Category: Randomness

• First off, we’re selling my wife’s old trombone, if anybody’s interested.
• Your Facebook account has three passwords.
• Why Netflix Never Implemented The Algorithm That Won The Netflix $1 Million Challenge.
• When Obama endorsed marriage equality…
• There’s No Time Like Today to Start Changing Things (for MovableType fans).
• The worst things for sale.
• Politwoops: Deleted tweets from politicians.
• Photoshop actions to fix the banding of Photoshop gradients.
• If all the earth’s water were put into a single sphere…
• Famous movie scenes in Lego.
• People Who Don’t Know How to Spell “Cologne”, instead spelling in “Colon.” Whoops…
• OKCupid Enemies.
• North Carolina banned gay marriage, but you can still marry your first cousin if you’d like.
• What if you removed the top million sites from Google? What would the results look like?
• Matt Groening confirms what we all knew: Springfield in The Simpsons is based on Springfield, Oregon.
• Depressed copywriter.
• GitHub releases Windows version.
• Something that should be implemented everywhere: Add Clippy to your website.

Since I gave my notice, I’ve been spending the last few weeks trying to finalize and document a metric ton of projects as well as find replacement(s) for the various work I do. Today was my last day in Sunriver, and it was with a bit of sadness that I left. While I’m looking forward to the new challenges and the people I’ll be working with, change is always a bit scary. But change sometimes has to be made, and I’m looking forward to a bit of change in my life. It was a bit weird removing a few e-mail accounts from Thunderbird.

Meanwhile, here’s some reading material that I’ve been sitting on for a while:

• 67 Books every Geek Should Read To Their Kids.
• If your site has a terms of service, making it easy to read like this is a good idea.
• This review for this product is absolutely hilarious.
• Bath image resizing made easy.
• Metafilter now has a “Best Of” blog.
• Zingiri Bookings is a nifty looking little online property booking app.
• The most common cooking mistakes
• Create your own election with the WaPo interactive tool.
• I’ve never played Monopoly this way, but it’s actually the right way to do it.
• Descriptive Camera: point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture and print a text description of the scene.
• Need an essay written? This should help you get a laugh.
• Fake S3 — Save time, money, and develop offline.
• Filepicker.io is a better upload dialog for the web.
• When you have an employee whose last name is Null, it can screw with programming.
• Parting out a UPS to provide battery backup to a critical sub-panel in your house.
• Fat Dogs are awesome!
• Gmail full? Clear out some big emails.
• Goodbye -9999px: A new CSS image replacement technique.
• The secret meeting that changes rap music and destroyed a generation.
• How computers boot up.
• How to access Gmail when its down.
• How to hack your own Wi-Fi network.
• How we use Trello and Google Docs to make UserVoice better every day.
• The new iPad’s screen under the microscope.
• Keeping Instagram up with over a million new users in twelve hours.
• Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews, Here’s How You Fix It.

More tomorrow, as I have a bunch of links I’ve collected.

• Want to relive the glory days of MSIE 6? Here you go.
• How to use the restore partition to break into a Mac running OS X Lion.
• Ridiculously high resolution picture of the Milky Way.
• JPEGmini is a photo compression technology that is compatible with the JPEG format, but does a much better job at making smaller files with out losing quality.
• Did you like the Leisure Suit Larry series of computer games? Folks are trying to bring the game back to life.
• Prince of Persia creator finds lost source code 23 years later.
• Skrivr lets you create a website just by saving textfiles in your Dropbox, and has support for advanced typography.
• Style Tiles allows you to present clients with interface choices without making the investment in multiple photoshop mockups.
• This brilliant idea will take one or more feeds from your Twitter account and turn it into four rolls of toilet paper, delivered straight to your door.
• No news here: Prisoners get better health care than us.
• Hero for the day; 7th grader saves bus from crash after driver has heart attack.
• Elderly couple in fear thanks to Spike Lee tweet.
• Free PNG credit card, debit card, and payment icons (these are going on a couple sites I manage). If you need smaller icons, there are some good ones here, too.
• Fighting sexist jokes the geeky way.
• TIL there are devices built specificially to inject ads into a page that weren’t otherwise there.
• How not to sort by average ranking.
• Best apps to keep on your flash drive.
• The reviews for this stupidly-expensive watch are hilarious.
• My dog sends me texts. Yeah, it’s weird.
• Use Google Docs to monitor your site’s uptime.
• Why $7.99 beats $0.99.
• Create a killer seamless, play-everything media center with XBMC. If XBMC had better TV tuner support, I’d probably ditch Windows 7 Media Center on my HTPC for this, as it’s pretty dang slick. Of course, my WDTV box does 90% of what I need, and uses a lot less power.
• The end of pagination.
• dMaintenance is a handy little Windows clean-up tool.
• Can’t stop staring at this one: Wind Map of the US.
• Finding Goatse: The Mystery Man Behind the Most Disturbing Internet Meme in History.
• Hillary Clinton embraces the Texts from Hillary tumblr.

• Whoops…Kazakhstan’s shooting team has been left stunned after a comedy national anthem from the film Borat was played at a medal ceremony at championships in Kuwait instead of the real one.
• Block your friends’ Facebook apps from accessing your private info.
• Welcome to the post-PC era.
• Need a legal document? Docracy is a social repository of contracts, legal agreements and other legal documents.
• Easily manage all your social network settings in one place.
• Somebody really knows their conspiracy theories.
• Font Awesome is an iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap.
• iPhone people have all the fun: This iPhone case combines all your credit cards into one. The Kickstarter project has long met its goal, and it’s too bad that this will probably never make it to Android (too many devices in different shapes — developing accessories for iStuff is far simpler).
• If you’re transferring cPanel accounts between servers (like I was a few weeks ago), some of these command will be useful.
• How we decreased sign up confirmation email bounces by 50%. Now I just need to implement this code on some sign-up forms I deal with.
• Similarly, the Open Domain Directory idea proposed here is a good idea, as is Humans TXT.
• The movie Inception explained in a nice little web site.
• Instead of “amazing,” why not say….
• Sometimes product reviews on sites are just plain worthless.
• Add a bit of water color to your Open Street Maps.
• Because I can never seem to find it via a Google search: the new Federal Student Loan Servicing page where you can log in and deal with your federal student loan account without having to remember a PIN.
• Why James Whittaker left Google.
• It was hard being a jazz performer during Nazi rule. They had pretty strict rules.
• One drug to shrink all tumors.
• Open plan offices must die.
• Post Office 2.0 Plugin for Movable Type allows you to e-mail to post to your MovableType blog.
• The regu.la blog network is a collection of simple daily information: Daily facts, quotes and numbers.
• What if modern photo editing techniques used in magazines were applied to classic artwork? It might look like this.
• Need to connect Lincoln Logs to Legos to K’Nex to Tinkertoys? Now you can.
• Interesting look at how testing and development is done on the Netflix app for Android.
• The time is…
• 10 Essential DIY Skills that Aren’t as Hard as You Think.
• Bradley Manning, the U.S. serviceman who leaked info to Wikileaks, is nominated for Nobel Peace Prize.
• RT Se7en Lite allows you to easily create Windows 7 Slipstream disks, like nLite and vLite did for XP and Vista.
• After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica has stopped publishing. Wikipedia has a collection of errors in Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia.
• The Weinstein company is done dealing with the MPAA: Bully to be Release Unrated.

• Still looking for prize donations for the pick ’em.
• Colin Mochrie does a hilarious AMA.
• The optical illusions on this site are amazing.
• Dear Boss: For a programmer, 10 minutes = 3 hours.
• Tens of thousands of websites’ SSL offers effectively no security.
• I really need to do this: Lifehacker’s Start-to-finish guide to whip your music’s metadata into shape.
• Download/Convert YouTube videos in one step with Downverter.
• Why does that QR Code go to justinsomnia.org?
• TIL: In 1995, New Mexico voted on a bill requiring psychologists to dress as wizards.
• Roger Boisjoly dies at 73; he was one of the engineers that tried to halt Challenger launch.
• This came in handy today, as our copier couldn’t use SSL for SMTP e-mail through our Gmail (for domains) account. But Gmail does have a non-SSL SMTP implementation as well which works great for those types of devices.
• How to create a bootable Windows 7 USB Flash Drive.
• Because breast cancer is not a pink ribbon (NSFW gallery).
• Averia, the average font.
• Speaking of fonts, Exo is a great geometric sans serif font, free to use, created from a kickstarter project.
• Jeff Atwood says goodbye to Stack Exchange.
• Pimp your Facebook timeline with a cool timeline banner.
• If they’re going to force SOPA on us, let’s force folks in Hollywood to use Hollywood Editions of our products.
• So how well has the OLPC project done?
• How to promote yourself without being sleazy.
• The designer’ list: Great resources and websites for designers.
• Didn’t know this existed: Cloudshark plugin for Wireshark.
• Use Firefox’s About:Config settings to speed up web browsing.
• Firefox to receive an enterprise-friendly version that won’t have the rapid updates.
• iOS apps and the address book: who has your data, and how they’re getting it

Update: Fixed missing “h” in “http:” on the SOPA link. Thanks Josh for letting me know.