links.lmorchard.com

May 2009

96 bookmarks saved in May 2009

The quirky genius of the Dos Equis ad campaign. - By Seth Stevenson - Slate Magazine

http://www.slate.com/id/2218849?from=rss
"This Dos Equis campaign features wonderful visual details. The production team clearly took glee in meshing vintage film stocks with unexpected locations and absurd endeavors. My favorite moment is the sight of our tuxedoed hero leading a moonlight expedition through a rocky canyon—flanked by elegant women in evening gowns, a military officer in full dress regalia, and a slightly befuddled fellow wearing a fez. We're left to guess at the precise combination of events that led to this scenario. I like to imagine it's an impromptu escape from a hijacked ocean liner."
#advertising #awesome #beer #dosequis #marketing #via:missadroit
archive.org #12284

Greasemonkey Hacks/Credits - WikiContent

http://commons.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Greasemonkey_Hacks/Credits
Reads like a Who's Who of my early 2000's RSS reading list. Oh, and I'm in there. "Leslie Michael Orchard is a hacker, tinkerer, and creative technologist who works in the Detroit area. He's engaged to a very patient and understanding science genius girl, and they both live with two spotted Ocicats and two dwarf bunnies. On rare occasions when spare time comes in copious amounts, he plays around with odd bits of code and writing, sharing them on his web site named 0xDECAFBAD"
#books #greasemonkey #link:rel=me #oreilly
archive.org #12281

Big Mess o’ Wires » Wire-Wrap Photos

http://www.stevechamberlin.com/cpu/2009/02/02/wire-wrap-photos
"I finished wiring the audio circuitry for BMOW yesterday, which marks the end of wiring for BMOW… for version 1 at least! I took the opportunity to reflect on my wire-wrapping odyssey, and took a bazillion photos of the namesake Big Mess o’ Wires before it disappears forever into an opaque case. It’s really quite a sight. There are 1253 wires with 2506 individually-wrapped connections, and I’ve got every one logged in a spreadsheet."
#bmow #computers #diy #electronics #hardware #homebrew #wirewrapping
archive.org #12277

Amazon.com: Leslie M. Orchard: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001JS692K
"Leslie Michael Orchard is a hacker, tinkerer, and creative technologist working in the Ann Arbor / Detroit, MI area. He lives with two spotted Ocicats, two dwarf bunnies, and a very patient and understanding wife. On rare occasions when spare time comes in copious amounts, he plays around with odd bits of code and writing, sharing them on his Web site named 0xDECAFBAD (http://decafbad.com/)."
#amazon #authors #link:rel=me
archive.org #12275

RemoteTap

http://www.readpixel.com/remotetap/index.html
Best remote control app evar for a Mac across the room hooked up to a TV. And yet, cheaper than all the Apple Remote apps I found. "RemoteTap 3 is a “Mac Style” remote desktop management solution for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It introduces several first and only features for any VNC-like application:"
#apps #htpc #iphone #ipod #ipodtouch #remotecontrol #remotes #vnc
archive.org #12274

Complete NES Nintendo Set | Collections | gameSniped.com

http://www.gamesniped.com/2009/05/28/complete-nes-nintendo-set
"EVERY GAME RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC LICENSED BY NINTENDO IN NORTH AMERICA IS HERE, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF STADIUM EVENTS. IF YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT NES COLLECTING, YOU KNOW STADIUM EVENTS IS SIMPLY “WORLD CLASS TRACK MEET” WITH A DIFFERENT NAME AND TITLE SCREEN. ALSO INCLUDING A LOT OF PAL EXCLUSIVES, BLACK TENGEN, CAMERICA, COLOR DREAMS/BUNCH GAMES/WISDOM TREE, AVE, ACTIVE ENTERPRISES, AND FAMICOM GAMES."
#awesome #gaming #nintendo #want
archive.org #12273

Sliders - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliders
What scifi show hasn't FOX screwed with? "The FOX Network aired the episodes in a different order to best capitalize on potential ratings-winning episodes, thus causing some continuity errors. For instance, the timer is first set to count down not in the pilot episode, but in "Summer of Love" — since FOX aired "Fever" after the pilot episode, though, many viewers were left confused as to why the Sliders suddenly had to leave within a very specific period of time. Similarly, the cliffhanger at the end of "Summer of Love" leads directly into the opening of "Prince of Wails" — which FOX had actually aired a week earlier"
#fox #geek #scifi #sliders #wikipedia
archive.org #12272

Hulu - Labs: Hulu Desktop

http://www.hulu.com/labs/hulu-desktop
"Hulu Desktop is a lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer. It features a sleek new look that's optimized for use with standard Windows Media Center remote controls or Apple remote controls, allowing you to navigate Hulu's entire library with just six buttons. For users without remotes, the application is keyboard and mouse-enabled. Hulu Desktop is a downloadable application and will work on PCs and Macs. It will initially launch as a beta product during which we plan to gather and incorporate user feedback to improve the service."
#entertainment #hulu #streaming #tv #video
archive.org #12271

Conn. Woman Bitten After 'Bite Me' Remark : NPR

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104648910
"A worker at the Connecticut Police Academy got into an argument with a man. She is an analyst at the academy, but the man called her a clerk. She says she responded by telling him, "bite me." She probably did not expect the man to take the invitation literally. And her antagoist, a former police captain, is accused of disorderly conduct."
#biteme #funny #npr
archive.org #12266

Dice-O-Matic hopper and elevator - GamesByEmail

http://gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic
"Introducing the Dice-O-Matic mark II, now generating the dice rolls on GamesByEmail.com. It is a 7 foot tall, 104 pound, dice-eating monster, capable of generating 1.3 million rolls a day.The Dice-O-Matic is 7 feet tall, 18 inches wide and 18 inches deep. It has an aluminum frame covered with Plexiglas panels. A 6x4 inch square Plexiglas tube runs vertically up the middle almost the entire height. Inside this tube a bucket elevator carries dice from a hopper at the bottom, past a camera, and tosses them onto a ramp at the top. The ramp spirals down between the tube and the outer walls. The camera and synchronizing disk are near the top, the computer, relay board, elevator motor and power supplies are at the bottom. "
#awesome #dice #diceomatic #gaming #hack #hardware #random #randomnumbers #rubegoldberg
archive.org #12265

Sony Pictures CEO: The Internet Is Still Bad | Techdirt

http://techdirt.com/articles/20090526/1159125014.shtml
"A week and a half ago, Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton made some news for saying that nothing good had come from the internet, period. Plenty of online sites (including ours) took him to task for that, wondering how one gets to be the CEO of a major content company without understanding the internet. Today, Lynton hit back at critics -- not by saying he was quoted out of context or misunderstood, but by standing behind the statement and adding some gems to it as well. Let's take a look..."
#content #copyfight #culture #drm #freedom #internet #p2p #piracy #sony
archive.org #12264

From Delicious to Mozilla at Spindrop

http://spindrop.us/2009/05/26/from-delicious-to-mozilla
Welcome aboard, Dave! "Today I said my good-byes to Delicious.com and Yahoo! and tonight I went to the Addons Meetup @ Mozilla to get a sneak peak at what I'll be working on in less than two weeks. ... I'm also happy to be joining an organization where everything is open sourced and available for comment. So I'm hoping to post a lot more on some of the cool tricks I do at Mozilla"
#davedash #delicious #mozilla #yahoo
archive.org #12262

Better local development with VMs | Open Komodo

http://www.openkomodo.com/blogs/jeffg/better-local-development-vms
"I just downloaded and installed Ubuntu Server 9.04 in a VM Image strictly for the purposes of setting up a simple local dev environment on my MacBook. This is the base image, which I want to configure with some useful but general capabilities."
#linux #osx #vms
archive.org #12257

Mozilla in one sentence « commonspace

http://commonspace.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/mozilla-in-one-sentence
"The Internet is the greatest development of our lifetimes. Mozilla exists to foster the Internet such that all people are able to realize its full benefit. We are a people-driven movement to protect choice and freedom on the Web. Join us!"
#internet #mozilla #purpose
archive.org #12256

ChrisLord.net : /Software/mozilla-is-actually-pretty-good-guys.enlighten

http://chrislord.net/blog/Software/mozilla-is-actually-pretty-good-guys.enlighten
"I've been meaning to blog for a while about Mozilla, and the current trend of abandoning it in favour of WebKit. I'm not against WebKit and there are definitely advantages it has over Mozilla in certain situations, but I'd like to highlight some of the great things in Mozilla and why I think we ought to reassess the whole webkit move."
#mozilla #webkit
archive.org #12250

Rules for Time Travelers | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/05/14/rules-for-time-travelers
"0. There are no paradoxes.1. Traveling into the future is easy.2. Traveling into the past is hard — but maybe not impossible.3. Traveling through time is like traveling through space.4. Things that travel together, age together.5. Black holes are not time machines.6. If something happened, it happened.7. There is no meta-time.8. You can’t travel back to before the time machine was built.9. Unless you go to a parallel universe.10. And even then, your old universe is still there."
#geek #science #timetravel
archive.org #12244

Whither Eucalyptus? - Jamie’s Web Log

http://www.blog.montgomerie.net/whither-eucalyptus
"If you’re wondering why Eucalyptus is not yet available, it’s currently in the state of being ‘rejected’ for distribution on the iPhone App Store. This is due to the fact that it’s possible, after explicitly searching for them, to find, download from the Internet, and then read texts that Apple deems ‘objectionable’. The example they have given me is a Victorian text-only translation of the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. "
#apple #appstore #censorship #iphone #kamasutra #wtf
archive.org #12243

Best Buy® Mobile Will Sell Palm Pre™ for Sprint in Stores Beginning June 6 | Best Buy Inc.

http://www.bestbuyinc.com/news_center/05-19-09/best-buy%C2%AE-mobile-will-sell-palm-pre%E2%84%A2-sprint-stores-beginning-june-6
"Best Buy Mobile, now in 1067 locations around the U.S. including standalone stores and stores-within-a-store at Best Buy will begin selling the Palm® Pre™ phone June 6. Without the hassle of mail-in rebates, Best Buy Mobile allows consumers to buy with instant rebate savings at the point of purchase."
#bestbuy #gadgets #palm #pre
archive.org #12240

Hot Stuff in a Squeeze Bottle - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/dining/20united.html?scp=6&sq=sriracha&st=cse
"Some American consumers believe sriracha (properly pronounced SIR-rotch-ah) to be a Thai sauce. Others think it is Vietnamese. The truth is that sriracha, as manufactured by Huy Fong Foods, may be best understood as an American sauce, a polyglot purée with roots in different places and peoples. "
#food #hotsauce #sriracha #tasty
archive.org #12239

Did cooking make us evolve? | Blog | Futurismic

http://futurismic.com/2009/05/19/did-cooking-make-us-evolve
"Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangman theorizes that cooking with fire triggered hominids to evolve into humans. His experience in the wild led him to conclude that humans could never live on what chimpanzees eat. Cooking, he thinks, might account for the sharp rise in brain size, and the decrease in the size of teeth, that occurred about 1.6 million years ago in Homo erectus over its predecessor, homo habilis. It might explain our relatively small guts and weak jaws, not to mention certain preferences that seem innately human"
#cooking #evolution #humanity
archive.org #12238

Edward Vielmetti - Downtown parking information by telephone project: my part is over

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2009/05/downtown-parking-project-over.html
"Sorry I ever brought it up, sorry for any hurt feelings. It was wrong of me to think that I could make any progress without the support of the organization providing the data, and wrong of me to press on regardless of the cost. Someone else will have to care - I give up. It's just not worth it and it's bad for my health to care and to spend too much time around parking structure fumes."
#annarbor #civics #data #foia #opengovernment #openness
archive.org #12234

Edward Vielmetti - I am not an "information activist" or a "civic minded data freak", thank you very much

http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2009/05/i-am-not-an-information-activist-or-a-civic-minded-data-freak-thank-you-very-much.html
"So if I ask for that page of numbers as the spreadsheet it was originally, and a public records officer for a public body gives it to me as a bitmap, I'm going to ask again and keep asking publicly and perhaps uncomfortably until we both understand that this is a routine request and that compliance with routine requests is much easier than making everything an exception - because maybe, just maybe, I can replace that FOIA letter with a tiny shell script and we can just go about our business."
#annarbor #civics #data #foia #government #opengovernment #openness
archive.org #12233

evserver - Google Code

http://code.google.com/p/evserver
"EvServer is a lightweight http server, created especially to host python WSGI applications. Additionally, it supports little known Asynchronous WSGI extension, which was suggested by Christopher Stawarz. Using this extension it's possible to create an output html response in many data chunks, without blocking the main server process while your application waits for external resources. "
#http #python #via:joshua #webdev #wsgi
archive.org #12231

Django tip: Caching and two-phased template rendering | Holovaty.com

http://www.holovaty.com/writing/django-two-phased-rendering
"It's a clever solution because you end up defining what doesn't get cached instead of what does get cached. It's a sideways way of looking at the problem -- sort of like how Django's template inheritance system defines which parts of the page change instead of defining server-side includes of the common bits."
#django #scalability #templating #webdev
archive.org #12230

Raph’s Website » The perfect geek age?

http://www.raphkoster.com/2009/05/14/the-perfect-geek-age
"Looking back on it, it makes me feel a bit sorry for those born ten years later. And I can’t judge ten years earlier, but so much of that seemed to hit at the right age. Looking back at history, it seems like the last big waves of popular invention like this were decades ago. Teens with hot rods? Engineering in the 20s? I see my kids now, and they are so clearly getting the finished products of so much, not the products in the process of invention… Am I wrong?"
#70s #80s #age #geeks #oldschool
archive.org #12225

Don't Listen to Jenny McCarthy | Cracked.com

http://www.cracked.com/blog/dont-listen-to-jenny-mccarthy
"In one video, I heard her say “Contrary to scientific belief, autism is not genetic and I truly believe it is a genetic vulnerability.” You know why science never says it “truly believes” anything? Because it’s fucking science. Which isn’t to say that science is infallible, just that I respect that science won’t say that a vaccine is good for you because it “believes” in it."
#autism #jennymccarthy #science #vaccines
archive.org #12220

Interview With a Stick of Butter « Whatever

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/05/15/interview-with-a-stick-of-butter
"You know what? After talking to you, I don’t think I want you to eat me all in one go. I question your willingness. I question your ability. I question your nerve. I question your worthiness. It takes a special sort of person to eat an entire stick of butter as it should be consumed, on its own, as a singular digestive experience. I see now that you’re not that person."
#butter #funny
archive.org #12219

Xiao Long Bao - Shanghai Steamed Soup Dumplings

http://steamykitchen.com/blog/2007/04/30/xiao-long-bao-shanghai-steamed-soup-dumplings
"If you’ve never had XLB before, its one of those foods that you absolutely must try in your lifetime. Inside the dumpling are little pockets of gelatinized broth made from chicken, pork and cured ham. When you steam the dumpling, the broth gelatin melts. If you would like to be seduced, read on. If you aren’t in a spot where you can comfortably moan out loud (like at work, or at school, or if your kids are running around), I suggest that you close this site, come back another time with a glass of wine - you really can’t skip the foreplay. "
#dumplings #food #soup #want
archive.org #12218

The War on Sharing: Why the FSF Cares About RIAA Lawsuits | TorrentFreak

http://torrentfreak.com/the-war-on-sharing-why-the-fsf-cares-about-riaa-lawsuits-090513
"In one of RIAA’s high profile cases the Free Software Foundation backed defendant Joel Tenenbaum, much to the dislike of the music industry lobby. John Sullivan, Operations Manager at the FSF explains in a guest post why they think these cases impact not just music, but also free software and its technology."
#copyfight #copyright #freedom #fsf #music #riaa
archive.org #12217

Gizmodo - Sprint Selling MiFi 2200 Portable Wi-Fi Hotspot for Its 3G Service - Sprint mobile hotspot

http://gizmodo.com/5252533/sprint-selling-mifi-2200-portable-wi+fi-hotspot-for-its-3g-service
I've got a pocket in my backpack that'd be perfect for this thing. "Remember how well Sprint 3G did in tests? And how much we like portable hotspots? Put them together with the $100 Novatel MiFi 2200, and you have a pretty nice setup, dubbed "Sprint Mobile Hotspot.""
#3g #mobile #novatel #sprint #wifi
archive.org #12216

possible/probable » Blog Archive » Wealth

http://www.possibleprobable.com/?p=228
"I make a good living, and I suspect that I will end up paying more taxes under Barack Obama than I would have under John McCain. I am delighted to pay those taxes. My father worked his entire life for the federal government. My brother, who has cerebral palsy, lives on Social Security. Much of what I know about the world I learned in public schools and libraries. I cannot possibly repay the government for all they have done for me, but I am happy to do my share."
#charity #government #taxes #wealth
archive.org #12214

Twenty Sided » Blog Archive » Starcraft: Bot Fight

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale?p=1597
"The setup is this: Seven AI players. Randomized start locations. Using the Broodwar expansion. The last “player” is the human observer, who controls no units but who can see the entire map. The script in question runs on the map “The Hunters”, although it could easily be exported to other maps. There are two Protoss players, two Zerg players, and three Terran Players. The computer players are all set to “insane” level difficulty, informed that all other players are their enemy, and told to go at it. Mayhem ensues."
#ai #gaming #starcraft
archive.org #12209

Why I So Very Much Dig My Stargate:Universe Creative Consulting Gig « Whatever

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/05/07/why-i-so-very-much-dig-my-stargateuniverse-creative-consulting-gig
"Because where else am I going to be able to give my thoughts on hyperthermophilic micro-organisms, infection vectors, black tape, M4 carbines, delta sunspot groupings, various animal venoms and the qualitative difference between “partially decomposed” and “partially eaten,” all at the same time? And have people thank me for it?"
#for:stlhood #scalzi #scifi #stargate #stargateuniverse
archive.org #12208

About Detroit Community Scrip

http://www.detroitscrip.org/About%20Detroit%20Cheers.htm
"There are two levels to the variety of retail participants. One, are those who simply accept Cheers as currency on a one to one with the US Dollar. The 3 Cheers note is worth 3 dollars; and change will be issued in us currency for purchases made with cheers when the cost of the item is less. The second are those who issue the currency and are identified on the tail side of the bill. The commitment of those who issue is that they will always keep in cash reserve the amount of their issue. Confidence in the notes are equal to the trust you have in the people behind them. The notes are expensive to produce and are as real as money, please do not treat them as paper, do not take them if you are not going to spend them. "
#detroit #detroitcheers #economy #michigan #scrip
archive.org #12203

Gizmodo - A Tour of McDonald's Horrifying Mechanized Meat Factories - Mcdonald's meat factory

http://gizmodo.com/5238869/a-tour-of-mcdonalds-horrifying-mechanized-meat-factories
"a torrent of beef spews out of a giant mechanical meat-hole onto a speeding conveyor belt; tubs, pipes and boxes of various sizes and shapes carrying a roiling mass of beef slurry; countless, mysterious processing chambers, each of which does who knows what else to the patties"
#beef #beefslurry #fastfood #food #horror #mcdonalds
archive.org #12199

Accessing an IMAP email account using telnet :: bobpeers.com

http://bobpeers.com/technical/telnet_imap.php
"IMAP is an email protocol for organizing, storing and retrieving emails on a remote server. It was developed after POP and is a much more advanced system, one of the main differences being that all the mail is stored on the server so it remains accessible from many different locations. With POP you have to download the mail to your local computer in order to read it and therefore you cannot synchronize your mail across many different machines.It may be more complex than POP but there are still only a few core commands we need to know in order to access our mail on an IMAP server."
#email #imap #nerds #telnet
archive.org #12197

hackademix.net » Dear Adblock Plus and NoScript Users, Dear Mozilla Community

http://hackademix.net/2009/05/04/dear-adblock-plus-and-noscript-users-dear-mozilla-community
"I abused the power and wasted the enormous trust capital gained by the NoScript add-on through the years to prevent Adblock Plus from blocking stuff on four internet domains of mine, without asking an explicit preemptive user consent." The rest of the blog entry is basically sorry-but-not-really.
#addons #firefox #mozilla #noscript #security
archive.org #12194