- Why we don’t hire .NET programmers.
- Great wallpaper resource: InterfaceLIFT.
- How to beat the salad bar (be sure to look at the useful graphic).
- The Future Shock, a three-year cross country adventure to save the world.
- Sprint makes switching to Google Voice very easy. Sign up here..
- The world’s best designed newspaper is in Portugal.
- How to remotely control your PC, even if it crashes (too bad none of the computers in my office support this feature).
- WebWrapper a simple wrapper for HTML 5 based web applications on Android devices (similar: PhantomJS is a full web stack, in JavaScript, no browser required)
- 12-year-old genius studying at IUPUI.
- Use WordPress to run your church site. Or Typo3, if you’d rather (I use the latter on a site I manage, but it’s entirely overkill and difficult to manage for simple stuff, so I might be moving it to something else).
- Pick a number from 1 to 10 … for science!
- Barack Obama’s top-secret tent.
- Have you ever thought about how you’d stay in touch with your loved ones if your city experienced a natural disaster or other emergency? Make a Safety Map.
Category: Randomness
Reading Material
Reading Material
- Nuclear power isn’t safe? As this Japan earthquake and its aftermath have proven, that’s hogwash, as things are getting blown completely out of control by the media. You could eat a bunch of bananas and be exposed to more radiation.
- Hollywood’s films aren’t going to get better anytime soon: The Day the Movies Died.
- Apple’s longest serving employee isn’t Steve Jobs, it’s this guy.
- Pretty sure I’ve linked to this before, but it bears repeating: All of you who are considering buying that next fancy Apple product should invest in Apple instead.
- Want to have a clickable interface to play a ton of video game themes? Here you go.
- You knew it had to exist: A list of video links to various types of animal fights.
- Speaking of animals, the Smithsonian has an amazing collection of 201,000 camera trap images collected from research sites around the world.
- Analyzing the implications of DNS prefetching.
- The Legacy of the CD: Innovation That Ate Itself.
Reading Material
Still recovering from being under the weather on Saturday and then playing a concert on Sunday, but need to get this stuff off my desk.
Have you signed up for our pick ’em yet? Why not?
- Big Shocker: Steve Jobs is misleading people about Android.
- Another big shocker: Limbaugh/Hannity parent company admits hiring actors to call their shows.
- Old case, but interesting discussion: Man receives oral sex, ordered to pay child support.
- How long does it take to beat a video game?
- Charles is an interesting looking HTTP proxy/monitor that allows a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet.
- Searching for torrents? Here’s a useful list of search options.
- I wasn’t aware that Google made a Car Home app. Naturally it doesn’t work on all devices (as I think it was originally designed for the Nexus or something) nor will it install via the Android Market. You can download the APK files here and install it directly onto your device (haven’t tried it yet). If you can’t get it to work, there are other apps that have similar features. With a good car mount, I could see this being very handy in the car.
- Speaking of Android, I’m now rocking this ROM on my phone. Biggest reason? Carrier IQ has been removed, which is basically a spyware package installed by Sprint/Samsung. I’m also now rocking some of these transparent widget skins.
- Need to calibrate your phone’s compass and/or accelerometer? Folks say this video has been useful, as have the tips here.
- Get the most out of Google Voice on Android.
- Conan plays a life-sized game of Angry Birds.
- Is Intel’s Thunderbolt cable a brilliant innovation or a worthless grasp at the past?
- This four-year-old has some great opinions on the world.
- Guess what? I just had sex.
- Golden Eagles are awesome, and can easily take down a mountain goat.
- The Force Unleashed II: Robot Chicken Commercial.
- Don’t let the government shut down the Internet. That’s the purpose of the Open Mesh project.
- F**K YEAH NOUNS!
- Hate RSS fees that don’t display the whole article? Problem solved.
- Upgrading through every version of Windows from 1.0 to 7.
Reading (Edit: and Watching) Material
- IBM’s Watson smacked around folks on Jeopardy, and here is a good Q&A with the development team.
- Looking for pinball in Portland? There’s a map for that.
- In case you didn’t know, programmers swear a lot.
- The question everybody needs answered: If I were an evil genius, how could I go about melting the ice caps?
- Man makes $50,000 goal, charities nearly get hosed because of a technicality.
- Why save PBS? Here are a pile of great reasons, but this one easily takes the cake.
- Speaking of cake: I Crashed Paris Hilton’s Birthday And Accidentally The Whole Cake.
- A bunch of Android links for you:
- Man makes an awesome carputer with a rooted NOOKColor and a DIY car mount (more photos and video here). Apparently MortPlayer has a “car” layout and a widget that makes this nice and easy.
- A great collection of Boot Animations.
- If you’re seeing screenshots of Android phones and wondering “What widget it that?” then this visual reference might help.
- Use your Wii controler with your Android phone.
- I’ve always been tempted to play with this more, but I just know I’d spend too much time with it: There are apps that will feed web audio streams of emergency radio frequencies. The frequencies are public record and some are fed over the Web which would make them work with those apps.
- I think I may have shared this before, but I can’t remember: ServerUp uses your phone’s network connection to monitor if your servers are still up and running.
- Samsung released the Froyo update for my phone a few days ago, but apparently the update is now on hold. It’s been working OK for me, but I haven’t pushed it too hard or tested it out much, so I’ll just keep my finger’s crossed.
- Ever wanted to know what the life of a gigolo is really like? Now you know.
- Ever wanted to know what happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator? Now you know.
- Every wanted to know what happens with you try to BBQ a fire-proof hard drive? Now you know (OK, enough of that “Ever wanted…”. Sorry…).
- Things you didn’t know about Futurama characters.
- FirewallBuilder looks like an interesting open-source solution to managing a variety of different firewall packages (it appears to support a ton). A handy write-up on a basic setup is here.
- A new AWS feature: Run your website from Amazon S3.
- If you try to game the system when it comes to SEO, somebody will always find out.
- Fun with Translation Party.
- For Google Docs to make inroads, it really needs to go offline.
- If you want your own personal cloud, Pogoplug looks like it might help.
Edit: Forgot about these — there are a couple videos after the jump…
Reading Material
- ahumanright.org plans to buy satellite and provide free Internet access for entire world.
- There had been rumors about this for years, but it does apparently exist: The Nazi graphics standards manual.
- Gawker’s design, while new, still has the original logo.
- How did WordPress win? A good read for folks who have followed the rise of WordPress. There’s some good reading there.
- I don’t read Penny Arcade much (it’s a good comic, and they do a ton of great charity work), but this timeline of the Dickwolves fiasco is entertaining.
- A look into how Google makes their Chrome updates so small.
- If you have an AMOLED screen on your phone (like all the Samsung Galaxy S phones do, like mine), you can save some battery by using a darker background. Here’s the science.
- Planning a weddding? Google can help.
- Former Big Picture blogger’s new site In Focus is now up and running.
- An interesting look at the fingerprints left on an iPad after using certain apps.
- If I’m ever in New York (which likely won’t happen anytime soon), I’d make a point to check out this amazing locksmith.
- Hash-bangs are breaking the web (and I didn’t realize, but he’s right: They are causing browser and servers to work harder to deal with those things).
- If you’re trying to avoid the FourSquare crowds checking in at your favorite place in London, use this tool to avoid them. It’s anti-social software. This tool really needs to expand outside of London. Full story.
- If you’re wanting to lock down your Google account further, Google now has a two step verification option.
- Want to get a read on somebody on you first date? Ask these questions to find out what you really want to know (from drug usage, political/religious affiliation, etc…).
- This could take a while: A project to remove all visual advertising from Time Square.
- Save yourself some airline hours: Visit some of the world’s best art museums with Google’s Art Project.
- CleverBot is a fun toy, and the conversation you can have with it are entertaining, as this Reddit thread shows.
- Want to make your own Coke? Here’s the recipe.
- Readability is a bookmarklet I use frequently, and the latest version has a membership subscription model that’s will pay publishers.
Reading Material
- I’m looking more into virtualizing a bit more to consolidate some old but still (unfortunately) necessary servers here at the office (still need the hardware to do it, but that’s another issue). They’re older Windows 2000 servers that won’t run well on Windows 2003 (I’ve tried). I’m leaning towards a Xen platform, possibly running on top of CentOS with Virtual Machine Manager installed. I’m more familiar with RedHat/RPM-based distros, but I’m just at the preliminary research stages so all that may change. Many of the solutions out there require XP/2003 or higher (like the stupid-simple Disk2vhd), but I’m going to have to look into some manual methods to get things moved as I really don’t want to rebuild the OS inside Xen. Thoughts/input is always welcome, since I know there are guys here that know far more about this type of thing than I.
- You thought BendBroadband’s 100GB data cap was bad? Try living in Canada and getting only 25GB. Because of the much lower cap, folks are much more inclined to block ads. Here are some ideas on how to block the ads on DD-WRT routers (another option — I’m sure something similar is possible on Tomato or TomatoUSB firmware as well). You can do it on a per-computer basis by using the MVP Hosts file.
- Is it me, or have people spent far too much time adding content to this Wikipedia entry? I wish that much effort was put into other articles on that site.
- Egypt is having a real democratic revolution, while the one in Iraq was fake.
- Is Netflix trying to embarrass certain ISPs? My streaming works great on my WDTV Live Plus so BBB must not be on that list. Wish Hulu would get onto my WDTV box and I’d rarely have to ever turn on my HTPC.
- Best okcupid profile ever.
- Some jobs I could do no problem. This isn’t one of them.
- Google is accusing Bing of copying their search results.
- The hilarious Axe Cop comic (written by a five-year-old, illustrated by his 29-year-old brother) really needs to be turned into a movie.
- Some stuff people are printing in my room over the internet. While live printing has been shutdown, there is some interesting stuff in the gallery.
- Another good list of Android apps and games.
Reading Material
- Why 3D movies don’t work and never will. Period.
- Poor Bullet Bill (if you’re a classic Nintendo geek, you’ll love Brawl in the Family).
- Speaking of Nintendo, here’s something I might have to try with our Wii: Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times.
- If you need to do a basic layout for any type of room, this online tool is pretty nifty.
- Man, I feel old: Oregon Trail is turning 40 this year.
- Oldie, but interesting: Nine ways to obfuscate e-mail addresses compared.
- Behind the scenes on the Back To The Future set.
- Truly Decentralized BitTorrent Downloading has Finally Arrived.
- The man who started Big Picture is moving on to a new gig that will allow him to focus on it full time (he was also a web developer at Boston.com).
- Need some symbols or icons? The Noun Project has a great collection of free, public domain, icons, available in vector format.
- BoingBoing has updated their stats dump. Hopefully Andy Baio will update his fun stats page.
- How to Print Gmail on your Android or iPhone using Cloud Print.
- Handy little guide to make your own 5-in-1 Network Admin cable.
- Cryptic JavaScript at its finest.
- Some more Android links, for my reference:
- wp clock is a pretty slick looking live wallpaper.
- Speaking of Live Wallpaper, this Super Mario wallpaper is pretty sweet.
- How to factory reset your Epic (I used this when I was trying — unsucessfully — to get Nebula ROM installed).
- Here’s an interesting read on how changing the Epic file system from RFS to EXT4 will speed things up (I tried this and it didn’t work right for me, but I didn’t really have time to dig into it).
- Now that I have Froyo installed on my phone, I was able to free up a bunch of phone memory by moving apps onto the SD card.
- Now that I have Froyo, I can now have a TI-83 in my pocket.
- If you’re looking for directions on installing your own custom ROM for your Epic, this might help.
- If you need to do a clean install and restore, Titanium Backup will help a bunch.
- If you need a way to track down a lost or stolen phone before it happens and the Prey Project isn’t enough for you, Theft Aware looks pretty dang powerful.
- Things you can’t do with your iPhone: Customize it a zillion different ways.
Reading Material (Lots of Android and Geek Stuff)
- I’m starting to get more into my Android phone, learning all the fun stuff the operating system can do. I’m getting all sorts of useful information from Reddit’s Android subreddit as well as the usual places like XDA and PPC. I’m finding far too many apps and time killers here (and here and here). I’ve rooted the phone so I could remove the Sprint stock apps (good list of what you can get rid of here and here), back things up, ad block and install custom roms down the road (among other mods). I’m also looking into Tasker and all the cool stuff it can do. I’m considering bucking up and paying Roam Control as that will help in Sunriver where the coverage from from Verizon is better in some spots. When I get an extra few bucks, I’m really considering getting something like this for my car and then installing the Torque app to monitor, clear, and read codes in my car. I really should get a dashboard mount for this phone and find a good music player and synching process and just leave my iPod at home. Then I could have a constant video recorder for my phone while I’m on the road using DailyRoads.
Seriously, though, I’m loving having an Android phone. Anybody else have any great tips or apps that I should look into?
And in case you’re wondering how or why I got such an expensive phone: No, I couldn’t even remotely afford this phone. I received it when Best Buy completely munged up the repair on my previous phone and I was using a loaner phone for nearly three months. They (thankfully) did the right thing and gave me a new phone, since it was pretty obvious that the repair company had no intention on sending my old phone back to me any time soon. Since my previous phone was top-of-the-line when I got it and had much better features than most of the phones there, the Epic was really the only one that matched up.
- Speaking of Android, Android vs. WP7 for developers, a case study.
- And now for something completely different, everybody’s flipping out a bit about this whole Arizona shooting and whether there were political influences (the dude was cracked, plain and simple). Just the same, Sarah Palin denies everything thrown at her, though I did think both of these twitter posts hit the nail on the head.
- If you shop on NewEgg.com (I do for a ton of computer parts), you might be interested in CamelEgg, which is a NewEgg price tracker to watch for price drops and alerts.
- Making computer science fun for all ages, it’s Computer Science, Unplugged!
- Read The F**king HIG is a great blog ranting about bad interfaces on Mac apps “from the Mac App Store, ‘designed’ by people who think they get interface design.”
- Speaking of interface design, everybody who has a site with a shopping-cart process needs to read this.
- While I still don’t see a ton of value in twitter (as the signal-to-noise ratio is about one-to-a-million), I love their response to the WikiLeaks subpeona and I only wish more companies watched out for their users like this.
- A few locals are starting up conference here in Bend called Ruby on Ales, a two-day, single track conference inspired by Ruby, microbrews, and shredding. They have a Facebook page as well. Since I know squat about Ruby, it won’t do me much good, but I’m sure there are folks out there with an interest in this.
Reading Material
- NASA names 2012 most absurd sci-fi film ever.
- Homeless man with Golden radio voice now has all sorts of job offers.
- Best film scenes of 2010 (some of these movies I haven’t seen — will need to get them on my Netflix list).
- Want to have some fun? Search Google images for the first picture people take with their cameras. The search templates are here.
- The review is nearly as long as the movie, but this three-part review of Star Wars Episode III is entertaining.
- Cute photo of the day: This guy was
hungover“sick” after New Years. Kids are awesome. - How to Boot 10 different Live CDs from 1 USB Flash Drive.
- Windows OS Re-created in Little Big Planet 2 Beta (Blue Screen of Death included).
- The PS3 master key has been cracked so home brew will be much easier.
- Two girls undermind the entire US border strategy in 18 seconds.
- Further research into using chickens as steadycams.
- The end of an era: Images from the last roll of Kodachrome.
- What could have been entering the public domain this year? Lots of good works.
- Thousands of animals are dying all over, all in less than a week and nobody seems to know 100% for sure what’s going on. Tin-foil hat-types believe that HAARP is causing things to be screwed up. Or something.
- Real-life cheat Codes to make little things in live much easier (now has been turned into an iPhone app).
- If this guy ever decides to make a PC video game based on the art here (I really like this image), I’d totally buy it. The game itself might suck, but the imagery is great!
- The new edition of Huck Finn it lose “the N-word” and replace it with “slave” to which Roger Ebert replies “I’d rather be called a Nigger than a Slave.”
- Update, forgot one…: Hilarious Video: Portlandia: Dream of the 90s.
Reading and Watching Material
Some videos and some interesting reads for you all (videos after the jump as to not clog up the front page):
- The Best of 2010 lists are tricklying out, so here are a couple: The Source’s Top 10 Local News Stories of 2010 and imgur’s Top Images of 2010.
- A great list of Free and Paid SEO Tools.
- Diving into the heart of Stuxnet, one of the most frightening viruses I’ve seen.
- I don’t know where I came across this guy, but Engineer Guy has a bunch of great videos and whitepapers that take some high-end engineering topics and explain them to us common folk.
- I may have linked to this before, but I’m doing it again, now that we have an Wii and can try it: Dolphin Emulator is an emulator for GameCube and Wii games that can run Wii games at 1080p.
- Putting the Record Straight on the Lamo-Manning Chat Logs.
- If you’re looking at msconfig or your startup applications list and don’t recognize something, pretty good chance you can find it here.
- Adsense, no sense at all –
- Install Mac OS X on any Intel-based PC. Now I just need an extra PC that doesn’t suck to try this on (I have lots of old PCs, but nothing that would run OS X worth squat).
- Rosetta Code aims to “present solutions to the same task in as many different languages as possible.” It’s interesting to see how a bunch of different programming language solve the same problem.
- An interesting read: The Great Tax Con Job (or why the richer are getting richer and why folk like us are getting screwed).
Read on for the videos…