Reading and Blogging Britannica
A UC Berkeley student is reading the entire Encylopedia Britannica, and blogging the good bits. It’s healthy to have a hobby.
A UC Berkeley student is reading the entire Encylopedia Britannica, and blogging the good bits. It’s healthy to have a hobby.
“Jim March, a member of the Black Box Voting board of directors, was arrested Tuesday evening for trying to observe the Diebold central tabulator (vote tallying machine) as the votes were being counted in San Diego’s mayoral election (July 26).”
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/8556.html
Adobe Bridge (bundled with CS2) is much much better than the File Browser in previous versions. It has some great features. It’s very fast, and has good support for previewing a large number of different file types.
But there’s still a lot to hate, mostly about things they seem to have left out (of course, it’s entirely possible that I’ve just missed them). I’d love to see these things in an incremental update and not have to wait for CS3, if in fact they are missing.
There’s probably more, but the point here is that Bridge is great. It’s fanstastic for many things, and it does a lot that’s good that none of the other files browsers I have do. But it falls down on some of the basics that make it unsuitable for using as the only file browser.
Bruce Schenier’s blog has excellent comments on the NYC subway search stupidity.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/searching_bags.html
NYC Police are apparently going to start random bag searches of people entering the subway.
And if you refuse to have your bag searched? Why, you’ll have to leave the subway and try again later.
http://1010wins.com/topstories/local_story_202135404.html
I fail to see the point of this huge waste of time, effort, and privacy.
Greasemonkey, not surprisingly, has some huge security flaws, and the author recommends you uninstall it. Who would have thought it would be a bad idea to download some code from random websites and run it in your browser?
http://mozdev.org/pipermail/greasemonkey/2005-July/004033.html
Another very informative article from Photoblog 2.0, this time on ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) 3.0.
http://www.digitalfieldguide.com/blog/86
Again, I mostly agree, with some comments.
I wholeheartedly believe that adjusting raw images in photoshop is an integral part of the modern photography workflow. The camera is an input device for getting your raw material. Obviously, the better the raw material you have to work with, the better your final product will be, so photoshop is no substitute for learning how your camera works, improving your shooting technique, or taking good pictures. But the latitude that you have available to you in photoshop is something that can’t be ignored.
A few general things about that:
Clever solution to a problem.
Put a contact in your phone that starts with ICE (In Case of Emergency). That way, if you’re ever incapacitated and someone finds your phone, they know which of the many entries to call.
This seems to be getting some press coverage, so I suppose there’s a chance before not too long that emergency responders will actually know to check.
That’s the best idea for greasemonkey I’ve seen so far. Generate an encrypted feed, subscribe to it in a public feedreader, and have your browser decrypt it locally in realtime.
Nice.
Via schneierblog:
I watched Blade:Trinity recently, and I got my answer for Wonder Woman casting.
Jessica Biel.
She’s got the right look, she can do kickass fight scenes that are reasonably believable, and she’s actually a pretty good actress.
Tell me that’s not Wonder Woman:
http://us.imdb.com/gallery/ss/0359013/blade3_c90-32.jpg?path=pgallery&path_key=Biel,%20Jessica&seq=3
[ Update: it seems I'm not alone, and the rumor mill has it that she's one of the candidates: http://www.jessica-biel.net/news/5 ]
My friend Amanda has started a blog for people who live in Lincoln Towers, an apartment complex on the Upper West Side, which seems to have already attracted some surprisingly mean trolls.
I love technology applied in creative ways to everyday objects.
These are faucets with the top removed so you can see the water flow, which is illuminated with red and blue LEDs to indicate the temperature of the water.
Awesome!
Digital cameras don’t produce pictures.
They capture impressions of the light that came through the lens, and it’s not a picture until you put some processing behind it. Even the simplest, most rudimentary digital camera has a tremendous amount of processing behind it. If you shoot jpeg and use the resulting images, the processing doesn’t go away, you’re just letting the camera choose the defaults for what the processing should be. When you shoot raw, you can do the processing yourself, and get a lot more control over every variable in the procedure.
There’s a pretty good guide to the steps here (via lifehacker):
http://www.digitalfieldguide.com/blog/69
The basic workflow is similar to what I outlined in my digital camera workflow diagram.
I mostly agree with the points in the article, but I have a few comments to add:
Millimeter-wave machines are to be deployed to scan the passengers of the London Tube.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,20409-1686151,00.html
Because the 500,000 security cameras obviously weren’t enough to prevent the bombing, obviously the answer is more invasive surveillance.
Perry Metzger (on hiatus from blogging), moderator of the cryptography list, wrote the following in response to the question of why Americans are so afraid of ID cards. I reproduce it here verbatim with permission:
Perhaps I can explain why I am.
I do not trust governments. I’ve inherited this perspective. My grandfather sent his children abroad from Speyer in Germany just after the ascension of Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s — his neighbors thought he was crazy, but few of them survived the coming events. My father was sent to Alsace, but he stayed too long in France and ended up being stuck there after the occupation. If it were not for forged papers, he would have died. (He had a most amusing story of working as an electrician rewiring a hotel used as office space by the Gestapo in Strasbourg — his forged papers were apparently good enough that no one noticed.) Ultimately, he and other members of the family escaped France by “illegally” crossing the border into Switzerland. (I put “illegally” in quotes because I don’t believe one has any moral obligation to obey a “law” like that, especially since it would leave you dead if you obeyed.)
Anyway, if the governments of the time had actually had access to modern anti-forgery techniques, I might never have been born.
To you, ID cards are a nice way to keep things orderly. To me, they are a potential death sentence.
Most Europeans seem to see government as the friendly, nice set of people who keep the trains running on time and who watch out for your interests. A surprisingly large fraction of Americans are people or the descendants of people who experienced the institution of government as the thing that tortured their friends to death, or gassed them, or stole all their money and nearly starved them to death, etc. Hundreds of millions of people died at the hands of their own governments in the 20th century, and many of the people that escaped from such horrors moved here. They view things like ID cards and mandatory registry of residence with the local police as the way that the government rounded up their friends and relatives so they could be killed.
I do not wish to argue about which view is correct. Perhaps I am wrong and Government really is the large friendly group of people that are there to help you. Perhaps the cost/benefit analysis of ID cards and such makes us look silly. I’m not addressing the question of whether my view is right here — I’m just trying to explain the psychological mindset that would make someone think ID cards are a very bad idea.
So, the next time one of your friends in Germany asks why the crazy Americans think ID cards and such are a bad thing, remember my father, and remember all the people like him who fled to the US over the last couple hundred years and who left children that still remember such things, whether from China or North Korea or Germany or Spain or Russia or Yugoslavia or Chile or lots of other places.
They missed a huge naming opportunity here – it should have been called Cat-amari Damacy.
Kottke asks:
As members of the human species, we’re used to dealing with the death of people we “know” in amounts in the low hundreds over the course of a lifetime. With higher life expectancies and the increased number of people known to each of us (particularly in the hypernetworked part of the world), how are we going to handle it when several thousand people we know die over the course of our lifetime?
http://www.kottke.org/05/06/death-in-the-celebrity-age
Interesting question. I think, like everything else, the lack of novelty will acclimate us to the experience and we’ll just get used to the fact that lots of people we know will come out of our lives as easily as they entered.
I’ve been reading over the specs and thoughts for the new consoles, and I haven’t seen any discussion of some things I REALLY want out of the next generation of console games:
This thing has been making the rounds:
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/06/idea2005/source/60.htm
It’s a new Rubbermaid product called the “Paint Buddy”. The idea is that when you paint, you leave a little left over in this thing for making touchups.
Didn’t I see this in a Lillian Vernon catalog, like 20 years ago?
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