Friday March 27, 2009 • Links
Steve Lambert has written and released an open source Mac app called SelfControl that allows you to block access to specific servers for a specific amount of time.
My girlfriend was asking about something like this to help her focus at work. Sites like Cute Overload and Facebook can be quite distracting; SelfControl blocks these sites and won’t let you unblock them until the timer runs out. No amount of mucking about in the application or restarting will unblock the sites.
(via Waxy)
Friday March 27, 2009 • Links
Justine Lai is painting herself having sex with every US president.
One wonders if the sexual acts being portrayed in each is intended to be a strange way of providing some political commentary on each presidency. So far, she’s up to Ulysses S. Grant.
(via Waxy)
Friday March 27, 2009 • Links
Merlin Mann and John Gruber gave a talk at SXSW called HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! that’s well worth a listen.
Wednesday March 25, 2009 • Links
The EcoDrain uses the heat from the water going down the drain in your shower to preheat the cold water coming in, reducing water heater use by up to 40%. Not bad for a passive heat exchanger with no moving parts.
(via NOTCOT)
Wednesday March 25, 2009 • Links
John Carmack, the Technical Director at Id Software and father of the first person shooter as it’s known today, talks about developing for the iPhone:
I told EA that we were NOT going to ship that as the first Id Software product on the iPhone. Using the iPhone’s hardware 3D acceleration was a requirement, and it should be easy […]. The developers came back and said it would take two months and exceed their budget.
Rather than having a big confrontation over the issue, I told them to just send the project to me and I would do it myself. Cass Everitt had been doing some personal work on the iPhone, so he helped me get everything set up for local iPhone development here, which is a lot more tortuous than you would expect from an Apple product. As usual, my off the cuff estimate of “Two days!” was optimistic, but I did get it done in four, and the game is definitely more pleasant at 8x the frame rate.
And I had fun doing it.
Beyond that nifty bit there’s a lot of information about porting Wolfenstein 3D to the iPhone, including interesting tweaks made to gameplay while attempting to retain the classic’s feel.
Sunday February 1, 2009 • Links
The latest XKCD to be posted on the wall at work.
Saturday January 31, 2009 • Technology
Julian Sanchez at Ars brings us a report on a federal court ruling regarding a student who posted disparaging remarks about the people working at her school.
The court had this to say:
Today, students are connected to each other through email, instant messaging, blogs, social networking sites, and text messages. An email can be sent to dozens or hundreds of other students by hitting “send.” A blog entry posted on a site such as livejournal.com can be instantaneously viewed by students, teachers, and administrators alike. Off-campus speech can become on-campus speech with the click of a mouse.
The issue of on-campus vs. off-campus being brought up is baffling to me. The remarks in question were made on LiveJournal. Last time I checked, LiveJournal’s servers aren’t housed inside the school in question. Just because you can sit down at a computer inside the school and browse to the page in question should have no bearing on the matter. If a local newspaper printed a letter from a student with the same remarks no one would think it even remotely on-campus speech, despite the fact that the newspaper can easily be carried into the school, or that a subscription could easily be ordered for the school.
If schools are allowed to discipline their students for their opinions expressed off-campus, regardless of the medium or its ease of accessibility in school, how the hell are we expected to stay informed via un-biased views on the things happening there?
Saturday January 31, 2009 • Technology
Engadget is reporting that Apple and Adobe are working together to get Flash working on the iPhone.
No. No no no.
Listen, goddamnit, you’re doing things out of order. Here’s what the priority list should look like:
- Get cut/copy/paste working on the iPhone.
- Get Flash working correctly and efficiently in Mac OS X.
- Get tethering working with little or no additional fees for data.
Once you do those things you can go and do whatever the hell you want, even if it is Flash on the iPhone, as long as it’s easy as hell to enable and disable. If it doesn’t work exactly like FlashBlock/ClickToFlash (or at least can be configured to behave that way) keep it off the device. Our batteries don’t last long enough as it is.
Saturday January 31, 2009 • Links
I wonder if my girlfriend will be upset if I post to my blog that I find the badges from Mary Yaeger hilariously awesome or not.
Oh, wait.
(via Neatorama)
← Older
