
- AES Encryption explained with simple animations.
- Before Michael J. Fox was in Back to the Future, Eric Stoltz was Marty McFly.
- Line Rider done entirely in HTML5.
Best Dad Ever?
I wish I was as cool as this guy:
This dad and his son sent a camera into the upper atmosphere attached to a weather balloon, then collected it and made this video from the footage.