January 2012
8 posts
I suspect I would lose a lot of these at the...
Rules: 1) The game starts after everyone has ordered. 2) Everybody places their phone on the table face down. 3) The first person to flip over their phone loses the game. 4) Loser of the game pays for the bill. via lil-b.tumblr.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
I support this plan for Blackheath Hill
But they will no longer have to take the exhausting 35-minute hike up the hillside thanks to a massive, outdoor escalator constructed by the Colombian government. via abcnews.go.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Dwarfs are far away
via tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
My money's on Firefox
I regularly use a program that doesn’t follow this rule. The program allocates a lot of memory during the course of its life, and when I exit the program, it just sits there for several minutes, sometimes spinning at 100% CPU, sometimes churning the hard drive (sometimes both). When I break in with the debugger to see what’s going on, I discover that the program isn’t...
It's not as bad as it sounds, honestly
The album was conceived as a concept album, taking the Earth from Creation through Judgement Day. Obviously such an ambitious undertaking would be difficult to do well in a single disc, and it isn’t really fully realized. via amazon.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Fetus = Vampire
Within the mammals, there is variation in how deeply the fetus sinks its placental teeth into the uterus. […] And others, the most invasive, are hemochorial, and actually breach maternal blood vessels. Humans are hemochorial.via scienceblogs.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Good luck selling this to consumers
Here’s the crazy part: when I am actually using the 4G network for tasks — such as turn-by-turn navigation or video streaming — it will drain 1-percent or more of battery life per minute. via shawnblanc.net Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
They truly are horrible creatures
In 1944 a children’s book club sent a volume about penguins to a 10-year-old girl, enclosing a card seeking her opinion. She wrote, “This book gives me more information about penguins than I care to have.” American diplomat Hugh Gibson called it the finest piece of literary criticism he had ever read. via futilitycloset.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
December 2011
25 posts
Mac + Garmin ANT Agent 2.2.0 = Forerunner 310XT...
If you’ve recently updated Garmin ANT Agent to 2.2.0 and your activities are missing from Garmin Connect, despite claims to the contrary in the status window, create a meaningless goal of type “Any Activity Type”. That seems to free up the synchronisational confusion caused by “Could not download goals” (I had no goals) and get your activities transferred...
A Christmas Creature In My Head
via creaturesinmyhead.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Winner of "Most Misguided Football Analogy" 2011
It’s wholly acceptable in parts of the Middle East to chop off the hands of thieves but we wouldn’t tolerate it here and it’s just the same when it comes to racism. via news.bbc.co.uk Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Do it to a live crab, damnit
biologists in Kyoto University in Japan have turned the shell of a (dead) crab completely transparent via architizer.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Designers have issues
I like to urge designers to always ask themselves: “Does this logo look like a penis?” The answer has to be a resounding “No”. If there is just a slight hesitation, then it probably does look like a penis. via underconsideration.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Today on "Doomed Before The Words Left His...
Instead, I’d just like to plead with my fellow developers. Before you decide to roll your own, please see if there is an existing project you could help improve instead. Consider it a way of repaying for all the open source work you have benefited from. Paving the road for others, like others have paved it for you. via mikkel.hoegh.org node.js suffers from the same kind of “cowboy...
3 tags
I love ungrounded futuristic speculation
Say you’re a hungry pedestrian walking the streets of New York and suddenly spot a new restaurant. You then make a gesture with your device to activate its voice assistant, point it at the restaurant and ask: “What rating did the New York Times give this joint?” GPS knows your precise location. The digital compass knows which direction you’re pointing. via gigaom.com This is some kind of GPS...
Rearchitecting, "very smart people" and...
… he is granted the services of some of the company’s “A Team” developers to help. Zope 3 will be based on a “component architecture”, which will allow independently developed and tested components to snap into it […] It will prefer composition over subclassing. […] Instead of being a largely monolithic system, like Zope 2, it will be comprised of very small...
I am officially old: I neither know nor like most...
It’s December so it must be time to list the best songs of the year. via metafilter.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Every morning
via sutured-infection.tumblr.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Nature: wackier than you can possibly imagine
One toad even managed to swallow a larva, which moved inside its stomach for two hours. For some reason, the toad eventually regurgitated its catch, and the larva, apparently unharmed, killed and ate the animal that had just eaten it via blogs.discovermagazine.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Do what now?
In other words, when UMG removes a video using YouTube’s CMS, that might be a takedown, but it’s not a DMCA takedown. And that, UMG argues, means that the DMCA’s rule against sending takedown requests for files you don’t own doesn’t apply.via arstechnica.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Nice set of tributes to Christopher Hitchens
via guardian.co.uk (even if he does look like a mad old Bond villain in that picture) Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
I want one of these for growing peppers, please
via vancouversun.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Freaky transparent evil plotting octopus
via tentaclegarden.tumblr.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
I love John Waters
via sutured-infection.tumblr.com He was excellent on Colbert: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/313678/june-28-2010/jo… (link will only work for US IPs) Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
American colleges sound a lot more fun than UK...
if there’s one thing college provides, it’s access to peanut butter. via amateurgourmet.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Ubuntu would do well to ponder this analogy
Want to know what happens when you make an operating system open? The same thing as when you leave your car open: sooner or later, it ends up smelling like a urinal. via mattgemmell.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
This is a really nice - but fake - cloud
via flickr.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Link dump from RSS backlog
Apologies if I’ve covered any of these already. http://laughingsquid.com/the-ultimate-hamburger-by-modernist-cuisine/ Mushroom? No chips? RUBBISH. http://www.architizer.com/en_us/blog/dyn/35672/an-urban-emoticon-that-measures-the-happiness-of-cities/ Someone buy some EL wire and make a UA version of this pleasehttp://www.bridgestone.com/corporate/news/2011112901.html Yet more...
This would be very handy
I suspect we’ll actually see an Xcode for iPad someday… the Xcode 4 UI changes and its single-window model made the app much more compatible with iPad UI conventions (the hide-and-show panes could become popovers, for example). via subfurther.com The distributed compiling seems like something you could offload to remote servers if necessary. I’m not sure how you’d run a test app on...
This definitely should be applied to software
Who was the architect who said that every great building should have a bomb in the basement, set to blow itself up after 50 years and thereby clear the land for something greater still? via bit-player.org Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Metallica: no longer even a parody band, now just...
Eight months before Metallica takes the stage in Germany, Mr. Burnstein decides whether the band should be paid in dollars, euros or a combination of the two. If exchange rates swing in a way that hurts Metallica’s earnings, he buys derivative financial instruments to lock in a preferred rate. Sometimes ticket prices are hiked to compensate for possible currency-related losses, though Mr....
Unclicked buttons should be seen and not garbage...
I was looking at about:memory and noticed entries for Facebook and Google+ URLs, even though I didn’t have either open. I figured they were probably from the social buttonry that decorates the web these days. No big deal… except they were taking up a bunch of memory! The Facebook button was using over 20mb and the Google+ button was taking over 40mb! via autonome.wordpress.com Posted via...
Dear Path (and other social networks trying to get...
It’s not that I don’t trust you - I do - but I don’t want to put my surname in. Most places I go by a single name that people know and love*.Why insist on first name and surname? What’s the rationale? It’s not like it even has to be my real name since I can create new Paths with fake names. Really, what’s the point except inconveniencing me and jwz? * people...
November 2011
50 posts
"Sir, I care nothing for your facts and even less...
As I’ve tediously explained tediously many times via tediously many actual tedious counts, President Obama actually uses “I” (and other first-person singular pronouns, like “me”, “my”, “myself”, etc.) at a slightly lower rate, in a tediously wide variety of comparable circumstances, than other recent presidents. via...
Again with the Rule 34
In a report in the venerable medical journal Fertility and Sterility, Argentinian scientists describe how they got semen samples from 29 healthy men, placed a few drops under a laptop connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi and then hit download. via today.msnbc.msn.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Time to put some points on my Holland & Barrett...
Weekly B12 injections were begun. “Soon afterward, she became less agitated, less confused and her memory was much better,” said Ms. Atkins. “I felt I had my mother back, and she feels a lot better, too. via nytimes.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
The original Keyboard Cat
via sutured-infection.tumblr.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
And a quick way to a heart attack...
it is an equally easy and enthusing way to upcycle your brioche: cubed and soaked in an egg and milk batter made chocolate-y by the addition of cocoa powder, it is then layered with chocolate chunks and chopped almonds, and baked until custardy in the middle and crusty-crisp at the top. via chocolateandzucchini.com Posted via email from Siftings | Comment »
Technoptimism vs The Grim And Brutal Truth Of...
In the public’s imagination, overnight the bitcoin went from being the currency of tomorrow to a dystopian joke. The Electronic Frontier Foundation quietly stopped accepting bitcoin donations. Two Irish scholars specializing in network analysis demonstrated that bitcoin wasn’t nearly as anonymous as many had assumed: They were able to identify the handles of a number of people who had donated...
I've woken up feeling like this
Even the ancient Egyptians, who took great pains to remove and store most internal organs prior to mummification, declined to keep the brain. Instead, they preferred to insert a long, slightly hooked tool through the nose of the body and swirl it around like a swizzle stick in a cocktail before tipping the deceased’s head forward and pouring the remnants out. via ft.com Posted via email ...
Separation of Church and State
In a vain attempt to regain control of this blog, my instagram cross-posts have moved from here to zimpenfishtagram.posterous.com. Thanks to Posterous for their posterous gem which made this a very simple task. Posted via email from Lurch of the eligible herring | Comment »
A Twitter-free week?
Trying to shamelessly copy @lipsticklori’s idea of a twitter-free week and being scared at how embedded Twitter is in my life: iPhone gets DM notifications from Tweetbot (turned off, app moved off homescreen) Blackberry gets notifications of mentions and DMs (signed out) Email gets notification of DMs (turned off) tweet.im is on my Jabber contacts list (de-friended) A select bunch of...
Makes the boys wink
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Cannon Street
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Guarded churchy
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Churchy
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Nanook
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Other monitor
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Monitor
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Bidniz
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