I ♥ the EFF
I thought I’d take a moment and give a shoutout to all my buddies at the EFF and remind everyone about all the good work they do protecting freedom of speech online! ›› Bloggers’ Rights | Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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Buzz Off, Google
When Google announced and subsequently unleashed Buzz on the world, on February 9, 2010, it was hoping to have a social networking hit on its hands. Instead, it was met with a lot of frustration and anger from users, who found Buzz thrust upon them, turned on and connected to the rest of the internet before users even knew it.
And when I say connected, I mean connected! Everything in your Google profile, including all your contacts and links and your YouTube Profile (like your sharing links to Twitter accounts), Picasa, your Google Reader shared items, and more, became available to anyone familiar with your Gmail address who wanted to follow your Buzz account. And this wasn’t a choice to opt-in, but instead was switched on all at once from Google headquarters and shoved out the door.
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Stopping Cyber-Bullies
My 90 year old stepfather was just recently claiming to my mother that kids didn’t pick on each other back in his day. When she told me about it, we nodded knowingly, smiled, and agreed he has a touch of the old-timer’s. Anyone who is a kid, has been a kid, or has a kid of their own knows that bullying is a big problem, at home, at school and on the playground. But with the advent of the internet, it’s moved into an entirely different arena- online, and taken a new name- cyber-bullying.
Excuse Me, You Have Email On Your Shirt!
Chris Ball is the lead software engineer for One Laptop Per Child, who is a geek and wears t-shirts and has an Android phone, pretty much like a lot of the rest of us.
But recently, a local electronics retailer had a promotion where they gave away free parts to 1000 people, and Chris was one of the lucky ones to participate.
Chris made off with $100 in free electronics and decided, with the help of his wife Madeline, to put them to use in a way no one had ever thought of before- making a t-shirt that keeps count of unread emails! Right there on the front of the t-shirt, using LEDs, it keeps a total count of how many messages are waiting to be read in the Inbox. It uses an Arduino Lilypad and Bluetooth dongle to talk to his Android phone and the count displayed right on the shirt for everyone to see!
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Screw Like Doctor Who!
Admit it, you watch Dr. Who, and you never miss an episode. You love Tom Baker and his stripey muffler best, but you think the new guy is doing a pretty darn good job so far.
And, you’re probably one of those types who likes to collect knick-knacks from your favorite sci-fi shows, too, right?
Think Geek‘s got you covered! The 10th Doctor’s sonic screwdriver was sadly destroyed… But, like Madonna’s career, thanks to the power of the TARDIS, it keeps coming back! Each Doctor has had a different sonic screwdriver, and this latest one is a little bigger and features the power of green light to work it’s magic.
You, too, can own one, and impress your friends while you make imaginary repairs to your inter-dimensional post boxes and time warp conduits, prepare your cube for impromptu time travel or just look cooler than the Star Wars kid.
Sound effects, springy action, and best of all, batteries included, just for $25.99! DO NOT DEVIATE!
What Do We Google?
Sometimes when you’re bored, you put your name into Google just to see the results, right? I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it… Then that gets boring, so you start looking for other stuff, just to see what you can find.
The staff of Nina Hale Search Marketing compiled some of the funniest and weirdest searches that they charted on Google over the past three months from their clients’ accounts, and found:
1. gloves that people can shoot out web
2. wool gangster shirts
3. what were the boots worn by Tom Selleck in Quigley Down Under
4. do tuna cook while they swim
5. who invented friction
6. kitten smells like rotten eggs
7. is turkey poop brown
8. what is tuna made of
9. what does Farrah Faucet look like
10. did duck hunting change the world…continue reading »
What’s NASA Been Puffin’?
Probably the worst part about working is the daily commute each way, stuck in traffic. NASA aerospace engineer, Mark Moore, dreams of the day we all get around like the Jetsons, flying around in our own personal space cars, instead.
He’s come up with the Puffin, a vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) personal aircraft, as part of his doctoral thesis. It’s purely designed for single occupancy- only 12′ long with a 14.5′ wingspan, and it’s completely electrically powered. Even more bizarrely, it’s part plane, part helicopter, and part “WTF is that?!?!?”
When Will IE Get It?
I’m sick and tired of having to design a website more than once every time I make one. Anyone who designs websites knows what I am talking about. You design it to W3 standards, which works for every modern browser like Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, and then you go back and make it work as well as you possibly can in Internet Explorer.
Even though Microsoft has released version 8 and is developing version 9, they are notorious for having their own standards for the web all the way back to the first release of Explorer. They are fairly capricious about which parts of CSS IE respects, and instead insist upon using their own set of “filter” commands to complete a small subset of what CSS can do.
Because it is the default install browser for Windows, it commands a large market share. The statistics on my websites show that IE users account for between 40 and 70% of my traffic. So I can’t dismiss it, as much as I would like to. But anyone who is reading this site, or is even slightly technically inclined, knows that their internet experience will be enhanced by using any other browser. Even my 90-year old stepfather surfs the web with Firefox.
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The Trouble With Astroturf
I was going through my RSS feeds yesterday, when, to my surprise, I came upon a glowing review of the tech blog I used to write for. “Techi.com Will Not Bore You” proclaimed the headline! And when I clicked through, I read a shining review of how original the content and magnificent the site was. Surprisingly, for a design site, there was no mention of the site design itself, which, at least from this designer’s standpoint is plain, at best.
The sentence that really caught my attention, however, was “I’m familiar with the guy behind this project and can honestly say he knows what he is doing.” I, too, am familiar with the guy behind this project. His name is Walter Apai, and he is also the guy behind Web Design Depot, a clearinghouse for web design links that has had middling success on the web. He’s also a self-admitted control freak, micro-manager and will freely admit to knowing little to nothing about technology or how to run his business. From what I gathered while working together, he got lucky once and is hoping to replicate his success with Techi.com.
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Adobe ♥’s Apple?!? Riiight.
Bwahahahahahaha!!!!
So when Steve Jobs wrote an excellent, well thought out letter explaining why Flash was antiquated technology and not fit for Apple’s next generation of devices, much less any modern computer, it was not surprising that the folks’ feelings at Adobe HQ in San Jose were hurt. Flash has been their bread and butter for years now, and they still hold on to the illusion that it’s the bee’s knees.
And, of course a public slap in the face from someone who’s been a pal since the launch of PostScript and PDF and other technologies from way back when couldn’t go unanswered. So what does Adobe do? Like a whiny bitch, they started a new campaign today professing their love for Apple!
Seriously. With a letter from the company founders and everything in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
With an utter lack of irony, Adobe’s new campaign is about choice! Here’s what I am guessing choice means to them: The choice to hog your processor completely! The choice to crash endlessly! The choice to suck your battery dry! The choice to invite viruses and hackers into your computer! The choice to not work with a touch interface! The choice to program once and deploy to multiple platforms badly and inconsistently! The choice to only work if you LICENSE ADOBE’S SOFTWARE!
Oh, wait, that has nothing to do with being an open, secure, usable environment like what Apple’s suggesting or working towards, does it?
Adobe’s hypocrisy would be giggle-worthy, if their pointless, reactionary and butt-hurt advertising campaign wasn’t adding more to the price of the next CS bundle I’m going to have to shell out for, but the basic point is that Adobe doesn’t ♥ Apple any more than Adobe ♥’s Microsoft.
What Adobe ♥’s is paying customers, and Apple pointed out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. Naked emperors get testy when their testes are showing, don’t they? How about putting all that ad campaign money towards a useful product?
