Category: Randomness

Need to get these off my plate before I begin a couple nights of rehearsals before this weekend’s concerts with 3 Leg Torso.

• Is the link you think is really cool actually really dated? Find out.
• Openfiler looks like a pretty cool SAN/NAS solution.
• While Google will now tell your your IP address, you can also have somebody Groan Your IP.
• If you could redesign a £50 note, what would it look like? Here are a few ideas.
• That just looks…uh…awkward.
• You get some weirdo replies if you’re looking for sex on craigslist.
• Angry that Redbox is hiking DVD prices? Blame congress.
• Guide to sniffing passwords and cookies (and how to proctect yourself from it).
• This apps going to get installed on my phone shortly: WiFiKill allows you to disable the Internet connection for a device on the same network. Meaning you could go to Starbucks with this installed on your phone and cause some havoc.
• Stupid trick for the day: Make Google do a Barrel Roll.
• Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice.
• An analysis of Steve Jobs tribute messages displayed by Apple.
• Famous logos done entirely in CSS.
• The Superest: Who is the superest hero of them all?
• My wife and I like British TV, and will be searching through this thread to see if we can find some other good shows.
• I was doing some research on upgrading a computer for Revit use, and this forum thread needed to be bookmarked.
• When I do this, I imagine I’m doing this.
• Mapping an FTP server as a local disk drive (handy for old DOS-based programs if you want them to back up to a certain drive). Align the same lines, FTP Drive works as well, though I don’t know about its command line capabilities.
• Supercut is a great collection of “every _____ in _____” videos. Like every “Yeah” from Fargo.

OK, so we all know that I’m kind of “meh” about the whole Halloween thing (see my canned veggies labels or my concrete filled pumpkin ideas), but my family and kids all enjoys the day immensely, so I do my best to not be a party pooper. So with that in mind, here are a few so-bad-they’re-funny Halloween jokes from Barney (share your favorites in the comments):

What’s a monster’s favorite play?

Romeo and Ghouliet

What do you get when you cross Bambi with a ghost?

Bamboo

What’s do you call a haunted chicken?

A poultry-geist

Why do mummies make excellent spies?

They’re good at keeping things under wraps

What kind of monster is safe to put in the washing machine?

A wash and wear wolf

What do you get when you divide the diameter of a jack-o-lantern by its

circumference?

Pumpkin Pi

Why do ghouls and demons hang out together?

Because demons are a ghoul’s best friend!

What happened to the guy who couldn’t keep up payments to his exorcist?

He was repossessed.

A family member just go a job at Starbucks (after paying the paychecks of at least a few of their employees with her coffee habit), and decided to celebrate by carving her pumpkin appropriately:

Speaking of pumpkins, the largest pumpkin of the year received an amazing carving job.

Have has just chaotic the last couple months, and work is just draining me. Here are some fun links and videos to make up for it.

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses.
• Not that anybody was really paying a huge amount of attention to QR Codes, but now you have one more reason to ignore them.
• Maxing out your dropbox referrals.
• Rate everything on Jotly, where everything about your life is exciting to everyone (hilarious parody site).
• For the popular music buffs: The Billboard Wayback Machine.
• A reddit discussion asked whether you could destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if you traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion? Great discussion ensued, and now it’s getting a movie deal.
• The Argos Catalogue from 1976 is a fascinating look back.
• If you’re wondering what the Occupy Wall Street movement is all about, these infographics and data will help you sort it out.
• People are notoriously quiet on the London tube. Here is one man’s quest to strike up some conversations.
• If anybody’s looking to buy me a gift this holiday season, this camera would be acceptable (the body is $6800 — seriously, if somebody’s going to blow that kind of money on me, I’ve got some debt that I’d rather have disappear first).
• Siri is a neat little toy, but she says some random stuff.
• Fun story on data overload in MS Exchange (speaking of data overload, ever heard of a Zip bomb?)
• 20 Useful Windows Registry Hacks.
• The YouTube Insult Generator (might be handy for some of the videos below).
• The Lifehacker Workout: Exercise for Normal People.
• Playing Day Of Defeat as a photographer can bring out some interesting photos.
• Take the Lollipop — I dare you.
• If you’re looking to calibrate your fancy HDTV, this may help.

Keep reading for videos…

(more…)

• A world without mosquitoes wouldn’t necessarily be a bad place.
• Leave it to some nerd to analyze the mathmatics on the blackboards of porn movies (safe for work, don’t worry).
• Time-zone database gets taken down thanks to threat of lawuit, but thankfully gets rebooted.
• Steve Jobs Was Always Kind To Me (Or, Regrets of An A**hole).
• May have linked to this before, but it bears mentioning again: fascinating map of submarine cables.
• MS Paint is actually more powerful than you think.
• An amazing way to celebrate a birthday, by collecting decades of memories.
• The birds and the bees, Dr. Suess-style: Now That You’re Big.
• Handy little tutorial to view mobile web sites in your Windows system tray.
• If I ever get an Android tablet, this is the first keyboard I’m installing: the Hacker’s Keyboard.
• The Wadsworth Constant (which become famous quick) should be the default on every YouTube video. Basically, a guy on reddit always opens YouTube videos and immediately punches the slider about 30% forward. That skips the crap in 99% of the videos out there and save a ton of time. An engineer at YouTube liked the idea so much, they implemented it. Just append “&wadsworth=1” to any YouTube URL, like so.

Just wanted to get these out of my way before I head out of town this weekend.

• Gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists.
• DIY Portable Wedding Photo Booth (looking at this for another project, non-wedding related).
• Ken Jennings is awesome, and you can help him write his new book.
• Frozen solid, but this hard drive still works.
• Why You Should Not Go To Medical School.
• What good developers should know about sending e-mail.
• Some ways you can earn money in your sleep.
• Inside the World’s Largest Embassy (here’s a hint: It’s in Iraq).
• An amazing nine-year journey of a rookie artist.
• Google and SolarCity work to make Solar Power Affordable.
• Zach Braff answers your questions.
• Woot CEO Matt Rutledge starts a new business, Netflix/Qwikster-style.
• If you do mobile development at all, this table of HTML5 support in mobile browsers will need to be bookmarked.
• Looking to make an Android phone a little more “old blind grandma”-friendly? BIG Launcher might be just the ticket.
• This is a really handy script to automate a lot of computer repair and clean-up tasks.
• Need map icons? Here you go.
• Use the Internet to investigate your next date, coworker, or friend, without being creepy.
• Seven-year-olds say the darndest things.
• Is anybody else see the same type of things in the most popular infographics.
• The 21 Greatest SEO Myths of the Modern World.
• Create a state of chaos in your town.
• Updated list of Microsoft’s Best Free Downloads (lots of good tools on there).
• Need to inventory all your DVDs and such? This app might help, allowing yuo to scan everything with your phone to a separate program.
• Everything is better when it’s said in llama.
• Google Wallet, hacked to run on more phones.
• 10 Ways to Turn Your Retired Gadgets into something useful.
• ColorBox is another lightbox plugin for jQuery, but this one is really lightweight compared to others out there (which is why I’m going to use it on some projects).
• Did you know you could hyphenate in Firefox and Safari? Me neither. Here’s a way to do it on other browsers.
• Interesting discussion on using font-embedded icons instead of sprites.
• Tabpress looks like a simple way to create custom tabs on your Facebook page. Will be trying it out on my day-job pages.
• Worried about somebody stealing your PS3? Setup a dummy PS3 with a GPS tracker.
• I’ve been going through all my ripped DVDs and trying to remove duplicate audio tracks (as I mistakenly had a stereo track plus an AC3/multi-channel track). MKVToolnix (specifically, the mkvmerge program) and Yamb have been able to simple take care of my MKV and MP4 files (respectively) and knock some bits of space off the sizes of those files.

• Comcast’s low-income $10-per-month internet service goes live. It’s for families who have children enrolled in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), which, I think means I would qualify, since my kids get reduced lunches at the schools. Wish they offered something like that here.
• Super Smash Land is an epic demake of the Smash Bros series to make it look like it’s being played on an old Game Boy.
• The Boston Globe’s new design takes fluid design to a whole new level. It’s brilliantly done. A designer in that was part of the project wrote up his experiences here and Hacker News has some good comments.
• Something for my project list: How to Automatically Cool Your Entertainment Center When It Gets Too Hot.
• Teen with no vagina becomes pregnant from stab wound.
• The Monks that participate in Kaihogyo are nuts, running thousands of miles over a three year span. Read more on everybody’s favorite source.
• Bear Grylls fan? He’s answered some fan questions.
• Writing a web application is not just LAMP any more. There’s more to it.
• Fix for VLC (my media player of choice) Skipping and Lagging on High Def videos.
• Like Synergy, Mouse Without Borders allows you to share a mouse and keyboard among multiple computers. It only works for Windows 7 (while Synergy works on multiple OSes), but it’s really slick and easy to setup.
• Sick of ads playing in Flash videos? AdBlockVideo for Firefox might help (haven’t tried it yet personally).
• This man is such a rebel.

Sorry about the lack of regular post frequency the last few weeks. My personal and professional life have been a been chaotic lately for reasons I won’t go into here. That being said, I have a metric crapload of links and videos I need to share (videos will come later). Enjoy!

• Apparently there’s a site where you can review and rate prostitutes. Shouting at Cows has gone through the archives and found some real gems.
• For obvious reasons, I didn’t post many of these links yesterday…The Decade of 9/11: war without end.
• Ten Years On, Sick Ground Zero Workers Still Without Proper Care.
• Wasn’t The PATRIOT Act Supposed To Be About Stopping Terrorism? It hasn’t been used as such.
• Homeland Security: The Decade’s Biggest Scam.
• On 9/11, I will….
• The True Cost of 9/11: Trillions and trillions wasted on wars, a fiscal catastrophe, a weaker America.
• Why does Fox News CEO Roger Ailes Hate America?
• Speaking of Fox News, what is it really like to work behind the scenes there? Read on.
• Why Wal-Mart’s veggies are so crappy (taken from this AMA with a Wal-Mart Store Manager).
• Speaking of Wal-Mart, it’s fun to play with their phone system and screw with employees.
• Great list of insightful and thought-provoking websites.
• Wall-E may be a PC, and Eve a Mac, but who really is better?
• Wikileaks posts all cables unredacted.
• Librarian: Very useful libraries manager for Windows 7.
• Why it’s really nice to have a Samsung Galaxy phone: They’re really hard to brick.
• Rick Perry has a BIG Porn Problem.
• Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda resigns from Slashdot.
• Get a full body workout with nothing but your body.
• Jewel Staite has a food blog that’s quite entertaining: Happy Opu.
• I could watch this for days.
• From Montior to Mobile: Optimizing e-mail newsletters with CSS.
• spin.js is an easy way to create one of those loading spinners without any images.
• Requests: is HTTP library, written in Python, for humans.
• Superior alternatives to crappy Windows software (most of these alternatives I have on my system).
• The Star-Wars films are coming to Blu-Ray, and they’re getting changed again.
• History’s Biggest Mindf**ks.
• Why Amazon can’t make a Kindle in the USA.
• A Faster Internet.
• Amazing paper sculptures.
• 10 Repair Projects you Should Never Pay For.
• Web server optimizatin at its finest: 9 million hits/day with 120 megs RAM.
• I really need to get some “Game Of Thrones”, as the visual effects look stunning. Here are a couple of amazing special effects reels.
• The New Apple Advantage.
• When you’re drinking, your recollection of things that happened is usually quite a ways off.
• After 17 year ban, you can finally buy Doom in Germany.
• The east-coast earth quake last month was felt on twitter before it was felt in real life, as XKCD predicted.
• How to back up printer drivers and restore them on another computer (had to use this the other day when I needed printer drivers but the site to get them was down).
• What’s powering that favorite website of yours? Find out with Under The Site.
• Congress-Man: Worst. Superhero. Ever.
• Redesigning the browser window.
• Microsoft’s idea of a streamlined and optimized UI for Windows Explorer is anything but.
• Great minimal business card idea (similar). Then just get it printed up on MOO MiniCards for the full minimalistic approach).
• 15 Inspiring HTML5 experiments.
• The Redditor, The Number One (and only) Unofficial Reddit Magazine.
• Edit: One more.…Before/after photos of the Japan Earthquake, six months later

Videos coming later…

Following up on last night’s dump, here is a bit more…

• World War II, the homefront, in color.
• Have a rooted Android phone and want to watch videos via the Google Videos app? You can’t, unless you have this hack.
• Fark Gets Patent Troll To Settle For Nothing. Read Drew’s post here.
• Heello is Twitter for Pretenders.
• openbook is a search engine for public Facebook updates (whether they were meant to be or not).
• Life on the Command Line.
• The Secret Ingredient In Your Orange Juice.
• Creepy iPhone case of the day: A child’s hand.
• Old folks with great AMAs on Reddit: 94 years old, shooting for 100 and an 82 year-old-man on the Internet for the first time.
• The Art of the Menu showcases some really unique restaurant menus.
• Red Robin’s have a People’s Burger competition, and I created one that you can vote for. Anybody’s who’s eaten a burger at the Westside Cafe will recognize it.
• passphra.se allows you to generate long passwords that are easy to remember, inspired by this xkcd comic.
• 360° Panoramic Views of Hiroshima after the Atomic Bomb.
• My response to the Chain World mutation (read the links in the post for links to what the whole Chain World thing is).
• Good jQuery and Javascript tutorials and training.
• May have linked to this before, maybe not: Nesfun allows you to play old NES games in your browser.
• I’ve been using MailChimp at work for a few months and am loving it. They recently created a WordPress plugin called Social that allows your blog posts to seamless integrate with Facebook and twitter. I’m seriously considering moving this blog to WordPress, but need to learn more about its templating language first.
• If you need a joke that has a really long setup for a pretty cheesy punchline, this is the one.
• Proxino is a cool tool to optimize and monitor your javascript.
• May have linked to this before, too, or at least something that has similar functions, but html5media enables <video> and <audio> tags in all major browsers.
• A good references for Facebook’s various social plugins.
• AeroFS is Filesync without servers. It’s basically a peer-to-peer filesystem.
• Techcrunch Defending Android looks into why it thinks Google bought up Motorola Mobility.
• Shortmail is like twitter for e-mail, limited messages for less than 500 characters.

• Great move for Google and for Android: Google to Acquire Motorola Mobility.
• I agree with Warren Buffett: Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.
• How to put your logo in a QR code.
• Ken Jennings has a great blog (that I’ve linked to before), but now he’s also writing for Woot’s blog (which is having a Woot Off today).
• According to the US Treasury, S&P downgraded the US credit rating by ignoring a couple trillion bucks.
• Despite the downgrade, our credit is still better than most of the planet.
• Apple Does Not Have More Cash Than The US Gov’t; Stop Saying That It Does.
• We knew the deficit would rise, because Obama didn’t actually lie about the numbers like Bush did. Quoting the story from 2009: “For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller.”
• Use Jonathan’s Card (which may or may not be fake) to buy yourself an iPad..
• One man’s quest to build a perfect SNES emulator (and the processor power involved to do it).
• What would happen if major brands swapped logos?
• Wow, there are some bad ones here: What’s the most enraging thing a computer illiterate person has said to you when you were just trying to help? I’m going to use this analogy on a fairly regular basis, I have a feeling.
• It may look like a “hosts” file, but it’s not.
• If you run a DHCP server, this might be worth reading: Rapid DHCP: Or, how do Macs get on the network so fast? Now I just need to figure out how to make these tweaks on a pfsense and/or dd-wrt routers.
• You’re mad about something on the Internet. What do you do?
• It’s over a year old, but it’s new to me. Something to be proud of, just the same: Oregon is number two in nation in penis size
• I’ve gotten addicted to the Now I Know daily newsletter, which has had some great tidbits. The Spirit of Butts Farm and The Old Man Of The (Crater) Lake where both interesting. Yes, I know I probably should have known about the The Old Man Of The Lake, being from Oregon and all, but sadly, I did not.
• How do you seem good at everything: Stop doing stupid s**t.

More tomorrow, I need some sleep.