- Setup a whole-house speaker system using existing phone lines.
- Cheap but powerful video card for HTPC use.
- The thickness of napkins in the programming world.
- SimpleFolio, a nice wordpress theme.
- If you missed the Super Bowl commercials last night, they’ve all been posted here (and the story behind the Leno, Oprah, Letterman ad is over here). Vote for your favorite here.
- According to teenagers, sites like mine aren’t cool anymore. Not that I’m losing sleep over losing the under-18 demo.
- Another high school, another overzelous administration conficating newspapers that do some real reporting.
- Always wear your seat belt.
- The anti-vaccine autism paper had catastrophic effects.
- Symbian Operating System is Now Open Source and Free — but will it matter?
- Relatively Portal.
- Netflix 28-Day Window Would Decimate Their Top Rental List.
- Kwedit, a new completely unreliable payment network.
- Calagator, open-source project for calendar aggregation (like Portland’s tech events).
- Run your own URL Shortener, and hopefully have better luck with spammers than my failed attempt (Ken is using it here).
- If you run a MovableType blog, this site might interest you.
- Licensing Delay Complicates Decision Between Open Source and Proprietary Video Players.
Category: Randomness
Reading Material
Reading Material
- 30 Commercial Games That Have Been Released for Free.
- The Apple iMaxiPad.
- Speaking of iPad, here’s a GUI PSD for it so you can start making your app interfaces.
- Life below 600 pixels (or “below the fold”).
- Software on the Cheap (or: Why good software is not something your cousin’s nephew can do.).
- Uncovering the secrets of Mega Shark.
- OptiPNG, great command line tool to knock some weight off PNG files.
- HTML5 isn’t going to save the Internet.
- Southpark Mac vs. PC.
- Man films his wife crying after movies, posts it online, everybody laughs (including the wife).
- Random picture blog for the day: Hot Chicks Plunging Their Toilets.
- Javascript experiments in Chrome.
- Speaking of impressive Javascript, Windows 3.1 Program Manager in Javascript.
- Sexting is now just for teens — old folks are doing it, too (yikes).
- Speaking of disgusting, Miley’s 9-year old sister is launching a lingerie line for kids.
Reading Material For The Night
- The problem with young people today…(reminds me of this guy).
- How David Blaine held his breath for 17 minutes.
- The most statistically full of s**t professions.
- Coca Cola “Happiness Machine”.
- Visualizing browser share over the years.
- Lessons from the AT&T/Facebook Switcheroo.
- SexyCycle jQuery plugin.
- How to run a meeting like Google.
- Valentines Day is coming, and it’s time for some gift cards (NSFW). Featured this last year, but they’ve put up some new cards for the holiday.
- In case you missed all the hype, Apple deputed a new toy today, and no it has nothing to do with this old Mad TV skit, despite the name.
- Mario was never in any danger.
Reading Material
- Zero Punctuation reviews Torchlight (a game I just got for $5 on Steams holiday sale).
- Why is the news media comfortable lying about science?
- iPhone and iPod CSS detection using PHP.
- How to kill your business: 30 Day Payment Terms.
- What’s the official name of Pac Man’s shape?
- Introduction to Website split testing.
- Letters of Note: Correspondence deserving of a wider audience.
- First China tried to kill us with lead in our toys, now it’s cadmium.
- Your passwords aren’t as secure as you think.
- Indoor HDTV Antenna review round up.
- If you’re a Dr. Horrible fan, you’ll love this.
- Obfuscate Javascript with PHP.
- Make desktop widgets out of any site with Snippage.
- Play a truck load of old-school NES, Sega, and Gameboy games online.
- Amy Spano’s around the world project.
- Freeware WYSIWYG web page editor.
- Somebody has far too much time on their hands.
Late Night TV Chaos
The blog world is all in a dither about NBC’s late-night shake-up. First, NBC outlined a plan to move “The Jay Leno Show” from it’s 10PM time slot to an 11:35 time slot, moving Conan O’Brien’s “Tonights Show” to 12:05. The reasoning, apparently, was because NBC affiliates were complaining that their 11PM newscasts were seeing lower ratings. The topic was brought up on pretty much every late night show. Conan came out and said he won’t do the show if it’s moved to a different time slot. The Web has come to the support of Conan, or “Coco” as he’s known, calling Leno all sorts of names. The Consumerist is encouraging people to email NBC before he decides to bail and go to Fox.
Personally, I’ve always like Conan and his show far better than Leno, but this whole fiasco is just hilarious and shows how much pull Leno still has at NBC (and how little respect they have for Conan).
Reading Material
- I always saw Nicholas Cage is a one-note actor, but one man believes that everything is better with a little more Nic Cage.
- Danny DeVito agrees to do a third season of “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia”… on one condition.
- A pictorial guide to avoiding camera loss.
- Speaking of cameras, this man likes to run from his.
- Vintage Ad Browser is full of all sorts of old racist, sexist, but entertaining ads.
- Fun tech support stories.
- Create an easy to use God Mode master control panel in Windows 7 using canonical names of control panels (Windows 7 has lots of GodModes).
- Showcase of modern navigation design trends.
- Avatar is just like a 3D Pocahontas.
- What kind of soda drink should I have?
- Best Buy’s “pre-optimizeing” service is a big stupid waste of money.
- Hacker Music, so all the geeks get a vote on what song is played next.
- Performance/Price comparison for CPUs.
- Need to speed up your computer? Just download some more RAM!
- Handy Nexus One vs Droid vs iPhone comparison chart.
- The presentation secrets of Steve Jobs.
Link Cleanup
- What’s it like being on twitter’s suggested user list?
- Comparison of TeX editors (as I’d really like to geek out someday and do my resume in LaTeX).
- You have to love how photo editors will Photoshop the female figure: Body by Victoria and its follow-up provide an indepth look on how you can detect altered images. Demi Moore, on the other hand, is completely denying that she Photoshopped, even though it’s quite obvious. You have to love Photoshop Disasters.
- If the Axis would’ve invaded American during WWII, how would they have done it? LIFE had a few ideas that probably scared a lot of people back in the day (it’s frightening me just looking at them).
- Everybody Panic: The encryption algorithm that encrypes most of the world’s GSM phone calls has been cracked.
- Crowdsourcing for the Conservatives, in response to the party’s request (in the UK).
- 20 years later, these guys still look the same.
- Hidden phpMyAdmin features.
- Using Nginx as a load balancer.
- How to research real estate in Bend, Oregon (great tutorial on using local online government resources).
- Top 5 Bend Blog Predeictions for 2010 — expect more “Thyme Killers” from me so I don’t put a hole in the space time continuum.
- There’s a reason trains have plows on the front.
- 10 Words You Need To Stop Misspelling (that comic should be put on a poster in every high school english class).
- Learn all about the real story behind fraud prevention at the credit card companies.
Post-Holiday Link Dump
- China wrecked the Copenhagen summit.
- Autobrake automates Handbrake ripping.
- 15 Biggest Internet Controversies of the Past Decade.
- You can now see Portland in 3D on Google Earth.
- Firefox 4 Windows Theme/UI update.
- Holy, Holy, Holy Batman.
- More end-of-the-year/decade lists: The 87 lamest moments in tech this decade and picturing the last 10 years.
- Google code projects you probably don’t know about, with my favorites being SpriteMe, a CSS sprite creator and Reducisaurus, a CSS and JS shrinker.
- Searching for dictionary words with Regex (examples).
- What martial arts can teach you about programming.
- I’m not big on screensavers, but this thing is pretty cool.
Weekend Reading
- Need a WPA key cracked fast?
- Image enhancement in movies doesn’t work quite like real life.
- Speaking of Holywood magic, see how they’ve destroyed New York over the years.
- Very profound: “The web is large. It is so much bigger than a balloon.”
- Leave it to scientists to figure out the perfect way to slice a pizza.
- Dissecting menu layout tricks.
- Yet another reason why we’re not winning the war on terror.
- For those in the UK: A UK Snow Map, based on twitter posts.
- The Big Picture has been doing their year end special and a decade-end feature. Incredible photos all around.
- Christmas Light Hero.
- A single sperm has 375mb of DNA information in it. Let the jokes commence.
- Google’s Browser Size Tool is a very handy tool to see how different screen resolutions see your site.
I Need Sleep…
…but you don’t:
- Why we should be eating horses instead of riding them.
- Great use of Google Maps: Zombie Outbreak Simulator.
- Help Save MySQL from Oracle.
- International Backup Awareness Day — which is why I’m working on adding even more redundancy to my office and server backups.
- How would you give directions with street names like this?
- The best twitter prank ever: the Twittering Honeymoon Bed.
- Ridiculous user interfaces and the men who create them.
- What if other celebreties were in Star Wars?
- Unnecessary Censorship: Sesame Street.
- Coolest Kid Ever playing the Ukulele.
- BendBroadband Launches “Nation’s Fastest Wireless Internet Service”. I’m considering using it for a failover connection at my office in Sunriver, where the local cable company has more outages than I’d care to deal with.
G’night!