see http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/The_Amazing_Mumford
not really a blog, here are just some notes, quotes, links and thoughts that are as much for myself as anything. if anyone else ever reads this, please excuse the silliness. hi mom
and, "smallduck".. don't call me that. it's just an id from back in the day playing Marathon at work (guess what colour i always was). as well as going to this page, through the inevitable
magic of RSS these entries also land on my facebook page - where i use my real name :-o
i recently changed the theme of this page but i still don't like it. i then customized it a bit and now i like it slightly less.
Anyone who doesn’t understand the service/site twitter.com that everyone is talking about, this site Favrd might help.
Twitter is like a blog but the messages (called “tweets”) are limited to only 140 characters of text and can be posted from mobile phones via text messages, little desktop apps & widgets, as well as a user’s custom page on the web site.
People can follow their friends, which will make those friends’ messages show on their page on the site, in that same app on their computer, or even back to their mobile phones.
It seems originally intended for people to post updates about what they’re doing that their friends and family might be interested in, like “have a cold, home sick today” or “cactus club was busy, went to milestones instead”, pretty much like status messages on facebook or instant messaging services. However, it seems to have degenerated into a general minimalist blog for the most part, with many people just trying to be funny and attracting the most followers. I think they need to add a classification system so users can separate their real friends & family from the celebrites and funny strangers they also follow. They haven’t done that yet, but one thing they do have is a feature where users can mark funny/interesting tweets they see as a “favorite”, which then puts them on a special saved list in their page on the website.
The site has an API meaning other websites have been made (“mashups”) that read tweets from twitter and do interesting things with them. For example, one that shows a random stream of tweets in real-time superimposed on a map of where they come from (I have a screen saver that does that too).
Favrd, pronounced “favoured” it seems, is another such mashup site. This one appears to collect some of the tweets of the day that several people have marked as favourites, showing them like a blog with newest tweets at the top. It’s little bit like how digg.com collects new weblinks with the most votes to it’s front page. So visiting Favrd gives you sense of the kind of tweets people are posting and seeing on twitter, however it apparently skews a bit towards the dirty jokes and oddball non-sequiturs (yes i’m talking about you, hotdogsladies).
Ars Technica is now part of Wired
(Ars Technica is a popular tech blog with occasional in-depth articles, it was recently bought by the company that owns Wired magazine/etc)
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&: per se, and.
More than you wanted to know about that shift-7 character.
Apparently, former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold commissioned the building of a Difference Engine a few years ago, originally designed by Charles Babbage in the 1840s but too large and costly to build in its day. The Difference Engine is a massive mechanical calculator with much greater capabilities than the simpler machines of its day. It’s the second of 2 such machines ever to be built, is eleven feet long, seven feet high and weighs five tons. I wonder if he keeps it in his living room.
The first Difference Engine ever built was completed in 1991 by the London Science Museum and is currently being moved to go on display next month in San Francisco.
Convince a friend to buy, on his or her American Express card: 2 tankfuls of gas, then some flashy running shoes. According to controversial tech journalist John C. Dvorak, this will instantly get the card cancelled :^)
“ It is possibly true that especially the neoconservatives thought there was a situation in the country and in the world where something had to happen to wake up the American people. Whether they are innocent about the contention that they made that something happen or not, I don’t think we can answer definitively at this point. All we can say is there is a lot of grounds for suspicion, there should be an official investigation of the sort the 9/11 commission did not engage in.
— Alex Jones? No. Richard Falk, Milbank professor of international law emeritus at Princeton University and U.N. Human Rights Council official
So.. flickr.com, popular site for hosting & sharing photos. Started by Vancouverites, bought by yahoo and for the most part not ruined in the process, nice. (MS, don’t buy yahoo! grrr)
So they just recently add support for hosting videos too, makes sense because cameras take videos too. I’m annoyed that iPhoto doesn’t store videos too.
Boom - backlash from people who don’t want flickr turning into youtube (which is easy, just don’t have the click-to-reply-from-your-webcam feature, that should do it).
So of course the rediculous backlash is being parodied: NO photos on Flickr ”Photos are the past! Please sign my petition” :^D With comments that follow: “I propose tagging all still images “UNMOVING FAIL” until this problem is corrected!”, a sparkly animated pony, and a great many like: “Flickr Video stole my bike” “Flickr Video makes bad coffee” “Flickr video told me it hated The Big Lebowski”
Any pictures I send to flickr in the future will definitely be tagged “UNMOVING FAIL”
this is in response to a Q seen on pownce.com: “Help, Mac users! What’s the best way to uninstall an app without a program like AppZapper? … AppZapper is not a free program, so I was looking into free alternatives.”
step 1. toss the app in the trash. step 2. there’s no step 2!
leave the prefs file because who cares*. leave any application support directory in ~/library or /library becuase who cares*.
exceptions: if the app is weird it might have a hidden startup app, menu extra or something, those can be annoying. those app will usually have uninstall program or instructions, track down the app’s website and find a readme (may involve downloading the app’s dmg/whatever again).
* if you do care, like if you really want the disk space back for example, do the same: find a readme or uninstaller from its site or by downloading it again.
i wouldn’t trust AppZapper or AppCleaner too much. oddball files & components of apps these days rarely seem to identify themselves like mac files used to (was it ‘vers’ resources? so long ago), so they can’t really do their job in cases of simple drag & drop apps. maybe they can for apps with installers (which leave behind a “bill of materials” file, aka installer receipt file), but those apps usually also have uninstallers anyway.