At 2560 x 1600 pixels, Apple’s Cinema HD display is big enough for three people’s egos. tags: apple, cinema hd, computer, display, ego, maisonbisson, monitor, nosheep, spiralbound » about 100 words
Flash app dynamically generates charts based on XML formated data or values in a PHP array.
XML/SWF Charts is a simple, yet powerful tool to create attractive web charts and graphs from dynamic XML data. Create an XML source to describe a chart, then pass it to this tool’s flash file to generate the chart. The same tool also accepts PHP sources. XML/SWF Charts makes the best of both the XML and SWF worlds. XML provides flexible data generation, and Flash provides the best graphic quality.
I’m off visiting the good folks at Pepper today. I’ll update this post with photos as soon as they’re available, then look for a pair of posts about how the hardware/software works and what I’d like to do with it later. Until then, here are some related posts: Ultra Portable Computing, Pepper Pad 2, and […] » about 100 words
David Weinberger at Many-to-Many pointed me to Tom Coates’ post about different schools of thought regarding tags. Coates has been thinking about tags as keywords, annotations. Thats how I’ve been using and thinking about tags too, but some people have different ideas.
…At the end of the argument I said to Joshua that it was almost like he was treating tags as folders. And he replied, exasperated, that this was exactly what they were.
Exasperation aside, Coates is pretty sure that Joshua’s view is loosing currency and the keywords view is growing.
Wienberger offers this explanation: we use tags as folders to organize things for ourselves, but we use tags as keywords as a way to contribute to the social understanding of things. That’s what Yahoo’s Social Search is trying to leverage.
Related: Google’s War On Hierarchy.
MIRTs turn red lights green, but merely having one will probably get you in a pile of trouble. More info at i-hacked.com{#176}.
Ross Rubin at Engadget just alerted me to Peerflix
…which can be described on a basic level as eBay meets Netflix. Peerflix resembles many online DVD stores, but it neither rents nor sells DVDs. Rather, it depends on a community of users willing to trade DVDs they have for DVDs they want. There are no subscription fees. Peerflix charges a 99-cent transaction fee and senders are responsible for the postage charge of 37 cents for the mailers that the company distributes. Behold the $1.36 DVD.
In a popular antebellum Arkansas story, a backwoodsman bought a 5-gallon barrel of whiskey, only to return a week later for another. “Surely you haven’t drank that whiskey already?” inquired the astonished merchant. “It ain’t so much,” replied the backwoodsman. “There are six of us, counting the kids, and we have no cow.” It’s not […] » about 100 words
Donna Wentworth, over at Copyfight pointed out a JD Lasica piece detailing the responses from seven studios to his requests to use short (10-30 seconds) clips of their films in a non-commercial project he was working on with his child. …four of the studios refused outright, two refused to respond, and the seventh wobbled. This […] » about 300 words
Google engineers have got the moon on their minds lately. We all got a laugh at their April Fools Day lunar hosting and research center job opening, but they’ve done themselves one better and several points more serious with Google Moon. Sure, it’s in celebration of the first lunar landing 36 years ago today, but if they’re so fixated on the moon, why not sponsor a space competition?
It would reasonably appear that here in the US, there’s only one map site: good ol’ Google. But until Google adds maps for countries other than the US, Canada, and UK, the rest of the world will have to look elsewhere. Enter the UK competitor: Multimap.com has been serving the world outside the bubble since 1996. From their self description:
Key features include street-level maps of the United Kingdom, Europe, and the US; road maps of the world; door-to-door travel directions; aerial photographs; and local information.
In short, it’s probably the best place to point any random set of coordinates. Example: my story about the Chernobyl tour should probably have included this street map of the region. (Yes, Google will now give me a low resolution satellite photo of the reactor, but photos and maps offer different value for different uses.)
My only complaint is that the service lacks the AJAX features that make Google Maps so great. But that might be changing. A post at The Map Room tells of a new feature for UK regions: a map overlay follows the mouse on aerial photos. Take a look at this example. Nice trick, eh?
Jenny Levine, over at The Shifted Librarian, is telling the latest chapter in her long-running struggle with DRM. Now, I’ve installed a lot of Windows software in my day, so I feel pretty confident in my ability to double-click on an installation file. However, when I try to install [Yahoo Music Engine], I get three […] » about 300 words
[[pageindex]]UPDATE: shout outs to Zach, Cliff, Justin, and Thomas who’ve submitted bug reports. Their feedback has been rolled in to the B4 July 20 release, available now (look for the link below). This is likely the last release before the code gets bundled into bsuite (more details on that later). Changes This documentation supersedes any […] » about 1100 words
First Lady Laura Bush speaking at the White House Correspondents Association gala noted:
George’s answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chain saw. Which, I think, is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well.
The quote is all over the net now, but I found it in the August issue of Vanity Fair.
Alan Moorhead, in his 1952 Rum Jungle — a sort of casual ethnography or serious travelogue — explains the uses and attitudes towards alcohol in his native Australia: […] I took it for granted that for all social occasions, at any time of the day or night, beer was the drink. You did not take […] » about 400 words
Search Engine Watch did a story about how to use Google and Amazon’s tools to search full-text content inside books.
The gist? when you can get to the tools and where they’ve got content, it does a lot to make books as accessible and open as electronic content.
Sort of related: I’ve spoken of Google Print before and there’s more in the Libraries and Networked Information category.
Jenny Levine is talking about an example of The Perfect Library Blog over at The Shifted Librarian.
The posts are written in the first person and in a conversational tone, with the author’s first name to help stress the people in the library. The staff isn’t afraid to note problems with the new catalog, the web site, or anything else. Full transparency — nice. You can feel the level of trust building online. They respond to every comment that needs it, whether it’s a criticism, question, or suggestion. And some of the comments are fantastic. Users are even helping debug the new catalog.
Jenny quotes some examples, go look.
The MAKE: podcast pointed me to gumstix — really small computers built for hacking. Cool.
From O’Grady’s PowerPage{#14723}:
I have no interest in true hacking (i.e. rummaging through people’s private junk) although viewing random unprotected IP cameras around the world in public places and controlling their panning and zoom functions is kind of mind-blowing. There are a ton of fun GHacks out there – like spelling out words in pictures using Google image search, and the Google poetry generator, or the news map generator etc. Check out more than a dozen Google Hacks here.
Sort of related: put an “&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky” at the end of your query URL to invoke Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” option. This is incredibly useful when using Google to search WorldCat, like this.
Old news from Gizmodo and Wi-Fi Networking News (quoting WiFi NN):
Skyhook has assembled a database of information about 1.5 million access points across 25 major cities in the U.S. by driving every street in every city. Their software records multiple data points per sample for directionality. Fire up their software on a laptop, and it compares the Wi-Fi information it sees with what’s in the Skyhook database, popping out a latitude and longitude within 20 to 40 meters.
Also geolocation related: Monopoly Live: London style.
The Nixon Rotolog. tags: nixon, nixon rotolog, rotolog, watch, wood panel, woody, wristwatch » about 100 words
Dwight Eisenhower’s eight years as president were about a lot more than I Like Ike buttons and interstate highways. From Wikipedia: After his many wartime successes, General Eisenhower returned to the United States a great hero. It would not be long before many supporters were pressuring him to run for public office. Eisenhower was generally […] » about 300 words
Yup, it’s up on eBay now (closing in a day or so) with the following description: Everybody needs one of these, cleaning out the garage, this little car is so much fun, it is thrust powered by 2 GE t-58 turbines, has 4 fuel tanks, power steering, power brakes, fire detection, fire suppression, roll over […] » about 300 words
I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, most recently in a comment at LibDev. In the old world, information companies could create value by limiting access to their content. Most of us have so internalized this scarcity = value theory that we do little more than grumble about the New York Times’ authwall or […] » about 400 words
Stealing from Corante/Copyfight:
It’s a short, one-sentence blog post + a link, à la Kottke remainders. [It’s] to share links to articles, resources, and websites of interest that do not necessarily require paragraphs of context or analysis. Enjoy!
Solar charging backpacks: Juice Bags (news), Voltaic Solar Backpack (news). And, solar iPod charger: Solio (news, news).