Entries Tagged 'web stuff' ↓

An Israeli newspaper, Hebrew language Israeli daily, gave all its journalists a day off and assigned the news to Israeli poets and novelists for a day.

For this edition of the paper, nearly all the rules taught in journalism school were thrown out the window. Writers used the first person and showed up in nearly every photograph alongside their interview subjects

Of course they did. For the stock market summary author Avri Herling wrote:

“Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place…”

Very fun. I volunteer for the next round.

Read the article: http://www.forward.com/articles/107571/

Via Boing Boing

Ubiquitous internet through the air is cool and so sci-fi. I loved the setup process — get a modem in the mail, plug it in, voila! Yes, having all that signal stream through my brain makes me nervous – but we’re already doing that to ourselves in no small amount.

Alternately: Comcast drives me crazy. They’re too expensive, hard to reach, and I don’t want their TV crap. I just want the pipe.

But look at these speed differences:

Clear WiMax (on the fastest plan, ~6MB):

Comcast (re-installed today)

To be fair: Clear tried hard. They were very friendly, their support was patient and knowledgeable. I tried their suggestions and once or twice got up near 4mb…but never consistently.

If you happen to be in an area where you get a better signal, and if you’re not running a freelance web dev business, maybe you’ll get better mileage. Sadly, I’m on Comcast’s wire again, and Clear’s box is heading out.

It’s always sad letting go of a domain. I love owning domains — each one represents a fresh slate, a new incarnation of my personality. Empty ground to build something exciting.

Dear8ball.com housed a fun little robot application I worked on for a while. I plugged it into twitter via a jabber bot so that you could simply reference it: @dear8ball ___(question)____ and it would grant you a magic 8 ball reply. It worked pretty well! It was a great project that I got 85% through, ran into a little technical difficulty, and then more or less lost interest. It happens.

And that’s a good thing — I wish it would happen more often. Every good idea does not merit implementation. Incidentally, it looks like someone else did work on a similar project (though that looks to have gone extinct now too).

In my pairing of domains, I recently gave away listmaker.org, and have let a few others expire as well. A little focus never hurt nobody.

I have too many domains — about 30 or so. It’s an addiction. I’m trying to pare down some so today I’m giving away listmaker.org

It’s a great domain, I think, and at one time I had plans for it.

Build your web app there, house your blog, etc.

Just leave me a comment here over the next few days about how you might like to use it — if you’re the only one it’s yours (by the way – it expires in two days – but I will register it for you for another year at gandi.net, and then transfer it to your account). If there are a couple of interested people, I’ll pick the one I like best. If you have no technical skills — I’ll even host it for you at dreamhost for a year (with wordpress?) to get you started.

Now, who wants it?

David pointed out to me that on Amazon, Couch has under ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ only a single item: the Omron HJ-112 pedometer.

A few weeks ago there were a number of books in the slipstream genre here instead, presumably because their algorithms looked up other books by my publisher and fitted Couch into this genre. Now enough people have bought Couch that they’re able to do some direct correlating.

What does it say? It says that the people at Walker Tracker are completely awesome. Thank you so much.

But I love how it looks, too. It’s as if people were buying the book and a pedometer simultaneously in order to set out upon the quest in the book for themselves. I would know it true were it accompanied by a few other tell-tale items. Say, a mustache trimmer, wire cutters, some RAM and a Spanish phrase book.

I would love to find other items on Amazon that tell a sort of story – items bought together to perform a single esoteric task. Certainly there’s some mystery that could be gleaned.