Guido Ooms has some pretty neat ideas. Engadget got high on his Anti Gravity Machine (you must watch the video), but there’s a lot more to see. I wish I could link to examples of his furniture, bottle holders, personal transportation devices, or dohickies, but his Flash-based site won’t let me. His Glassbulbs are pictured […] » about 100 words
Zach likes tall buildings. Perhaps it relates to his superhero obsession (leap giant buildings in a single bound and all), but it’s undeniable that he likes them. Here, he gushes about the details of what makes a tall building and how it is measured. Judging can be to the top of the highest occupied floor, […] » about 200 words
I don’t remember how I found this tip to BaitCar.com‘s collection of police videos of car thefts. They’re good for a few laughs, but things like this — and about half of the programming on Spike{#13535} — make me wonder how far we are from from the worlds depicted in Running Man and so many other stories.
Eh, at least we’ve got Bravo. That’s some good TV.
I’m entirely captivated by Mark Michaelson‘s collection of mug shots on Flickr. It’s titled “Least Wanted” and he notes with little fanfare that they’re “Nobody famous.” Some of the photos contain little histories, like this set from the 40s and 50s that includes conviction details — “30 days W. H.” for “selling obscene literature.” Another […] » about 200 words
“I want all the books that I’m interested in on one shelf.”
Everybody else may know this, but MacOS X includes the command-line utility to make Windows-compatible ZIP files. It works a lot like tar, but without needing any switches.
> zip {target file} {source files}
Engadget yesterday had a story about the Mobile Plate Hunter 900, a device that mounts on police cars and scans 500 to 800 license plates an hour. More details are in the Wired News story, where LA County police commander Sid Heal notes that the system is hands-off: “It doesn’t require the [officer] to do […] » about 200 words
I’ll be switching hosting providers this week. At some point I’ll have to turn off the comments here so that I can synchronize the database and prevent loss of comments as the DNS changes propagate.
**Update:
**
The switch seems to have gone well and the DNS changes have propagated to the networks I’m using. Comments are on again. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.
UPDATE: bstat has been updated. I’ve finally added a clean admin interface to my bstat WordPress stats tracking plugin and cleaned up the code for release as a public beta. Quick Start Installation Download and unzip bstat.zip Place bstat.php in you wp-content/plugins directory Place spacer.gif in your wp-content directory Log in to your WordPress admin […] » about 900 words
It’s a story that won’t die, and yet it can’t get any attention. Since November 3rd, reasonable people have been wondering what happened. On election night, exit polls predicted a 5 million vote win for Kerry, but the official election results declared Bush the winner by 3 million votes. We’re all suspicious of polls, but […] » about 500 words
The Fairlee Drive-In Theatre is open with double features on weekends
Details:
1809 Route 5, Fairlee VT 05045 (one mile north of town)
802-333-9192
The usual Hotel/Motel concept of in-room movies is cable TV, this is one of only two Drive-ins in America that have a motel on the premises with a view of a drive-in movie. All rooms have a picture window and speaker, allowing motel guests to watch the movies. The motel has only 12 units, so be sure that you make a reservation well in advance to enjoy this unique drive-in which has been in operation since 1950 in rural Vermont.
But the Meadows Twin Drive-In in Woodsville (NH) appears to have closed at the end of last season (old info at Driveinmovie.com).
The strange folks over at Custom Creature Taxidermy Arts have come out with a Squirrel Liquor Decanter that’s making the rounds. Jon said simply “words cannot describe.” But the good folks at Gizmodo assure us that “anyone who sees you sucking on the desiccated neck of an ex-squirrel will know you are a man of […] » about 200 words
George Weller won a Pulitzer Prize, a Polk Award, and was named a Neimann Fellow during his fifty-some-odd year career during which he covered much of Europe and Asia for the New York Times and Chicago Daily News. Weller died in 2002 at age 95, leaving behind a body of work that tells much of […] » about 500 words
David Rothman points to a Daily KOS story that points to a MyDD story titled “Aristocratic Right Wing Blogosphere Stagnating.” What’s the point? Of the top 40 political blogs, more than half are ‘liberal,’ and more importantly, they support community involvement — including basic features like comments — that the conservative blogs shun. of the […] » about 300 words
I’m listening and watching along with the EDUCAUSE online presentation from the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and their participation in Google Print. Presenters: John P. Wilkin Associate University Librarian Library Information Technology and Technical and Access Services University of Michigan Reginald Carr Director of University Library Services and Bodley’s Librarian University of Oxford […] » about 300 words
Last week I got excited about the as-yet unreleased geolocation API for BBC Backstage. Now Larry D. Larsen of the Poynter Institute is excited too. In a post titled The Future of News (… Hint: GPS) he talks about putting news in geographic context with geolocation tags. Eventually, clicking an article in a news/Google Map […] » about 200 words
Copyfight is pointing to the EFF‘s new Legal Guide for Bloggers. Most of the content is about liability, but it also addresses issues of access and privilege that are generally granted to journalists, election law, and labor law. From the introduction: Whether you’re a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you’ve been seeing more […] » about 400 words
Geolocation by GPS my be the most straightforward approach, but we mustn’t forget the other ways to get lat/lon coordinates. All current cell phones support aGPS positioning to comply with federal E-911 mandates, but not all phones make it easy for the user to get that information out of them. Still, some do and GPS-enabled […] » about 400 words
I love libraries, and I love books, but there the needs of our students and limitations of our budgets have no room for misplaced romantic attachments. That’s why I’ve found myself paraphrasing something from Ibiblio’s Paul Jones (via Teleread):
That smell of an old book, that smell of old libraries? That’s the smell of the books rotting.
We must remember that libraries catalog and share information and knowledge, not books. Our students and faculty have already voted with their feet and demonstrated that our paper (and microform) collections of periodicals are useless compared to the online, fully searchable versions. How long before the same happens for books as well?
Connections: some people don’t get this, but there are a number who do (too many to list, actually). This issue is bigger than ebooks alone, but OpenReader deserves a plug here too.
The Laconia Citizen reported today that Ron Mowry’s 31 year quest for recognition as the real pinball wizard of 1974 has finally achieved some success. The Twin Galaxies Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records will credit Mowry’s 72 hour 8 minute marathon pinball session as a record. Mowry set his 1974 record […] » about 100 words
I imported the content of my old referrer tracking database as hits in my new bstat stats datatabase so I could have more data to work with. I mixed this with a fairly simple graphing routine and now we can see the “pulse” of the whole site and each story. Take a look at the […] » about 300 words
I’ve been hard at work on my bstat stats tracking plugin for WordPress and you can see the results in the sidebar and in the story views here. The work has been made especially easy because of the great documentation, including writing a plugin, plugin API, and related pages at the WordPress codex.
I’m testing the plugin with a limited group now (thank you Sandee and Cliff). But with a few more tweaks and a little more time to prove itself, I think it will be ready for an open beta.
At least that’s the only thing a person can conclude from the stories at Copyfight earlier this week. This post reports on two stories where the photo services concluded that the photos to be printed were too good to have come from an average customer. Upon trying to order prints of her child, one Ofoto user found the following:
Your order has been cancelled because it appears your order contains one of the following… 1. Professional images.
And Wal Mart told another mother:
We can’t release the pictures to you without a copyright release form signed by the photographer.
At least Ofoto gave the mother the opportunity to sign an affidavit warranting that she was the photographer or had permission from the copyright owner. Wal Mart wouldn’t even accept that.
So, like I noted in the headline: Professionals apparently don’t use Ofoto or Wal Mart. I wonder if they promote that as a selling point…
Seltzer’s post notes the new copyright warning that Canon is putting in their camera manuals and the trouble{#157&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0} that the developers of the open-source Gallery image management software project found themselves in recently.
The APIs aren’t yet out, but the BBC has already won me over with their Backstage BBC concept. Of course, I’m a fan of anything with an API, but the real deal here is that it appears they’re planning on releasing a “query by geo-location data” API — and I’m all a gaga about about […] » about 100 words
I don’t know why IE has never displayed my transparent PNGs correctly, but I know now that I’m not the only one with this complaint. Bob Osola (name?) shares my frustration, and better, he sat down and coded a solution, shared the code, and posted a wonderfully informative guide to the problem.
Not sure if your browser can display transparent PNGs properly? Follow that link for examples.