NotesRecently, I paid $12 at Mingtong Digital Mall for a complete phone, featuring quad-band GSM, Bluetooth, MP3 playback, and an OLED display plus keypad for the UI. Simple, but functional; nothing compared to a smartphone, but useful if you’re going out and worried about getting your primary phone wet or stolen. FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesI’ve long privately thought that Firefox should treat feed reading as a first-class citizen of the open web, and integrate feed subscribing and reading more deeply into the browser (rather than the lame, useless live bookmarks.) The impending demise of Reader has finally forced me to spit out my thoughts on the issue. They’re less polished than I like when I blog these days, but here you go – may they inspire someone to resuscitate this important part of the open web.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThe shadow of this cube in different directions gives QR codes pointing to the Wikipedia articles for Kurt Godel, M.C. Escher, and J.S. Bach respectively. Note that QR codes cannot be read in mirror image, so only 3 of the 6 possible cube orientations cast a readable shadow.FeedUnfurl
NotesThis is it, folks. This is the ideal world I’ve heard whispered about, referenced, and planned for a very long time. It’s here. I know you might have expected it to land with an earth-shattering boom but it was a slow and steady flowering on the Internet Archive’s servers. The Archive of Historical Computer Software is here, and it is very, very large.
Blow me away.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesIn the 1950s, Doug Engelbart set his sights on a lofty goal — to develop dramatically better ways to support intellectual workers around the globe in the daunting task of finding solutions to larger and larger problems with greater speed and effectiveness than ever before imagined. His goal was to revolutionize the way we work together on such tasks. He saw computers, at the time used only for number crunching, as a new medium for advancing the state of the art in collaborative knowledge workFeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesLet's face it, the year is 2013. Where are our flying cars? Why isn't deep space travel a thing yet? Why hasn't virtual reality become, well, reality? The Oculus Rift seeks to fill that lack of virtual reality in our lives. Still in its early developmental stage, the Oculus Rift promises to deliver VR gaming to the yearning public. Join us as we take a peek inside the Oculus Rift and its hardware.Unfurl
Notes The unnamed pensioner from Catamarca discovered he had been duped when he took the two animals to his local veterinarian to be vaccinated. The ferrets had been given steroids to increase their size and had been groomed to make their coats resemble those of pedigree poodles.FeedUnfurl
NotesI suspect United States is in fact ahead of the African nations in bringing the dead back to life. It's hard to find a good estimate of how many bodies are resurrected in the U.S. each year, but let's go with this vastly oversimplified figure: 92,000. 92,000 is the number of people the American Heart Association estimates are saved in the U.S. each year after their hearts or their lungs have stopped moving, i.e. by CPR. Or let's go with a percentage: 45.3%. That's the success rate in the bottom-quarter of American hospitals in a 2012 study in restoring circulation to a body whose heart has completely flatlined. 14.5% of the bodies treated managed leave the hospital. And that's in the hospitals with the lowest performance. Wait till you see American rates for getting the lame to walk and the blind to see.FeedUnfurl
NotesThis stuff matters. If we want to be the profession that leads the way in understanding and interpreting the past, we should be part of this conversation, or at the very least learn and see how we can help out. I should note here, quickly, that I know there are historians who care. I follow them on Twitter and they’re awesome. But they’re a small minority of the profession, and that needs to change. This doesn’t just affect digital historians, it affects historians. Our very profession.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesIn the coming era both the opportunities and threats to the Web are just as big as they were 15 years ago. As the role of data grows and device capabilities expand, the Internet will become an even more central part of our lives. The need for individuals to have some control over how this works and what we experience is fundamental. Mozilla can — and must — play a key role again. We have the vision, the products and the technology to do this. We know how to enable people to participate, both by contributing to our specific activities and coming up with their own ideas that advance the bigger cause of enriching the Web.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesBarring a civilization-ending event, technology is not going to move backward. More and more of our world will be controlled by software. It’s already become so ubiquitous that, argues one of my colleagues, it’s now ridiculous to call some firms as “tech” companies when all companies depend on it so much.FeedUnfurl
NotesStart out perfect and don’t change a thing. Always accentuate your best features by pointing at them. And conceal your flaws by sucker punching anyone who has the audacity to mention them.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThe ironic thing is that Cesar Chavez was a Christian activist, basing his civil rights rallies upon Jesus’ example of achieving social justice through non-violence, and as such, is an iconic hero to Mexican Americans.
The Right is up in arms on Twitter, threatening to switch to Bing as revenge against Google for honoring a Christian activist on Easter.Unfurl
NotesSo, no. The fact that you’ve replaced that picture of yourself mugging for the camera with a red square and an equal sign will not cause Justice Kennedy to bang his gavel or stomp his foot and say that he’s come to a final decision on the matter, and that it’s all because of your new profile picture. Changing your Facebook image will not have a direct impact on our legislation.
But a widespread descriptive norm implying that it is socially acceptable to advocate for same-sex marriage and that most people in contemporary American society seem to be pro-marriage-equality?
Now that just might.Unfurl
NotesInteresting historical perspective on RSS & feed readers & usenet, and a kind of depressing prediction that we're going back to the days of magazine silos.Unfurl
NotesJoe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way social scientists think about human behavior and culture.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes "I got a call from the principal yesterday morning. She informed me that bodily noises were inappropriate and would not be acceptable in the talent show. Everybody takes things so serious. We're talking about a seven-year-old and armpit farts. There could be so many other worse things, and I don't agree with her decision, and I think I have hundreds and hundreds of people that stand behind the way I think," she said.FeedUnfurl
NotesNow, we’ll be forced to fill the hole that Reader will leave behind, and there’s no immediately obvious alternative. We’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.FeedUnfurl
NotesIf you are unlucky enough to have your computer infected with a RAT, prepare to be sold or traded to the kind of person who enters forums to ask, "Can I get some slaves for my rat please? I got 2 bucks lol I will give it to you :b" At that point, the indignities you will suffer—and the horrific website images you may see—will be limited only by the imagination of that most terrifying person: a 14-year-old boy with an unsupervised Internet connection.Unfurl
NotesFirefox today reminds me of Firefox when I first discovered it. Mozilla has once again delivered a technically superior product while completely respecting my rights as a user. Firefox is freedom.Unfurl
NotesBut back to my user journey. After the 404 error I took control of the user experience myself. I Googled “Doctor Who S07E01 torrent”, and I very much doubt I’ll ever attempt to use UltraViolet™ again.Unfurl
NotesWhat I cannot quite wrap my mind around is how the mind which wrote such a beautiful meditation on empathy can be the same one that argues for the violent overthrow of the American government because of its failure to ban gay marriage and to outlaw homosexuality generally.Unfurl
Notes The missing APIs must be added to the web platform in order to enable the billions of new mobile users who will be coming online in the next few years to have affordable web-based phones, tablets, and apps. Emerging market consumers and developers generally cannot afford increasingly higher-end, native-app-advantaged smartphones from the two bigs.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThe women who have advanced in our community, and have overcome the hardships that are inherent to being in such a minority, almost certainly function at a higher level than the average community member.FeedUnfurl
NotesUnfortunately, it appears that Time Machine will sometimes get upset if you backup a symlink to a directory, convert the symlink back to a real directory, and then try to backup again.FeedUnfurl
NotesIn fact, many workers even have a public Amazon profile page containing their real name and sometimes even a photo, at http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/workerID.Unfurl
NotesIn the past two decades, the AR-15 has evolved into an open, modular gun platform that’s infinitely hackable and accessorizable. With only a few simple tools and no gunsmithing expertise, an AR-15 can be heavily modified, or even assembled from scratch, from widely available parts to suit the fancy and fantasy of each individual user. In this respect, the AR-15 is the world’s first “maker” gun, and this is why its appeal extends well beyond the military enthusiasts that many anti-gun types presume make up its core demographic.Unfurl
NotesWhat if the private pursuit of profit was—for a long time—proximate to improving the lot of humans but not identical to it? What if capitalism has gone feral, and started making moves that are obviously insane, but also inevitable? Unfurl
NotesThe take-away: it isn’t simply overeating that can make you sick; it’s overeating sugar. We finally have the proof we need for a verdict: sugar is toxic.EmbedUnfurl
Notes “We received about 60 text messages from people complaining about the stacking in the program,” said Lars Mytting, whose best-selling book “Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood — and the Soul of Wood-Burning” inspired the broadcast. “Fifty percent complained that the bark was facing up, and the rest complained that the bark was facing down.” Unfurl
NotesFirst, we are sorry there hasn’t been more communication about the state of Moon Breakers. The current state is that development has effectively been halted on the game. Imba, the developer and owner of the game, ran out of money and the Moon Breakers team was disbanded. FeedUnfurl
NotesThese kinds of ethical and paradoxical questions alone could potentially make Continuum not only a good time travel show, but maybe, just maybe, a sci-fi cop show that intelligently critiques its own existence.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesWhen we have to share common space, I feel like we are all better served when each of us takes reasonable measures to ensure we are not announcing ourselves too loudly. That we're not taking up more than our share of the sidewalk, talking at unnecessary volumes on the phone, or occupying the seat next to us with our bag even as the train fills to standing room only. Those kinds of acts are, I feel, deeply selfish.Unfurl
NotesYahoo has the opportunity to make Flickr the photo-sharing site on the Web. And if it continues to innovate and update the service, Flickr could even become the next Flickr.EmbedUnfurl
Notes Now Republicans find themselves boxed in. With taxes scheduled to rise on Jan. 1 in the absence of an agreement, they can’t play their usual game of just saying no to tax increases and pretending that they have a deficit reduction plan. And the president, by refusing to help them out by proposing G.O.P.-friendly spending cuts, has deprived them of political cover. If Republicans really want to slash popular programs, they will have to propose those cuts themselves. Unfurl
NotesAs we speak, certain vigilante Wikipedia users are hard at work erasing whatever scraps of little-known BBS door game history that resides in Wikipedia's databases. The first casualty in this war was the entry for Space Empire Elite, which was deleted early this morning.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThe vector lines, which are created by aiming a beam DIRECTLY AT YOUR EYES only to be stopped by a coated piece of glass, have a completely different feel. The phosphor glows, the shots look like small stars floating across the glass, and a raster line is not to be seen. It’s an entirely different experience, and the teenagers at MAGfest had never seen it before, and unfortunately, it is well on its way out.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesReally, I think the issue here is that these sharing buttons embedded in website content belong in browser chrome. But, that raises issues of metrics on the content side and choice of services on the browser side.Unfurl
The $12 Gongkai Phone « bunnie's blog
Why feed reading is an open web problem, and what browsers could do about it – Luis Villa
jwz: G, E, B, Leviathan
Inventing the Mouse | collective iq
Nothing To Do With Arbroath: Fluffed-up ferrets on steroids sold as toy poodles
Why Are There So Few Resurrected Corpses in the United States? - Heather Horn - The Atlantic
Yahoo! Has Probably Destroyed the Most History, Ever – And Historians Need to Wake Up | Ian Milligan
BBC News - Author Iain Banks has terminal cancer
Celebrating 15 Years of a Better Web | Mitchell's Blog
How the internet is making us poor – Quartz
The Pier Glass - Miss Piggy On Beauty
This is CSS
Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World
Nothing To Do With Arbroath: Seven-year-old boy's armpit farting act deemed inappropriate for school talent show
Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams | Ars Technica
What happened to Orson Scott Card? - Salon.com
MWC 2013, Firefox OS, and More Web API Evolution | Brendan Eich
Sean Coates blogs: Affirmative Wager
Time Machine and npm - Wanderview
Drink and Revive: The rise of Barcade | Polygon
BIG O Extreme Gaming Desktop | Features and Details | ORIGIN PC
It's the Sugar, Folks - NYTimes.com
Inside the GIF-Industrial Complex | New Republic
Sprites mods - Raspberry Pi micro arcade machine - Intro
uberent.com • View topic - Moonbreakers: A Brief Update
Will Continuum Destroy the Sci-Fi Police Procedural? | Tor.com
Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr - NYTimes.com
VC&G | Wikipedia is Deleting BBS Game History
NBCUniversal, Hearst Corp. Close Deal to Rebrand G4 as Esquire Channel - The Hollywood Reporter
What a Wonder is a Terrible Monitor « ASCII by Jason Scott
