...more recent posts
Cloning keeps heating up. Weirder and weirder. And we're just getting started. (via robotwisdom)
Doc Searles is offering ebay a free ride on the cluetrain. I hope they take it (to heart.) And speaking of ebay (which a few of us were just the other night,) how does it work exactly? Do they get a percentage of the sale price, or is it just a flat fee to list your auction? Bill? I thought it was just the flat fee, but as usual I could be wrong...
Here's one for MB, or anyone else into the wide world of fonts. (via kottke)
It's unbelievable how many distributed file and resource sharing apps are popping up. I think this one has a shot. Here's a nice chart comparing some of the different players.
Harrumph has some nice photo pages. Here is the clever photostickerbooth project from Fray Day 4, and here is her (simple, straightforward, and charming) behind the curtain page.
The second coming, techno futurist style. Assuming any of the "holy relics" are real, I can't think of any reason why this wouldn't be possible.
Alex's last two picture posts are amazing. He's making me look bad because I had always blamed my poor shots on the camera, and clearly it is possible to take amazing shots with that thing (no, really, if I just had the 4 megapixel camera....)
In case you're ever wondering why the web became so big so fast (while being so decentralized,) you can read a good explanation here. (link via kottke) Basically, it boils down to two words: view source.
But what about linked style sheets? Aren't they really a step in the wrong direction? (Away from transparency?) If I ever get around to cleaning up the html on this site (its all dynamically generated, and I've never taken the time to make sure it formats nicely) I'm going to put the style sheets in line (not that anyone wants to learn any design tips from this site, but it's for the principle of the thing.)
I just found var/system.log! Oh my god this unix stuff is so cool. If I knew what I was doing I could probably solve a lot of problems by looking through these logs. Even without knowing much I think I figured out what was going wrong with my PPP connection today. This makes what I do to troubleshoot older Macs look like a large order of mumbo-jumbo with a side of fuzzy intuition. Throw out the prefs and pray. Check for damaged fonts and pray. Drag the system folder off its drive and back (and pray.) Throw out objectsupportlib (again) and pray. With OS X I can go in and actually see what is happening. Knowing what to do after you see what is happening is another story, of course, but at least we are in the realm of science. Knowing how to keep pre-X Macs running is more like superstition. I know the incantations to chant, and I've got my various rabbits feet at the ready, but knowing that stuff never taught me anything about how the system really works in there. It seems like I won't be able to help learning a lot about how unix works by learning to run the system. Or maybe I'm just carried away by the novelty of it all...
I really like this site. This is the place that had the informative article on space elevators a few weeks (months?) ago. Today /., linked to this great one on using magnetic bubbles for traveling in space.
"Last week's test was a success. We were able to completely fill the vacuum chamber with a magnetic bubble. The only thing that stopped the expansion was the presence of the chamber walls. In space this same experiment might create a mini-magnetosphere 15 km across.I love the artists conception of what such a spacecraft would look like. I wonder if it has anything to do with a scientists conception of how it would look.
Maintaining such a bubble in space would require about 1 kW of power and less than 1 kg per day of helium propellant for the plasma source. In return, the bubble would intercept about 600 kW of solar wind power."