Rough Drafts
Essays and blog posts I've written that haven't been published elsewhere yet
808 postsWho Cares: The T-shirt
Dismayed by the lack of vendors offering “who cares what you think?” T-shirts, and emboldened by a suggestion from Bill Hangley himself, I decided to go into the T-shirt business. Here it is, then, by popular demand: The who cares what you think? T-shirt store. Don’t hold back — buy a shirt! Tell th
Camera flash.
After you delete all the files from the SD card in a Kyocera Finecam SL-300R, they aren’t completely gone. When you turn the camera on, the LCD briefly flashes the last picture it displayed–even if that picture isn’t on the SD card any more. The camera is obviously storing this image somewhere in th
Quick email access.
Phoenix Technologies, which makes BIOSes for notebooks and desktop computers, has a nifty idea: something called Firstware Assistant that lets you check your Outlook calendar and email without booting up the machine. You turn on the machine through a special quick-boot cycle that bypasses Windows an
Free-rangeatarian.
MSNBC: More and more people are calling themselves flexitarians — meat-eating vegetarians. Or, as I used to call myself, a non-practicing vegetarian. Veggie guru Molly Katzen is quoted as saying, “I don’t feel it’s wrong if you’ve got a great big plate of vegetables [and] your protein is from a heal
1 min read
Top notch web hosting.
About a month ago, I moved this weblog and my haiku site to Birdhouse Hosting, run by my friend Scot Hacker. It was a good move: Both sites are faster, Scot’s spam-filtering has given me back 20 minutes a day that I used to spend deleting junk mail, and most importantly, Scot is a patient, […]
Time to invest.
The Merc’s Dan Gillmor says now is time to face facts, make needed investment — in data infrastructure (last mile broadband, in particular), in education, in basic research, and in health care. Without these investments, Silicon Valley — and the U.S. at large — could easily lose what competitive edg
Let a thousand domain names bloom.
Brad Templeton has a canny solution to the domain-name fiasco: Let almost anyone create their own top-level domain, as long as they’re able to maintain it and contribute to the maintenance of the overall domain name system (DNS). Instead of just a few TLDs, like .com, .gov, and .biz, we’d have zilli
1 min read
Bovine Rectal Palpation Simulator.
“While using the Bovine Rectal Palpation Simulator the student palpates virtual objects resembling parts of the reproductive tract inside the rear-half of a fibreglass cow.” (via strata lucida)
Elvish 101.
A school in the U.K. is now offering a course in Elvish — or more precisely, Sindarin and Quenya, two languages invented by Tolkein.