Good link from my old buddy.Saddled with XP? Fearing to use SP2, yet afraid not? The folks at Tech Republic are collecting tales of woe and the solutions others have found. Good stuff, before and after.[2old4this]
Researchers find holes in XP SP2 - Computerworld
News Story by Paul Roberts AUGUST 18 2004 IDG NEWS SERVICE - Security researchers inspecting a new update to Microsoft Corp.%27s Windows XP found two software flaws that could allow virus writers and malicious hackers to sidestep new security features in the operating system.
You’d think that one of the few small pleasures of destroying some gadget that’s been driving you crazy would be doing it yourself. But if you can’t be bothered, a company called WeBlowITup.com (get it?) says that for the princely sum of about a hundred bucks they’ll use explosives to blow up your cellphone, laptop, or “small appliance” for you, and then send you a video commemorating its destruction.
[Engadget]
[Via LockerGnome]
He he he... blowing things up... cool!
The Mars rover adventure, brought to you in stunning pre-rendered CG. [Futurismic]
Very cool. Quicktime required.
Paul sez, "The Library of Congress has digitized and placed online Lewis Carroll's scrapbook -- clippings and the like that the author found interesting and worth saving. Since it has never been published, this is the only way to see it without going to DC." Link (Thanks, Paul!)
[Boing Boing]
gapingvoid: how to be creative: "So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years:"
Bookmarks are so yesterday. They reside on one machine; I compute on three. Bookmarks are browser-specific; I use Firefox unless MS zealots or lazy designers force me to use IE; my wife uses Opera. And sharing booksmarks with others is not simple.
Two free services have sprung up to address these issues. While Spurl and Furl sound the same, their functions are different.
Spurl is an online links list. Click a button and Spurl saves the URL, page title, and your comment on the web. You can begin by uploading your bookmarks file. You can also download. Or you can create a "directory" and share your finds with others. For example, when redoing a webpage this afternoon, I needed to look up a few things about color combinations and CSS options. When I found my answers, from places I'd ended up on past projects, I Spurled them. Here are my Design Links.
Furl saves entire pages. Its creators describe it as an electronic filing cabinet. Take a look at my public Furl archive. Furl is dedicated to making it easy for users to archive, recall, share, and discover useful information on the Web. You can even set up RSS to notify people when you add to your store of material.
See the difference? Say you read a great article in Wired or the New York Times. To save or share it, you'd use Furl. If your intent was to read Wired or the Times issue after issue, you'd Spurl it. Think "F" for file; hence Furl. Think "S" for subscribe; hence Spurl.
Both Furl and Spurl offer several modes of looking at things. You can have your private view, which simply puts what used to be on your machine and makes it accessible on the web. You can have a public view, where you share what you've found. You can look at other people's selections, or you can look at summary results by popularity.
I love the metaphor of these new tools. They help you individually. They enable you to help others. They are drop-dead simple to install and use. They are free. You can't ask for much more than that.
For years, before this blog became popular, the most visited page on my sites was the eLearning Jump Page. I may simply convert the links there to Furl and Spurl and shut the sucker down.
After I wrote this, I went ahead and Furled/Spurled the links on my Design Page. This gets tricky. One is six links were dead, abandoned, or FUBAR. A few others were trends that never went anywhere. I lost a few pages I wished I'd Furled while I could.
If I come upon Joe Blow's neat reference page on the web, do I Furl it or Spurl it? That depends on my confidence that Joe will be around for a while. (Some great stuff has disappeared from the web in the past two or three years). If I expect Joe to be here, I'll Spurl him, figuring I'll get new content on my next visit. If I figure Joe's webpage will disappear, I'll Furl it, so he doesn't fall entirely off my radar.
I started cruising around to look at consensus favorites at both Spurl and Furl. That's something you don't get from your traditional, orphaned bookmark list.
I took off for an hour to walk Latte the longhaired dachshund through the swirling fog here on the hill. As we walked, I flashed on how if you ask someone where they bank, they usually tell you what bank provides their checking account. That's because their checking account is used often and is sometimes the interface to their other financial relationships. Most people have much more significant financial relationships with their mortgage company, their broker, and even their credit card issuers than with the bank they identify as theirs.
What brought this to mind was a recording of Doug Kaye talking Tim O'Reilly that I downloaded from the web and into my pociet mp3 player. Tim recounted asking audiences at general conferences, "How many of you use Linux?" and having perhaps one in five raise their hand. Then he'd ask how many use Google or Amazon, everyone raised their hands, and Tim would point out that Google and Amazon both run on Linux.
So too, most of us running Windows on our local machines fail to recognize that an increasing amount of our work is shifting to the net. I'm particularly sensitive to this, what with testing Gmail and an online desktop, being a web junky, and running a number of Linux-housed websites.
Spurl and Furl are just a couple more drops in the bucket of software running "over your machine" instead of inside of it. Sic transit gloria mundi
[Internet Time Blog]
Do you Furl? It's free. And Beta. And great. When I see a webpage I may want to reference, I push a button on my browser's toolbar to furl it. Unlike a bookmark, Furl lets me store a category, my rating, notes, and a excerpt. Here, take a look at my Furl Archive.[Internet Time Blog]
I've mostly used this blog as an annotated bookmark list. Perhaps this would work as well.
Zarax Online DVD to wMW tutorial: "By Zarax This tutorial will guide you trough the process of creating the best backup for your DVD movies. The author is not liable of improper use of this tutorial, so if the creation of personal back-up copies of personal media content is forbidden you will do it at your own risk."
The cartel has killed off 321 Studios, which sold software letting people back up their DVDs. Another scalp for an industry that will sue businesses into the ground when they dare to offer people a way to use the digital music and other "content" they've purchased in the ways they choose for their own personal use. The cartel says anything that can be used for infringement is not allowed to exist. Corporations rule. Customers are supposed to submit. They don't always have to. So, if you need to make a backup of your DVD, you'll now need to work a little harder. You'll have to visit one of the other places. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
This really bites!
It's rare for any speaker to draw a standing ovation from the OSCON audience, but that's what David Rumsey did last week. And Rumsey isn't one of the heroes of open source software. He's a philanthropist who collects historical maps, scans them at high resolution, and publishes them on the Internet as open content that anyone can access and repurpose. His motive is partly to connect many people to content that few would be able to view in a museum:
I thought about donating it to a university, but their libraries focus on preservation, they'd have put my collection in a vault and there would have been no access. Along comes the Internet, and I found we could do even more with the digital content than with the originals. We serve over 7000 visitors a day. A typical map library will serve 200 visitors a year.
[Jon's Radio]
http://www.electricstory.com/...
The opinions expressed in these articles do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the ElectricStory.com staff. Having said that, we're more than glad to have Howard aboard. You are unlikely to find a more interesting curator of cultural phenomena. Howard doesn't go out of his way to offend, but his language isn't always polite, and he makes no apologies or excuses; so be advised this stuff ain't for kids. "Crimea River" was originally commissioned by Jonathan Strahan for Eidolon magazine. Reports of the subsequent demise of Eidolon seem to be exaggerated; it eventually recovered from its brush with Howard and is alive today.Gotta be interesting if it's written by Howard Waldrop.
"Meat. They're made out of meat."
Cute little story I read some time back and just discovered on the 'Net.
The pointless ramblings of an aging computer geek. I was a computer geek before anyone knew what a computer geek was. I was a computer geek for that brief dot-com period when being a computer geek was cool. And I'm still a computer geek.
