March 2009

"Reformation 01 is VNV Nation's first ever Boxset and is packed with material that any fan of the band will want to have. This deluxe hardcover embossed box contains 2 full length CDs, a DVD, and a 32 page booklet. CD-1 has 12 live tracks, the band's first-ever live CD release, CD-2 has 13 tracks of unreleased material and remixes, while the DVD has 8 live video clips from their last 2 world tours. The Boxset is limited to 9000 copies in North America (NTSC Format DVD) and 9000 copies in Europe (PAL Format DVD). "

just shipped my first iPhone app:

"Free articles and resources by best-selling author and TV co-host Ray Comfort that will help you to pull the plug on the rising tide of atheism."

"The question is how well a tiny trackball will work on a Windows PC? We don’t have to wait any longer for the answer. Evergreen in Japan has announced the Micro USB Mouse for Windows that is a portable little USB gadget with a retractable cable. In spite of the name, the “Mouse” is really a little trackball with buttons and while it looks goofy, this is a gadget that might actually be useful for those who like trackballs. No word on pricing or if this will make it to the U.S. but you sure could fit a lot of these little things on those empty ships that used to bring a lot of Toyotas to the U.S."

"With almost every student owning a laptop, the school decided that the time was right to save several hundred thousand dollars by eliminating access to shared machines. (It’ll continue to offer space for students to share as they work together, so the lab’s value as a collaborative environment won’t disappear.)"

"Although Stainless started out as a technology demo to showcase our own multi-processing architecture in response to Google Chrome, we've been inspired by our growing fanbase to forge ahead and craft Stainless into a full-fledged browser. In fact, Stainless now has features you won't find in Chrome or in any other browser."

"You may use a template to create your own dust-jackets. Just download it, adjust, print it out, cut out:"

"When you absolutely need to destroy a cock now, you need The Cock Shot. There are a lot of parodies of the Shamwow guy these days. This is my favorite."

"You may be running non-free programs on your computer every day without realizing it—through your web browser.Many sites still use Javascript that way, but some use it for major programs that do large jobs. For instance, Google Docs downloads into your machine a Javascript program which measures half a megabyte, in a compacted form that we could call Obfuscript because it has no comments and hardly any whitespace, and the method names are one letter long. The source code of a program is the preferred form for modifying it; the real source code of this program is not available to the user."

"Someone, sometime soon is going to start describing the climb out of this impressive hole we’ve dug for ourselves, and they’re going to call it “America 2.0”. Clever, yes. We need a new version of ourselves and that’s going to involve bright, unexpected ideas from those we least expect them from, and they’re going to strike you as impossible. All you need to do to understand these terrifyingly ambitious ideas is to look back at what we’ve already done to understand what we can do."

"Nuclear power will have to form part of a comprehensive post-carbon energy infrastructure, and its downsides are greatly overstated, according to a group of experts."

"He's smarter than Egon, funnier than Venkman, and almost yellower than Ray."

"But the city offers a much greater attraction for artists than $100 houses. Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished. From Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project (think of a neighborhood covered in shoes and stuffed animals and you’re close) to Matthew Barney’s “Ancient Evenings” project (think Egyptian gods reincarnated as Ford Mustangs and you’re kind of close), local and international artists are already leveraging Detroit’s complex textures and landscapes to their own surreal ends. "

"1.14 + "

This goes a long ways toward explaining why everything Google does is so damn ugly. "Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle."

"Another day, another Watchmen videogame, although I'm not sure which consoles this one will be coming to. FYI, it's technically safe for work, but it's probably not safe for coworkers, unless you want them to think you're some horrible pervert or something. If you do want them to think you're a horrible pervert, there are probably more effective videos to watch, though. "

I own these, but I keep forgetting what they're called. "With the Sony MDR-EX85LP you can shut out the distractions of the world with your favorite audio. These super-light earbuds give you high performance sound quality and help you enjoy your songs everywhere you go. The premium sound delivered by a 13.5mm driver combines with a soft silicon-rubber compound for great audio and hours of comfortable wearing. The closed acoustic structure blocks out most external noise, for a superior listening experience and the clearest sound reproduction possible. Whether you're going to work or class, walking to the shops or working out at the gym, you'll get stunningly rich sound quality. "

"But the Volusian peach mango salsa was galactically delicious."

"Porticus is a Cocoa GUI for the MacPorts package manager. MacPorts provides ready to build open-source software packages modified to compile and run on Mac OS X. The MacPorts project provides a TCL command line tool to manage installation, update and activation of the port packages. Porticus provides a GUI front-end to this tool."

"Scrapy is a high level scraping and web crawling framework for writing spiders to crawl and parse web pages for all kinds of purposes, from information retrieval to monitoring or testing web sites. "

"The current financial crisis is the best opportunity we have had in a very long time for a bloodless revolution against the faceless fascism under which we have been living, unaware, for much too long. Let us seize the day."

"With Reveal, time is always in the present. This timekeeper reveals the current time through a looking glass while fading the past and the future. If you are a person of the present, this watch is made specifically for you. Reveal is the work of computer graphics pioneer Daniel Will-Harris. "

"If you're feeling Watchmen overload, this tribute to the comic (and ads of yore) is exactly the tonic you need."

"RT is an outmoded and misguided way to dish out your hi-5's. It seemed cool at one time, but now we know it's noisy and doesn't add value. Let's create a better Twitter. Whether you are a reformed re-tweeter *points to self*, have always hated it or are somewhere in-between, join us to keep RT's from clogging up the intertubes. There is no shame here. Only hugs."

"ARKHAM, MA—Arguing that students should return to the fundamentals taught in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon in order to develop the skills they need to be driven to the very edge of sanity, Arkham school board member Charles West continued to advance his pro-madness agenda at the district's monthly meeting Tuesday."

"The original PC-Trac is re-born again as the L-Trac high performance laser optical trackball. Utilizing the latest in laser navigation technology, the L-Trac has selectable resolutions of up to 1600CPI, which are "button selectable", allowing rapid changes of sensitivity. The high performance laser navigation system is capable of tracking at greater than 30 inches per second, even at a 20G acceleration rate. This means the user can "fly" around the screen with a flick of the finger or snap from one side the the screen to the other with a healthy flick of the arm. Either way, this precision, high performance pointing device produces predictable, quick and precise motion that becomes intuitive in a few minutes of use. The optional scroll wheel is smooth and readily accessible, located above the center button. Also an option, the L-Trac can be fitted with two external switch jacks allowing the use of 5 buttons for added flexibility. "

"In general, using the browser’s run-time as a prototyping environment enables ridiculously fast rapid prototyping. There are no deployment steps to worry about, changes are reflected instantly, and all changes are dog-foodable from the get-go. Prototyping is also entirely decoupled and parallelizable: that’s especially powerful when you don’t have access to the site for which you are making a live-patch, the backend code is obtuse, or when you multiple have competing ideas for changes you’d like to make. We actually use the same technique for prototyping new behaviors for the the Ubiquity code repository."

"We've posted the video tour, now take another look inside the secret location 80 feet below ground where Founders Brewing Company ages some of its beers."

Sweet merciful crap do I love this beer. "The stout, loaded with coffee and chocolate and aged in oak bourbon barrels, is available in four packs ($20). The barrels sit underground in a gypsum mine before they are brought to the surface, returned to the tanks, finished and bottled. KalamaBrew hopes to have its video tour of the mines up on the blog soon. Check back, you don't want to miss it."

"According to the report, sections of the documents— "almost invariably the most crucial passages"—are marred by an indelible black ink that renders the lines impossible to read, due to a top-secret highlighting policy that began at the agency's inception in 1947. "

"A port of the Quicksilver string ranking algorithm"

"How to deal with the “not-so-mellow yellow” of old computers and consoles "