Visual Thesaurus
a visual thesaurus, nice :)
a visual thesaurus, nice :)
internet magazines, redundant or what? like carving out a stone tablet on the advances in printing techniques...
can you imagine someone trying to burgle jenni Jeenicam's flat? either a damn stupid thing to do (for all the obvious reasons), or an extremely cool feat to pull off.
weird, mozilla now seems to be rendering tables in the same broken way IE has always done it, ie not showing the background gif between the cells. this sucks big time as now i'll have to add a border setting to make it readable...
check out surfbot, ressurected from a silly toy nick and i messed around with way back when. it was written to emulate a collegue of ours (who shall remain namelss). basically all it does is surf, all day. set it going on a spare monitor and just watch the results every so often. beware that it does not filter for taste, i take no responsibility for the sites it may come across.
to change case on the unix command line - tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' (or the other way about)
excellent page on why not to use frames - http://www.html-faq.com/htmlframes/?framesareevil
one of the most shocking, and sickening parts of this attack (for such a one sided, unprovoked conflict can hardly be termed a 'war') on Iraq is the twisted reporting of it by the military, the politicians and the media. it is becoming impossible to tell what is actually happening on the ground, impossible to disect the fact from the propaganda. there really are two realities now, the reality that sells newspapers, and the reality in which people's lives are literally being torn apart.
Robert Fisk's is one of the few voices in this frenzy that speaks clearly. This article in the Independent made me ashamed to be British, ashamed to be a part of this sick, stupid, waste.
what have these people done to us to deserve what we are doing to them? if they didn't hate us before, they can but do so now.
Thought about doing this myself over the last few weeks : http://www.iraqometer.com/. Be sure to read the about section. cheers to Ben for the link.
Will I have to go to war and if so will I have to kill? This and many other questions are answered for potential soldiers in the Army FAQ
Found this excellent site a while back comparing Sky Scrapers around the world. The illustrations are wonderful. Now Jeff Russell has done the same thing with space ships, an equally impressive site. Thanks to my bro for the link.
one day i will know the crontab entry time fields off by heart without having to look them up in "Essential System Administration"
"The last of the original Beetles will roll off the production line at the Volkswagen factory in Puebla, Mexico, later this summer" reports the BBC.
Once again http://www.bootdisk.com comes to the rescue.
Once again http://www.bootdisk.com comes to the rescue.
So I get to thinking about bayesian filters which have recently been used to fight spam. The idea is that you build a corpus of 'bad' text (in this case spam) and a corpus of good text (in this case legitimate email), and compare every subsequent incoming email to each corpus. The one it matches the most determines whether the mail is spam or not. Apparently this works well. Each new email is added to the approrpiate corpus making the system stronger as time goes by.
So what about applying this system to web pages? Add two extra buttons to your browser interface, 'Good' and 'Bad'. At each web page you visit you click either the good button or the bad button depending on your experience there. The browser adds the page to either the good corpus or the bad corpus. Over time, the browser, by comparing the page to both sets of data, will begin to be able to tell you (reasonably accurately?) whether or not the new page you are looking at is of interest to you or not.
Extending the idea, your personal Bayesian enabled web spider could be trawling around the web finding pages it thinks (knows!) you will be interested in.
Stupid idea?
Word of the day - pusillanimous
adj : lacking in courage and manly strength and resolution; contemptibly fearful [syn: poor-spirited, unmanly]
Why oh why do PCs ignore a keyboard that has been unplugged/plugged back in? And if that's not enough, if I dare to power the machine on without a keyboard why the hell can't I then subsequently plub one in and expect it to work? Why?
"Web site under construction" - how 90s! I can't believe people still do this and expect users to make an effort to come back to the site in the future to see if the site owners have finally gotten their act together.
http://www.rickross.com A database of information about cults, destructive cults, controversial groups and movements.
Howard Stone is a genius. Thanks Nick.
"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper." - Rod Sterling
Thought for the Day: Before you criticise someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticise them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. - cheers Nick for that one
Incredimail - how to utterly and totally miss the point of email. What rubbish. Beware anyone sending me one of these, a) my mail client doesn't display all that crap, and b) you will not get a reply. End of story.
Hektor seems to be a can of spray paint suspended from two motors, all attached to a PC. It draw pictures! Cool. The world needs more of this sort of thing. Reminds me a little of the Blinkenlights project. cheers to Ben for the link.
George Bush has pledged 200 million dollars to fight famine in Africa. Sounds like a lot until you realise that he will spend 250 million on his re-election campain. Interesting piece about Bush's African roadshow.
Something I've often wondered, who would win in a fight between G-Force, Ulyses 31 and Warmington on Sea Home guard (dad's army)? This chap has done an excellent study on the subject, along with a number of other interesting combinations. Good work!
Unblinking.com - an interesting site along the lines of my Surfbot.
http://24.milov.nl/ - neat Jscript colour picker. move your mouse around the screen, cool.
http://24.milov.nl/ - neat Jscript colour picker. move your mouse around the screen, cool.
Heard the beginning of a news bulitin this morning on the radio - "The American government has today warned of the possibility of more terrorist attacks". I genuinely assumed the report would go on to say something like "After invading Afghanistan and Iraq they are now considering Iran or North Korea".
"This webpage contains information about Red Hand Gang as part of the Kids TV In The 70s section." It does? Oh yes, shoved into a tiny column in the corner after the ad which takes up most of the page, yes I can see it.
A list of senator Bush's accomplishments since he failed to be elected by a majority. Makes for interesting reading. 'spect to father Ben for the heads up.
The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations took 90 hours of recording time over 6 months to finalise, and cost 16 thousand dollars (1966). Sheesh, and it sounds like something they knocked up in a couple of hours. Apparently the idea behind the track was Brian Wilson's notion of telepathic signals between humans and animals, (Pet Sounds?). Considering how far off the rails he eventually slid, I think this was a sign of things to come.
These and other facts from a fascinating book - Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage, a biography of the life of Leon Theremin, the inventor of the instrument that makes the eerie space noises heard on Good Vibrations and many of the early Sci Fi movie sound tracks.
Mailinator is a neat way of being able to give out disposable email addresses when you don't want to give out your real one in fear of spam. Messages sent to any address at the mailinator.com domain are available for reading instantly and kept for a couple of hours. One interesting waste of half an hour is to guess addresses others may have used and read the mails you find.
At last, instructions for ordering 100lbs (or more) of Silly Putty. My plan for world domination is finally achievable.
London transport have recently introduced the Oyster smart card which tracks and records your movements.
I didn't know this, but apparently British law states that mobile phone companies have to keep a record of your movements based on the cells into which your phone has moved.
Tescos has been trialing smart tags, devices that can be hidden in shop bought products and later remotely scanned for a unique number. This number can be cross referenced against the details taken from you when you paid for the item (with credit card of course). The upshot is that someone only has to be within 20 meters of you to find out who you are, and all your shopping habbits.
If you add London's extensive CCTV coverage to this equation, the technology is there to track you whereever you go in most of the UK.
Also in the news this week has been David Blunket's proposals for a national ID card system, an non-compulsary system which looks like it will become very inconvenient to avoid.
The phrase 'thin end of the wedge' spings to mind. Where will all this lead? The companies and organisations introducing this technology state that the information will only be used for benign purposes, or when crimes are being commited. But a) we only have their word for it, and b) things change. Information is the new commodity.
I spend a large portion of my life immersed in technology. I am fascinated by it, hell I earn my living from this fascination. But paradoxically I also find myself becoming more frightened of it at the same time. Maybe knowing intimately what can be done with it makes me more aware of how it can be abused.
Well I never, the low down on Lorem Ipsum - "Lorem Ipsum, or Lipsum for short, is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry.". There's even a Lipsum generator. I've always wondered where it originated. Well, not always, but in the odd spare moment, now and again.
OSX has a rather agressive NIS authentication mechanism. Once configured, if configured wrongly or the NIS server is un-available, the OS can get horribly locked up trying to contact it. This can be a pain, as it even prevents going in and changing the config. Bit stupid really. Marcel Bresink has written a very comprehensive set of instructions on using NIS with OSX, including (at the bottom) a way of fixing a mis-configured machine.
"On September 7th, 2003, President Bush announced on national television that he was asking the Congress to grant him an additional $87 billion dollars for the next fiscal year, beginning October 1, to continue the fight on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But $87 billion is an impossibly high number for anyone to visualize. Let's have a look...."
Ta Nick for the link.
I know very little about the film, or the comics behind it, but judging from these images, HellBoy looks like it could be pretty good. Directed by Guillermo del Toro who did the very underrated and beautifully imaged (?) The Devil's Backbone. Check it out, it's worth a watch.
'spect to the bro for the heads up.
Two recent additions to my already crowded technical life - ADSL, and wireless. The combination transforms internet access at home. You don't even want to know where I'm typing this blog entry.... ;)
I'm surprised I haven't come across Anim Watch before. Wonderful site showcasing all that's good in computer animation. Stumbled across The Firefly Man as a link from the site, beautiful. I have to find the whole film. The flash (ok, so I make exceptions to the I hate flash rule once in a while) sound is very soothing. I think I'll just leave it on in the background when things get tense at work. If fact, imagine all the machines in the office playing it, with the lights turned off! Wow.
Mugshots.org, and interesting diversion.
That's it, The Internet Movie Database no longer does it for me. The searches don't work properly (try searching for The Appartment), the database is crammed with television stuff which shouldn't be there, and it's way too commercial. Much prefer All Movie and its sister site All Music.
After I mentioned The Firefly Man a few entries back I got an email from its director Todd Fjelsted saying that the web-casting rights for the film have been aquired by Atom Films, and that it will be available for viewing some time in the new year. Make sure you keep an eye out for what promises to be a wonderful film. And cheers to Todd for the heads up, good luck!
Some nutter has been mapping all the old ZX spectrum games. Fantastic stuff, nostalgia city! A 16k ram pack to my bro for the link.
Two very nice IPv4 network calculators. They may just have gotten me out of a fix... Nice to see everyone friendly javascript implementations when I couldn't find one that works on OSX.
Exercises in style is an attempt at 'creating as many variations as possible on a simple one-page non-story'. Really interesting. Ta bro.
So I've been using Firebird/Mozilla with a modified userContent.ccs to block ads very successfully for a year or so now, but Flash still gets through. Now I didn't want to block all flash, as very occasionally it is fun, but on the whole its abuse pisses me off big time. So now I have it combined with Flashblock, a little extra code for userContent.ccs that shows any Flash as a simple icon which will only play when clicked. Perfect. To get this :
- Install Flashblock
- Download the ad blocking userContent.ccs
- Merge the two userContent.ccs files, and restart your browser
See what you may be sharing when you join a P2P network - http://www.seewhatyoushare.com/
Wow, it's a French verb conjugator - http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/ARTFL/forms_unrest/inflect.query.html. But what I could really do with is a site that does your French homework...
This is really good - The Vice Guide to Everything.
At last the problem solved - plain text URLs automagically surrounded by anchor tags. No more bouncing on the OPTION-C,OPTION-T,OPTION-V keys to open them. And enforces once again what a genius idea it was to allow extensions to be written in Firefox/Mozilla. The developers can get on with making the core browser even better whilst leaving everyone else to work on the periphery stuff.
One the whole I don't have many problems with Firefox, but the bad choice of mapping CTRL-U to view source is one of them. CTRL-U should be, as all good people know, mapped to delete all characters in the field back to the beginning. This is normally so handy. So I googled a bit and hey presto, a solution :
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-gnome/2004-October/008614.html
Basically the idea is to remap the key yourself. Edit the file :
/usr/X11R6/lib/firefox/lib/firefox-0.10.1/res/builtin/platformHTMLBindings.xml
or where ever it happens to be on your machine, and add the following line to the input section:
<handler event="keypress" key="u"modifiers="control" command="cmd_deleteToBeginningOfLine"/>
The best thing is that CTRL-U in the page still brings up the source.
I don't understand why this option isn't made the default for Firefox. There's nothing I hate more than links which insist on opening new windows. Bloody arogant if you ask me. Actually the feature should never have been allowed in the first place. It's my decision to open a new window or tab, not the site designer's. Rant, rant.
Thanks to misterzeta for pointing me in the direction of Meebo, very nice web front end to Gtalk, Yahoo chat, ICQ and MSN Chat. Useful if you don't have a client handy, or are stuck behind a firewall.
I've never liked clowns, this just confirms my suspicion of them. Very well done though, sort of Hunter S Thomson meets Billy Smart.
Incredible page of photos from Tehran, the captial of Iran. I bet there's not many people outside Iran that could say they expected it to look so modern.
Pingmag calls itself "The Toko-based magazine about 'Design and Making things'". Full of interesting stuff.
http://www.pimpmysnack.com/ - We take Snacks to their limit, and show what they're capable of with a little ingenuity, a little cash, and a lot of imagination. Madness in the kitchen. - Thanks to Nick for the url.
machine learning techniques, Robotics Institute researchers Alexei Efros and Martial Hebert, along with graduate student Derek Hoiem, have taught computers how to spot the visual cues that differentiate between vertical surfaces and horizontal surfaces in photographs of outdoor scenes. They've even developed a program that allows the computer to automatically generate 3-D reconstructions of scenes based on a single image. [...] Identifying vertical and horizontal surf
Stop Firefox loading a page based on your clipboard contents on middle mouse click:
In about:config set middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false.
This sounds silly, but it's been driving me nuts. I use the middle button to paste, and if you don't happen to have a text box in focus at the time you can loose whatever you've been entering into the rest of the form.
From:
http://aymanh.com/archives/2006/01/27/firefox-and-middle-click-clipboard-url
Truely useful site that does, very simply, what (in my experience) no single pience of software seems to be able to manage:
And it's free! Excellent.
Fascinating stuff : http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/
Some interesting things you may not know about your favorite social networking site: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
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