Rod Begbie
About: Grumpy Scots git.
Lives in Somerville, MA. Earns pay in the R&D group at a consumer electronics company whose name RhymesWithNose. Blogs at groovymother.com
Photos:
Blog Posts
Things - task management on the Mac
--I will confess to having fallen somewhat head-over-heels in love with Things as a TODO list manager over the last couple of days. Requires some li...
Stevey's Blog Rants: Business Requirements are Bullshit
--"ONLY BUILD STUFF FOR YOURSELF. That's the Golden Rule of Building Stuff. If you're planning to build something for someone else, let someone else...
REST Request
--Another handy REST post. The API I'm building at work currently only uses GET & POST, this helps explain that it's still "RESTful"
iTeletext
--MODE 7 lives! Teletext viewer for iPhone.
CD Purchase: Primal Scream - Beautiful Future
--Primal Scream - Beautiful Future
Braid's ending explained
--SPOILER, natch. Internet theorising about a non-obvious subtext to Braid's story. If Portal was a video-game short-story, is Braid a video-game p...
Explaining REST to Damien Katz
--A good "Wherefore REST?" post.
BackwardsIncompatibleChanges - Django
--Suspect I will be referring to this a lot over the next week or so as I bring my blog code up to snuff with the impending Django 1.0 release. (Curr...
Amazing but True Cat Stories
--The best use of Mechanical Turk so far: Paying people pennies to draw cats and supply cat stories.
ERNEST BORGNINE - Secret to Old Age
--Ernest Borgnine delivers a pitch-perfect stage whisper on Fox News.
CD Purchase: The Dandy Warhols - ...Earth To the Dandy Warhols...
--The Dandy Warhols - ...Earth To the Dandy Warhols...
Manny Ramirez Likes Red Sox's New Blue Uniforms | The Onion
--"I'm also happy that they shortened the Green Monster, and painted it blue, because that wall was too tall before"
Symmetry Explorer
--Symmetrize Flickr photos based on tag. Ones that turned out interesting to me were "bassethound", "kiss", "hippo" and, disturbingly, "boobs".
PushPopURL
--A stack for URLs you don't have time to read now. Bookmarklets control the stack, so you can push pages when you're busy, and pop them when you're ...
Google Translate now for iPhone
--Never spend money on a foreign phrase book again -- translate phrases on the fly with Google Translate.
Chandler 1.0!
--Holy crap! The Chandler Project ("star" of the excellent book "Dreaming in Code") has shipped version 1.0, a scant six years after it was promised...
We need a better class of conservative
--Taken from a comments thread on Current.com: I agree, this site is supposed to be in the hands of the people, but it seems to be serving as a lib...
Anatomy of a Subway Hack
--The presentation on hacking the MBTA which was pulled from Defcon due to a court order… but not before the slide deck had been distributed.
Official Braid Walkthrough and Cheats
--Braid, the stonking painty platformy puzzley game released on XBox live this week, has an official walkthrough. Make sure and read the second page...
Paris Hilton Responds to McCain Ad
--"See you at the debates, bitches"
"Clear" Air-Travel Pass Data Stolen From SFO
--I've always hated "Clear", the pay-$100-to-skip-to-the-front-of-the-security-line card. Firstly, because it's private enterprise falsely dressed a...
Movie box office charts
--Nice streamy visualisations showing movie box office sales over time.
Deep Fried Scotland
--Short video review of all that is great about Scottish cuisine: Deep-frying. Helpfully subtitled.
Large Hadron Collider nearly ready - The Big Picture
--I'm bored of "beauty in nature" -- Hurrah for The Big Picture covering beauty in science! Enjoy these photos before they turn the collider on, and...
It's a Different Set of Rules - The Daily WTF
--Forwarded to me by a co-worker after a grammar argument. "The comma is supposed to go inside the quotes."
Political videos meet Google speech-to-text technology
--Google has a first stab at making video content searchable, across a selection of political speeches. Will be interesting to see how well this works.
Zero Punctuation : The E3 Trailer Park
--Zero Punctuation is always worth watching -- viciously funny videogame reviews -- but this week's is a great sampler if you haven't watched before.
BBC - Music
--The first part of Auntie Beeb's integration with MusicBrainz and Wikipedia is live. Every artist in MusicBrainz now has a page on bbc.co.uk, featu...
Kansan sticks it to election system
--Sean Tevis's xkcd-style request for campaign funds for his attempt at the Kansas legislature ended up bringing in almost $100k. It'll be interesti...
It's 1975 And This Man Is About To Show You The Future
--Slides from a vintage IBM sales presentation. I might do a presentation some time that *only* uses these for illustration.
GET YOUR WAR ON: the new animated series
--The same Get Your War On you know and love, now with moving pictures and ringing telephones int he background. Hurrah!
Silverback: guerrilla usability testing
--Pretty damned nifty usability-testing app for OS X. With an *awesome* icon. Similar to (and considerably cheaper than) the Windows app Morae.
Ophcrack
--Windows password cracker. Has an interesting open-source business model: The cracker is GPL, and there are free (but limited) Rainbow tables. To g...
The Muppets Unleash More Viral Videos onto the Web
--So great to see the Muppet company having fun with the medium of YouTube. Incredibly reminiscent of the old musical numbers on The Muppet Show.
Amazon.com - Universal Wish List Button
--Bookmarklet that lets you add items from any online store to your Amazon.com wishlist.
A Detailed Explanation Of How The BSA Misleads With Piracy Stats
--Ah, the "ripple effect". Inflating statistics since time immemorial. (The first comment is ace, too!)
Lobel: Manny fined -- and wasn't happy about it
--Conjecture and rumours about Manny Ramirez -- Are we seeing the start of a "Nomar is not a team player"-style whispering campaign by the Sox front ...
Safety first in Bangkok
--Ever wondered what the international pictogram is for "girl on girl fisting"? It's like xkcd porn.
Dr. Horrible's Freeze Ray Will Stop the World
--Summary of Joss Whedon's new online musical miniseries. I plopped down the $4 for a "season pass" in iTunes, and loved the first episode. Looking...
Running for Office: It's Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner
--An information architect explains his reasons for running for state office in Kansas, in an xkcd stylee. Worth sending $8.34 to.
Pasties, Pasties Everywhere - Freakonomics
--The Economist replies in their characteristically classy manner when Stephen Dubner accuses them of misspelling "pastries". (And now I find myself...
DEFENDER of the favicon
--The classic arcade game Defender, implemented as a Firefox favicon! A bit of a silly hack, but the idea of updating favicons dynamically (to alert...
CD Purchase: Zoë Keating - One Cello x 16: Natoma
--Zoë Keating - One Cello x 16: Natoma
Feist on Sesame Street
--In retrospect, "1 2 3 4" was an obvious choice.
Adeona: A Free, Open Source System for Helping Track and Recover Lost and Stolen Laptops
--Open-source app which logs your laptop's network location (and optionally a snapshot from the webcam) to a DHT distributed database at irregular in...
jgrowl
--JavaScript growl-like popup messages for webpages.
Gates vs. Jobs The Game // Current
--Some geek silliness on the Current site.
RA DIOHEA_D / HOU SE OF_C ARDS - Google Code
--New Radiohead video was shot without cameras, instead using lasers to get 3D data which was visualized. Chunks of the data are available from Goog...
Shazam iPhone app
--Probably the best free app on the iPhone so far: Hold your iPhone near a music source, and it will identify the track for you. My initial tests ag...
GraphJam: Let's Dance
--David Bowie in flowchart form
CD Purchase: Beck - Modern Guilt
--Beck - Modern Guilt
Zoomii.com - The "Real" Online Bookstore
--Whizzy Amazon-browsing UI, for those who like to judge books by their covers.
Protocol Buffers: Google's Data Interchange Format
--A smidgen of Google's secret sauce -- a lighter-weight-than-XML data interchange format, with heavily optimized cross-language serialization routin...
Charlie Brooker: These days, I assume that everything I do is probed and examined by omnipotent corporations
--"The way things are going, I half-expect to hear a quiet electric "peep" noise each time I flush the toilet; another bowel movement logged by Bumla...
The Greatest Bug of All
--Or "Why you need to understand operating system fundamentals if you want to ship end-user software"
Yay! Fireworks!
--Photo essay on the insanity of fireworks packaging, courtesy of Cabel Sasser. When I was a kid in the UK, home fireworks were crappy little cheap ...
Queue everything and delight everyone
--Good thoughts from Les Orchard -- Your webapps don't have to do all your work the second a user clicks the button on a form. Queue up tasks an...
Boston Red Sox - Balance ball
--Bizarre event at today's Sox/Yankees game. Johnny Damon caught a hit before colliding with the wall and losing the ball... which balanced atop...
Visualizing 4.5 years of Flickr development
--Flickr's codebase-over-time visualized.
GLaGPS - Genetic Lifeform and Global Positioning System
--Tweak your Garmin GPS to speak like Portal's GLaDOS. Be wary if it instructs you to stop for cake.
Fail Whale sculpture - a set on Flickr
--Quality! A 3D-sculpture of Twitter's almost-ever present beacon of FAIL!
Sorry I Missed Your Party
--Found photos of dreadful-looking celebrations, with appropriately snarky commentary. Ace!
An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant
--Even billg gets frustrated by the pain of Windows Update.
CD Purchase: Sigur Rós - Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
--Sigur Rós - Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
CD Purchase: Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends
--Coldplay - Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends
firefox-mac-pdf
--In ye olde days, displaying PDF documents in the browser drove me nuts. You'd unwittingly click on a link, and your entire web browser would ...
YouTube - ???????????
--THEREMIN CAT IS THEREMINNING!
Lit 101 Class in Three Lines or Less
--"Ah! Kill it, lion Jesus!"
How to nap
--Boston Globe article advocating the refreshing power of a mid-afternoon nap. Wonder if anyone would mind if I scheduled time in the conference roo...
Stewart Butterfield's bizarre resignation letter
--That's the way to do it. "Nary a sheet of tin has rolled of our own production lines in over 30 years!"
Most complex crop circle ever discovered in British fields - Telegraph
--This should be the calling card for xkcd geohashing meetups.
reddit goes open source
--Reddit release (most of) the source for the site, allowing anyone to host their own reddit. Excellent video announcement from the mascot too.
Do not go and see Signs. It is a bad, bad movie.
--From 2002: Why I will never see an M. Night Shyamalan movie again, and am completely unsurprised at the vitriol being unpoured on The Happening.
The New Republic Movie Review: "The Happening"
--"This film is so bad that I feel compelled to make a spoiler-laden list of its most laughably terrible parts rather than review it."
Bad Science: Money money money money money
--Ben Goldacre on the experiments that show that humans are happier with things that cost them more money. I suggest naming this "the Bose effe...
What is a Munchy Box?
--The culinary minds in Scottish chip shops that brought your the deep-fried pizza have a new creation. (They can give me American nationality, but ...
Send Barack your baby
--"Barack Obama travels a lot, but many babies live in places he hasn't been. Send him your baby, and he'll kiss it and send it back ...
The Onion | CD Sales Down, LP Sales Up: What do you think?
--"I think at this point people are just fucking with the record industry as a whole."
CD Purchase: Supergrass - Diamond Hoo Ha
--Supergrass - Diamond Hoo Ha
Civics and Citizenship Study Materials
--One for the Americans: download the "Civics Flash Cards", and see how well *you'd* do on the Citizenship test.
Start!
--A one day conference for folks interested in starting their own company. A cheap $200, since this is one of those conferences that's hard to ...
PhoneFinger
--Testing tool for iPhone development -- Replace your mouse cursor with a lifesize finger. Needs a dirty-fingernail easter egg, if you ask me.
The Letter in the Pond
--A grumpy "message to the future" uncovered when a pond was dug up in a back garden. I hope the author is aware their hard work was in vain.
That design is money!
--About the UI design of Wells Fargo ATMs. My decision to open a Wells Fargo account after moving to SF was largely influenced by the experience I h...
CD Purchase: Aimee Mann - @#%&*! Smilers (Special Edition)
--Aimee Mann - @#%&*! Smilers (Special Edition)
Big Ideas (Don't get any)
--Beautiful video of Radiohead's "Nude" being "performed" on old hardware. (Slightly skeptical because I don't recall t...
The Big Picture
--Blog by Alan Taylor gathering together the best photos from the newswires, displayed at a decently-high resolution.
Video speech matching (TheyWorkForYou.com)
--TheyWorkForYou has a crowdsourcing project matching the Hansard transcripts of parliamentary debates to BBC video. It's pretty easy work if y...
CD Purchase: The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing
--The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing
CD Purchase: Weezer - Weezer (Red Album)
--Weezer - Weezer (Red Album)
Rekindled
--In 2004, due to a job change, I switched from commuting to work via public transport to driving each day. The biggest change this made to me was t...
DenyHosts
--Excellent Unix tool which watches for attacks on ssh and blocks malicious hosts from connecting. I've only just found that it has a "syn...
Read at Work
--Classic literature, camouflaged for reading at your desk. About the only time I've liked Flash's full screen view for anything other tha...
The Question of Global Warming
--Outstanding and thoughtful article by Freeman Dyson.
Techdirt: Web 2.0 Buzzword Bingo
--"To be useful across different types of social media, profiles and reputation have to be localized and linked to the context of the conversati...
CD Purchase: Spiritualized - Songs in A&E
--Spiritualized - Songs in A&E
CD Purchase: Mogwai - Young Team (Remastered)
--Mogwai - Young Team (Remastered)The classic Mogwai album remastered with an extra disc of rarities and live tracks. I first bought Young Team in 1...
CD Purchase: The Breeders - Safari EP
--The Breeders - Safari EP
TypePad AntiSpam
--SixApart launch an Akismet-compatible anti-comment-spam system, with a GPL'd open-source backend available for customized installs. I've...
Man Allegedly Bilks E-trade, Schwab of $50,000 by Collecting Lots of Free 'Micro-Deposits'
--Man opens thousands of checking accounts, then links them to E*Trade, who verify each by sending sub-dollar deposits. The richard-pryor-in-superma...
Guitar Hero: On Tour: R.I.P. Guitar Hero (2005-2008)
--Activision stares down that delicate "So bad it's good" line, before pissing all over it. "Wiggle wiggle wiggle YEAH!"
chumby > london tube status
--Even though I don't live in London, I like having this pop up on my Chumby. It's just a nice way to feel ambiently connected to the UK.
Break Up the Memcache Dog Pile
--Good tips on how to use memcache in a way that doesn't put a huge strain on your database every time the cache expires.
COLOURlovers :: Patterns
--ColourLovers has a new (to me) section collecting tileable patterns. Some gorgeous designs here -- just the thing for your wallpaper.
LastGraph3
--The last.fm music visualizer just upped the awesome a tad. I love the "posters" showing your artist preferences over time.
YAZ
--Suggested advertising slogan for Boston: Avoid "the impossible dream" with this contraceptive pill. (Alternative slogan for lovers of mi...
Music Catch
--Gentle quick and fun flash game, with lovely piano accompaniment.
Weezer, "Pork and Beans"
--The YouTubiest video ever, with helpful links to the original videos.
Biggest Drawing in the World
--An artist uses the planet as his canvas, sketching a self-portrait by shipping a GPS-tracking briefcase around the world.
Owls - Weebl's Stuff
--I try hard to resist linking to every single animation Weebl posts, but this one was too good not to share.
MOO.com | API
--Moo's printing services made available through an API. Generate the graphics and text you want, shove em over to Moo as XML, and they'll...
Treasure Island Music Festival
--Awesome looking two-day music festival in San Francisco -- Justice, Goldfrapp, Spiritualized and The Raconteurs are amongst the acts. Tickets go o...
PuzzleManiak
--Great puzzle collection for the (jailbrokened) iPhone. Some are a bit fiddly to play with your finger as stylus, but overall they're a lot of...
Nom Nom Obama
--Makes me smile every time I look at it.
Clutch
--Web remote-control plugin for the Transmission bittorrent client. Very handy.
Spectra Visual Newsreader | msnbc.com
--Interesting attempt by MSNBC to visualize (their own) RSS feeds.
Doctor Who - Steven Moffat Takes Charge
--This is amazingly good news. Steven Moffat (writer of Coupling and Press Gang, as well as the best episodes of "new" Doctor Who) is taki...
Favrd. Trickle-down egonomics for the twitter attention sp...
--Digest of the most-favourited tweets, with a "webcock-free" twist. Some great examples of what can be achieved with 140 characters.
I Love Stars
--Lightweight menu-bar app for OSX which displays, and lets you edit, the star rating for the current track in iTunes.
Irn-Bru: If
--Excellent advert from Irn-Bru: A staggeringly accurate glimpse into the Scottish psyche.
The Best of "Manny Being Manny"
--ESPN's Baseball Tonight runs down some of the best WTF?! Manny moments.
Debian OpenSSL Predictable PRNG Toys
--More details on the Debian openssl patch farrago. Important point: Every sysadmin needs to scan their boxes (not just Debian users) to find any co...
US Trailer for 'Life on Mars'
--Preview clip of the US version of Life on Mars. Getting past the generic music and cheesy voiceover, this looks like it has the potential to get t...
The Debian SSL fubar farrago - some light perspective
--If you have a Debian or Ubuntu box and used it to generate an SSH key in the last couple of years, due to a rather heinous bug, there’s a hig...
XBMC on OS X
--Port of the XBox Media Center to OS X. Works with the Apple Remote, making it more elegant than my usual VLC + Sofa Control combination. Looks good.
Brand new Google Reader for iPhone
--Lovely AJAXy enhancements to Google Reader make it a wicked quality experience on the iPhone.
Things younger than John McCain
--The state of Alaska, the polio vaccine, and both of Barack Obama's parents are younger than John McCain.
SlideShare: Ignite Web 2.0 Expo SF II
--The slide decks from the recent Ignite night, synced up to recordings of the presentations. Each is a mere five minutes long, and I highly recomme...
tms - Command line client for Time Machine backups
--Command line tool for interrogating and diffing Time Machine backups.
The car, the radio, the night - and rock's most thrilling song
--Travelogue round Route 128, inspired by Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner"
CD Purchase: Shawn Lee & The Ping Pong Orchestra - Miles of Styles
--Shawn Lee & The Ping Pong Orchestra - Miles of Styles
It's Now Completely Impossible To Sell A Laptop On Ebay
--I can't imagine trying to sell anything of value on eBay these days -- it's hard enough on Craigslist, and that's free to post to. ...
TapeDeck. ?? The tape recorder…fast-forwarded to Mac OS X.
--Graphically lovely, and drop-dead simple, audio recording app.
Sunshine Project Uncovers US Military "Gay Bomb"
--Tonight's "30 Rock"? Not *entirely* based on fiction.
Processing.js
--John Resig has ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, using the <canvas> tag. John is officially one of the most scary-...
Instant Rimshot
--Because you never know when you're going to quickly need to accentuate some comedy.
Chronotron
--Excellent time-travel-based platformer -- interact with past versions of your actions to solve puzzles.
CD Purchase: The Last Shadow Puppets - Age of the Understatement
--The Last Shadow Puppets - Age of the Understatement
Economist wins acclaim from rap duo
--Things I never thought I'd hear: Nerdcore rapping about The Economist.
Unobtrusive JavaScript with jQuery
--Some great tips from Simon Willison on using JQuery effectively.
CD Purchase: Various Artists - Radio One Established 1967
--Various Artists - Radio One Established 1967
CD Purchase: Various Artists - Radio 1's Live Lounge, Vol. 2
--Various Artists - Radio 1's Live Lounge, Vol. 2
CD Purchase: Various Artists - The Acoustic Alternative Album
--Various Artists - The Acoustic Alternative Album
CD Purchase: Various Artists - Later... Live with Jools Holland
--Various Artists - Later... Live with Jools Holland
vi in JavaScript
--Just what the internet needed... a vi clone implemented in JavaScript.
Twitter Charts
--Nice plotgraph of your Twitter posting habits.
Richard Herring slams a heckler
--How not to heckle, a handy guide.
nine inch nails: the slip
--Another NIN album released for free download under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. It should be noted that Ghosts I-IV was the first NIN al...
LOLCODE It's Everywhere
--Flickr's API includes LOLCODE as a return format. Duly noted for any APIs I might create in the future...
CD Purchase: The Breeders - Mountain Battles
--The Breeders - Mountain Battles
CD Purchase: Portishead - Third
--Portishead - Third
CD Purchase: Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I - IV
--Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I - IV
CD Purchase: The Black Keys - Attack and Release
--The Black Keys - Attack and Release
Olinda
--Schulze & Webb's hardware prototype of a socially-networked open-source digital radio. Some excellent ideas for internet-enabled physical...
5 Cats that Look Like Wilford Brimley
--The most important webpage you will look at today.
XSketch
--Multiplayer online Pictionaryalike.
Review: Apple Keyboard
--I've been using an Apple aluminium keyboard at work for the last couple of weeks (after stealing it off the desk of a departing colleague), an...
YouTube - batting stances: red sox
--Accurate and entertaining impressions of Red Sox players' batting stances. His "Youk getting a third strike" is uncanny.
Falindrome.com
--"The world's largest (only) source of fake palindromes!"
Holy Crap! Pepper // Peppermill // Mint: A Fresh Look at your Site
--Hehe. Plugin for Mint which sends you an email if you get referrers from Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc.
World Tapir Day
--Hooray for tapirs -- the most wicked awesomest damned herbivores in the world!
Creative Review: Spiritualized and Farrow: made for each other
--Interview with Jason Spaceman and Mark Farrow about the fantastic packaging they've put together for Spiritualized's albums. They'r...
CD Purchase: Various Artists - Gigantic: A Tribute to Kim Deal
--Various Artists - Gigantic: A Tribute to Kim Deal
Boston Apple Store
--Apple's "Coming Soon" facade for the new Boston Apple Store is fashioned after the Green Monster scoreboard. Well played, Apple!
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
--Clay Shirky's talk from web2expo, which was by far the best of the keynotes. "Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of c...
@TrackThis: Track FedEx/UPS/USPS/DHL Packages using Twitter
--Get DM'd on twitter (and thus on your IM, email or phone if you've got DM forwarding enabled) every time that package you're waiting...
BBC NEWS | Jazz legend Lyttelton dies at 86
--Man, this is sad news. Humph's impeccably innocent delivery of a filthy "double" entendre on "I'm Sorry I Haven't a ...
Social Networking Wars // Current
--I hadn't seen the "Super News" animations before starting working here, but they can be pretty good -- and this one is excellently g...
OAuth support for Google Accounts and Contacts API
--Google announce alpha OAuth support, a day after Yahoo announce they'll be rolling it out. Giving your password to an untrusted site just bec...
Portal/Rickroll Cake - Instructables
--The cake is a lie.
Is Mike Arrington a Dick?
--Posted without comment.
Calculate the carbon impact of your travels with Dopplr
--Lovely bit of green-design from Dopplr, giving you glanceable insight into your travel's impact on the environment.
Boston News Net
--Excellently funny blog from the folks behind ImprovBoston's new weekly satirical show. If you're in New England, it'll be well wort...
CNN Shirt
--Awesome! CNN's new "Headline on a T-Shirt" service is Widdecombeable!
The book that is indirectly responsible for me getting my new job
--A few months ago, I was in the pub with a couple of geekchums. The topic of job interviews was going round the table, in part because I’d ...
YouTube - Never Gonna Give You Up by Tay Zonday
--The entire internet on one page, frankly.
Mibbit
--Excellently-done IRC client-in-your-browser, getting around the usual firewall issues if you're on a corporate LAN.
Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Waxy.org
--Andy Baio has the scoop on the great text-adventure sequel that never was. Fascinating stuff.
MILF Island T-Shirt
--I think the NBC marketing department are onto a winner here.
Trapped in an Elevator for 41 hours
--Frankly claustrophobic CCTV footage of a man, trapped in an elevator in a New York office building for 41 hours. (Note: You may not want to watch ...
A Random interesting video from Flickr
--Hack by Kellan to find the interesting moving pictures on Flickr. Some wicked cool stuff is being uploaded.
We Can Solve It | Unlikely Alliance
--I have to admit, this commercial made my jaw drop a little. Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson side by side, in a spot for climate change prevention.
Git Magic
--Judging by the geeks I follow, I'm suspecting that learning Git should be high on my TODO list. This resource looks like a good place to start.
San Francisco Giants Band Together To Score Run | The Onion
--I really shouldn't laugh at this, since I now work across the street from AT&T Park, but... heh.
Britain's Got Talent: Gin the Dog
--Awesome animal act.
CD Purchase: Various Artists - The Saturday Sessions
--Various Artists - The Saturday Sessions
CD Purchase: The Moldy Peaches - The Moldy Peaches
--The Moldy Peaches - The Moldy Peaches
CD Purchase: Hot Chip - Made In the Dark
--Hot Chip - Made In the Dark
CD Purchase: AC/DC - Back in Black
--AC/DC - Back in Black
Portishead in Portishead // Current
--Portishead concert, showing on Current TV over the next few weeks. Material from their splendid new album, Third.
Ten Thousand Cents
--Mechanical Turk project where users were paid $0.01 to draw a section of the $100 bill.
Best Game Ever
--Improv Everywhere make a Little League baseball game into a massive event. Lovely.
Red Sox World Series Ring Raffle
--Your chance to win an ugly-ass bit of bling, and a $7000 tax bill. Um.. thanks?
Computer Science Unplugged
--Simple worksheets to explain CompSci concepts like text compression or sorting algorithms. Pretty nifty.
Absolutely Everything DVD Box Set
--The superb 90s sketch show Absolutely is finally getting a complete DVD release. Hurrah!
CD Purchase: Neon Neon - Stainless Style
--Neon Neon - Stainless Style
CD Purchase: Neon Neon - Stainless Style
--Neon Neon - Stainless Style
The Royal Mint: The New Designs Revealed
--The new UK coinage is wicked cool -- the individual coins are part of a larger picture.
COBOL ON COGS
--COBOL ON COGS IS AN OPEN-SOURCE WEB FRAMEWORK THAT AIMS AT MAKING LEGACY INTEGRATION AS EASY, FUN AND LUCRATIVE AS FIXING YEAR 2000 BUGS.
Al Jaffee - A Veteran MAD Man Remains in the Fold
--NYTimes article on Al Jaffee and his Mad Fold-Ins. Make sure to check out the interactive fold-in flash app for some great examples of his work.
Flying penguins found by BBC programme
--The Beeb pick the perfect day to launch a lovely promo video for iPlayer.
BBC Radio Labs - Still Playing in the Cloud
--BBC Radio experiment with XMPP for radio "Now Playing" information dispersal.
shirt.woot: Now Let Me Get This Straight
--Best shirt.woot in a while. Only problem? When I wear it, I can't get the bloody song out of my head.
CD Purchase: She & Him - Volume One
--She & Him - Volume One
ImprovBoston's Bachelor and Bachelorette Auction
--Attention Boston! The amassed hawtness that *is* ImprovBoston are holding a bachelor auction in May to raise money for their new theatre in Centra...
Crossover Games
--Wine for OS X and Linux especially designed to play graphically-intensive Windows games. The Orange Box and its contents are supported, and Audio-S...
Abyss & Apex : Wikihistory
--"Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what&apo...
What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?
--Oh, so close. Predictions from a 1968 issue of Mechanix Illustrated.
CD Purchase: The Raconteurs - Consolers Of The Lonely
--The Raconteurs - Consolers Of The Lonely
Rick Astley, king of the 'Rickroll,' talks about his song's second coming
--Rick on Rickrolling.
mail-trends
--Analyzes your email corpus and displays nice graphs. Currently only works with GMail, but support for all IMAP servers is planned.
CD Purchase: Tom Middleton - Lifetracks
--Tom Middleton - Lifetracks
Rod Begbie's twitter conversations - Quotably.com
--Clever attempt at threading Twitter conversations.
Arsecandle on Sea - MyMiniCity
--Lovely little piece of web frivolity -- You start with an empty patch of land, which only grows into a city as people visit the page. If you could...
wikinear.com, OAuth and Fire Eagle
--Simon Willison knocks out a quick prototype showing Wikipedia articles related to your current location, a masterpiece of mashuppery.
CD Purchase: Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple
--Gnarls Barkley - The Odd Couple
Will This Judd Apatow Movie Be Any Good? Vulture Does the Math
--It's just simple science. Superbad > Anchorman > Talladega Nights
Experimental Gameplay Project t-shirts at Target
--Target is stocking t-shirts which come with CD-ROMs of games from the Experimental Gameplay Project. Off-the-wall short-form games *and* silk-scree...
Vote for virtualization
--I rely on virtual machines for testing Windows code -- I cannot fathom how Mac developers can possibly be expected to deliver quality applications ...
How to Make a Button
--Miranda July's searing behind-the-scenes exposé of the button manufacturing industry.
ze's page :: colorwar 2008
--Ze's explanation for the colorwars on Twitter.
Do Not Reply
--The owner of donotreply.com blogs emails that have bounced to him when corporations (and government agencies) have sent email "from" @don...
Twitter / zefrank
--Ze Frank is causing splendid hijinx on Twitter. Let's go Sepia Team!
Black Guy Asks Nation For Change | The Onion
--Most gloriously offensive Onion headline in a while? Perhaps.
VPSLink Promotion: 10% Lifetime Discount Coupon
--Unsolicited testimonial: VPSLink, the virtual machine hosting service that I use to host this here very blog, has a 10% off the lifetime of your se...
Transcript of Obama's speech on race - msnbc.com
--"The path to a more perfect union [...] requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; th...
ClassNamer
--"Can't think of a good class name? Try this" Also handy for filling in status reports. "This week, I optimized the WritableCo...
RescueTime: Web-based Time Management Software
--Another example of the "ambient" data-gathering I'm becoming so fond of. Tracks what applications you use, and what websites you vi...
CD Purchase: Various Artists - Tom Middleton Presents Crazy Covers 2
--Various Artists - Tom Middleton Presents Crazy Covers 2
NPR: Obama Campaign Skewers Clinton E-mail Statement
--The Obama campaign responds to a Clinton press release in a format which highly resembles a snarky follow-up on USENET.
Sun in wintertime, We will feel just fine
--I’ve posted this as a tweet the other day, but to fill in the details… I’ve accepted a job offer to move to San Francisco next m...
Port-O-Rotary
--Your very own red rotary phone, retrofitted with cellular access, a battery and a SIM card slot. Just the thing for answering at 3am when you&apos...
Apple - Trailers - WALL•E
--After the teasers, the full trailer is up for PIxar's next flick. Summary: Amazing!
compfight
--Really nice Flickr search tool. Gives you a great at-a-glance thumbnail view.
Rock Band, Less Effective On The Street
--Reddit's Alexis's Rock Band combo "breadpig" has their first public gig.
This American Life: Tough Room
--Excellent segment on This American Life about The Onion's writing room. Skip about five minutes into the episode to find it.
The Beauty Of 99¢ iPhone Apps
--I hadn't thought of this: Apple may have said they'll let you give away apps for free on the iPhone Apps store, but why not charge a coup...
A Question of Programming Ethics
--Pretty much inevitable -- An app that asked for your GMail username & password was harvesting them. One point to the "Why we need OAuth&...
Swiss-Army-Knife Software Engineer at Bose Corporation, Framingham MA
--My group at RhymesWithNose is hiring. I can honestly say that this is the most fun and challenging job I've ever had, so if you think you&apo...
STEWART LEE - ENGLISH HECKLERS IN NEW ZEALAND
--Stewart Lee's essay on only needing, or *wanting*, 7,000 fans.
Kevin Kelly -- 1,000 True Fans
--"Anyone producing works of art needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living." Discussed this over lunch today, and could defini...
David Sedaris delivers a pizza
--Pitch-perfect parody. One for the NPR listeners in the crowd.
AOL "opens" AIM Protocol
--That "open" AIM thing announced earlier? Looks to be more of a club to try and force clients like Gaim and Adium to include AOL advertis...
CD Purchase: Salt-N-Pepa - 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection
--Salt-N-Pepa - 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection
CD Purchase: Morcheeba - The Platinum Collection
--Morcheeba - The Platinum Collection
CD Purchase: Babyshambles - Shotter's Nation
--Babyshambles - Shotter's Nation
Fire Eagle
--Fire Eagle has launched -- a broker for your physical location, which other applications can use to improve user experiences. It's really jus...
Open AIM | dev.aol.com
--AOL have opened up the AIM protocol for reals, documenting the protocol and encouraging, rather than barely-tolerating, third-party AIM clients. I...
Airborne Settlement
--If you've ever paid for the popular placebo "Airborne" (or are willing to pretend to to get some free cash), you can claim your mone...
John Resig - Unbreaking the Web
--The real reason for Microsoft's switch to web standards in IE8? John thinks he's found it.
Coding Horror: Actual Performance, Perceived Performance
--The way you code a progress bar will do more to "performance" than tweaking the process it's measuring. "Humans do not perceiv...
An hour and a half with Barack Obama
--"What's the picture that emerges from these four impressions? Smart, normal, curious, not radical, and post-Boomer. If you were asking ...
Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts
--Trent Reznor releases a new NIN album as online download with "premium" collectors offerings. Notable differences to the Radiohead "...
I Has A Hotdog!
--Did not know there was a LOLDOG meme spinoff.
iPhone Stopwatch hits 1,000 hours
--What happens when the iPhone stopwatch runs for 41 days and 16 hours.
CD Purchase: MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
--MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
CD Purchase: Kid Loco - DJ Kicks
--Kid Loco - DJ Kicks
CD Purchase: Hot Chip - DJ Kicks
--Hot Chip - DJ Kicks
CD Purchase: Various Artists - Mastercuts Chilled: 3 CD's Of Essential Chillout Classics
--Various Artists - Mastercuts Chilled: 3 CD's Of Essential Chillout Classics
CD Purchase: Goldfrapp - Seventh Tree (Special Edition)
--Goldfrapp - Seventh Tree (Special Edition)
Trunk Monkey Compilation
--A series of superb car dealership commercials. My next car had better have a Trunk Monkey.
GROW CUBE
--Why I was late for work this morning. Excellently addictive flash-puzzle.
Comcast Blocking: First the Internet -- Now the Public
--Comcast paid people to take seats at the FCC hearing in Cambridge to prevent opponents from being in the room. Just amazing in its brazenness.
Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 08 Election
--The Onion News Network is getting better and better.
Winclone
--I bought a new laptop drive for my MacBookPro last week, and with SuperDuper, was able to copy my OS X partition and boot off it within hours. The...
Stephen Fry's Podgrams
--New podcast from Stephen Fry. Subscribed!
Git - SVN Crash Course
--Bookmarking this, since work has just started creating an officially sanctioned SVN repository, so it's clearly time for me to start using a m...
Word Aligned
--Excellent geekyblog recommended to me by a co-worker. Interesting articles, which delve into algorithms and some of the guts of Python I never con...
Forumwarz
--Funny and clever RPG based on pwning internet forums. I'm having a lot of fun with it.
Photojojo's Photo Time Capsule
--Get an occasional email containing photos you uploaded to your Flickr account a year earlier. Micronostalgia. Lovely!
CoverSutra
--Got this as part of MacHeist recently, and dismissed it as "pointless eyecandy". I couldn't be more wrong -- While it is graphicall...
YouTube - VIVA OBAMA 2008
--Well, if a mariachi band won't bring out the "hispanic vote" in Texas, I don't know what will...
Obama of Dreams
--Obama t-shirts in a baseball-logo stylee. (Notably lacking in any donation to the campaign, though)
taint.org: Vote for Dustin on Saturday
--Amazing! Ireland's potential Eurovision entry treats Eurovision with precisely the seriousness it deserves. Best entry since "Guildo Ho...
Venture Capital Wear
--T-shirts for VCs. "Not Even Powerpoint Can Save You Now"
The World's Greatest Music Collection - eBay
--3m records and 300k CDs, for $3m? Bargain! /me runs off to ask for line increase on my credit cards
Newegg.com - Western Digital 250GB Notebook Hard Drive
--Reportedly, the perfect thing to supersize the diskspace of your MacBookPro. Wicked tempted to get one, cause iTunes is bastard-slow when your 116...
CD Purchase: Sia - Some People Have Real Problems
--Sia - Some People Have Real ProblemsHer cover of "I Go To Sleep" (the best Ray Davies song the Kinks never recorded) is sublime.
Music using ONLY sounds from Windows XP and 98!
--Posted mostly because it's clever, but also because I miss hacking on MOD files.
CD Purchase: Various Artists - Lost In Translation
--Various Artists - Lost In Translation
Audiosurf: Ride Your Music
--An outstandingly fun Windows game: Drive a car over coloured blocks on a track generated by an MP3 of your choosing. Pick something mellow, and yo...
chumby: barack obama is your new bicycle
--Hooray! Just what I wanted!
Vara Software : ScreenFlow
--Really rather sweet Mac screencasting software. The post-capture editing tools look handy.
ACM Queue - January/February 2008
--ACM Queue is the one freebie trade magazine that I eagerly await and read cover to cover. If you're a software engineer or architect, I highl...
Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle
--Collected facts about Barack Obama. This needs to be a Chumby app.
Flying Meat: VoodooPad
--Local private hypertexty wiki note-taking brain-dumping app for OS X. I've been using it for a few days now, and really like it.
TrackMyShipments
--Forward your shipping confirmation emails to this site, and they'll ping you as the packages move across the US.
Pepsi launches 'healthy' option
--Pepsi launches an all-"natural" version of Pepsi in a limited trial. Of course, it's just as unhealthy, being massively full of sug...
YouTube - Rabbit Rescue
--Amy Sedaris and some bunnies do some top-notch pimping for Microsoft Office.
18 Smokin' Hot Business Card Designs
--Varied mix of designs for business cards, plus links to suggestions for what to put on them. Spurred me on to creating something nicer than Moo Car...
Late Night: Behind the Brawl
--Outtakes from last week's Late Night where Conan O'Brien, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart killed time/entertained the nation (delete as a...
Android in Harvard Square
--If you're interested in developing for Google's new cellphone platform, there's a developer day in Cambridge in a couple of weeks. ...
Commuter Feed
--Crowdsourced traffic reports, via Twitter. Of course, there'll need to be another site tracking all the accidents caused by folks texting acci...
Network
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l.m.orchard (mutual) friend |
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kellan friend |
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Jonathan Boutelle friend |
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Danny O Brien friend |
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Will Bunker friend |
Comments
Great to meet another curmudgeon!
