Microlog Interesting

Microlog entries filed under Interesting

David Yow’s actor’s reel
That’s a pretty impressive acting resume for a guy who once howled with The Jesus Lizard. Permalink   ·

The Hike Guy: My Pacific Crest Trail Moleskine Journals
Six months worth of hiking through California recorded in 850 pages of journals. That’s commitment. Permalink   ·

Cartographies of Time
“Selections from a captivating history of timelines—from time circles to time dragons, to a history of the world drawn on a single piece of paper.” Permalink   ·

Happiness takes (a little) magic
An essay on cutting back one’s digital lifestyle to enjoy the finer things. I’m not sure I’d save three hours a day like Brian Lam does, but I see his point. Permalink   ·

The world’s biggest cities: How do you measure them?
“Defining the borders of a city is no easy task - and there is no international standard to ensure consistency” [c/o @StudioXNYC]. Permalink   ·

Phoney politeness and muddled messages: a guide to euphemisms
“A culture without euphemism would be more honest, but rougher.” Indeed; directness has its place, but euphemisms make life, shall we say, colourful. Permalink   ·

Reviewing DC Comics’ new brand identity
It’s slightly too clean and bland on its own, but I like its versatility, even if it is perpetuating the Gotham meme in marketing design. You know what else would help? Ben-Day dots. Just a thought. Permalink   ·

Designing Google Maps
On Google’s design iteration process. Great for maps, especially when they add usefulness like public alerts; not so good for the Google UX, which seems to change on a whim every few weeks. Permalink   ·

Tetsuo Kondo’s suspended ramp, Tallinn
Says its creator: “In the elegant woods of Kadriorg, we added a path. The path is supported by the trees as it floats through a forest that is over 300 years old. I feel that the appearance of the woods changes slightly when you walk along this path. We are no longer looking up at the trees from the ground but we come closer to the leaves and glide through the branches.” When do we get one? Permalink   ·

Gardens and Zoos
BERG’s Matt Jones posts his talk on ‘the near-future of connected products’. Permalink   ·

Introducing The MakerBot Replicator
Oh, if only I had a spare two grand! Permalink   ·

The Restart Page
Geek alert: you could easily lose an hour with these simulated start-up routines for various OSes. A lovely little piece of computing history. Permalink   ·

Dogs I meet: a set on Flickr
This man meets a lot of dogs. Permalink   ·

Stealth Mountain’s favourites
Stealth Mountain is a Twitter bot that alerts other users who type ‘sneak peak’ when they meant ‘sneak peek’. The vitriol it gets in response has to be seen to be believed. Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry on the ‘commonplace book’
“Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books.” I guess today we do that with websites, too. Permalink   ·

Once Upon a Tram (1958)
A nice little short film at the Europa Film Treasures archive capturing one of the last runs of the Hill of Howth tram. My grandmother on my mam’s side was on the last ever tram, if I’m not mistaken. Permalink   ·

The Unofficial Lego Advanced Building Techniques Guide
Tips and tricks for master builders. It’s amazing the stuff you can do. Also: there’s an online Lego shop for Ireland now? When did that happen? Permalink   ·

Fireplace
A pixellated hearth for your computer screen. Might come in handy this week, it’s pretty cold. Permalink   ·

Decisionmap.ie
Visualising Ireland’s public data. I wish they would make more of an effort to advertise these things; it would educate the public better as to how Census information is applied and for what purposes. Permalink   ·

Compute it yourself
“The only way to get the sense of a fully hackable world is to dive in.” Great primer on getting started with the tangible internet (Arduino, etc). Permalink   ·

“Sometimes the stories are the science…”
On the importance of video prototyping. They’re on to something here; people want/need to see how new things are used. Permalink   ·

ExtendNY
The Manhattan Grid extended to every point on Earth. I’m at 59,233rd and 9,160th. Permalink   ·

Simple Comic
A neat comic reader for the Mac. Best one I’ve used, actually. Permalink   ·

Lomokino
A movie camera that shoots on any 35mm photographic film (if you can get it). Permalink   ·

Shapecatcher.com: Unicode Character Recognition
Draw something in the box, and it finds Unicode characters to match it. Not perfect, but pretty nifty. Permalink   ·

Toolbox tips: drilling and fixing
I will find this very useful one day. Permalink   ·

Take a walk in the park with Google Street View
Google showing a good understanding of what people use Street View for, right here. Permalink   ·

excavations.ie
A searchable database of Irish excavation reports. Surprisingly useful, and very educational. Here’s details of work carried out where we used to live in town. Permalink   ·

Megacities
“By 2050, three-quarters of the world’s population will be urban. That means more — and much bigger — metropolises.” Permalink   ·

Will Japan build a backup Tokyo?
I suppose if anyone could do it, they could. Permalink   ·

Robot Roundup
It’s kind of shocking to think about the amount of things (outside of industrial processes) that have been robotised as a matter of course. It’s sneaking up on us, in a way. Permalink   ·

My Robot Nation
Build your own unique robot, replicated to order. The prices are a bit steep at the moment, but this kind of thing is going to explode. Permalink   ·

7 billion people and you: What’s your number?
Mine’s 4,446,117,843 (or 79,030,555,906 since history began) Permalink   ·

Enthusiasms: Things That I Believe
These are mostly things that I believe, too. Permalink   ·

How the Potato Changed the World
Added to the ‘Things I didn’t know’ file: tomatoes can be affected by potato blight [c/o The Morning News]. Permalink   ·

Phil Gyford on asymmetry
The notion of seeing - and judging - others differently to ourselves. In other words: “I am infinitely subtle, complex and never quite what I seem; you are predictable and straightforward, an open book.” It’s particularly evident in US politics and culture at the moment. Permalink   ·

Why Do Spicy Foods Make Your Nose Run?
Didn’t realise there was a downside to it. With my bad sinuses, I should be more careful in future. Permalink   ·

Scott and Scurvy
Epic post from Maciej Ceglowski last year that I never noticed at the time. Did you know they forgot the cure for scurvy in the 19th century? Crazy stuff. Permalink   ·

Robottke
A robot blog emulating the style of Jason Kottke. It was bound to happen at some point. Permalink   ·

Don’t Call Me Limey, Yank! Limey, Don’t Call Me Yank!
MeFi’s linguistics nerds have a field day. Permalink   ·

11 Interesting Things About the Umbrella
So now you know. Permalink   ·

On first glance, it’s just a blog post on dummy credit card numbers for testing e-commerce sites…
…but scroll down to the comments and things start getting insane. Only on the internet. Permalink   ·

MAKE How-To: PS/2/You LED Sign
All you need is an LED display, an Arduino board, a PS/2 port and keyboard, and a little creativity. Permalink   ·

The naming of things
Bobbie Johnson doesn’t like the term ‘3D printer’, and neither does Tom Armitage. Both are correct that it doesn’t reflect what such machines actually do. Bobbie suggests a few alternatives, like ‘rep’. I prefer the unshortened ‘replicate’ myself; it already has some cultural cachet via Star Trek. Permalink   ·

Online notes for Stanford’s Digital Photography class
What a brilliant resource! Permalink   ·

HiLobrow on Objectography
‘We demand a great deal from our objects: that they be functional, that they be meaningful. And yet they also stand apart from us; like creatures at the edge of a clearing, they peer off elsewhere in feral disregard.’ I think the Japanese have a better understanding of objects in this regard (cf Matt Webb muses on tsukumogami). Permalink   ·

qrtime.com - a QR Code Clock
Reminds me of the self-destruct countdown at the end of Predator. I guarantee you someone’s already working on a watch with a QR display right now. Permalink   ·

Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops
Related to the previous entry. I’m convinced that when people are confronted with the real-time effects of their behaviour in an open setting (such as with dynamic speed displays, which are pretty common here) it does prompt a change for the better. Permalink   ·

Sketchbook: Melbourne Smart City, for City of Melbourne/C40 Cities (incl. a note on why it’s easier to crowdsource a revolution than a light-rail system)
Another epic post from Dan Hill, this time on the concept of the ‘smart city’, relaying real-time metrics of the city to its inhabitants through various means, as well as the problems inherent on a municipal level with that kind of big thinking. Permalink   ·

South African English is lekker!
I’m pretty sure Bee doesn’t use even half of these (the ones that aren’t plain old English English, I mean). See also: more on South African English from the OED. Permalink   ·

The Kid Should See This
The best of the web curated for children. If teachers aren’t finding a way to use this in classrooms post-haste… Permalink   ·

BERG’s Friday Links
Weekly roundups of links about, well, everything. Permalink   ·

Evolution of NBA Team Logos
The best and worst aspects of design on one page [c/o MetaFilter]. Permalink   ·

My problem with the ‘Internet Of Things’
Big thinking about the future of objects, their production and our interaction with them. I’m excited about where all this is going. Permalink   ·

Rhodia Writing Pads
I’ve just started using a No 16 (yellow grid) with a cover and pen loop and I love it already. It’s so much lighter (and cheaper) than the Moleskine I was using, and the paper quality is more suited to my tastes, too (I use a Pilot G-2, which used to bleed and smear on the Moleskine but writes with a finer, drier line on the Rhodia). Plus when I’m finished, I just swap in a new pad — no more worries about filling my pages with nonsense. Permalink   ·

Sweden’s space port
“Kiruna has few natural resources beyond a rich vein of iron ore stretching more than a mile below the ground. It’s not a skiing destination, and there are few cultural attractions. There’s an ample supply of reindeer, but otherwise little charismatic wildlife. Yet the town has been gifted with something less tangible: a willingness to bet on seemingly crazy ideas — and brilliant marketing.” Permalink   ·

London From the Outside In: Walking From Heathrow Airport
Inverting the usual pattern of discovering when visiting a new city. How many places could this work for? I can’t imagine it would be too interesting walking to town from Dublin Airport, unless you like industrial estates. Permalink   ·

Montrealers unnerved by a city collapsing around them
Decades of infrastructural neglect are catching up with the people of Canada’s second city. Permalink   ·

Bicycle Tutor: How To Shift Your Gears
Clearest tutorial on gear shifting I’ve found online. I don’t need to know about cadences and gear ratios: I just want to know which one I should use on a hill, and which I should use going flat out. Permalink   ·

TileMill
“TileMill is a tool for cartographers to quickly and easily design maps for the web using custom data.” Looks very interesting and useable. Saved for the possible journalistic applications. Permalink   ·

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100
The definitiom of tl;dr (but worth saving for reference). Permalink   ·

The Robot-Readable World
I’m still waiting for the practicalities to be sorted out (stuff like Kinect might be WJW and fun and all, but lacking substance behind the lustre). However, these are exciting times for the way technology interacts with the real world, and people in it. Permalink   ·

Do it yourself and save
A wealth of how-to guides for fixing things around the house. Permalink   ·

The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist
A very sad tale of man’s inhumanity to man. Permalink   ·

On Bookmarking, Dog Ears and Marginalia
I can’t bring myself to dog-ear or scribble on my books, but technology (note-keeping apps such as Notational Velocity and the like) is making things easier for people like me. Permalink   ·

Spray Tissues with Air Freshener and Layer Them in Luggage for a Fresh-Smelling Arrival
A very smart idea, this. And it might help get that garlic/onion smell out of my backpack, too. Permalink   ·

Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer
This is great fun! The computer quickly learns your patterns to anticipate your next move — and it’s also smart enough to figure out when you’re predicting its own moves [c/o @qikipedia]. Permalink   ·

Catch the London Underground (and London Buses) with Google Maps
Very nifty interface for tourists and locals alike. The bus directions are especially useful. Permalink   ·

Slide To The Train
Dutch rail bosses have installed a so-called ‘transfer accelerator’ at a train station in Utrecht. It’s basically a slide. Looks like fun, but the potential for having one’s clothing ruined (or worse) is quite high. Permalink   ·

BLDG BLOG: Twisty little passages
On the discovery of mysterious underground tunnels in Bavaria. Permalink   ·

15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent
I particularly like ‘zhaghzhagh’; it’s very onomatopoeic. Permalink   ·

MetaFilter Memories
Celebrating 12 years of MeFi (that weird URL is a tribute to the first ever MeFi post). Permalink   ·

Manual Photography Cheat Sheet
This is very useful, but that grungy look? Could really do without it. Permalink   ·

Errol Morris: Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck?
Part one of five, and every one worth proper digestion. Permalink   ·

C64 Yourself
Convert images to 8-bit pixelly versions. Neat. Permalink   ·

‘Like watching paint dry’
On Norwegian state TV’s 24/7 live broadcast of a Nordic coastal voyage, and a refreshingly positive, understanding attitude to public service broadcasting. Permalink   ·

Glitchbot’s photostream
Posting a new corrupted image every day. Permalink   ·

Nachos, anyone?
The OED dips into the history of the ubiquitous Tex-Mex snack. What a great story. Permalink   ·

Walled Gardens and the Instrumented City
On the encroachment of private spaces in the nominally public ‘instrumented cities’ of cyberspace. Permalink   ·

What 9,000 TV Channel Logos Looks Like
For all fans of the Look-in listings pages out there. Permalink   ·

Aerotropolis: An Interview with Greg Lindsay
BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh chats with the co-author of a book that posits airports and their environs as the cities of the future. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but there’s some interesting ideas here. By the way, the book is on my wishlist, hint hint. Permalink   ·

Timeline of the History of Information
Only goes up to 1998. I think quite a bit has happened since then. Permalink   ·

Notes on New Songdo City
Another epic post from City of Sound, this time on one of the Far East’s latest ‘instant cities’. It’s incredible really, as if someone’s literally playing Sim City with the landscape there (cf. Blog All Bookmarked Web Pages: Shanghai Diary). Also: I never realised China, South Korea and Japan were in such close proximity as to make a bridge between them a realistic engineering challenge. Please make that happen. Permalink   ·

A brief history of Japan’s vintage railways
“Historically, the shape of rail’s introduction to Japan and its development into a tourism industry mirrors that of the West. Unlike the West, steam trains have taken on a symbolic strength that permeates the culture… Melancholy, wistful, an image of the voyage and sadness of life itself.” Permalink   ·

BLDGBLOG: Water Towers of Ireland
Once upon a time I’d see the UCD water tower every day and just for a moment believe I was in the future. Permalink   ·

Google Recipe Search Cooks Up Next Gen of Search
Sure, this is more about search than it is about food, but I’m still interested to see if it can find me things more tailored to my improving diet. Permalink   ·

Things to do in NYC for people who like transportation
Saving this for the next visit, whenever that is. Permalink   ·

Hamster exoskeleton
Matt Webb on animals and technology, sort of. This guy thinks so fast it’s hard to keep up. Permalink   ·

Mat Honan’s hack for auto-tracking shipments
That’ll save me doing the ol’ copy-paste-return. Permalink   ·

Stop Lying About What You Do
“I read with continuous partial attention and I don’t care that I am frequently interrupting my own reading. I despise the discourse that says we are all shallow, that we are all flighty, distracted, not paying attention. I am paying attention, but I am paying attention to everything, and even if my knowledge is fragmented and hard to synthesise it is wider, and it plays in a vaster sphere, than any knowledge that has gone before.” Permalink   ·

Instruments of Politeness
Workarounds for maintaining discretion in an always-on world where our devices tell nothing but the truth. Permalink   ·

WeatherSpark weather trends for Dublin
Fantastic site for visualising weather data over time. Also available as an app for Chrome. Permalink   ·

Bulkr: The complete solution to backup, browse & download photos on Flickr
Just in case the worst happens. Flickr is a Yahoo! company, after all. Permalink   ·

Morten Just’s location-based phone number
I think ‘contact ID’ would be a more appropriate term. But I like it. There’ll be apps for this. Permalink   ·

Dime = Decimal Time
Kind of like internet time. Only cooler. Permalink   ·

How to add contact information to your Mac’s login screen
Handy tip, this. Somewhat related: Create an ‘AppleCare’ account (to protect your machine when it goes in for repairs). Permalink   ·

Scale-Model Stadium Freezes a Moment of Baseball’s Past
Quite seriously, I would love to have the skill and the patience to create something like this. Permalink   ·

Tiny Useful Things: MyTravelMaps
I’m going to do this next time I go away somewhere that requires some navigation. Permalink   ·

Isotope
A jQuery library for interactive layouts. Saving this for future reference. Permalink   ·

Insiders’ guide to the northern lights
Probably the wrong time of year for this, but it’s on my bucket list! Still not sure which country is the best option, though. Permalink   ·

Google Maps Javascript API V3 Tutorial
Never know when I might need this. Permalink   ·

The Year of Practical Thinking
In 2010, Giles Turnbull literally learned something new every day. Not all true, but that doesn’t matter. (Also: 21 August made me smile; I know all the details about it, too.) Permalink   ·

Matt Webb muses on tsukumogami
From Wikipedia: “Tsukumogami originate from items or artifacts that have reached their 100th birthday and thus become alive and aware.” So pretty much like the opposite of animals, then: we live our lives then turn inanimate; they remain frozen for a lifetime or more, and used by us, before they’re finally born. Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry on desire lines
I just love that there’s a term for this phenomenon. Permalink   ·

‘What’s the font?’ Chrome extension
For finding out the name of a font simply by selecting the text. Will come in handy as more and more sites use prettier web fonts. Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry on the Japanese addressing system
“Street names are seldom used in postal addresses… and most Japanese streets do not have names.” Permalink   ·

Wikipedia’s list of common misconceptions
I’m surprised this is up for deletion, as its utility is pretty self-evident to me. See also: Kitchen Myths and The Baseball Myth. Permalink   ·

Anime/Manga Title Generator
Just for the lulz, like. Permalink   ·

Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch
Words aren’t required for this one. Permalink   ·

List of Crayola crayon colours on Wikipedia
With hex codes! I heart this [c/o Kottke]. Permalink   ·

Pictaculous
Upload and image and get an appropriate colour palette. Neat. Permalink   ·

Read Houdini’s books via Google Books and Library of Congress
Saved here for future reference. Permalink   ·

Why the future doesn’t need us
“Our most powerful 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech — are threatening to make humans an endangered species.” I’ve already Instapaper’d this to read on my Kindle. Permalink   ·

7 Essential Skills You Didn’t Learn in College
Good stuff here. And if I might add to the reading list for statistical literacy: Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column. Permalink   ·

Matt Webb on telepresence robots
I thought this was just Webb reporting from the future again till I followed the links and saw that THEY ACTUALLY EXIST. See also: Domestic robots and the Furby phenomenon. Permalink   ·

World of Warcraft’s Archaeology Skill
“One of my fellow archaeologists in Qatar has been playing as an archaeologist in WoW. Apparently the in-game play action of archaeology is incredibly tedious, which is perhaps appropriate. He says that people complain on the special WoW archaeology chat channel about it, and he tells them, ‘this is what I do in my real life too!’” [c/o delicious.com/bldgblog]. Permalink   ·

Curbing the kilogram’s weight-loss programme
This is just the beginning! It’s only a matter of time before the fabric of the space-time continuum unravels itself. Permalink   ·

Out-Think the Fink
Take on the WWE’s resident statistician (and greatest ring announcer of all time) in a test of wrestling geekiness. Permalink   ·

Set Up and Get to Know Your New Camera
Saved for future reference; having not yet explored any of my camera’s manual settings after 2+ years, I think this will come in handy. Permalink   ·

Set Up and Get to Know Your New Mac
Saved for future reference; a handy checklist for those who just want a spring clean, too. See also: Lifehacker’s best free Mac downloads. Permalink   ·

Fimoculous’ lists for 2010
US-centric as always, but lots of great stuff to discover here. Permalink   ·

100 exciting things you didn’t know about Dublin
Some of these are a bit silly, others quite surprising. It’s part of a project tasked with reinvigorating the city centre (I hope they’ve noted the obvious points: blight in many parts creates a bad impression; and shopping/socialising options in the suburbs have improved, keeping people closer to home). Permalink   ·

Where is London?
How to define a place when there’s no consensus on its boundaries. Permalink   ·

One year in one image
Amazing how the atmosphere in a place can change so much depending on the time of year. But then, reality is all about the lighting [c/o Interconnected]. See also: The Slow-Photography Movement — What is the point of taking pictures? Permalink   ·

Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period
The two-spaces thing infuriates me. Who taught people to do that? Never happened to me. Permalink   ·

The Top 10.25 Things Women (genders 1-2.5) Don’t Know About Men (genders 3-5)
“Love Advice for Extraterrestrials, from the redoubtable but unquestionably masculine (in an extraterrestrial sort of way) Xortar Cheemchim, as published in Ranflax Planet 9’s most prominent women’s magazine.” Permalink   ·

My First Blog
“Recently, going through my extensive personal archives I came across my first blog, which seems to have been written when I was in kindergarten. This would have been 1991, which makes me a true early adopter of the medium.” This is brilliant stuff; just read it. Permalink   ·

Dublin Bus Network Review
Staff and passengers alike critique the Network Direct scheme, which has done more harm than good to the city’s bus services; the timetables are really just a joke at our expense now (it’s a long thread; I’ve linked to the latest page). Permalink   ·

How London buses are numbered
The consistency is remarkable, especially considering the haphazard numbering of Dublin bus routes. Permalink   ·

Inventables
Materials for artists, designers and inventors. And they’re surprisingly inexpensive. Permalink   ·

Stargazing and dark sky tourism
UK-centric, but the tips apply anywhere. Considering a weekend out west this year, somewhere nice and dark at night. Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry on the bootstrap paradox
Following a discussion with Bee on the Terminator paradox, which to me isn’t so much a paradox as a difference in philosophical argument. My position? “Kyle Reese always goes back.” Permalink   ·

3D printer kits - a great gift for the geek in your life
These exist now? For the same price as a laptop? We really are in the future (hoverboards aside). Permalink   ·

Top 10 Ways to Access Blocked Stuff on The Web
Saved for future reference. Permalink   ·

MyUS.com: Shop Without Borders
For ordering stuff that US sites won’t ship overseas. Has anybody used this one? Testimonials, please! Permalink | 1 Comments   ·

The Scale of the Universe
AKA Science is awesome. Permalink   ·

Warren Ellis: Ghosting the real world
As he writes himself: “We are growing more comfortable with doing business with invisible things.” It’s not just ‘business’, of course; it’s interacting with the world in general. But we’re still quite a ways off yet. Indeed, how many of us actually have smartphones in a world where this is the most popular phone in the world? Permalink   ·

WebCollage
Eleven years on the interweb and this totally passed me by till now (possibly NSFW). Permalink   ·

Chart of Awesome Words That Combine for Even More Awesomeness
Space panda! Permalink   ·

Proofreaders’ marks
All my time editing, and I’ve never actually learned these. For shame. Permalink   ·

Should you build your own home?
Why not? I built this site from scratch (though I use MT to manage it). It’s my home online, and I want it to reflect something of myself; it’s hard to do that with a theme or skin that a thousand other people are using. Permalink   ·

RFID tokens on the Shenzhen Metro
Making the future more palatable by combining traditional and hypermodern forms of money. Funny how it’s only for the tourists, though… Permalink   ·

Dimensions
A simple way to put distant things or events in a more local, easily comprehended perspective. Cue a thousand school projects! Permalink   ·

Vanity Press Plus: The Tweetbook
Tempted to do this for my own tweet archive. Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry on ISO 3166
The standard for international country codes. I just love that this exists. Permalink   ·

Sharpie introduces the Liquid Pencil
Why is this not available everywhere? This separation of territories crap has to stop. Me want now! Permalink   ·

HTML5 Boilerplate
The easy way to upgrade to the latest standard. Although it’s not really a standard yet, since it’s not fully supported by today’s browsers. It’s like 10 years ago all over again. See also: 28 HTML5 Features, Tips, and Techniques you Must Know. Permalink   ·

How to Create a Stop-Motion Animation Movie on Your Mac Using Your Digital Camera and iLife
For another future project I’m mulling over. It’s how they make Robot Chicken, more or less, so that’s good enough for me. Permalink   ·

Fixing the Bus System
“The bus system in every city I know is broken, hardly usable, and we hardened urbanites only cope with it because we’re so used to it.” The symptoms he gives for this brokenness are all ones I would identify in my own experience. Some can be remedied to an extent by providing better information, online or otherwise. But I also see his point that such solutions might only be for the tech-savvy, or those with access to mobile devices (not everyone has an iPhone, whatever Apple et al want us to believe) [c/o del.icio.us/blech]. Permalink   ·

Russell M Davies: On the structure of time
“I think the explanation is simple: weeks make sense to us, months just don’t.” This! Permalink   ·

Notes on Susan Sontag’s On Photography
Saving this for when I eventually get round to reading the book. Permalink   ·

Google Cheat Sheet
That’s three years of university down the drain, j/k. Permalink   ·

Making ambient music on a MacBook
Some good links and advice here, but why is Ableton always the stock answer for such questions? Garageband and the like work just fine. Most people simply want to dick around with making sounds; they don’t wanna be George bleeding Martin. Permalink   ·

List of inventors killed by their own inventions
I need say no more. [c/o Gulfstream] Permalink   ·

Web Stencil Kit
I don’t know when I would ever need one of these (I’ve never designed a site on paper; just hard coding and lots of browser refreshes) but I want one. Permalink   ·

Ten Things to Do Before This Article Is Finished
The New York Times asks: what’s on your life list? I sort of have one, and have already ticked off a few items. But maybe I should write it down, to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Permalink   ·

St Paul’s: A Space for Learning
The blog to accompany a very interesting TY architecture/environment project at my old secondary school (my cousin Sean was part of the team, too). I’m jealous; we didn’t do anything even nearly as interesting in my transition year. Permalink   ·

Germany’s Incredible Hanging Railway
Mark my words: I will ride this train someday. Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry on proprioception
One for the ‘so that’s what it’s called’ file. Permalink   ·

Team sets out to clear bodies from Everest’s death zone
The whole idea of this just creeps me out. Permalink   ·

An answer to the age-old question: why is doctors’ handwriting so bad?
The solution seems so simple. Yet as with all simple things, it’ll take fucking forever to fix it. Permalink   ·

The Editor and the Curator (Or the Context Analyst and the Media Synesthete)
In short, the concept of curation is being corrupted by the use of the term as a fancy synonym for ‘editing’ or ‘selecting’. After all, the act of curating is about preserving things, not cutting them away. [c/o Fimoculous] Permalink   ·

Where to turn when you can’t ask the hive mind?
So nice to see there’s more to online advice than Yahoo! Answers (which really lives up to its name, come to think of it). Permalink   ·

The 24-Hour Cycle at Clean Rite Laundromat
I love stories like this. Is there anything like it outside of the US? It’s such a contrast to my local laundrette, where I’ve never met another soul (apart from the guy who takes in the binliner full of clothes). Permalink   ·

Kottke on Greg Allen on rotating the dishes
I’m already getting in the habit of stacking from the bottom, after noticing half of our plates weren’t used in months. Permalink   ·

MUJI & LEGO
This is lovely. I can haz it now? Permalink   ·

Why progress-bar traffic lights are long overdue
This is a great idea (more about it here) akin to the countdown timers for pedestrians on many traffic lights here in Dublin. Those certainly work for me — but then my mammy raised me right. Permalink   ·

How to buy on eBay
I thought this was how everyone did it. Permalink   ·

Khoi Vinh on the tradeoff between convenience and high-definition
“The essence of [the] argument is dead on: superior fidelity and resolution is terrific but overrated in comparison to convenience… Actually, it’s the content that really matters.” Hear, hear! Fidelity is great and all, but there comes to a point when I care less about the quality and more about the content. Actually, it’s more a spectrum of appreciation than any fixed point on a graph. Permalink   ·

Google Zeitgeist 2009
The annual Google Zeitgeist seems like the only time of year when us English-speaking Westerners realise that there’s a whole other world out there using the web just like we are. Permalink   ·

Man ‘finishes’ World of Warcraft
I thought this was an Onion story for a minute. Permalink   ·

Immaterials
Matt Jones of BERG describes the company’s work in the tangible-ness of intangible things. I particularly like the idea of raw data as a material to tell real stories that are ‘human readable’, for lack of a better expression. Permalink   ·

Is modern web design too like print design?
“If I was standing in 1995 and looking ahead to 2009 and was told how all of those technical restrictions would be lifted, of what would be technically possible, I’d imagine 2009’s web to look a lot more exciting than it does. I’d expect it to look less like a magazine or a newspaper and to look more like what the web could be.” Agreed. But I think that the fact that this question is even being asked is a sign that we might see a more exciting web in the near future. The last few years have mostly been about function, about what’s under the hood. But we’ve got that sorted, more or less; now’s the time to have some fun with the web again. Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry on trolleybuses
I’m fascinated by trolleybuses. Probably because I’ve never been on one or even seen them in operation. Permalink   ·

Formula 1 user interfaces
Some hot car/tech pr0n, in anticipation of the new F1 season starting this weekend [c/o Daring Fireball]. Permalink   ·

The Onion: Oh No, Performers Coming Into Audience
My greatest fear realised. And I’m going to see Cirque du Soleil next week; I swear, if they try it I’ll run screaming out of the building. Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry on dog communication
Fascinating reading, here. I never realised a tail wag could convey so many different meanings. Permalink   ·

Jessica Hagy and her index cards
I concur with the Demetri Martin comparisons. Permalink   ·

The iPod Death Clock
According to this, mine’s got less than a year left before it buys the farm. That’s not good. Permalink   ·

The AV Club interviews Steven Wright
From last November. Steven Wright is a comedy genius, and a great performer to boot; when I saw him live a few years ago he did two-and-a-half hours straight, no breaks. That’s something. Permalink   ·

Manhattan Elsewhere
What would Manhattan look like if it could be floated to another city? Nice work, but an even more radical thought occurs: what if any city could float? We can already reclaim land from the sea and live on soil where there was recently only water — what’s stopping us from constructing a true floating city? And I don’t mean some humongous ocean liner — I mean a giant man-made island that could be propelled from one sea to another. Rather than a Manhattan Elsewhere, how about a Manhattan Anywhere? Permalink   ·

Meet the Life Hackers
Another piece from my year-old collection of open tabs, thanks to which a new term has been introduced to my vocabulary: ‘interruption science’. Permalink   ·

Joe Nishizawa: Japan’s underground photography
I’m a bit of a sucker for links like this. Permalink   ·

CSS resources in one handy hyperlinked PDF file
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Permalink   ·

CSS Maintenance Tip: Use a Color Glossary
Will do in future. Thanks for the tip. Permalink   ·

iScroll2: Two-finger scrolling for pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks
Might try this instead of SideTrack. Permalink   ·

Most useful CSS related resources?
Filing this for future reference. Permalink   ·

Smultron: An open-source text editor written in Cocoa for Mac OS X
Might give this a try. Permalink   ·

List of problems solved by MacGyver
You won’t find this in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. That’s why Wikipedia rocks. Permalink   ·

PDFLab
For splitting, combining and generally tinkering with PDF documents. It’s not very elegant but it works [c/o paulhammond.org]. Permalink   ·

Why is the mafia so often associated with the garbage industry?
The answer — money laundering, more or less — is pretty mundane and pretty much what I always assumed. But still, it’s good to know. Permalink   ·

The Great Quake 1906-2006
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake. I’ve spent the last few weeks reading a book about the event which, like Mat, I found disappointing. I gleaned a lot about the San Andreas Fault and seismology in general, for sure, but much less than I expected about the earthquake itself. Oh well. (See also: Wikipedia’s good introduction to the 1906 quake.) Permalink   ·

Expandable Messenger Bag by Manhattan Portage
This is my new bag. I’m digging it muchly. (Delivery was quick, too: I ordered it on the 31st and it arrived last Monday — only three days later.) Permalink   ·

Hacking the user interface through tags
“Tagging isn’t just metadata; it’s metadata you can use.” Makes me wonder if I’ve been using my tags right; rather than a form of internal navigation, they point outwards, to other blog posts, to give some context to my own. Permalink   ·

JBL says ‘buy Apple’
Man, how could I ignore this one! (By the way, he’s the WWE US champion, not the US WWE champ as the article states. Just to be clear.) Permalink   ·

Textfiles
I can’t even describe this. Just go there and have a look around for yourself. Permalink   ·

4096 Color Wheel
Unbelievably cool interactive colour picker [c/o del.icio.us/barryf]. Permalink   ·

Paparazzi!
An OS X utility for capturing full-length screenshots of web pages. Very handy indeed. Permalink   ·

Urville
An imaginary city that exists only on paper and in the mind of its autistic savant creator. Astonishing [c/o Boing Boing]. Permalink   ·

The Great Outdoor Fight
I never really got Achewood before, but this story arc had me riveted [c/o Hammersley]. Permalink   ·

Send me an Odeo
Just a little social experiment… I’m not fishing for compliments, I swear. Permalink   ·

How long would it take before a zombie’s muscles were no longer functional?
Some people have too much time on their hands. But hey, you never know when you might need an answer to such a question. Permalink   ·

Tokyo Secret City
There’s a secret Murakami-esque network of tunnels running beneath Tokyo, allegedly. Sweet. Permalink   ·

Can you read without using your inner voice?
The answer, quite simply, is ‘no’. Bad Science’s Ben Goldacre has been cracking me up lately with his excoriation of the ridiculous Brain Gyms and the impossible crap it advises, such as ‘reading without your inner voice’. Where do they come up with this shit, and more importantly why do people fall for it? Permalink   ·

DocuWiki
Looks interesting; might be a better fit for my WikiThesis. Permalink   ·

Mind Hacks on eliminative materialism and philosophy of mind
I’ve had an interest in the philosophy of mind since my undergrad days. Much food for thought here. (See also: A retro ‘Chinese room’ moment.) Permalink   ·

Divine inspiration
A phsychoanalyst muses on the muse, while some artists reveal what inspires them. Permalink   ·

Phil Gyford’s Timeline
Now this is what a styled table is supposed to look like! Impressive information design too. Permalink   ·

Today is CSS Naked Day
In case you were wondering where the design went. Permalink   ·

Locating primary sources on the web
May I make a LazyWeb suggestion: somebody do this for Europe, please? Permalink   ·

Invisible city
“Twenty-four hours in Chongqing, a megalopolis you’ve never heard of.” Surely the whole of China is virtually invisible to the West, not just this corner of it. Very enlightening. (Update 12/04: The Guardian has just posted an accompanying film of Chongqing with the journalist Jonathan Watts.) Permalink   ·

Druid Street
Another tumblelog to add to the list. Some great photos to be found here, too. Permalink   ·

Podcasts from SXSW Interactive 2006
If you couldn’t make it to Austin for the annual geek-out… Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry for Sturgeon’s law
“Ninety percent of everything is crud.” Amen to that. Permalink   ·

First look at the Nintendo DS Lite
OMG!! I want one!! Permalink   ·

Results from last night’s Irish Blog Awards
I was going to go along; I registered and everything. But then I realised my wallet was empty. And I remembered no one nominated me. Fuckers. Permalink   ·

Bill Gates, good or evil?
David Byrne posits an interesting philosophical quandry. Permalink   ·

Takeshi no Chousenjou: maybe the hardest videogame ever written
The ‘Takeshi’ of the title is Beat Takeshi. Which explains everything [c/o MetaFilter]. Permalink   ·

Penn Jillette talks about ‘Desert Bus’
Part of a legendary game from the mid-90s, which ultimately went unreleased. Maybe we’re better off for it, but part of me just bursts with enthusiasm for the idea. Permalink   ·

I’ve got two mentions on Anarchaia today
When did I get so famous all of a sudden? It’s going to my head, I tells you! Permalink   ·

Can You Revive an Extinct Animal?
A good long piece from The New York Times, focused on the attempt to revive the quagga, that throws up a lot of interesting questions. Permalink   ·

Why is there an entire web page devoted to Iron Maiden album covers with SpongeBob SquarePants inserted into them?
Why, indeed. Permalink   ·

Moisture! & nibbl.org
Two new tumblelogs to enjoy. (Not at all to be confused with this site, which is merely tumble-esque.) Permalink   ·

Time travel with the London tube map
I’m linking to this if only because I love the fact that there are people out there who care about these things. Permalink   ·

VRMAG
Online magazine featuring 360-degree panoramas from around the world. Filed here for exploring at a later date. Permalink   ·

Bring me your AIBOne
This article was all it took for me to dream of having my own AIBO. Now if only they were Mac compatible, like the new Lego Mindstorms… Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry for Photic sneeze reflex
It’s a real condition! After years of thinking I was the only one… Permalink   ·

Renzo Piano on Paris, peripheries and progress
The notes on peripheries are particularly thought-provoking. I can see the same problems in Dublin’s peripheral sprawl, where giant shopping malls have sprung up, taking the place of true community centres of commerce and interaction in the satellite towns, in a half-hearted effort to patch up the mistakes involved in their conception. Permalink   ·

Ambient Findability: Talking with Peter Morville
The more information we have to deal with — and believe me, the volume is growing at a near-exponential rate — the more necessary it will be for this information to be ‘stored’, tagged and thereafter located. And that’s even just thinking of sources of news. I’m looking forward to reading Morville’s book sometime this year for his ideas and theories on the subject. Permalink   ·

Edited transcript of Newsnight interview with Tim Berners-Lee from last summer
I lost a lot of respect for Mark Lawson after seeing the broadcast of this. I mean, if Gutenberg were alive today should he have sleepless nights over the printing of Playboy or Mein Kampf or whatever? Lazy, lazy thinking. Permalink   ·

Pacific Mall Toronto
Next time I visit TO I’m so checking this place out. Permalink   ·

Paul Graham on good and bad procrastination
I personally don’t believe there is any such thing as good procrastination, but I do abide by the principle of ‘everything in moderation’. Related: ‘Procrastination Nation’ on NPR. Permalink   ·

weblog conversation
Data visualisation used to discover why bloggers join specific conversations in multi-author blogs. Permalink   ·

Yahoo! Answers
It’s hopelessly clogged with bullshit, and Ask MetaFilter is better anyway, but it might be worth exploring if you have the time or the patience. Permalink   ·

Everybody needs a personal “status” page
Yes we do. I’ve got my own status page right here. I try to keep it up to date. Permalink   ·

Inventor of the web finally catches on to this blogging lark
Consider this link a thank-you. Permalink   ·

Searching for a fresher taste
Bobbie Johnson invetigates Yahoo!’s investment in Web 2.0. All the cool kids work for Yahoo! now; it’s the new Google. Or something. Permalink   ·

The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging
An intro to the phenomenon for those unfamiliar. Filed here for future reference. Permalink   ·

Structured Blogging
“Structured Blogging is a way to get more information on the web in a way that’s more usable.” If you want it used, that is. (There’s more discussion here) [c/o Subtraction]. Permalink   ·

Those Year-End Listing Blues
The A.V. Club’s Noel Murray has had it with lists. Sort of. Permalink   ·

A Day in the Life of a Reference Librarian
Is it weird that I find the idea of this job very fulfilling? [c/o The Shifted Librarian] Permalink   ·

Falling back to earth, alone
In 1960, Joe Kittinger shot up to 30km above the Earth in a high-altitude balloon. Then he jumped. Remarkable. Permalink   ·

A Rocket To Nowhere
Maciej Ceglowski’s thoroughly researched, damning indictment of the state of the US space programme. Immensely readable, even for those with less than a passing interest in things astronomical. (Be sure also to read his recent follow-up piece, Meanwhile, Back In Space.) Permalink   ·

chil.us
A project examining Chicago’s status as a global city, placing it in context with America’s other major metropolises. Be sure to check out the photo-slices. [c/o del.icio.us/fakeisthenewreal] Permalink   ·

Hong Kong In Motion
“Photographs of cities can convey something of the texture of the sidewalk, and certainly do a good job conveying skylines or monumental spaces. But it’s harder to capture the flow of a city.” Steven Johnson gave it a go, anyway. Permalink   ·

Merlin outlines his txt setup
I’m used to my one big text file for now, as it’s just enough for my needs. But if I need something bigger, to cover more aspects of my life, then this system looks like it’s worth a try. Endlessly resourceful, our Merlin. Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry for Getting Things Done
Amazing how quickly this all took off. Gotta credit Merlin Mann with some of that. Permalink   ·

Web Browser CSS Support
Very handy to know [c/o Stylegala]. Permalink   ·

ToneTester: A Macintosh application that tests hearing
Turns out I have a left-pitch offset of -0.15 semitones. Good to know. Permalink   ·

Five fake Brian Wilson songs from the mid-70s
Including the old favourite, ‘French Fries in My Beard (Make Me Happy, But Sometimes Very Sad).’ Permalink   ·

Reith Lectures 2005: The Triumph of Technology
The Independent’s Nicholas Lezard says the broadcasts were boring, so I’m happy enough to read the lectures instead. When I have the time. Permalink   ·

Countries of the world, resized by population density [c/o A Whole Lotta Nothing]
And you can make it out of Lego, too. Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry for Parkour
The kids in the US mid-west call it ‘extreme walking’, if I remember correctly. Permalink   ·

I am a camera
From The Guardian a few weekends ago; an article on moblogging that doesn’t once mention Flickr. Strange, that. Permalink   ·

Bricksmith: Virtual Lego modelling for the Mac
Christmas just came early! Permalink   ·

Printing a Book with CSS
I had a feeling print typesetting wasn’t much of a step up from web markup; this is the proof. Excellent stuff. Permalink   ·

Sesame Street Encyclopedia
Plus a direct link to my all-time favourite, Telly [c/o K10k]. Permalink   ·

TransFormers costumes that actually transform
Fantastic! I wonder how many of these we’ll see at Hallowe’en next year? Permalink   ·

Open Source Mac: Free, Open-Source software for OS X
With some more links to open source software here. Permalink   ·

Riffs: Your Social Recommender
I wasn’t sure what this was at first, since there’s so much going on on that front page. But I guess it’s the digital equivalent of bursting into a room full of strangers and asking whether or not they like something. Nice idea. Permalink   ·

Secret of bees’ flight revealed
So that’s how they do it. Permalink   ·

‘Shorthand’ tips for handwritten notes
Some good non-shorthand notation for practical use here. But they’ve got Pittman wrong: a pencil isn’t required, it’s just easier for most. The way I write shorthand I can’t tell the difference between the weights of my lines, and besides after a certain level of practice it’s not supposed to matter. Permalink   ·

RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs
The sad thing is that, like the five-blade razor, this might well turn out to be true some day. Permalink   ·

The Walker: Texas Ranger clip Conan O’Brien was afraid to show
But he showed it anyway. And I thank him for it. (For supplemental laughs, watch this MetaFilter thread fold in on itself as people take the piss out of others trying to explain the joke. God, do people really need instructions for everything?) Permalink   ·

stevenberlinjohnson.com: Meet The New Blog
It’s official: short-post blogging is the new black. Permalink   ·

Odeo finally launches its browser-based podcast recorder
It sure took them a while. I’ll try it out some day. Permalink   ·

Peter Lindberg on stimulating diversions
I often find myself spinning off on tangents, my thoughts seeded by others’ thoughts and ideas. Always thinking, always evaulating and interpreting and striving to understand. Permalink   ·

Barry Frost on SuperGlu
I owe Barry a link since I pretty must stole his homepage design for my new look. Permalink   ·

Hong Kong walk signal
Dublin traffic light signals are similar, but the sound patterns for green and red are more distinct. Permalink   ·

I’ve only just noticed Anarchaia’s link to this blog, ten days after the fact
Sorry about that Christian, I don’t check Technorati very often. Thanks for the mention! Permalink   ·

Perry Bible Fellowship archive
Not familiar? Oh boy, you don’t know what you’re missing. (Read The Guardian’s feature on the strip for some background.) Permalink   ·

London Topological
Exploring London’s clandestine underworld — which is something Dublin is sadly missing, at least on this scale. Permalink   ·

Play Risk using Google Maps
I’ve never played Risk… Didn’t have much of a childhood, did I? [c/o MetaFilter] Permalink   ·

iPod audiobook/podcast tip: In iTunes, do a Get Info, go to the Options tab, and check “Remember playback position” and “Skip when shuffling”.
Ah! Finally I can save place on my iPod while listening to 3-hour-plus downloads! That’s my in-flight entertainment sorted. Permalink   ·

XHTML: Differences between Strict & Transitional
I’ve got so many elements to change to make my code strict, I don’t think it’s worth my while. But I’m filing this here anyway, for future reference. Permalink   ·

Semantics in the Wild
Interesting article on informal semantic metadata in web code, as opposed to just semantic usage of HTML tags, which is something I’ve tried to implement here. Just my little contribution to the Semantic Web. [c/o SimpleBits] Permalink   ·

The end of One Big Text File
I don’t know. I see what he’s doing there, but I’m happy sticking with my Big Text File for now. The key, I think, is to not use it for archival, but only the stuff you intend to work with. Anything else can go in a folder as a separate file, just like you’d do if it was hard copy. Permalink   ·

Camino v1.0.1 Release Notes
Camino was my browser of choice before I upgraded to Panther and got hooked on Safari. I’m very tempted to switch back. Permalink   ·

Macintosh Web Browsers, Past and Present
So many! Who woulda thunk it? Permalink   ·

Goodbye, 38 Routemasters
I never did get a chance to ride on one. Sure, times change and things evolve, but London’s losing a big part of its character. Permalink   ·

Voltron gets served
Our version of Cartoon Network sucks so badly compared to this [c/o elsewhere.subtraction.com]. Permalink   ·

Rabid vampire bats kill in Brazil
Now that’s a headline! Permalink   ·

Guide to Modular CSS
I had a set-up somewhat like this for the last design, and I’m trying something new for this one too. Keeping a separate file for colors will make swapping any changes much easier. Permalink   ·

Footnotes and Textpander
Filing this for future reference. Permalink   ·

Web Developer’s Handbook
This is the mother lode. Permalink   ·

National Geographic’s WildCam Africa
Real-time video from a watering hole in Botswana, and the single coolest thing I’ve found online this year. I’ve only been watching for ten minutes and I’ve already seen an ostrich, an elephant and a crocodile having lunch! Oh boy! Permalink   ·

Typetester [c/o del.icio.us/plasticbag]
A cool web app for comparing screen fonts. Permalink   ·

CSS Techniques Roundup [c/o Airbag]
Permalink   ·

Introducing the CSS3 Multi-Column Module
Lovely. Browser support will be coming along any year now. Permalink   ·

Rock Paper Scissors, times 25
This one’s for Markham. As if 15 times wasn’t enough for you. Fucking hell! Permalink   ·

Lifehacker’s guide to weblog comments
All seems pretty sensible to me. Permalink   ·

600 barrels of loot found on Crusoe island
There be treasure! Just a shame, says I, that it’s a week too late for Talk Like a Pirate Day. Yarrr. Permalink   ·

Online Oblique Strategies [c/o LinkMachineGo]
“Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame.” Ahem. Permalink   ·

Kenny’s Bookshop closes its doors [c/o Slugger O’Toole]
A real shame. I went there last January with Benitha; it’s a fine establishment. We need more places like this, not fewer. Permalink   ·

Google Talk is live
So this is the big surprise everyone’s been talking about. Shame there’s no Mac client, but I’ve got the IM set up through Adium. If anyone wants to chat, I’m macdara(dot)conroy(at)gmail(dot)com. Permalink   ·

Making Sections In Text Files With SubEthaEdit
Invaluable advice, inspired by this article (also noted at 43 Folders). My current system involves three .txt files — one for blog drafts, one for linklog stuff, and one for thesis notes — which I could well see merging into one mega-file, yet for the time being keeping them separate but using LaTeX syntax has made navigating my notes so much easier. Permalink   ·

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory
Gravity didn’t make that apple fall on Newton’s head — the Flying Spaghetti Monster did it! Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry for the Flying Spaghetti Monster
See also: Touched by His Noodly Appendage Permalink   ·

On behalf of the Kansas Board of Education, welcome to the new Devo Middle School
The only place for all you spudboys and girls. I hope you get a flower pot hat at graduation. Permalink   ·

What motivates citizen reviewers?
Lots of ideas to get my head around here. Permalink   ·

PHP Manual
I’m going to learn this some day, I really am. Permalink   ·

The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List [c/o del.icio.us/gleuschk]
Filing this for future reference. Permalink   ·

Elephants storm Zimbabwe resort
“A team from Zimbabwe’s National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority is trying to find out why the animals seem to be moving closer to people’s houses.” You want to know why? I’ll tell you why — they’re trying to get away from being shot at in the national parks, that’s why! Permalink   ·

Astronomers have discovered a group of stars that look like the TV character Victor Meldrew
I don’t believe it! Permalink   ·

Podcast of the BBC’s Reinventing Radio presentation at ETech 2005 [c/o del.icio.us/cityofsound]
Permalink   ·

Yummy! Personal PDF Library [c/o del.icio.us/gleuschk]
It’s like del.icio.us, but for PDFs. Now if only they could do something about the downtime… Permalink   ·

Learn to Program (with Ruby) [c/o plasticbag.org]
Something else to read when I finish my thesis. Permalink   ·

JSAN: JavaScript Archive Network [c/o JayAllen.org]
A comprehensive resource of JavaScript goodies. Permalink   ·

Nvu: The complete web authoring system for Linux, Windows and OS X [c/o What Do I Know]
Looks great, but you get what you pay for. Permalink   ·

Obscenities Uttered by Jesus Christ
“Holy Mom, mother of me.” Ha! Permalink   ·

Brian Eno on Working with Strict Structures
Eno speaks the truth. One could write an entire thesis on how limits foster creativity. Not me, though; I’m busy with my own one. Permalink   ·

Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass [c/o del.icio.us/cameron]
Boy am I glad my thesis hasn’t turned into something like this! Permalink   ·

Talk Digger: Check who’s linking to you [c/o del.icio.us/jack]
Handy tool for checking linkage across multiple tracking services. Could do with some better icons, though. Permalink   ·

Robust CSS Drop Shadows [c/o Alt Text]
I’ll definitely be experimenting with this. Permalink   ·

Idiot Toys [c/o del.icio.us/jack]
A gadget blog with a sense of humour. Excellent! Permalink   ·

Amputator: an ampersand-encoding plugin for Movable Type [c/o Subtraction]
Nice. Requires template edits to set it up, but it’ll save me the trouble of hand-coding the bloody things. Permalink   ·

Astronomers detect ‘10th planet’
Seems like these discoveries are happening all the time now. For a name, Matt Webb suggests the distinctly un-Roman-god-like ‘daes’. Also: Farewell Pluto? Permalink   ·

Although I Like a Good George W. Bush Joke as Much as the Next Guy, Some of Them Seem Gratuitous and Mean-Spirited
“Did you hear that Bill Clinton hired a new intern? It turns out that his old intern had to go home and spend time with her family after her brother was killed in Iraq.” Permalink   ·

Internet companies that should have been bigger, but weren’t
I think Blogger did pretty well, actually. But they didn’t adapt fast enough to deal with their popularity, and targeted the service towards novices at the expense of their older, more experienced users. Permalink   ·

About Going Solo
Some of these tips apply for freelance journalism, too. Permalink   ·

GIGANTICIDE [c/o Fireland]
It’s a bit like Schott’s, but not quite. If you read it you’ll see what I mean. Permalink   ·

Star War: The Backstroke of the West [c/o The Morning News]
Long time ago in the faraway galaxy… Permalink   ·

Did Penn Jillette invent the Aristocrats gag? [c/o WaxyLinks]
It’s been pretty much confirmed that he didn’t… but I wouldn’t have put it past him. Permalink   ·

“I think that as a Mac user, I’ve become very complacent about security. And that’s [a] problem. As more and more people come to the platform, we’re going to start seeing more and more exploits.”
And so it begins… Permalink   ·

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers
I haven’t read this yet. I really should. Permalink   ·

Space shuttle to get critical fix
This comes after Nasa announced that they’d been “playing Russian roulette” with their shuttle crews since launches began 24 years ago. Permalink   ·

The Non-Exciting, Non-Adventures of Han and Chewie
“No Chewie, those were my sandwiches.” Ha! Permalink   ·

Make the Web Mobile With IYHY [c/o Asterisk]
Very handy tool. See, for example, how this site looks stripped bare. Permalink   ·

Bursting the magic bubble
How the audience lets itself be tricked by magicians. Permalink   ·

Archive of Steve Bell’s cartoons for The Guardian [c/o LinkMachineGo]
Permalink   ·

Introducing: Yacht Rock
Thank Jebus for Channel 101. Where would we be without House of Cosbys? Permalink   ·

Online Papers in Philosophy [c/o Tesugen]
Permalink   ·

Electronic Games of the ’80s
I had Caveman when I was younger (the Tomy version). It lasted well into the ’90s, too… They don’t make ‘em like they used to. Permalink   ·

Philosophomon: Great philosophers’ heads on Pokémon bodies [c/o Boing Boing]
I like Descartle. Needs more work, though. Permalink   ·

Throwing Tables Out the Window
Tables will always be a necessary evil for certain layouts until IE bites the dust or starts supporting universal standards. And that’s never gonna happen. Still, it’s nice to dream… Permalink   ·

Story of a street
I love stories like this. Permalink   ·

Anthology Books: Manhattan Portage Bags
I need to get me a new bag soon. These look nice. Expensive, though. Permalink   ·

Blog Day is coming on August 31 [c/o The Big Drought]
That’s 3108. Get it? Permalink   ·

How To Fix An Underexposed Photo
Note to self: take more photos so I might actually have use for tips like this. Permalink   ·

How to style a restaurant menu with CSS [c/o kottke.org]
Or style anything else, for that matter. Permalink   ·

Quick start your design with XHTML templates [c/o del.icio.us/merlinmann]
Filing this for future reference. Permalink   ·

“We’re taught in school, in our families, or at work to feel guilty about failure and to do whatever we can to avoid mistakes.” [c/o kottke.org]
Very true. There’s a real stigma about trial-and-error, but that’s the essence of creativity. Permalink   ·

Scientists predict brave new world of brain pills
Modafinil scares me. It’s the amphetamine of the 21st Century. Permalink   ·

Technorati: A New Public Utility
It’s certainly going that way. Who would have thought folksonomy would take off so fast? Permalink   ·

The “Vinegar Boy” Saga, as told by Aaron [c/o MetaFilter]
This guy is my new hero. Permalink   ·

Online PDF converter
Handy for short documents if you don’t have PDF conversion built-in. Permalink   ·

Turn a Zip case into a Hipster PDA [c/o 43 Folders]
Very nice, but probably more trouble than it’s worth for me. Permalink   ·

Create Gapless CDs and AAC Files with iTunes 4.9 [c/o del.icio.us/jack]
Filing this for future reference. Permalink   ·

MetaFilter reponds to GoDaddy’s dodgy domains privacy policy
With this coming after the Gitmo controversy, I think I’ll be taking my business somewhere else when the time comes. Permalink   ·

How the housefly evades ambush
Funny, I always thought it was because their ocular senses are faster than ours. Permalink   ·

How to make enhanced podcasts [c/o Asterisk]
Filing this for later reference. Permalink   ·

Architecting CSS [c/o Asterisk]
Filing this for later reference. Permalink   ·

Ten CSS tricks you may not know
I have the strangest feeling I’ve linked to this before. Permalink   ·

We Have Liftoff, Baby, Yeah!
Oh dear, that’s an unfortunate photo. Permalink   ·

On the CIA’s evil genius, Dr Sidney Gottlieb
Fucking hell. This is precisely why you should never trust authority. Permalink   ·

Caring for Your Introvert
I don’t really need this, since Benitha feels the same way as I do. Isn’t it great when you’re compatible? Permalink   ·

Putting for the Fences [c/o WaxyLinks]
Miniature golf reportage — this is great! I’m starting to like the New York Times again. Permalink   ·

Mice gang up on endangered birds
At this rate, killer rabbits won’t be far behind. Permalink   ·

Philosophy Tilt-a-Whirl: The major philosophers, rated [c/o kottke.org]
He’s not very fair to Wittgenstein (who rose considerably in my esteem knowing that he spent much of his time at Cambridge watching westerns at the cinema). And I don’t agree with his offhand dismissal of Derrida, but I admit his work is better talked about than read. Permalink   ·

Warm Planet: Global warming news from all corners of the Earth
My buddy Mat’s new blog, keeping track of this important issue. (Read this post to see why he’s doing it.) Permalink   ·

Mammatus clouds over Hastings, Nebraska [c/o Boing Boing]
These are creepy. It’s like some sort of horror movie chemical gas attack. Permalink   ·

Building a weblog engine with Ruby on Rails (MOV) [c/o plasticbag.org]
I know feck all about programming, but this stuff looks remarkably powerful and easy to learn. Permalink   ·

The Hall & Oates Test [c/o del.icio.us/magnetbox]
Let me guess… you’re an Oates? Permalink   ·

WorldEar [c/o Airbag]
A device to provide ambient sound connections between cities in multiple time zones on public transportation. My only reservation? Public transport might be too noisy for this to work without headphones. Permalink   ·

Mellel — The word processor for Mac OS X
Might be handy for writing my thesis, if I don’t decide to set it in LaTeX instead. Also, you’ve gotta love their honesty in the reviews section. Permalink   ·

Secrets to creating Wordpress themes
Cornerhost upgraded my hosting plan this month, giving me a couple of mySQL databases to play with. So I might just migrate to Wordpress one day, if I can get to grips with the PHP. Permalink   ·

Some printable paper rulers [c/o del.icio.us/gleuschk]
You never know when you’ll need something like this. Permalink   ·

Kids drawings as lush paintings [c/o Boing Boing]
These gave me the giggles. In a good way. Permalink   ·

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System
Screw Powerpoint! We should all be using browsers from now on. Permalink   ·

Simple templating with PHP
I should redo the Furnace website with this system. It’ll make managing it much easier. (I’d use MT but I don’t want to pay for a licence.) Permalink   ·

Blogumentary maker squares off with a ranting loony [c/o WaxyLinks]
If there’s anything I hate more than summer humidity, it’s ranting loonies. Permalink   ·

MetaFilter moans about Matt Webb
Is this what we’ve come to? That we can’t write on our own blogs without some jackass complaining we’re not up to the standards of the New York Times or something? Jeez… Permalink   ·

Character entities for XHTML
So I don’t forget it. Permalink   ·

Google Advanced Operators Cheat Sheet [c/o Helium3]
Permalink   ·

Ebooks for your iPod
I’ll have to give this a go. Permalink   ·

The Daily Show in great form on the Michael Jackson verdict
This will be the only item about the Michael Jackson trial you will find here. Permalink   ·

Ssh! Don’t tell anybody, but the new design for The Morning News is up and ready The new Morning News design was officially launched today
I prefer the old one, to be honest. Though that javascript nav bar at the bottom is pretty swish. Permalink   ·

Help Cameron graduate by filling out his blog survey
I did my bit; it really does only take about 10 minutes. Must get cracking on my own survey, what with that thesis I have to write and all. Permalink   ·

Darth Vader on Wheel of Fortune [c/o WaxyLinks]
It only works if you’ve got audio on your computer. I know, it’s so gonna get old in a few weeks, but why not milk it for all it’s worth while we still have time? Permalink   ·

Certain kinds of memory decrease the more knowledge you accumulate, reports a new study
So Homer Simpson was right after all: everytime I learn something new it really does push some old stuff out of my brain. Permalink   ·

The lifecycle of bloggers [c/o Accordion Guy]
I’m almost ashamed to say I’ve been through most of these stages. But not #13. As Anil rightly says, “nobody’s ever been fired for blogging.” Permalink   ·

eBay Ireland has been launched [c/o Slugger O’Toole]
I registered with eBay years ago, but I’ve only just bought something through ‘em. Permalink   ·

United States of NOOOOOOOOOOO!
This is funny if you can remember back like two or three years ago. Permalink   ·

Scientology Losing Ground To New Fictionology
“Scientology uses strictly scientific methodologies to undo the damage done 75 million years ago by the Galactic Confederation’s evil warlord Xenu—we offer our preclear followers procedures to erase overts in the reactive mind. Conversely, Fictionology is essentially just a bunch of make-believe nonsense.” Oh The Onion, what would we do without you? Permalink   ·

Freecell for Mac OS X [c/o Torrez]
I’ll need to learn how to play this. I only know one version of patience and it’s different enough from this to matter. Permalink   ·

Astronomers photographed a cosmic event which they believe is the birth of a black hole
I saved this one to my ‘blogfodder’ folder a day or so before Kottke and everyone else beat me to it, so I’m posting it anyway. Permalink   ·

Self-referential aptitude test [c/o Boing Boing]
I haven’t got a fucking clue. Permalink   ·

Oberkampf: a set of tools to build custom photo galleries running off your Flickr account
Permalink   ·

How to sit at a computer [c/o del.icio.us/gleuschk/]
When I get around to setting up a home office, I’ll need this. Permalink   ·

THIS IS FUN TO MAKE A BLOG ON THE COMPUTER WEBSITE [c/o The Morning News]
It’s what the internet was made for. Permalink   ·

The Acerbic Wit of Lewis Black
If you don’t know who he is, well, he sorta looks and kinda sounds like that Mike Wilmott guy who hangs out with Rich Hall. But he isn’t. Permalink   ·

South African commuters, left stranded by a bus drivers’ strike, vent their anger
Not the first time that’s happened there; they burned down a train station a few years ago, too. And having first-hand experience of Pretoria’s public transport system, I can understand their frustration. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened here yet. Permalink   ·

Motion induced blindness [c/o MetaFilter]
Very cool. Would this have any significance in terms of drivers’ vision, perhaps? Permalink   ·

RideAccidents: your one-stop shop for news-clippings about accidents on amusement park rides [c/o Boing Boing]
Permalink   ·

Podcasts from Etech 2005 [c/o Boing Boing]
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Overheard in Dublin
An homage to Overheard in New York, perhaps? Permalink   ·

VideoLAN might disappear due to patent legislation
They have to kill everything that’s good in the world, don’t they? Permalink   ·

Untitled (Art History Notes): $25k starting bid
Permalink   ·

The Thumb-sized Heart of TK the Cat
I’m not embarrassed to say I cried when I read this. Permalink   ·

Old-school Soviet service one way, 70s retro chic the other: riding the rails from Helsinki to St Petersburg [c/o del.icio.us/cityofsound]
Permalink   ·

MGM leaves its private web directories open to the public
Speaking of MGM, their movie channel was added to my basic cable this week. The only noteworthy thing to say about it is the wildly inappropriate scheduling of 18-cert films well before the watershed. If it was a subscription channel, that would be different. But it isn’t. I don’t mind hearing ‘fuck’ on TV before 9pm, but I don’t think the majority would agree. Permalink   ·

I’ve Got Something in My Front Pocket for You
This, dear reader, is why I love South Park. (You know I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be a real Noel Coward tune, too.) Permalink   ·

Metafor: Visualizing Stories as Code (PDF)
Something worthwhile from the Media Lab for once. Not like that stupid Clocky. Permalink   ·

Jack Schofield interviews Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield
I wonder what Wittgenstein (he of the language games) would make of the whole tagging-slash-folksonomy phenomenon… Permalink   ·

Quicksilver tips and tricks at 43 Folders
Quicksilver is such an amazing idea and so easy to use that it’s a wonder Apple didn’t think of it first. Permalink   ·

Become the Idlewords.com macropatron
Injoke alert! Permalink   ·

The Guardian’s April Fool’s Day Quiz
Nine out of nine: perfect score! I ain’t no fool, yo. Permalink   ·

Hybrid CSS Dropdowns (A List Apart #197)
Something for the summer redesign, maybe. Permalink   ·

Developing Dashboard Widgets for OS X Tiger
Doesn’t look very difficult at all. Just time consuming for someone like me. And of course I’d have to upgrade to Tiger, which I don’t see happening for a while. Permalink   ·

“The Web is not really a web after all. It is a list of lists.” [c/o kottke.org]
Permalink   ·

Pupils ‘do worse with computers’
Another one for the ‘I coulda told ya that’ file. Permalink   ·

Jack Mottram on being barred from photographing an exhibition that “utilises the function of a gallery as a public and social space for engaging with creative ideas”
Arf! Permalink   ·

What’s the weather like in Dublin?
Miserable few days ahead. Bugger. (Good link, though.) Permalink   ·

Ceefax.tv: BBC and RTE teletext online [c/o Interconnected]
It’s completely searchable and clickable, too. Fantastic. Permalink   ·

FreeMind: free mind-mapping software, written in Java [c/o del.icio.us/gleuschk]
I don’t like the way it slapped a folder into my user root directory, but it may yet prove useful enough to earn my forgiveness. Permalink   ·

Clocky is a clock for people who have trouble getting out of bed [c/o del.icio.us/gleuschk]
Oh my fucking God. Where do I begin? There’s no visible clock, for starters! This, ladies and gents, is the kind of thing on which the Irish Government spent millions of taxpayers’ money before they pulled the plug on Media Lab Europe a few months ago. Permalink   ·

Doogie Howser, M.D. was the first blogger
This is nothing short of brilliant! Permalink   ·

Notes from the Folksonomy discussion panel at O’Reilly Etech 2005
Permalink   ·

Chump change: a brilliantly scathing review of 50 Cent’s new album
Here’s a gem for you: “[50 Cent] is no big shakes as a rapper, but as a lyricist he’s a disaster. He can’t do metaphors - at one juncture he claims to have the dancefloor ‘hot as a tea kettle’ - and his idea of humour involves referring to fellatio as ‘licking the lollipop’. He can’t even insult people properly … He calls Fat Joe fat, which, given that he already calls himself fat, seems unlikely to sting the very core of his being. Fat Joe himself is hardly among hip-hop’s rapier wits - his wildly varied oeuvre includes Shit Is Real, Dat Gangsta Shit, We Run This Shit and Shit Is Real Part 2.” Permalink   ·

Bill Bryson answers your questions about A Short History of Nearly Everything
I never did listen to the live lecture I linked about before, so this will have to make do, until I ever do. Permalink   ·

Oblique Strategies for Mac OS X
(By way of the fertile mind of Brian Eno.) How could I say no? It’s free! And I might even use it. Permalink   ·

The Onion’s Irish-Heritage Timeline
Ha ha ha, and all that. Permalink   ·

Drag and Drop Images and Layers, using DHTML and Javascript [c/o del.icio.us/gleuschk]
Just when you think you’ve seen it all… Permalink   ·

Google News now customisable
Permalink   ·

Bill Bryson will deliver a lecture on A Short History of Nearly Everything this Thursday
I hope I remember this. I’m still only half-way through the book, but I’m enjoying it very much. Permalink   ·

A California judge has said that bloggers should not have the same protection afforded to journalists under US law
I’m not sure what to make of this. You can’t go making wild accusations with ‘anonymous’ sources as your only evidence, but these sites in question were reporting responsibly (providing information of public interest, at least to that segment of the public with an interest in technology) and not doing anything different than what a mainstream publication would do (PR embargoes be damned!). Permalink   ·

Yahoo! Netrospective: 10 years, 100 moments of the web
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Office Space, starring the Superfriends [c/o MetaFilter]
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Squashed Philosophers: The great philosophical texts, condensed and abridged to keep the substance, but ditching all that irritating verbiage [c/o del.icio.us/ObserverBlog]
Permalink   ·

Three new moons discovered around Saturn by the Cassini spacecraft have been given provisional names
I remember reading something about these months ago, but for some reason I didn’t keep track. Will wonders never cease? Permalink   ·

Today is Free Mojtaba and Arash Day
Permalink   ·

Proofs of a children’s spelling dictionary by Ludwig Wittgenstein could fetch £75,000
I’ve had a book on Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations on my bedside table for three years. One day, I’ll read it. Permalink   ·

How to maintain notes using Gmail
Apparently this is an ‘old school’ trick, but seeing as Gmail has been around about a year, that doesn’t make sense. But anyway. This could be adapted to maintain almost anything. I’m already using it to keep separate folders for notes, links and large documents. Permalink   ·

The Theory That Self-Interest Is the Sole Motivator Is Self-Fulfilling [c/o kottke.org]
Well, I coulda told ya that. Permalink   ·

MacInformation, a Dublin-based Apple consultancy
Permalink   ·

London Map Downloads
A very handy resource. Permalink   ·

Researchers at UCLA have tweaked HIV to create a gene therapy that attacks cancer tumors in mice
This makes be both hopeful and creeped out at the same time. Permalink   ·

Folksonomies Tap People Power
I’m thinking of a way to tag my posts here that fits in with the look of the site, and isn’t too much of a hack. Permalink   ·

Greg knows how to romance a lady
Permalink   ·

An introduction to the Kyoto Protocol
If you look at the ‘global greenhouse’ infographic linked at the end of the page, you can see how poorly Ireland is doing. Permalink   ·

Project Manager Leaves Suicide Powerpoint Presentation
“When Ron started deleting all of his old files last week, I thought he was worried about another hard-drive crash. I never imagined he was, you know, preparing.” Priceless. Permalink   ·

Hokkaido installs musical roads [c/o Interconnected]
Why is it that the Japanese always come up with the best ideas? Permalink   ·

What If…
See? There really is more to the internet than weblogs. Permalink   ·

The Moleskine Multi-Tab Hack [c/o del.icio.us/merlinmann]
I’m using my Moleskine to keep track of my dissertation progress — citations, notes, etc. — so something like this might come in very handy. Permalink   ·

Crazy shoppers cause stampede at north London Ikea opening
I shouldn’t have to say this, but IT’S ONLY BLOODY FURNITURE! Permalink   ·

I got myself a new watch today
It’s great! I don’t want to take it off! Permalink   ·

Wikipedia entry for ‘Folksonomy’
Permalink   ·

The Sound of Data [c/o del.icio.us.com/jack]
It sounds better than you might think. Permalink   ·

The Apple Store Of The Future
What a great iDea ;o) Permalink   ·

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Making driving seem more dangerous could make it safer
It seems like this is what they’re trying to do with O’Connell St here in Dublin, but will it work? Permalink   ·

Audio of the RTÉ Science Lecture for 2004, The Storied Machine by Glorianna Davenport (also available in video)
Permalink   ·

The New York Times marks the 20th anniversary of string theory [c/o The Morning News]
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Japanese robot to chat lonely elderly out of senility
I don’t know whether to be happy or scared witless. Permalink   ·

Dolphins save swimmers from shark [c/o Boing Boing]
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The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook [c/o Interconnected]
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‘Original’ great ape discovered
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In Defense of Posthuman Dignity, by Nick Bostrom [c/o Interconnected]
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Profanity Adventures
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Behold, the Gematriculator [c/o The Morning News]
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Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content
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More on Homo floresiensis, the tiny humans of Indonesia
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A fire that broke out more than 100 years ago at a Chinese coalfield has finally been extinguished
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Scientists have discovered a new and tiny species of human that lived in Indonesia at the same time our own ancestors were colonising the world
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New giant ape found in DR Congo
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Guardian Special Report: The World in 2020
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Quicksilver: moving around and training yourself
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The Lifehacks Wiki [c/o del.icio.us/merlinmann]
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First direct image of a planet orbiting another star [c/o helium-3]
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A Silicon Valley startup claims to have cracked one of most elusive goals of the software industry: a near-universal emulator that allows software developed for one platform to run on any other
Permalink   ·

Maciej Ceglowski demands four minutes and twenty seconds of your life
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At least the Beeb gets Wikipedia
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Wired catches on to Kaiju Big Battel, about two years after I did
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“It’s sort of the Jay Leno of computers, but otherwise it’s beautiful.”
Permalink   ·

The all-new iMac is unveiled
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People genuinely enjoy telling others off if they have done something wrong, according to scientists
Permalink   ·

Make your own miniature paper TransFormers [c/o Boing Boing]
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European scientists have discovered what they describe as the smallest Earth-like planet orbiting a star outside our Solar System
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Ethical Philosophy Selector [c/o plasticbag.org]
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Mat and Harper are coming to Europe
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Isaac Brock’s message to the children of the world: “Grow the fuck up.”
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I found a digital camera in the woods… [c/o del.icio.us/kfan]
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Tricks of the Trade
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“Oedipus, as you know, is the tragic Greek king who killed his father and married his mother, a sequence of events that seldom turns out well.”
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“I don’t know what the woman wanted, waiting for the train. The sockless junkie is another story, because I know he felt a real pleasure at the cascade of pocket change into his palm, relief imminent. I don’t have room to criticize, because when I write, I make my living asking strangers for their approval, and their change.”
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The morons come out in force again; this time they want to be famous (but wait, is that Bill Wyman? And OJ Simpson?? OMG!!!) [c/o del.icio.us/mathowie]
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Steve Minutillo on the lack of undo in Safari: “Didn’t that lady throw that hammer through the scary guy on that big screen so I don’t have to deal with this?” [c/o Antipixel]
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“The ghost of my father keeps leaving me post-its.”
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Introduction to Yakuza Japanese
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Whatchoo doin back there? [c/o del.icio.us/cityofsound]
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Cinematic Supervillain Showdown! [c/o kottke.org]
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Don’t feel bad if you often get lost in cities — network analysis shows their structure is peculiarly difficult to navigate
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“If TiVo were a beverage, it’d be a tall glass of Jamaican ginger beer with chipped ice and a lime wedge, while the Explorer 800 would be a paper cup of warm fake lemonade stirred with the finger of a nose-picking six-year-old.”
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The Chipmunks, slowed down (4.3MB mp3) [c/o The Morning News]
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Groksoup and the 5th Anniversary of Hosted Blogging [c/o Interconnected]
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Putting my website on the map [c/o Submit Response]
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ShaBot 6000: a comic strip for the 21st century modern Jew!
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iPod vs. The Cassette [c/o del.icio.us/magnetbox]
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Best restaurant menu ever! (PDF) [c/o kottke.org]
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“Sheep are quite intelligent creatures and have more brainpower than people are willing to give them credit for.” They’re plotting to take over the world… [c/o Interconnected]
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NASA’s Cassini has found the Death Star [c/o Metafilter]
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The Big Web Design Details List
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Google is looking for Ireland-based part-time internet researchers
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Conversational Cheap Shots
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“Somebody related to Charlie Brown’s teacher reminded all of those waiting for the uptown local train to report any suspicious objects or persons to ghuaghuaawa waghawawa.”
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SA crime-stoppers use ‘evil eye’
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Spamusement: Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines
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Cooper Black: Behind The Typeface
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Movies classified by philosophical theme [c/o del.icio.us/magnetbox]
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Bad baby names
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“I hold my hands up. I did plagiarise. I never dreamt it was a problem.”
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A Tribute to the late Ronald Reagan
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Bushgame: Hulk Hogan rallies America’s greatest heroes to take on the evil forces of the Bush Administration! (NSFW!) [c/o the irrepressible Mat Honan]
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Dublin City Collective
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Lists of Famous Pairs [c/o del.icio.us/merlinmann]
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Want some more evidence to support my stupidity theory? Get a load of this!
Permalink   ·

“College is something you complete. Life is something you experience.” Thanks for the encouragement, Jon.
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I used to feel guilty for assuming that most people, in general, are idiots - but after reading this beautiful piece of evidence, I feel much more comfortable with my assumptions [c/o A Whole Lotta Nothing]
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John Gruber with another perspective on the Movable Type fiasco
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Test Drive a Macintosh [c/o Submit Response Reading]
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I disagree with Merlin: I think “Da Lovas o’ Henry James” would make a brilliant gang name
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Star Trek flat for sale
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The Shining, in 30 seconds (and re-enacted by bunnies) [c/o plasticbag.org]
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Bad Names for Undercover Police Officers
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“[Although] it’s odd (and a little hard to take) when the hucksterish Jillette makes impassioned pleas for sanity, his overall tone of snide indignation is almost always funny, like when he calls a shady chiropractor who works on toddlers a “baby-twisting motherfucker.”“
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I’m a blahbity blah blappity blopeity blaaah blah blahblah bleeeblooooblah! What type of blahblah are you? [c/o blooblah.blorp]
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“It’s bollocks. All of it. An utter joke.”
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Pareidolia: a type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct
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The Degree Confluence Project [c/o Submit Response]
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The smallest wonder in the world…
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From An Essay on Beauty and Judgment by Alexander Nehamus
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Web standards jokes
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Chicago Mile by Mile [c/o del.icio.us/magnetbox]
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Wikipedia entries for Toronto [c/o Accordion Guy]
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Courtship by haiku: 1, 2, 3, 4
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Chemistry Exam
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Mat’s weblog is was three years old today yesterday
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The Adventure of Lemmiwinks
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Man’s Best Friendster [c/o linkydink]
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“Plato is a wrestling recruit at Athens University. He’s supposed to wrestle for them in the Olympics. They’ve given him a chariot to wrestle there, because he’s a big-time wrestler. He’s failing his philosophy class, Basic Thought, so his school hires Socrates, who’s a senior, to tutor him. Plato’s a little thick, so he ends up cheating, and they end up road-tripping to Mount Olympus so he can wrestle in the Olympics. The Greek gods Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades are all wrestling fans, and they’re betting on whether he’ll make it, so it’s kind of a big Greek epic.”
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Unlimited choice = Genuine suffering
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Does God Exist? Yes, Mathematician Says [c/o leuschke.org]
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“They wanted to be left alone and we left them alone and maybe we shouldn’t have left them alone.”
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Don’t you hate reviews by writers with fancy degrees who have seen the movie and have informed opinions? Now’s your chance to fight back! [c/o Magnetbox]
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Physicists in Austria say that they have observed events separated by the shortest time interval ever, and plan to use the technique to study atomic phenomena
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I am The Catcher in the Rye! (Take the Book Quiz yourself) [c/o leuschke.org]
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My bladder is far too shy for this toilet
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Giant Black Hole Rips Apart Unlucky Star In Cosmic Reality Show
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I’m still the first MacDara in both Yahoo! and Google - Go me!
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BBC News Quiz: Are you a cynic? [c/o plasticbag.org]
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The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity [c/o dive into mark]
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An American Airlines pilot terrified passengers when he asked Christians to identify themselves and allegedly went on to call non-Christians “crazy”
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Black Holes Can Be Ejected From Galaxies
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Quotes from Either President of the United States George W. Bush or Senator/Chancellor/Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars Movies [c/o Kottke.org]
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Ten ways of thinking about deconstruction [c/o Boing Boing]
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“Radioisotopes J. Borgia can go to hell, and I don’t care if he does want to chat about “benedictine racetrack degas grapevine”.”
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RealPlayer Free, now spyware-free (thanks to the BBC) [c/o Boing Boing]
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Alpha testing to begin soon on Movable Type 3.0
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Web-based Scrabble, nicely done in CSS and Javascript [c/o kottke.org]
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Richard Dawkins’ paean to the humble Apple Mac
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Only one week left to vote for your favourites in this year’s Bloggies
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74% liberal, 26% conservative [c/o weblog wannabe]
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Holy Crap! I’ve been blogged by Bob Mould!
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Antarctica at a glance (PDF file)
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These guys will take a scanned sample of your handwriting and turn it into a fully-functioning computer font for you, for free! [c/o plasticbag.org]
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Thank You Fahelpinme Be the Cat I Know I Can Howcan I Put Thistha Cat That’s Sep Rit from Othacats
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101 Things To Do in 2004
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The Best of 2003
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Tom Coates on Kottke’s metadata post (also: Sippey throws his hat in the ring)
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Using Excel to write a love letter (plus some stuff about metadata overload)
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Saddam Hussein Kevin Kline arrested in Iraq
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We are all nerds now!
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‘We can implant entirely false memories’
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Now that’s what I call a venn diagram [c/o sippey.typepad.com]
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Animals ‘can think about thought’
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Awwwwwwww! [c/o highindustrial.]
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Wired’s things of the past [c/o plasticbag.org]
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A.N. Whitehead’s 1927 Harvard Philosophy exam paper [c/o leuschke.org]
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Vampire Killing Kit Sells for $12,000 [c/o Magnetbox]
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Monsters Are Everywhere!
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Matthew Engel reports on how America [rightwing corporate America, that is] is ravaging the planet
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The incredible story of two British teenagers who completely revolutionised the concept of video games
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“Lately I’ve been wondering what would happen if a robot and a person had sex.”
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The Picture of Everything [c/o leuschke.org]
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Amusement park physics
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Hypnotoad! [c/o kottke.org]
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Movie manners courtesy cards [c/o Accordion Guy]
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Bill Bailey has a weblog [c/o Infovore]
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The first genomic analysis of human faeces reveals that our guts are teeming with 1,200 different viruses, more than half of which are unknown
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Can you tell a real smile from a fake one?
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The Reflex Tester [c/o Signal vs. Noise]
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Ten Things I Dig About Panther
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According to a recent study, Kansas really is flatter than a pancake (plus more about the Ig Nobel Prizes)
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Unnervingly accurate personality test results (accurate for me, anyway)
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A Brief Overview of Linguistic Features of the Blogosphere [c/o Interconnected]
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Today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day
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I go to sleep in a soldier-like position, but I usually wake up a starfish
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Acoustics professor proves ducks DO echo after all
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A Letter from Walt Kraemer, composer of The Pinball Song
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Obituary for American philosopher Donald Davidson
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Another introduction to semiotics (structuralism and post-structuralism) [c/o Interconnected]
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A story that makes you realise that the world isn’t a completely evil, despicable place after all
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It started when Johnny Boots, the man with magical boots, broke away from the Power Gang…
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Semiotics: A Primer
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Cognitive Psychology & Information Architecture: From Theory to Practice
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Manuel DeLanda: Annotated Bibliography [c/o Interconnected]
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Karma Vertigo: or Considering The Excessive Responsibilities Placed On Us By The Dawn Of The Information Infrastructure [c/o Interconnected]
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Boatmen, a spam poem
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flash mob, noun: An impromptu gathering, organized by means of electronic communication, of the unemployed.
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I blog like this too [c/o leuschke, who also blogs like me]
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Do Not Move To Canada
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Winnie-the-Pooh Redux
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Amateur physicist solves Zeno’s paradoxes with a revolutionary conceptualisation of time [c/o Frownland]
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Lebowski Fest!
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Today is National Orgasm Day, apparently
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It’s moving… but it isn’t (and many others like it) [c/o onlineblog]
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In the 3 weeks (approx.) since signing up, Knowspam has blocked an incredible 1,165 spams from my inbox
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What kind of brain do you have?
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Buddy Hackett 1924-2003
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Sumo Faces
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The internet is not shit
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How to swear in 108 languages [c/o Boing Boing]
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Raymond Carver, agony uncle (I’m sure this is a re-run, but it’s a good one)
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The guy in Memento should have had a blog
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Comparison between left- and right-aligned website navigation menus
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McSweeney’s: Rounder Characters in No Time Flat!
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Instant Enemy returns tomorrow; in the meantime, rock out to Slayer, MIDI-style
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Click here to view this site through the kaleidoscopic spectacles of mid-90’s homepage design [c/o kottke.org]
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“Were you born with a dim bulb or did you have it installed?” (this is what I get for trolling on a right-wing blog; always with the acidic one-liners)
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“Blogging is really the online equivalent of a philosophy department. What else does it do but produce other philosophy professors (or record store clerks)?” (this is so true, it hurts) [c/o The Truth Laid Bear]
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360 degree panorama from the top of Mount Everest [c/o kottke.org]
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Bert and Ernie Call it Quits: Eight Six-line Plays Initiated by Bert (Barthelme-esque)
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Instant Enemy is back!
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“If a number can’t come real / then I don’t need that stumper / The concept of the variable / can take it in the dumper.” [c/o AccordionGuy]
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The Onion presents Cooking Tips
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Antipixel in pirated site controversy
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Five guesses at the number you’re thinking of right now (the first of these was once statistically proven on Tomorrow’s World, I kid you not)
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How to use Japanese style toilet (love the creative spelling of ‘bowl’)
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At McSweeney’s: Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn discuss The Fellowship of the Ring [c/o kottke.org]
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How to make a quick links weblog in Movable Type (this helped me a great deal)
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AccordionGuy: What happened to me and the New Girl
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Blurbs: Writing Previews of Web Pages
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Matt Haughey on real names in cyberspace
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About

This is the personal website of MacDara Conroy, a production journalist and mediavore in Dublin, Ireland. Read more »

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This page is a reverse chronology of Microlog entries by MacDara Conroy filed under Interesting. You will find many more in the Archives.

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