Aryk pointed to this Crude But True, T-shirt.
forgetfoo remembered better than I did that today is sysadmin appreciation day, and notes some of the things that a sysadmin has to deal with each day. Hopefully you hugged your sysadmin today. No one hugged me :(
Kudos to forgetfoo for the adminspotting poster, I wonder if anyone got their t-shirts yet... (old internet meme/joke from the 90's, you probably won't get it unless your an old curmudgeon like me).
People still burn CDs and DVDs? Huh. If you are one of these oddities, you might be interested to know that you can Download Nero 9 Essentials Free Edition (No Activation License or Serial Key Number Required). No idea how many.... "helpful" popups this comes with to tell you about the non-free version, but if you want to be legal, and need features in the nero suite of software, this might be a good get for you.
Looks like (after actually reading the article) the software only allows you to copy a CD or DVD, and burn data CD and DVDs... so basically really minimal functionality, the sort provided by free tools out there already....
Just as a note from someone who is going to the my digital life site for the first time, this is definitely somewhere that you need to run adblock plus on your browser when visiting....
Apple has posted a fix for the SMS vulnerability for the iPhone, so sayeth Pixelated Geek. Go forth and update before your phone is part of a botnet!
Pretty awesomely random, it's a mirror and stales arranged in such a way as to reate a city full of skyscrapers. Again, pretty rad to look at.
DPReview had a Olympus E-P1 Review. The "digital Pen" is a remake of a classic camera, and being a 4/3rds system, is probably of interest to the camera geeks out there.
Debian has posted their 6.0 "Squeeze" release goals for the release coming at some point in the future. As always, the Debian team is focused on support for multiple architectures, speed, and stability. Of note though is full IPV6 support (hasn't that been in Linux forever?) and faster boot time.
In a related note, they also announced new time based release plans, adopting a 2 year cycle. Personally I think that 2 years is way too long, and will drive any desktop users to something like Ubuntu (which will have 4 releases in that timespan). For the server though, this isn't all that bad :)
Via reddit comes an awesome picture to start your morning with.
First of all, I don't read comics. As geeky as I am, comics have just never thrilled me, and other than borrowing a bunch from a friend years ago, I've basically ignored them. However, The Totally Rad Show mentioned Kick-Ass and it's associated movie at Comic-Con, and I grabbed the first 6 episodes.
Fucking Brilliant is my conclusion. Basically it's a "what if a nerdy kid wanted to become a superhero, in our universe". Issues of school, explaining fight-related injuries to your dad, that sort of thing. Absolutely fantastic and awesome, amazingly well drawn, violent, gory, and awesome.
About the closest I've found to any more information on the movie is over at slashfilm. Seriously - go get this comic, totally worth it.
Youch! Seems lightning ignited a Whistler Blackcomb Mountain Wildfire. Pics in the link, and you can follow more on twitter on #whistler.
Pointed to by Fozbaca, Jerakeen.org claims It's hard to like Android, and the G1 in particular. This is something I'd love to see for myself, as I live in an area where there aren't any G1 phones sitting around to see. Damn you big city dwellers!
MovableType 4.3 has been released, looks like a lot of interesting new features (pagination, better search, better docs, more performance). Good work six-apart team!
Seems this should be the time to upgrade as well, currently I'm running on MT 3.2, which is way out of date. Just need to find someone to do some design work to update the look of the site :) Any volunteers out there?
Pro Git is a free online book from the guys at GitHub (along with a dead tree version).
Very interesting story about the raid and takedown of UWWWB by the FBI (I had never heard of them before this) from the point of view of the owner. An excerpt:
Here's what happened: March 12th, 2009, at about 5:AM in the morning, my home alarm system went off. I get up to see what’s going on, on maybe 3 hours of sleep, and my wife points out there are two people with flash lights in my back yard. Now, this may not be unusual for everyone, but I lived in a fairly nice home in Southlake Texas, the United States highest per-capita income city for 2008. A very nice community, virtually no crime, and excellent schools. That is to say, I did not live in a shack in the hood, this is nice suburbs, and not where the FBI usually does raids.
Reading the full story it is an interesting tale from a point of view that you don't normally hear, and basically amounts to a huge headache (to say the least) based on the ability for someone to cry wolf and bring the full might of the US government down on someone without that much investigation (at least in this case).
Sounds like Yahoo Gives In to Microsoft, Gives Up on Search and the two are now in control of 30% of the search business (compared to the 60% that Google has). The ever-opinionated John C. Dvorak Posted by Arcterex at 09:05 AM
Not all from Apple is wine and roses. Check out this dialog between the developers of a Google Voice app and Apple in There's No App for That. What I've discovered with Apple is when things work, they were very well and life is good and you feel like you're dancing on candy rainbows. But if things go badly, they go very, frustratingly, hair-ripping-out, mindblowingly badly, and, as you can see from the exchange in the link, this holds true for the App store process. For every "write a fart app and make $7k a day" there's something like this...
OK, so if you're going to take your rig to a campus LAN party, why not go whole hog. Translated version here.
A visualization of the various movie numbers of Michael Bay of Transformers, The Rock, and so on movies.
I'm sure you've seen this before, so I post it only for completeness. Here's how William Shatner Makes Palin's Speech Into Poetry over on the late show. Personally I think this is brilliant.
Aside: Sucky pre-roll ad crap.
This is pretty cool... Aryk pointed to the HP Media Docking Station, which lets you plug anything from a hard drive to a USB or flash card into it to play at 1080P. Very cool....
Interesting look at Rounded Rectangles and the UI costs and benefits.
Via reddit. Some of the the year 2000 - from 1900 predictions aren't all that far off actually. Consider that personal airships could be considered small planes (and these days it's not unreasonable for someone to own a little Cessna), undersea tourist boats are part of Disneyland and IIRC West Edmonton Mall, and I've seen them move houses by train on the discovery channel. Hell, the moving pavement is in pretty much all major airports! Of course, the weather control and personal flying machines (assuming these are taken separately from personal airships) were still off. Interesting to see how their ideas were heavily influenced by what was currently "modern". I can only imagine just how completely off our current predictions for the year 2100 will be..
OK, first of all if this is true, you really have to wonder how completely fucked up the kid and parents are. Seriously. The story is: Kid Drinks Gasoline To Be More Like the Transformers. A 9 year old figured that since the transformers drink it, he could get super-energy from it.
Sounds more like a fake "ha ha look how screwed up Chinese kids are" story that something real.... if it is real though, you know those stories that talk about "kids who play video games don't kill people, you have to be messed up to think that and video games don't have anything to do with it"? Yea, this is one of those kids...
OK, this is potentially the coolest thing ever. The Interactive Electronic Tattoo over at Neatorama is something that's inserted under the skin and uses glucose to electricity.
The device is bluetooth and allows touch control through the skin. Imagine being able to walk up to a computer and getting a terminal login that you can type commands into, or use an iPhone like touch-screen. Or have it talk to your car, cell phone, or whatever else you can think of. Also as it's computerized you would be able to update it with new functionality....
Some potentially awesome uses for this, you just have to be OK with a permanent non-natural, electricity powered addition under your skin :)
Ooohhh.. in addition to the Firefox 3.7 mockups I saw last week, looks like OSnews found the Firefox/4.0 Windows Theme Mockups. Sexxxxxy.... interesting that they are flirting with the chrome-like tabs-on-top.
Looks like I finally have fixed the error I've had since the install of the new server running on Ubuntu (8.10, but not relevant for this IMHO). I put some of the details here. Basically tons of segfaults in the apache2 log showed up after moving from Gentoo to Ubuntu. I found what looks like the answer here.
Basically in sysctl, the setting for fs.epoll.max_user_instances defaults to 128, which means that it restricts the number of child processes an application can have. Ergo, apache was being limited to 128 children, but in my /etc/apache2/apache2.conf the setting for MaxClients was the default of 150. This means, I think, that when apache tried to spawn more children, as it is want to do on this fairly busy server, the kernel would deny them.
I followed the instructions and set the sysctl variable to 4092, and so far, no errors! I'll see what happens when I try to post this :) Assuming you see it, it looks like it worked!
Found this at WinExtra over the weekend, and was only able to check it out recently. XPize is a project to, non-destructively (I hope), make XP look better. Basically they patch some theme DLLs, replace some resources (like all those icons in windows that have been unchanged since the Windows 95 days) and generally tweak a lot of the display. The screenshots on the site give you a good idea on how things look, and point out some of the "problem areas" that this little app aims to tone and sculpt. So far (10 minutes or so anyway) this look good, feel slicker and better, and don't make me want to go against corporate policy and install Windows 7 quite as much :)
Interesting site to study happiness. Track Your Happiness has both a questionnaire section as well as an iPhone component which lets you track how happy you are at any particular time. Interesting idea, as long as you don't mind them getting some personal information about your financial situation, etc.
Digital Photography School has a nice post with a collection of Airliner Landings. Some pretty awesome images there to enjoy and get some inspiration from!
Cool project that has produced an Android LiveCD for those wanting to see what the Linux-based phone distro looks like running on your laptop (or VM).
If you've been paying attention to the tech world (or at least the Apple rumor world) for the last couple of years, ever since the iPhone rumors of a "big" iPhone in the form of a Mac Tablet have been flying. Now, I've seen a lot of argument against the tablet / NetBook as an a) viable platform and b) good market for Apple to get into, but the Apple Blog makes some good points for an Apple Tablet in Late 2009. My favorite is "September comes before Christmas" :)
Your random science video link.... How to shark a 'guess the number of M&Ms in a jar' contest.... Yay science!
My buddy @bdobson pointed me to TwttrPoop, which is, well, exactly what you think it is. Also related is this Penny Arcade cartoon.
Uneasy Silence has posted the Snow Leopard Build 10A421 New Desktop Pictures. Some good stuff in there.
The title says: 'TRON Legacy: Grid VFX Concept Test' Comic-Con Movie Teaser Trailer, and I'm not sure if this is just a concept, a technical demo, related to Tron 2 or not, or what. What I do know is that it looks mindblowingly awesome!
Those gnarly GNOME hackers have displayed some mockups for a (much needed) streamlined Nautilus (the GNOME file manager).
Via reddit.... Robot Drummer is sort of hard to describe, other than an object finding drum machine bot. Kinda. Takes him a bit to get it in the video, but when you see it, it's pretty cool :)
OK, this is pretty freakin' awesome. Check out the “Coder Girl” Rap:
Love the 'sudo make me a sandwich' reference too :)
Google Latitude is now available for the iPhone. Looks good too, the mobile web design they've done is second-to-none in my opinion, though there are a couple of odd niggles I saw, nothing that won't be fixed or a non-issue though.
For those who don't know, latitude is basically an awesome stalking app, which lets you see where your friends are and share your location with them. In theory great for coordinating meetups with friends, or seeing where the hot party is. Even better to use as a stalking app to find out where your ex-is now that the *sniff* bitch left *sniff* you for that bastard Ronnie!!
Remember how Palm said their Pre would sync with iTunes, and everyone said "oh, wonder how long that'll last?". Then Apple released iTunes 8.2.1 which "fixed" iPod authentication issues (and restricted access to Palm devices? And as expected, Palm webOS 1.1 is now available and it fixes iTunes 8.2.1 syncing.
Anyone want action on an iTunes 8.2.2 release that fixes the unfixing of the fix? Or maybe some sort of deal, or law suit, cause really, this is going to turn stupid really fast.
A Washing Machine emulator. Depressingly accurate.
So as you may have noticed if you're an iPhone fanboy, a comany called Navigon released a fairly good looking GPS app ahead of TomTom. Wish you could check it out, even if only to see how the interface feels? You can, kinda. Use these instructions to get yourself a free iTunes account in Australia, then search in the app store for 'navigon', and you'll see (and download) they released a free 'lite' version of their app (itms link to .au store).
Of course, unless you're in Australia you won't be able to use it, and I have no idea if it'll even run or just bitch that you're on the wrong side of the world. However, in theory it'll give you a demo and you'll be able to get a feel for things to see if you want to drop the $69 (or $99 after Aug 15). Also as this is a lite version there isn't any GPS or "active route" support available anyway :)
Ok, google is pretty awesome sometimes. Feel free to try the search yourself :)
As the kids say these days, the this, but that's just a blurry trailer at 720p :)
Trailer looks good, I'm not sure about Johnny Depp, but after his last few performances, I'm sure he'll be awesome. Mia Wasikowska (say that 10 times fast), who I've never seen in anything, looks great as Alice, and the rest of the environment and it's 3D computer generated goodness looks good, as expected, as well.
Holy crap, how cool is this!? Amidst all the rest of the 40th Anniversary of Man On The Moon fever comes the Apollo 11 mission's source code!
To commemorate this event the Command Module code (Comanche054) and Lunar Module code (Luminary099) have been transcribed from scanned images to run on yaAGC (an open source AGC emulator) by the Virtual AGC and AGS project.
Some amusing comments in the article as well.... you'd almost think the internet is full of smarmy gits! :)
If you think about it too hard, your mind will be blown. First of all, man walked on the freakin' moon. Secondly they did it 40 years ago. Lastly they did it with computers with less processing power than your phone. In fact, you can't even really compare your iPhone to the Apollo 11 computer, it's more like a quarter of the power of the original IBM XT, ie: about 1mhz.
Mozilla has released a long-awaited Thunderbird 3 Beta 3. Improvements include tabbable email messages (not just folders), a cool summary view if multiple emails are selected, smart folders, and more.
Google LatLong blog notes a new Google Maps Feature: Just keep searching. Basically maps will keep previous searches you do and you can selectively turn previous searches on and off through a blue bar at the bottom of the left-hand pane. Very neat feature, should make trip planning a easier.
So I have no idea what's up with the TomTom iPhone app that was so touted at the last couple of Apple iPhone events. Sadly, either the app was a complete tech demo (read that as you will) or they are somehow strategically doing nothing to let people know that it's coming (or not). In the meatime, MacRumors has a look at the Navigon GPS unit. Bonus here is it's a single up-front cost (though at $69 till August 15, $99 after it's a bit pricey), and I believe that the map updates are said to be free.
Some folks in the forums seem to think it's not the best deal, or are waiting to see what TomTom is doing. They also point out "gmaps", which is far less ($20) and has state/country (including Canada, yay!) specific releases. Sadly some of the reviews for gmap aren't all that great.
Personally I too am waiting for the TomTom, just to see what the options are. I really want the charging mount, as one reason I don't like using the iPhone maps in the car too much is I worry about battery life. Also if the mount can be setup to pipe into my stereo, hey, double-plus-good bonus? However, if the mount is super expensive, or the app has a large cost associated (ie: monthly fees, map update costs that are high, or a huge upfront cost), I may find something else. Personally I think that TomTom is killing themselves a bit by not giving out any new information... Course, they may also be trying to figure out how to make money on the app without completely cannibalizing their hardware business.
Anyone out there doing the turn-by-turn iPhone GPS thing? Suggestions? Good finds?
An ex-coworker of mine just sent me a collection of the 15 Most Literal Photos Ever.
An amusing look at what would happen news wise If Man Walked on the Moon Today.
Reddit has a nice list of complied links for some Free Full Games on Steam.
The Mozilla Wiki has some Firefox/3.7 Windows Theme Mockups for consumption. Nothing mindblowing, but a good step more towards the uber-cool windows (for one) look integration that was promised for the 3.0 phase (or was it earlier?). I find it interesting that they're moving towards the Chrome/Safari style with the page and tool buttons on the right hand side of the bookmarks bar, but after using chrome for a bit, it does seem a reasonable design paradigm. Very sexy buttons too!
Really, how freaky is this.... @bryandobson pointed me to a video where someone mashed upNever Gonna Give You up and Teen Spirit, with some bizarre results.
Today only, the iPhone astronomy app SkyVoyager (and it's companion app, SKyGazer) is free today only. Haven't seen them yet, but given they are normally $14, might be an idea to grab them...
Not sure if I missed the month and it's really April 1 today, but it looks like The Onion has been sold to the People's Republic of China. Via ForgetFoo().
Just found out about Shattered Horizon, a space fighter / sim involving the moon blowing up. Just a teaser right now, with no gameplay footage, but there is a signup to be part of the beta.
Penny Arcade has their own look at the announcement that Microsoft will open retail stores near Apple Stores. As you may expect, this RETAIL OBLIVION gets the usual treatment :)
I'm back working at a place where they use windows on the desktop, so to feel more at home I'm running Cygwin of course. However, the biggest fail with Cygwin (IMHO) is the actual console, which, lets be honest, pretty much sucks. Luckily I happened across a nifty article on LifeHacker which pointed me to MinTTY, a terminal app for Cygwin which feels far more like Konsole or Gnome-Terminal (ie: a console that doesn't suck) that is native to windows. Yay!
For some reason I thought they had this already, but seems that Google Earth now has the moon in it as well. You can get more information from the website linked above or the @googleearth twitter feed. The cool things are proper 3D models (taken no doubt from the soundstage where they were first used) of the landers, interactive views like the panoramic views you can "fly" into a-la earth on google earth, and other nifty things. Check out the video on the splash page, or grab the version 5.0 to check it all out. If you already have Google Earth 5.0, just go to the planet dropdown and select 'moon' and voila, there you go.
Other coverage is on the Financial Post and of course, Google News.
A bunch of marketing videos from Microsoft show each of the components of Office 2010 in great detail. Some seem a bit "meh" to me. I mean, how much more can you do with a word processor?! Still, for business and collaboration there seem to be some neat stuff, though I have a feeling you have to go all-in with Microsoft to get all the features (like collaborative editing and click-to-call type features).
Instructions on how to watch theDailyshow.com videos in Canada that actually work from Reddit. Confirmed to be working, just awesome!
Via one of my flickr groups comes a craiglist ad for someone wanting to get a Nikon D40 any way he can!
It's stupid, immature, probably photoshopped, but I still giggled a bit at this.
Now it all makes sense! this cartoon which matches cartoon characters with medical afflictions explains it all!
Sure, it's not as sexy as a Drobo or a "real" SAN, but The 10 TB Array is a hell of a lot more affordable! Via slashdot.
Someone on the Valve (the Half Life guys) created a handy Valve Time to actual time chart to help people decipher what phrases like "today" or "this q1" actually mean.
Gizmodo points to what happens if you Auto-Tune the News. This is the same auto-tune that singers use to hide the fact that they can't sing (you know who I'm talking about)...
"Roommate Confessions", some of the most disturbing acts of revenge you'll read today...
Multi-IM free app fring just got itself updated with newly added push notification.
Holy crap, gorgeous HD video of the 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world (shot on 5dmk2 on Vimeo).
Via JK.
Moving fairly fast, Mozilla has released Mozilla Firefox 3.5.1 which among other things, fixes the slow start up Windows issue.
Via the Full Disclosure mailing list, looks like there's a exploitable hole in Linux 2.6.30 /SELinux/RHEL5 test kernel. I'm not 100% familiar with this, but being it's called "test kernel", I'm assuming this isn't properly released or in use in the real world yet. Link has more details.
The sysadmin's best friend, nmap, just got a major version update. The Nmap 5.00 Release Notes have all the details.
Crimson Dark, a very cool looking comic that I'd never heard of, just like reddit said.
The Daily WTF has a great SQL String entry. Best part for me is the final 'added clarity' comment :)
Darren sent me a video on YouTube which was called the Vision for MechWarrior, a new proof of concept game that is set to reboot the MechWarrior series. I saw some talk about this on the latest TRS podcast, as well as some details emerging in an interview with IGN.
Just for comparisons sake, here are the intro and some gameplay footage from MechWarrior 2. Wow, I do remember that looking way better Back In The Day(tm)....
Disturbing but cool Star Wars classic art mash-ups over at Sci-Fi Wire. The page you really want to go to though is the worth 1000 page.
It's been a while since the E-Text Editor was released as open source code. The blog, Being the Change, has some updates as to how the linux building is progressing, with the top (current) entry being a link to a guide on building E on Fedora 10.
E, for those who don't know, is basically TextMate in windows.
The Google Reader blog has some details of some of the changes to the Google RSS reader (my main page BTW). Following, liking and people searching are on the plate. The liking is basically what you get from facebook, and I'm a bit surprised that this wasn't added earlier. Looks to work well, and will give people some more ways to find interesting stuff online. The people searching I'm kinda "meh" on though, as the only people who I know who use the Google Reader I'm already following their shared updates :)
Banshee, the excellent Linux media player on the road to version 2.0, has gotten some cool netbook focused UI changes. Aaron Bockover has details of project "Cubano" as well as some other news from the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.
To flesh out the Apple new today, how about the news from Microsoft that the "Project Natal" magic camera system that makes your game console act like it's in Star Trek (at least under heavily controlled technical demo situations and marketing videos) is coming to the PC. I'll believe it when I see it of course, both in the "coming to PC" and the "does work anything at all like the demo" aspects.
Speaking of Apple, here's a great example of them being bastards. Seems the new iTunes 8.2.1 release cripples the Palm Pre. On one hand this is Apple's software and they can do with it what they want, and one could argue that keeping other devices from faking it out and using it is in their business interests... if you like iTunes and want a smartphone, the only choice is really the iPhone/iPod and not a Palm Pre.
On the other hand, geez, are they going to get into an arms race with the 13 people who bought the Pre to battle to stop them from using the iTunes store and listening to the music they are buying from the iTunes store on non-Apple devices?
That said, anyone not see this coming? :)
Yea yea, a bit fanboy-ish, but this article on the Apple Blog about Hidden Gems in Apple Design has some good info not only on why Apple Fanboys are apple fanboys (and why it seems that when people start using a Mac they fall in love), but also some nifty things to look for next time you see an Apple ad. For product designers, some things to take note of here too :)
Just a quick FYI, if you are having sync problems using Mozilla Weave with Firefox 3.5 (the little spinner keeps on going forever and the activity log has something like "(NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [IWeaveCrypto.unwrapSymmetricKey]" in it), check out the latest release (at this point 0.5pre1) over at https://people.mozilla.com/~cbeard/weave/dist/latest-weave.xpi , it seems to solve the problem nicely.
After the Impact is a new teaser site for the new iD Software to-be-released-when-it's-ready game, Rage. And when I say "teaser" I really mean "teaser". People more detail critical than me will probably be able to find secret hidden things in there :)
Am I the only one who thinks that this "there I fixed it" isn't such a bad idea?
Seems that not only do same sex human couples have to deal with the same things that traditional couples do, seems that same sex animal couples have issues as well. SF Zoo's Same Sex Penguin Couple Split Up. Seems one of the girls was actually bisexual, and started flirting with a boy, which led to fighting, etc. Someone think of the chicks! Hopefully this ends well though.
Even the Microsofties will enjoy the latest Joy of Tech cartoon, entitled The secret behind Apple rumors!. One of those great "possibly bordering on reality" cartoons... :)
Paul Thurrott has a very nice Office 2010 Technical Preview in which he goes through the new features and look in quite a lot of detail. As someone who just started working in a "real" office again, and being saddled with Outlook again, I really hope that the new "conversation view" replaces the absolute suck that is the current outlook view. Come on, at least an option to have "real" threading guys.... Some shots of this can be found in search, still looking for something with some more detail though. I hope it takes the same tack as GMail and it's conversation view, as that seems to work very well for people.
Anyone got a technical preview I can be a part of? :)
The Mars Science Laboratory site will let you Send Your Name to Mars. Well, kinda. You'll be included on a microchip, so as soon as the martians learn to create / clone the technology to read human microchips, they'll see a huge ass list of people's name, country and postal code.
Assuming of course their death fleets haven't been learning earthling technology for the invasion already.... :)
hid.im is an interesting service that will turn a .torrent file into a .png. Un-searchable, postable anywhere, and decodable with a nifty firefox extension.
Mac App Storm has a few notes about what to look forward to in the next version of OS/X. Nice upgrade I think, but about on par with (and I know this blasphemy) Windows 7.
Mac App Storm has a few notes about what to look forward to in the next version of OS/X. Nice upgrade I think, but about on par with (and I know this blasphemy) Windows 7.
So the big Microsoft reveal turns out to be a free, online version of Office.
Didn't this come a while back, in the form of online saving thing that you needed office installed already for?
Even if it's not, and it's a version of google docs, I question the need, outside of course the one-up / copy / rip off of google docs. First of all, Microsoft doesn't live in the online space nearly as much as google. With google we're used to doing things online, with the RSS reader, mail, etc. Microsoft's offering in this realm is pretty small, hotmail for mail, and, uhm.... what else?
Secondly, this really smacks of "they have one so we have to have one too". Microsoft seems to have forgotten that they aren't online providers. They don't make money off of search (or at least as much), and they have a perfectly good set of desktop OS and apps that 90% of the world uses! I use google docs now and then for quick and dirty tasks, but even I, the evil anti-Microsoft guy I am, know that for "real" jobs you have to pull out excel, word and friends.
The article quotes:
"Web-based tools are not taking share away from Microsoft's desktop Office suite," Webster said. "But to the extent that these products are complementary, Microsoft needs to get in the game. They risk losing users as people get more comfortable using Web-based tools. And they risk losing their edge."
if you're looking for more of an explanation.
Maybe competition in this market is good? There are a bunch of online editors (or at least there used to be), though none of them seem to have the access / convenience of google docs, or the access to your local files as I'm sure Microsoft will have though their (I assume) IE only / activeX laden tool. Still, looking forward to seeing it when it comes out.
I know this is supposed to make me feel guilty about eating bad food, but some of the stuff on This is why you're fat looks sooooo good!
Great video over at Boing Boing of the unboxing of a Chinese iPhone knock-off that looks just like an iPhone, and barely works.
Found an awesome photoshop Army Squirrel Tutorial over at DeviantArt. Good stuff, great subject and amazing results.
IO9 looks at the question of Are We In A Villain Recession?
Lunar World Record 2009 is a huge image of the moon, stitched together from 288 high resolution images out of the 1000 or so taken (about 1.1T of data).
@loic emailed me this morning to share a video for the Launch of Seesmic Web and Seesmic Desktop 0.4. The desktop (AIR) version seems to be fleshing out nicely, with some good new features. Also Seesmic web is basically the same product, but on the web. Very very cool. A sexy update, good job Seesmic team!
That said, a couple of requests: trends, syncing, adding users to user lists is still clunky, and there is some confusion when looking up a users profile in the "home" tab seems confusion as I'm not sue what some of the operations will work on. Still, minor niggles :)
OK, after the last lame Microsoft marketing attempt, I have to give them props, cause Office 2010 The Movie "trailer" is pretty freakin' hilarious!
John Gruber over at Daring Fireball puts What Little We Actually Know About Chrome OS Into Context.
The Google Maps blog points out that the blue circle has come to the desktop. The "my location" blue dot you're used to from the iphone/mobile maps, now if you're using a supported (ie: modern: chrome or Firefox 3.5) browser that supports geolocation, right above the zoom bar on the left of the map will be a weeeeee little blue dot that'll get you to about where you are.
MechWarrior 4 and it's expansions will be available (soon) for free to celebrate BattleTech's 25 year anniversary.
Gizmodo has a nice typographical display of How Large Is a Petabyte? In this day and age getting a petabyte isn't that far away (IMHO), so knowing just how huge an amount of data it can hold is a Good Thing.
Mozilla labs has released Ubiquity 0.5, with more/better instructions, internationalization, and "smart" suggestions (ie: 'pasta' will summon yelp results).
10 Bonsai Masterpieces to inspire you. Via reddit.
2012: It's a Disaster!!! is a fan video for the upcoming 2012 movie which really boils it down to it's essence :) (thanks Darren)
Well now this is interesting.... Google just Introduced the Google Chrome OS, an open source OS targetted at netbooks. They say it's different from Android, though there are areas where it overlaps.
Very cool, interested to hear what other people think about this.
Don't Copy That Floppy 2 is COMING SOON!
Tombunto points that you can Download and Install BitDefender antivirus on Ubuntu with 1 year free license. Big question is, do you need it.
Mozilla labs has launched the Open Web Tools Directory, a "real world" use (if nothing else) of the modern browser canvas.
(Note: a modern browser with canvas is required to view this, like Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 2, or Opera 9).
If you just click through the icons, it's fairly unimpressive. However, do some searching with the box at the bottom or the category tabs, and observe the sexiness. Sadly they don't even let you see how badly the Microsoft "modern" browser (IE8) renders this and you just get redirected to the HTML only version.
Gary: Landlord of the Flies is a tumblog of someone's tale of their dealings with their landlord. Can't we all just be friends?
OMFG, from the official Google Blog comes word that Google Apps are out of beta. It's true too, if you go to gmail.com you'll find that there is indeed no "beta" on the icon anymore. Not bad for a webapp that was released over 5 years ago.
A title I never thought I would write. However, the World’s strongest vagina breaks own record lifting 14 kilos:
The embarrassing first experience did not scare Tatiana off. She developed quite a taste for vagina fitness, and now she has her exercising balls custom-made.
Read the full article for more things you only imagined could be written with a straight face.
Title says it all. Via Reddit: 10 Most Amazing Replicas That Bring Life To Wood.
The Problematic extensions section in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base is a good resource to find solutions to memory leaks or issues related to extensions in Firefox.
VLC, or VideoLAN has released version 1.0. VLC is a free and open, cross platform, video player that plays, well, anything.
Looks like the CrunchPad is set to release very soon. To quote the article:
Arrington toldThe New York Times that he will introduce CrunchPad at an event at the end of this month or in early August and that the product will be available "as soon as possible" and retail for less than $300.
If it hits at that price.... hey, I'd get one I think.
Speaking of crazy cosplayers, check out the big ass swords that some of them have!
The role players in Russia are really into Fallout. Some freakin' amazing costumes in there!
Not for those into naturopathy without a sense of humor.... Homeopathic A&E.
Fozbaca tweeted about Video for Everybody, a very cool system for embedding video on web pages. It uses a cool system of fallbacks from the HTML5 <video> to flash to quicktime and so on, all without Javascript. It claims to work in pretty much every situation in every OS, even iPhone. Sadly, the iPhone version for me just shows the 'there is a movie here but we won't let you view it' broken icon. Still, very cool.
Just a quick note to say a happy 4th of July to my friends and readers in the good 'ol USA!
Appstorm has some details and screenshots of Postbox, The New Mail Client on the Block. While it looks like it is a solid mail client (and it'd have to be to fight Mail.app, Outlook, Thunderbird and friends) it seems to have some of the "social" stuff built in as well. Appstorm has a nice writeup though, so just hit the link.
Aryk pointed me to this one on shipment of fail: Suggest a caption as I’m speechless. I LOL'd. I'm speechless too.
I do like EverNote as I've mentioned before, now someone has modified the evernote web clipping bookmarklet so it works with the Readability bookmarklet I previously mentioned to create a Bookmarklet to reformat text for reading and Clipping.
After the cool Giving up my iPod for a Walkman that was passed around a bunch in the last couple of days, Forever Geek has posted a bunch of other cool walkman photos of hacks, sculptures, old ads, etc.
Check out the Flickr Twitter Beta which lets you twitter images from flickr pages, or send them to twitter by email.
I found what I want for my birthday this year... the Cute penguin robot has motion sensors and can connect up to facebook for various interesting things. How cool! Thanks Cali over at Geekbrief.tv.
Holy crap this is the coolest thing ever!!! If you have a moderately recent macbook or other laptop with a multi-touch trackpad you can set up multi-touch tab switching in Firefox! Basically you can set it so that if you twist two fingers on the trackpad it'll switch tabs left and right. Awesome!
A major upgrade for virtualization software Virtual box has been released. More changes than I'd list here, hit the link for all the details.