Was there some computer help in putting this video together? There’s lots of discussion about it, but it’s a good one-minute watch either way. It’s work-friendly, in spite of what the title might suggest to some of you, and you know who you are.
There are two links because commercial videos seem to go away after a while, probably due to copyright issues.
vPipes. The “Last Generation Electronic Bagpipe”. There’s even a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcR9Kp6UEvQ
Need I say more?
An addictive game with no instructions. How good is that? Even the music isn’t obnoxious. I only wasted about 45 minutes, but I’ll be back.
Play Boomshine
There was a big overhaul on the blog today. Most of it you won’t see, but support was added for RSS feeds, some display issues that changed with Firefox 2.x were fixed. The RSS feed made me change the way I do the post titles, in an attempt to get the feeds to look better. We’ll see.
When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.
A study describing the phenomenon, “Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli,” appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. But a N.Y. Times article gives a summary probably isn’t quite as technical.
Pete Townshend (of The Who) announced an Internet-based software program that will help compose personalized music at the click of a button. Users will be able to compose instrumental tracks that they can email or post on their Web sites.
There will be free access to the Web site, http://www.lifehouse-method.com (it’s not alive yet), for three months starting May 1. After that it will become a subscription-based service.
I recently received a “how-to” email from a friend about how to email. It gave good advise about how not to make the mistakes that lots of people make, for instance replying “okay” without including what they are replying to. I like good advise, but ignore the parts I consider bad advise.
“The Effective Emailer” also gives mostly good advise. A bit of it is business oriented (“to help you become a more effective emailer”), but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t also apply to personal emails.
Ignore the parts that don’t work for you. Rules are made to be broken, but first you have to know the rules.
GetHuman lists the way to get through to a real, live girl person for a lot of companies. Sometimes, just pressing zero doesn’t get it done.
“The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification” was named winner of the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for oddest book title. The book’s website, www.strayshoppingcart.com/, can help you identify your cart of interest.
I had heard of 800-FREE411, but forgot about it because I rarely use 411. Today I got a call from Harbor Light Entertainment that was raving about how great 800-GOOG-411 is. It’s another free 411 service, but it can text details to your cell by SMS so you don’t have to write it down. They do say that it’s “still in its experimental stage” and may not be available in all areas or at all times.
This is lifted from BoingBoing; see the permalink for the original location. I love the wording of the letter. Since the RIAA keeps doing this stuff, it’s nice to have a starting point for a response on record.
A California man got out of his music-sharing lawsuit by having his lawyer send a sharply worded letter to Sony Music, the plaintiff (music lawsuits aren’t brought by the RIAA, but by individual record companies — like Warners, who are suing a paralyzed man for his disability check). The letter threatened to sue Sony for malicious prosecution, citing the crummy evidence used by record companies in other suits, and on receipt the letter it, Sony chickened out and withdrew the suit.
The Evidence Code sections are quite clear: settlement negotiations of all kinds may not be used to prove the validity of any claim or defense. Mr. Merchant has and had no more duty to respond to attempts to “sell” him one of your clients’ boilerplate, non-negotiable $3750 settlements than he has to return cold calls from pushy life insurance salespeople. If your client (and your law firm?) are seeking probable cause shelter in a settlement negotiations house of straw (as suggested by your March 23 letter), all of you should consider the prevailing winds of the Evidence Code before making yourselves too comfortable. Straw will burn.
Your client take the position that my middle-aged, conservative clients should speculate regarding the identity of persons your clients’ claim used their AOL account to download pornographic-lyric gangsta rap tracks as predicate to possible case resolution. In an age of Wintel-virus created bot-farms, spoofs, and easily cracked WEP encrypted wireless home networks (among other easy hacks), the only tech-savvy response to such a request is, “You’ve got to be kidding.” The extensive press that has been generated over computer security (and the insecurity of Windows XP and its predecessors) underscores the complete absence of facts on which probable cause to sue my clients could be established and your clients’ willingness (even insistence) that others be implicated in Big Music’s speculative, “driftnet” litigation tactics. Sorry: Mr. Merchant cannot and will not expose himself to still more litigation by speculating.
posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:54:52 AM permalink | Other blogs’ comments
Green flashes are optical phenomena that occur shortly after sunset or before sunrise, when a green spot is visible for a short period of time above the sun. I haven’t seen it, but a group of my friends have. I just figured it was an after image or something, but apparently it’s well documented.
There’s an article at Wikipedia.
I like these multi-blade scissors because they don’t take up a lot of space. Usually, only a small part of a document needs to be shredded and these would make that easy. Unfortunately, it seems that they are only available in Japan.
Cool Hunting has lots of other interesting stuff, but it’s on the pricey side.
In 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot filmed Picasso as he painted – the result is a time-lapse photography of the fantastic way Picasso created his artworks.
Well worth the time it takes to watch this painting be transformed to something completely different than what it starts as.
The prices of plane tickets go up and down more often than a commuter shuttle. But now there’s Farecast.com, which predicts whether the price of your flight is likely to rise or fall before your travel date and tells you to buy or wait. The site achieves its 70 to 75 percent accuracy rate–high for a market so volatile–by using data mining to analyze past flights and determining which factors most affect ticket prices. The service is available on more than 2,000 popular routes. Free;
You probably know a lot of them, and some are for Windows programs you probably don’t use, but it’s still a good list. Skim the comments, because they have a few more shortcuts that aren’t in the list.
The Best of What’s New 2006 has loads of interesting stuff. This isn’t just for geeks: one of their items is a better nail for hurricanes and earthquakes. Another is a cap that stiffens on impact to act like a helmet, but doesn’t feel like one the rest of the time.
The full title is really “Disgruntled Dell customer finds crafty path to lawsuit settlement”. It’s a fun article about how some guy sued Dell for his unresolved computer issues by serving the papers to a Dell shopping mall kiosk.
I wonder if HP has any kiosks? I finished reinstalling my programs and was having the same problems again, infrequently at first, then more and more. HP’s response was, “It must be one of the programs you installed causing the problems. We don’t know which one, and can’t help you.” Essentially, if you do anything other than use the computer in the factory provided state, you’re on your own from a support standpoint when you get an HP.
Making the previous entry on www.AnswersThatWork.com reminded me to mention why I wanted to post it here. It has been very useful in the continuing fight with my new, partially-functional HP desktop computer. It’s been about two months now; they won’t take it back and they won’t fix it.
I’m not working on this all the time, of course. At this point, I’ve done a complete reformat of the drive and re-installation of most of my programs. This time running Windows Update didn’t break it. I have rebooted after each program was installed, as requested by HP’s support person. I learned on my own not to use MSFT’s video driver “update” because it is older than the update on the video manufacturer’s website, and it determined that it was what broke my graphics program the last time. The new driver is also not on the HP site, but the video program (Paint Shop Pro) help area is where I learned that it was needed to get things working. I’m still getting occasional crashes (no blue screens) and the HP printer has trouble talking to the HP PC. They sent me PC recovery disks from free, but the disks were unreadable until I discovered a driver update for the DVD player on the HP website. It doesn’t sound like they will ever get my older programs to work at all, in spite of them working on my older XP system. I won’t be able to make music CDs without living with HP’s idea of the minimal requirements of what CD burning software should do (such as you must always have a 2 second break between songs).
There was a time when companies tried to make sure that new products were compatible with old, and made an effort to fix the problem if it didn’t. Now I guess we have to just buy new software with the new hardware and hope it works, if a new version is available at all.
If you’re a properly inculcated PC user, you probably always run virus software and, at least occasionally, also ad-ware or spy-ware checkers such as Ad-Aware. Or maybe the PC seems to be running slow, so you check out what tasks are running. The problem is that sometimes something shows up that you don’t recognize, like msimn.exe. It may not be a problem, but it’s a research project to figure out if it’s a program that should be there or not. Many Google links just go to places that have a one line description of the task or program, and the rest of the page is trying to get you to buy their software if you want to know more.
This one has a bit more info, and I like the name of the place: www.AnswersThatWork.com
They’re still selling, but their free answers are more complete than other sites I’ve been to. I include it here because it is usually buried deep in all the less-useful Google listing.
