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September 30, 2006
links for 2006-09-30
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short video about Manhattanhenge
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whoa, how the harvest moon works (thanks margann)
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some nice clean firefox 2.0 themes for the mac
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useful looking
Posted by 1:24 AM
September 28, 2006
BBQ 2.0
Let it be known from this day forward:
barbecues (BBQ) shall henceforth be known as meat-up meet-ups. The abbreviation MUMU will also suffice.
Posted by 12:23 PM | Comments (1)
RSS done right (in firefox 2)
I love the way the release candidate 1 of Firefox 2 handles a RSS feed.
I accidentally hit a RSS feed today and was pleasantly surprised by the user experience. There was an informational message at the top explaining it as a feed, along with a RSS subscription preference option and a nicely rendered (not just XML data) feed.
Here's a short 1.7Mb movie of what that looks like the second time you click on it (the top explanation goes away and you just see the RSS subscription preference).
Posted by 11:02 AM | Comments (2)
links for 2006-09-28
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I love when people are so completely honest like Tim in this interview. Skip the bullet points at the top and read the full text below.
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kill junk mail and pay for planting trees for $3/month. I'm gonna try it out.
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Great stop action movie.
Posted by 1:23 AM
September 27, 2006
Frank Gehry film on PBS
Last year, a little documentary came out about Frank Gehry. It sounded like a good concept -- have actor/director Sydney Pollack hang out with Gehry and learn how he makes all those fabric-like steel buildings. Alas, my local art house theater never carried the film and as I awaited its release on DVD and into my Netflix queue, I noticed today that the movie is being played on PBS this week, for free, as an American Masters episode.
There aren't a lot of films on architecture these days so I'm looking forward to watching it tonight on my local PBS. It's odd that the DVD is only two weeks old and now it's being broadcast on public television but I'm not complaining.
Posted by 10:33 AM | Comments (1)
links for 2006-09-27
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stationary recumbent bike + computer = total nerd fantasy
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wow, nice looking stuff
Posted by 1:28 AM
September 25, 2006
testing...
Just testing out MT 3.3...
Posted by 8:54 PM
September 21, 2006
links for 2006-09-21
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Love for a dearly departed friend.
Posted by 1:16 AM
September 20, 2006
links for 2006-09-20
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This looks like a really nice review/rating aggregator site. Like a meta-Epinions.
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The crazy story of the bounty hunter.
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brilliant proposed updates to SF mass transit signage
Posted by 1:16 AM
September 19, 2006
links for 2006-09-19
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take it to the bridge...
Posted by 1:17 AM
September 17, 2006
links for 2006-09-17
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The average Apple Store, with its 6,000 square feet of space, generates two-thirds of the revenue of a Best Buy, which averages 38,000 square feet.
Posted by 1:16 AM
September 16, 2006
links for 2006-09-16
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I wonder if adult bloggers can beat smart high school students
Posted by 1:16 AM
September 14, 2006
links for 2006-09-14
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This never happened until today. Today it happened like 20 times.
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might be handy
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roger black gets a blog and follows his design rules: always use red, white, and black, and every website deserves a custom font.
Posted by 1:17 AM
September 13, 2006
MeFi Down for a bit
Just a note to people looking for *.metafilter.com -- this morning there was an OS-level software problem on the web server, which required a total wipe and reinstall of the drive. The database server is fine, and I am getting all the data off the original web server drive, so everything should be back up and running by this afternoon or tonight at the latest. At the moment stuff is just being reinstalled and will take a few more hours.
Posted by 11:32 AM | Comments (5)
September 12, 2006
links for 2006-09-12
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Threadless: 6.2mil in sales last year. Egads.
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great story of a musician in NYC on 9/11, and how he's used that for doing good.
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Bill Stumpf, my body thanks you for the aeron chair design.
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Hideously bad idea
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handy looking service
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Ugh. A story about buying cars online that is sympathetic to car salesmen. Rot in hell, fuckers. You scam for 50 years and now the internet allows buyers to get the best price. Cry me a river.
Posted by 1:18 AM
September 11, 2006
links for 2006-09-11
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looks interesting
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Nice little traditional prefab design. Probably makes a great small vacation house.
Posted by 1:16 AM
September 7, 2006
Attention Artists: Brushes and Paint are now Free
Flickr and YouTube are wonderful services that have been lauded in the press hundreds of times this year, but recently I figured out their worth was much more profound.
Back in college, I spent my free time designing web pages for fun and due to my dead broke status, I got a lot of software on heavy student discount, borrowed copies from friends, and if need be, pulled copies from usenet. It used to be pretty easy to get copies of anything you needed and I justified it by saying when I went on to a career in web design, my employers would be purchasing full licenses of the products I bought, borrowed, and stole.
I also had this idealistic mantra: when everything you are creating is digital, the supplies should be free. An artist should never be limited by tools she cannot afford. Ideas should be the only limits.
Fast forward a few years and most of the things I clung to in college came true. My employers bought full copies of Photoshop and I generally had access to limitless free bandwidth thanks to employers and friends. The only limiting factors were my ideas and imagination. Anything I could create I could upload to my server and share it with the world.
But there was one thing I never thought quite worked out right, and that was The Bandwidth Problem. The web is an amazing, democratic, open, limitless thing that has forever changed my (and everyone's) life, but it always had the Achilles Heel of paying for bandwith. In the early days of the web there were plenty of free hosts with limitless bandwidth and we got all sorts of things like Mahir's I Kiss You, dancing hamsters, and fighting stick figures.
Free hosting popped just like the bubble did, and as blogs began to gain popularity in 2001-2003, paying for bandwidth was a constant problem, especially for sites with no revenue. During those years I talked to a lot of people with interesting ideas that were held back by the fact they couldn't afford to host their work or pay for the downloading of it by thousands. Nosepilot was a great example of the problem. Flash was still synonymous with "skip intro" and crappy techno background sounds when some random freaky artist builds a continuous sort-of story that takes the form of a whimsical scrolling film. The hosted file was something like 50Mb in size if you played the whole thing and as it gained instant popularity, the creator was hit with a multi-thousand dollar bill from his provider. I remember him trying to raise money through donations and giving him something via paypal. He eventually had mirrors set up to view the file on other servers while he was trying to sue his host into cutting the bill down. It was an ugly outcome for such a lovely piece of net art.
These days, whenever I see someone on Ask MetaFilter wanting to explain something, they'll almost always link to a screenshot hosted on flickr or a short cameraphone video on YouTube. I think we've all forgotten what the web was like before YouTube came around. Just a year ago, video on the web was still a thorny problem. The only people that could reliably offer it were huge movie and TV studios, and I recall even downloading the video for "A Million Ways" by Ok Go last summer required people volunteering mirrored downloads of a quicktime file.
Just over a year ago, I found something incredible on usenet: a mock terror exercise that was part of some anti-terrorism training program. In order to share the 81Mb file, I had to set up my own bittorrent server to share the download bandwidth with others. Even with bittorrent, when the file was linked on BoingBoing, the server crashed to a halt, and when brought back, almost maxed out my bandwidth for the month in a couple days. Until that time, I always considered my server shared with a friends was limitless at 1200 gigabytes a month, but this one video almost cost me a bundle.
Thankfully in 2006, everyone has YouTube and Flickr. Video is no longer a problem online. You can post thousands of huge images on Flickr and not have to foot any bill. You are free to create any movie, design, or photograph without fear of getting punished financially for its popularity. It can cost nothing to host, and millions can experience it.
The tools to deliver your creations are finally free. I am already seeing profound changes in how students can create and share their work but I bet in a couple years from now it'll be even more dramatic. We'll look back at the days when you were charged by the downloaded megabyte as quaint and laugh and wonder what things were like before YouTube and Flickr (and others, of course) took away those limits.
Posted by 10:58 PM | Comments (9)
links for 2006-09-07
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lots to chew on here
Posted by 1:17 AM
September 6, 2006
links for 2006-09-06
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insanely nice
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In almost 20 years and over 200k miles of my own driving, I've loved all three of the hondas I've owned. This essay gets to the heart of it: Hondas are simple, dependable, and fun.
Posted by 1:16 AM
September 5, 2006
links for 2006-09-05
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A 22 minute Arlo Guthrie parody with plenty of MetaFilter in-jokes. A tour de force.
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ah, that's how it's done.
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freaking brilliant
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This is something I've thought about a lot, post-child -- do what you love, but not past the point where it becomes selfish and certainly not to the point where you abandon those you love most.
Posted by 1:17 AM
September 3, 2006
links for 2006-09-03
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Awesome! Marc Hedlund starts a blog around his new company.
Posted by 1:16 AM
September 2, 2006
links for 2006-09-02
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This is the best soft drink review ever.
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This is the coolest story: pro NBA player makes affordable $15 shoe, promises to play in games wearing them while other stars sell $150+ shoes.
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Starbury Ones on eBay
Posted by 1:18 AM
September 1, 2006
links for 2006-09-01
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Yo Gmail team! Read this and try it out on attachments for spam prevention
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Fantastic advice for anyone entering college. O how I wish I knew about these.
Posted by 1:17 AM