Category: Randomness

My desktop is getting over run with shortcuts. Time to dump some of these…

• Man trolls dating sites by drawing pictures of the girls.
• Part of my reasoning for avoiding WordPress development was (for me at least) the templating was a bit more confusing than MovableType’s. Bones should help.
• Honestly, I wished forced steralizations were legal in more states as there are some folks that really should never have kids. Ever.
• WorklogCreator makes it quick and easy to post project work logs on forums.
• Keanu Reeves confirms that ‘Bill And Ted 3’ is on the way. Excellent!
• Similar to Garfield Minus Garfield comes Realfield where the cat’s a bit more realistic.
• First Month on the Android Market looks at one dev’s experiences with ads versus paying for the app.
• Famous opening lines updated for the modern age (my favorite: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of an internet startup to call his own.”).
• This commit could have done some serious damage. It inspired some folks to share their big screw ups.
• Have a URL for a file and need to save it quickly to your Dropbox? URL Droplet might help.
• Have you ever been reading your favourite online news site, stumbled across a headline with seven syllables, and followed it in your head with doo-dah, doo-dah, in the style of Camptown Races? No? Really? Well, this guy has and created a Greasemonkey script to add “doo-dah, doo-dah” to seven-syllable breaking news headlines.
• Dear Photograph is a great tumblr blog that show folks taking a picture from the past into the present.
• In many cultures, there are more than two genders.
• Playable Archeology: An Interview with Telehack’s Anonymous Creator.
• Need to make a diagram with ASCII? ASCII Flow might help.
• Be productive during Photoshop progress bars by reading your RSS feeds automatically.
• Myth busted! A break down of what happens on screen during a typical hour of an episode of Mythbusters.
• Make your secondary Google Voice number permanent.
• Coming to a receipt printer near you: Receipt Racer.
• New and improved rage/troll faces.
• You have to be a Zelda geek to appreciate the humor in this.
• 12 Common Mistakes Designers Make and How to Avoid Them.
• If you’re looking for computer hardware in the Portland area, there are some good places to find it here (mostly bookmarking it for my reference as I have non-tech-savvy friends up there that are always calling me asking me that sort of thing).
• Hire to Hire Developers (if you’re interested in a profanity-laden version, you can find that here.
• The $113 Billion Hole: Ten Things America Gave Up This Year To Pay For The War In Afghanistan.
• I knew about some of these, but not others: 5 Fake Sounds designed to help humans.
• Android SMS Pop-up will soon get installed on my phone as it’s just so stupid simple and better than the default.
• One more…Goodbye TinEye: Google Images now lets you search by image.

OK, that’s enough for now. Enjoy!

Had this all ready to post yesterday, and got to my desk this morning, realized I neglected to hit submit. Whoops…

• Cuteness alert: Animals with stuffed animals.
• Blind horse is helped around by seeing-eye goat and sheep.
• 21 Fantastic Games under 5MB.
• TermKit combines Webkit with terminal on the Mac to create one cool looking terminal.
• I think I may have linked to this before, but An International Comparison of Cell Phone Plans and Prices basically shows how expensive our cell phone service is here in the US.
• Six unusual city maps: Locals vs. Tourists.
• Amazing long exposure airport photography.
• If you’re an Android developer, this might be useful: Test your app on the most popular devices.
• Apparently people are getting Oprah and Opera confused. Tells a lot about Oprah’s fans.
• Hacked Canonical Tags: Coming Soon To A Website Near You?
• Is that movie at the theater a little dark? I could be because they forgot to take the 2D lens off.
• Are you a stock market whiz? Kapitall makes a game out of it.
• Only tumblr posts with 10,000 notes or more need apply.
• ifttt (if this then that) looks like an interesting service that basically will automate tasks in your social media and real world.
• If you’re a web designer trying to get information across to a client in better ways, WeeNudge will help with useful articles on spec work, white space, content, feedback, etc… .
• Decades before the Web, Newspaper Row in Boston was where people got the news updated in real time.
• A visual representation of 11 million player deaths in Just Cause 2.

Mentioned a couple times how I’ve been utterly slammed the last week or so. But I really need to get rid of these links, so here’s a nice little dump…

• Multi-platform/network IM clientTrillian 5 is free everywhere.
• Five running apps for Android (wish I could be running — body’s not letting me).
• Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex.
• Cool trick to position an animated GIF over a JPEG.
• “I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.” Full story.
• I’m 37 and haven’t aged in 17 years.
• Why do so many web sites fail to use print stylesheets? (I’m as guilty as anybody, and really need to rectify that on sites that I work on).
• Tych Panel is a great way to create a photo grid in Photoshop.
• Need to create a site for mobile use? 320 and Up provides a good starting point.
• Which SciFi series should you watch?
• OMGIMG.US is a fun little site whose goal is to cultivate conversations that are built from images alone.
• Villagers in a remote part of China may have descended from Roman soldiers.
• 55 T-Shirts Made Just for Designers.
• I could’ve used this one recently: How to get sign-off for your designs.
• Great trip down memory lane: Growing up in Arcades.
• Samoa to jump forward a day.
• Kotaku shows its lack of journalistic integrity.
• Comic Sans Criminal: Helping people like you learn to use Comic Sans appropriately.
• Apparently in ’97 on April Fools day, Pat Sajak and Alex Trebek hosted each other’s game shows. Alex hosting Wheel is here and Pat hosting Jeopardy is here.
• 50+ Tools to Automate Your SEO Link Building.
• Need dead-simple video chat for up to four people? AIM AV looks pretty slick.
• Somebody needs to actually sell these Casualties of War little army men toys.
• I’ve said it 100 times, I’ll say it again: When it comes to HDMI cables, brands don’t matter.
• Trolling Tumblr.
• Go The F**k To Sleep is a book every new parent is going to want. Excerpt here and it’s managed to become a best-seller on Amazon, despite not being released yet.
• Looking for a music app for your Android phone? This comparison will help you choose.
• PSA: AIM and Google Talk users can now talk to each other.
• 21 New Rules For Technology — A Maximum manefesto.

While you don’t have to look too hard to find Bin Laden news lately, I thought these few links were interesting.

• This photo from the White House photostream really tells a great story about what our country’s leaders were going through when the attack was going down.
• If you want the best unbiased news about this whole thing, Aljazeera’s the best source, and their round-up of reaction from world leaders (on both sides) was really interesting.
• An interesting graphical look at New York Times readers’ reaction.
• Two popular quotations that have come out of these events that have been attributed to Mark Twain and Martin Luther King Jr. are both being mis-attributed.
• This actually came before Bin Laden’s death, but since there are stories now that there might be cuts in the military, this story from last week was an interesting foreshadow.

Got a bunch o’ stuff that I need to get off my desktop before I start another couple nights of rehearsals and a crazy-busy week of projects and other stuff. I was finally going to try and make it to a COWPU meeting after not having been to one for a helluva long time, but it looks like it’s not going to happen this time.

On to the dump (video dump coming later today)…

• Tom Hanks is a Lot of Animals.
• If I could buy some art, I’d buy some of these.
• I’m building a point-to-point wireless bridge, and I’m seriously considering the Pringle-can antenna, but I don’t think the bosses would like the look of that.
• I need multiple monitors (and a permanent desk, but that’s another story entirely), and when I have do, here’s a good software chart to best take advantage of it all.
• Google April Fools’ Joke (Gmail Motion) becomes reality.
• Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications.
• Only Little People Pay Taxes.
• Just mash the buttons on your keyboard, just like they do in the movies, and you too can look like a hacker.
• Speaking of movie-based computer interfaces, here’s a collection of screenshots of computer GUIs in Hollywood.
• Looking for an alternative to istockphoto? Here’s a few good ones.
• I’ve used PublicIP for at hotspot before, but HotSpotSystem looks pretty slick and works well with dd-wrt, which is also a bonus.
• Need to quickly create a grid of guides in Photoshop? GuideGuide will help.
• From Me To You: More subtle animated GIFs, very similar to the previously-linked to If We Don’t, Remember Me.
• Please let this GIF be real.
• Six hilarious ways that game designers are screwing with pirates.
• Amazon’s $23 million book about flies.
• General Electric Paid No Federal Taxes in 2010. Really, though, they didn’t do anything illegal, so in my ignorant opinion, I blame our tax laws more than anything.
• Three website exploits — are you protected?
• The Wilderness Downtown is a great interactive film, built in HTML 5.
• I think I’ve accomplished most of these help-desk achievements.
• 40 names of bands before they were famous.
• People ask the dumbest questions.
• Practical guide to subversion on Windows with TortoiseSVN.

Videos coming later…

• Converted cement factory is a pretty sweet home (a little too industrial for my taste, but still pretty nice).
• Need help speeding up your site or testing speed? Google Page Speed Online can help.
• Want to increase the speed of your SD card on your Android phone? This is a pretty sweet trick. From this XDA thread, there’s an app for that.
• This sprinkler is pretty sweet. Just make sure you look at the customer images for it’s full product glory.
• Firefox starting up slow? One of these extensions could be the cause (I have Firebug installed, which I do use whenever I’m doing development work, so I’m not about to remove it).
• Trying to understand the rules of Cricket? To protect your pies, you have a bat.
• Facebook opened up their data center and server designs as part of the Open Compute project. The local data center is one of the first centers to use all these ideas, and it’s making me wish I could see the interior of the place more and more (somebody want to give me a tour sometime?).
• It’s prostitution, but not. I guess. WhatsYourPrice.com matches people willing to pay for dates with beautiful women with beautiful women who are willing to take money to go on dates.
• Looking for music to match your running speed? Jog.fm will help.
• Creepiest blog I’ve seen in a while: Chicks With Steve Buscemeyes.
• For someting completely different, Sad Stuff on Street.
• DIY iPod Car Mount. Or you could always try the binder clip method.
• Keep track of your daily accomplishments and tasks via e-mail with iDoneThis.
• creepy is a geolocation information aggregator so you can track folks down on a map by the geo tags on their social media posts.
• I wish I hard the hardware to do this well: Paravirtualization With Xen 4.0 On Debian Squeeze (AMD64). I’d really love to virtualize the entire server infrastructure here (about 10 servers, total), but don’t have the hardware to run 10 virtualized Windows servers with any sort of decent speed (and I have a feeling converting live systems easily to images with minimal downtime would be a pain in the butt as well).
• If you’re wondering how they create large crowds in movies, they just inflate them (site’s getting hammered, so it may take a couple whacks to load it).