My friend Jonah just launched a site to help raise money for Darfur. Check out the site, and if you’re a member of Digg, digg it!
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Category Archives: me
And so it begins…
There is, at least, a wishlisting blog up. For anyone interested in status on what we’re up to, when the site goes live, etc. those types of announcements will be made on the blog.
Cool Color Trick
My dad sent me this link. It’s pretty cool, and one of the few cases where he can relate part of his work (as a color scientist) to something I can understand.
The colored image that you stare at has the color chroma data reversed. When you bring the mouse into the field you will suddenly see a full color image appear, and then fade to B&W as your eyes adapt to black and white image. The color you see for a short instant is based upon the eye locally adapting to the previous negative color image.
Google Reader – Sharing Articles
One of the reasons I’ve stuck with the Google Reader over Bloglines is the ability to star and share articles. As Fil pointed out, someone should eventually write something that will integrate this sharing feature with del.icio.us. In the meantime, the articles that I’ve shared are here.
The starring feature is kind of cool because sites like craigslist let you bookmark searches as RSS feeds. For example, I used an RSS feed from craigslist to keep an eye on apartments for rent in Seattle. I then used the star feature of Google Reader to remember which ones I wanted to go back and look at. It worked quite well (aside from the fact that I didn’t switch apartments). It’s also a prototypical experience of the new web. Craigslist may not need to build a starring feature, or a sharing feature – they just need to expose their content in RSS, and let other applications layer on additional capabilities.
Podcasts
I sold myself on the fact that I was a nerd when I started subscribing to podcasts, and listening to them regularly. That really just happened over the last few weeks. It feels like a free education – pick the topics you’re interested in, and hopefully there will be shows out there that talk about them. I’m still trying to determine which podcasts are worth keeping in regular rotation, and yes most of them are nerdy, but here’s what I’ve found so far…
One day I'd like to live here.
This place looks pretty nice… if they just knocked 90% off the price I’d be all over it. (Found on craigslist)
Programmable Soda – don't make people think.
Gizmodo posted this article about a Massachusetts company who’s come up with the idea of a soda bottle that’s programmable. For example, if you wanted some cherry, and some lime, you could push some buttons and add flavors as necessary.
I think I dislike this idea for the same reason that I’m not enamoured with those restaurants where you pick your ingredients and they cook it for you. I’m not a cook. I know what I like to eat, but I don’t know how to make it. I don’t know what flavors go well together in various ratios. I go to a restaurant to have a cook do that work for me. I buy soda knowing that a bazillion people already taste-tested this thing, and it was good tasting enough that a company decided to spend a bunch of money putting it on the market. Once I find out I like it, I can buy it again and it will taste the exact same – every time.
Maybe there is someone who wants a soda with 3 squirts of cherry, one lemon, a hint of vanilla, and a half squeeze of lime. That reminds me of that Brian Regan bit about how donut places have this donut with chocoloate all over the top, but sprinkles only on half of it. As if there’s someone out there who’s so particular about their donut topping that they need the ingredients in those exact amounts. It’s called the “Sprink Smidge for Lunatics.”
MySpace is becoming a haven for SPAM
myspace.com, currently pushing 100 million members, is attracting a lot of commercial attention. What happens when a lot of people gather at one site on the internet? They get targeted for viruses, spam, and all sorts of advertising overload – of course!
Today was a weird day for me on myspace. I don’t normally chat with friends there, leave comments, send messages, etc. I’m linked up with everyone, and browse profiles from time to time, but I wouldn’t say I’m a heavy user. Today:
– I received 10 MySpace messages
– I received 9 Friend requests
Lately I've had to cheer for my second team
Non-techie web development
If you or a non-technical family member wants to put up a web site but doesn’t know anything about HTML, there are a number of options available. There are tools like FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and even the free Nvu which will let you build websites. However, even those tools are overkill if you just want to put some basic things online. (Nvu is also buggy to the point where I’d consider it worthless). Because my mom was looking to put up a website that she could manage herself, I investigated stuff like online content management systems, because when you’re working wholly online you don’t have to worry about uploading files, relative/absolute links become less of an issue, etc.
I didn’t find anything that looked particularly easy to use until I stumbled on SiteKreator. My mom was able to walk through the tutorial and set up her website with minimal frustration. They have a lot of built-in tools for creating image galleries (it auto-creates thumbnails, auto-aligns them, and auto-links them to big versions of the image) and laying out blocks of text/tables/graphics together. It’s an interesting UI as well – not nearly as complicated as the other WYSIWYG tools, but it still offers a “drop in arbitrary HTML” feature which would let you put a paypal button or some other fancy stuff in if you want.