04/16/08

A mom let her 9-year-old son take the NYC subway and bus home from Sunday shopping. For weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I ...

This timelapse video of man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours is difficult to watch. The video accompanies an article in the New Yorker about elevators. White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watche ...

James Danziger on the photographs of the Florida teens accused of beating a classmate and filming it for YouTube. The pictures of the accused are startling in the banality of the faces. (While the spelling of many of the names -- April, Britney, Bri ...

Female leads are difficult to find in blockbuster movies. (link)

Why Superman will always suck. Really, what lessons do the Superman comics teach? It says that mankind is full of dull, pointless weaklings and evildoers who can only be stopped by a white ubermensch from another planet, who didn't work a day in his ...

factoryjoe : fring » fring for your iPhone - it's a fringing world first! - fring voip service comes to the iphone. Saved By: Chris Messina | View Details | Give Thanks Tags: iphone, voip

deusx : The Final Ethernet - C64 Ethernet Cartridge - "The possibility of connecting the Commodore 64 to an Ethernet local area network has been a collective dream in the Commodore community for decades." Tags : c64 hacks hardware networkin ...

43folders : NEAT Receipts Scanner - Manage Receipts Organizer - Call: 866-NEAT-REC

jonhicks : pyetv - Google Code Tags : Leopard eyetv frontrow mac macmini mediacenter plugin

nelson : Game development problems (PPT) - Talk from a game developer about the challenges of writing games Tags : games haskell programming unreal via:ckline

yay!

Heh

A most excellent hack

"...I don't actually believe in the "Mobile Web" anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst."

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The Sorting Algorithm Demo (495)

Easy Photo Wall on a Shoestringwire Budget » Curbly | DIY Design Community « Keywords: photos, home, decoration, wall (226)

Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide (221)

Revisiting "How Much Power Does My Laptop Really Use"?: A good look at just what uses battery life on your laptop (and your desktop too, I suppose). The author hooked up a Kill A Watt meter, and ran various tests. The top consumers of ...

Blue Jeans Cable Strikes Back - Response to Monster Cable : If you’re fan of intellectual property bullies getting their comupence, then this letter is for you. Monster Cable — perhaps the king of useless products — sent a cease-an ...

On April 11, 2008, Barack Obama tried to explain his earlier comments that some working-class Pennsylvania voters "cling to guns or religion..." MediaCurves.com played excerpts of Obama's explanation for 843 voters and recorded their reactions.

I bought the last MacHeist Bundle back in January and continue to use the Apps everyday. Now MacHeist has raised the bargain again and turned it into both an online and Retail bundle. So you can buy it online or pick it up in stores. The bundle inclu ...

eldavojohn passes along what may be the last nail in the coffin for CAPTCHA technology. Coming on the heels of credible accounts of the downfall of first Yahoo's and then Gmail's CAPTCHA, Ars Technica is reporting on Websense Security Labs' deconstru ...

Burz writes "As a reaction to Virgin Media CEO's promise to violate the concept of net neutrality, Cory Doctorow is declaring his ISP contract void, canceling the service, and calling on other Virgin customers to do the same. He isn't alone. Charlie ...

esocid writes in with a followup to the recent discussion about the possibility that our galaxy's central black hole could reignite. "Using NASA, Japanese, and European X-ray satellites, a team of Japanese astronomers has discovered that Sagittarius ...

Lucas123 writes "Yesterday Seagate filed suit against STEC, claiming several of its products, including solid state disks and some DRAM devices, infringe as many as four of its patents. Today STEC responded that it holds patents on the technology 10 ...

Alien54 writes "Audioholics has a fun read regarding a recent legal dustup involving Monster Cables. The well-known (some might say notorious) cabling company sent a cease and desist letter to Blue Jeans Cable over a supposed patent violation. What t ...

Pickens writes "Today when most people refer to Ada it's usually as a cautionary tale. The Defense Department commissioned the programming language in the late 1970s but few programmers used Ada, claiming it was difficult to use. Nonetheless many obs ...

Pope Benedict XVI arrived Tuesday in the United States to a presidential handshake and enthusiastic cheering, a warm welcome that followed the pontiff's candid admission hours earlier that he is "deeply ashamed" of the clergy sex abuse scandal that h ...

State officials Tuesday defended their decision to suddenly separate mothers from many of the children taken in a raid on a polygamist ranch in West Texas. Texas Children's Protective Services spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner said the separation was made ...

Bombings blamed on al-Qaida in Iraq tore through market areas in Baghdad and outside the capital on Tuesday, killing nearly 60 people and shattering weeks of relative calm in Sunni-dominated areas.

Comcast Corp., under federal investigation for interfering with the traffic of its Internet subscribers, said Tuesday it wants to develop a "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" for file sharing.

EBay Inc. said Tuesday it will discontinue by year's end the section of its site that allows users to participate in live auctions hosted by other companies.

Hiding a ring in a bouquet just wasn't enough when a computer programmer decided to pop the question. Bernie Peng reprogrammed Tammy Li's favorite video game, "Bejeweled," so a ring and a marriage proposal would show up on the screen when she reached ...

The French parliament's lower house adopted a groundbreaking bill Tuesday that would make it illegal for anyone — including fashion magazines, advertisers and Web sites — to publicly incite extreme thinness.

Ken Griggs likes his new dog, but he preferred the old one. Then again, it might be the same dog. In a possible case of mistaken identity, Griggs said the black Labrador named Callie that he left at a Dundee kennel before spring break was not the sam ...

Australian police are searching for a burglary suspect who escaped custody by stealing a police car — despite being handcuffed.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pope Benedict arrived in Washington on Tuesday for his first papal visit to the United States due to include a United Nations address and discussions about a sexual abuse scandal that left him "deeply ashamed."

This article describes harassment and barrage of assaults I have been experiencing on my body during the past five months.   I am an American citizen, an immigrant of Middle Eastern origin.  I have been living in the US for 35 years; I am n ...

More than 70 people are killed in blasts at three cities in Iraq, in one of the deadliest days there for many weeks.

I’m delighted to say that online bookstores are shipping copies of Here Comes Everybody today, and that it has gotten several terrific notices in the blogosphere: Cory Doctorow:Clay’s book makes sense of the way that groups are using the ...

Since we just decided that it's No-Frills Tuesday here at Fleshbot, let's start out with the basics: Diabolic's new "Top Shelf" stars Amy Reid, Courtney Cummz, Jenna Haze, Sarah Vandella, Brianna Love, Audrey Bitoni and Shawna Lenee. It was directed ...

Someone who claims to have worked as a software engineer for the Google AdWords Report Center wrote a blog post detailing why he quit Google. The post mentions a great many benefits and joys of working at Google, but then also goes into problems like ...

ComScore released an overview of search engine usage in Russia. According to the study, which excludes traffic from internet cafes and mobile phones as well as users below the age of 15, Yandex is the leading search property with 47.4% of the share o ...

A mom let her 9-year-old son take the NYC subway and bus home from Sunday shopping. For weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I ...

One of the biggest criticisms of Google's App Engine have been cries of lock-in, that the applications developed for the platform won't be portable to any other service. This morning, Chris Anderson, the Portland-based cofounder of the Grabb.it MP3 ...

One nation under God. The "bold conservative" GOP Congressman Paul Broun from Georgia is intent upon removing a vexing comma from that phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance, which was amended in 1954 when President Eisenhower was moved by a se ...

Dear Monster Lawyers, Let me begin by stating, without equivocation, that I have no interest whatsoever in infringing upon any intellectual property belonging to Monster Cable. Indeed, the less my customers think my products resemble Monster's, in f ...

Paulo in London asks musicians to write him a story on an index card. For example, the Polyphonic Spree's Michael Musick and Bryan Wakeland, Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry, Jens Lekman, Sufjan Stevens, and the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne.

Guillermo Habacuc Vargas, Bienarte, Maltratador de Animales. Costa Rican artist Guillermo Habacuc Vargas' exhibit El Perrito Vive has drawn a number of criticisms from concerned animal rights activists after he allegedly starved and deprived a dog na ...

enjoy

John McCain's so awesome that when he proposes cutting gas prices by 18.4 cents/ gallon by doing away with the federal gas tax temporarily this magically cuts the price of gas by 20%.

Something Awful eschews humor in this week's Comedy Goldmine for gibbering madness. "I know you were coming here expecting to laugh at the Comedy Goldmine this week. Well, you're screwed....

"It's the Bizaro Ethel Merman." "She's like a garbage bag full of fighting Muppets back from the dentist." "It's like the little exorcist girl stung by bees." "The first time...

A short film in which a Paris Hilton-esque socialite is revealed to be the architect of her own loopy attempts at notoriety, and who will go as far as she...

I woke up the other day motivated to learn XCode 3.0 and make some small improvements to the OPML Editor. I want to add a few verbs that make it easier to monitor object databases that grow large. I would have put these features in years ago if I kne ...

Gallup daily tracking poll: Obama 51%, Clinton 40%.  — —

....Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter....

....The next four and a half hours we spent working though these tools in a hands on manner. We covered the basics of WordPress quite thoroughly Each of the participants got a blog through Edublogs (thank you James Farmer!) and we started from there ...

Registration is now open for Business of Software 2008 (the first ever Joel on Software conference). Neil has lined up great speakers: Seth Godin, Business Week's "Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age", is the best-selling author of 7 boo ...

“If the flight attendants on the JAL 747 from Tokyo I'm on right now were to, in a remarkable lapse of Japanese standards of service, throw me off the plane with a parachute, I could do a pretty nice roll when I hit the ground.” From my ...

loving tributes in the updates and comments  

Skype support appears to be wifi-only  

from brilliant New Yorker article about the lives of elevators; the ordeal changed him forever  

a thing of beauty  

animated rendition of an 11-year-old's diary; see also: 500 Miles to Hollywood  

for anyone interested in online group dynamics and/ or the current Atari 2600 scene  

John Martz drew cartoon versions of every student from his mom's 1968 yearbook; see also: The Liner  

Yesterday I posted a photo of an honor payment system at a bookstore in Ojai, California, and a lot of readers shared heart-warming stories about other honor payment systems. Today, I came across this article in the Daily Yomiuri Online about people ...

Derrick Bostrom of Bostworld provided an invaluable service to the world by scanning a vintage Classroom Filmstrip and uploading it to YouTube. Classroom Filmstrips have been a staple of kitch fans since time immemorial (that's about four decades, ...

"Up and Then Down," Nick Paumgarten's New Yorker feature on elevators, is centered around Nicholas White's ordeal of being trapped in an elevator for 41 hours after he left his office at Business Week to go downstairs for a cigarette. The article i ...

Shinsei Bank, one of great success stories in Japan, has always been an example of how legacy companies in Japan can be turned around with good management and smart methods. The "methods" include a great deal of innovation towards simplicity by one o ...

I am coming to grips with the sticker shock of hitting my 40th birthday. Unfortunately, I'm 57. This inconvenient truth is born home by Doc Searls' recent "incident." [More from Doc here, here, here, and here.) I am one of the absurd number of peop ...

Imagine Master Chief hanging out with Chicken Little. A Warthog drops from the sky and kills Master Chief. And Chicken Little is left with nothing to do but spend hours in Forge, discovering just who made the sky fall on our lovable hero/ Little's fi ...

Sega had an early—and we want to stress that "early"—version of Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood playable at last week's Nintendo Media Summit. The Sonic role-playing game from BioWare applies the developer's well polished formula&m ...

Red, yellow and blue cars are on their way in a hurry to the Brooklyn side of the bridge.

AFP

Just kidding. Unless you're you're a tax adviser (congrats, take a vacation), April 15 sucks. But over at Salon, they're making future Tax Days a little less suckier—at least for freelancers. Catherine Price—a veteran self-employed writer—lays ou ...

Nanotechnology is now available in a store near you. Valued for it's antibacterial and odor-fighting properties, nanoparticle silver is becoming the star attraction in a range of products from socks to bandages to washing machines. But as silver's be ...

Officials at FBI headquarters held up a 2005 terrorism investigation by forcing a local agent to return records he'd lawfully subpoenaed from a university. Two weeks later, the head of the FBI cited a delay in the case as justification for more domes ...