2002-12-14»
family matters»One more thing I’m going to have problems explaining to my daughter: what “cc:” stands for.
Currently:
2002-12-13»
peppercoin»Hmmm. Some buzz going about Ronald Rivest’s new startup, a cryptographically secure micropayment protcol. My spider-sense is tingling about online payment systems in 2003. Oh, boy, another opportunity to look stupid in twelve month’s time. Scott Loftesness is a good news-aggregating blogger on this topic and quite a few others.
2002-12-12»
rsi»So, last week’s ST column was about RSI (I’m slowly crippling myself with mouse shoulder, so I’m trying to stop doing Bad Things). Gary Marshall wrote a very kind mail listing all the trick he’s been doing to fend it off. I said that it’d be great if he through it up on the Web, and he did, so I’m linking to it: Gary Marshall’s Guide to RSI.
too much information»
Great short piece from the New Yorker wondering what Philip K. Dick would make of the Total Awareness Office. I came because the title of the piece – Too Much Information – which is fun. I blogged because of the fantastic payoff in the last paragraph. Sometimes you suspect people write whole columns just to be able to finish them on flourishes like that. Or, as in this case, you just know they did.
google news bookmarklet, contd.»
Small tweak to the bookmarklet below – I’ve stuck in an escape function call to cope with news URLs with GET parameters. The bookmarklet will still have problems with URLs that willfully stick in user information into the URL (like MSNBC), but it’ll do much better with quite a few others.
hooray for the lazyweb, part 2313812»
Here’s your Google News bookmarklet, courtesy of the amazing (and currently not quite as lazy) Rod Begbie.
2002-12-11»
let google news do your background research»Another (slightly trickier) URL hack. Bookmark this google news bookmark in Moz, and give it a shortcut (as in the last entry) – say “gn”. Now, if you’re at a news article, and you want to see what other news sources have to say about it, just replace the “http://” bit of the URL with “gn “, hit return, and Google News will spew out the cluster of news stories that are similiar to your news article. So, if you were at “http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm”, a news story about Yemen, change the URL to “gn news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm” would take you to http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=cluster:news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2568223.stm which is the index page for all the news stories Google knows about this topic.
This could probably do with turning into a platform-independent bookmarklet. Any volunteers?
secrets of the idiot overlords»
Bookmark this link in Mozilla or Phoenix, and then go to “Bookmarks/ Manage Bookmarks”, select the new bookmark, choose “Edit/Properties…” then give the damn thing the keyword “ntk”. Then, whenever you type in “ntk foobar” into the location bar, you’ll search NTK for foobar. Here’s another one for Oblomovka.
software patents update»
NTK plugged a Brussels European Parliament meeting on the EU’s moves to adopt software patents last month. Here’s a summary of what happened there. For those who want the juicy bit (any juicy bit), here’s EuroLinux’s list of cases where software patents are currently blocking development and availability of free software.
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yet another reason to buy bbedit»
They’re giving the EFF ten dollars for every copy sold until the end of December. (From Doc’s weblog).