1 March 2013
[tech] The Restart Page … Re-experience the thrill of watching your favourite retro operating systems reboot.
4 March 2013
[comics] Annotations to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – Nemo: Heart of Ice … more work-in-progress annotations from Jess Nevins … ‘I confess to not understanding the “urine storage scheme” reference.’
5 March 2013
[books] The Book-Writing Machine … What was the first book ever written on a word processor? … ‘It was 1968, and the IBM technician who serviced Len Deighton’s typewriters had just heard from Deighton’s personal assistant, Ms. Ellenor Handley, that she had been retyping chapter drafts for his book in progress dozens of times over. IBM had a machine that could help, the technician mentioned…’
6 March 2013
[tech] How Qihoo 360 Won the Browser War in China … a look at how a virus company leveraged it’s position to create China’s most popular web browser … ‘When a user tries to uninstall the 360 browser, they are presented with three choices: Repair, Change to IE9, or uninstall directly. If they choose to change to IE9, after installation another popup occurs and when you click “Next”, it reinstalls the 360 browser and makes it the default.’
7 March 2013
8 March 2013
[twitter] The Real Weird Twitter Is Espionage Twitter … Is Twitter being used as a numbers station? … ‘GooGuns posts nothing but strings of letters and numbers, like b39e65fa00000000 in intervals of about five minutes on average. The string of characters always ends with zeroes, occasionally with the location service turned on, so you can see that 554705fa00000000 was allegedly tweeted from the “Region of Khabarovsk.” This has been going on all day and all night, for years, with more than 318,000 tweets posted since 2009. But why?’ [via @qwghlm]
11 March 2013
[life] The Godzilla Threshold: ‘Things are at the point where even summoning Godzilla, king of monsters and patron saint of collateral damage, could not possibly make the crisis any worse. The situation has crossed the Godzilla Threshold. Once the Threshold is crossed, ANY plan, with even the smallest possibility of success, no matter how ludicrous, impossible, dangerous or abhorrent, suddenly becomes a valid option.’ [via YMFY]
12 March 2013
[drink] What Coca-Cola Contains … ‘The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space.’
13 March 2013
[apple] Abandoned Apples … pictures of long discarded Apple computers that have been left to slowly decay.
14 March 2013
[weird] So Ben & Jerry’s has an actual Graveyard for their Discontinued Flavours … ‘Surrounded by a white picket fence on a grassy knoll, lie the headstones of especially beloved flavours or particularly despised flavours, some that were introduced as early as the late 1970s when the ice cream company was founded, but sadly met their untimely fate. The folks at Ben & Jerry’s are pretty good at word play and each flavour has its own poetic epitaph…’
15 March 2013
[weird] Richard Nixon Meets Robocop …
18 March 2013
[funny] How To Get Coments On Your Posts … ‘My post included cute animals, Chuck Norris, open source software, bacon, Ron Paul, the recession, epic failures, cynicism, Apple and a FREAKING NARWHAL!!!’
19 March 2013
[tech] It’s OK to Be a Hater Because Everything Is Bad … amusing rant about the awfulness of technology … ‘Tablets are a complete luxury item—PURE luxury—and owning one makes you an asshole, instantly, categorically. It’s a wonderful toy. But a toy. A big boy toy. Nobody needs an iPad. Nobody. Not a single person, unless you’re literally so stupid and/or infirm that you can’t use a keyboard and mouse like the rest of the industrialized (or barbaric) world. iPads are a status symbol, a second computer that’s built expressly for convenience. You’re spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make your cushy life even cushier by carrying a beautiful computer you don’t need that you can use while flopped down on the couch or leaning against an airplane window like the bourgeois brat idiot you are. You don’t need this thing, and you know you don’t need it. You need a PC-yes. You need a PC to be part of modern society. But you don’t need an iPad, and the entire notion of the luxury device is noxious and offensive…’
20 March 2013
[life] Taxis and the shortest route home … ‘When I first started driving a cab, I drove the shortest route -always, I’m ethical- but people would accuse me of taking the long way because it wasn’t the way they drove. So, I learned to go their way ending up with a lot less grief and a lot more money. If you’ve ever wondered why a seeming professional cab driver will ask you how to get to your destination, this is why. Going your way means they’ll make more money and they won’t be accused of ripping you off. Not to say that in the beginning, I wasn’t stupid. I’d try to show the customer the route on a map but they’d usually be offended that I was contradicting them. It was to their house, if I’d never been there, how could I possibly know better than they did?’ [via As Above]
21 March 2013
[email] Time’s Inverted Index … What it’s like to examine your past using your email archive … ‘While right now it’s unusual in general population for a person to have all this history so close, so quickly searchable, obviously the world will go this way. There will be many new forms of art and commerce over time, I think, that allow us to interact with, and share from, our private archives. There is going to be an urgent market need for tiny mechanical historians who can live in our pockets and point out our flaws.’
[comics] Go Look: An Actor Who Should Have Played Green Arrow.
22 March 2013
[comics] Go Look: Only A Sub-Normal Human Being Would Buy This.
25 March 2013
[comics] The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Owns The Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval … I missed this when it happened – the rights transferred in 2011 and the code closed down in 2010 … ‘The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund today announces that it has received the intellectual property rights to the Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval in an assignment from the now-defunct Comic Magazine Association of America, which administrated the Code since the 1950s.’
26 March 2013
[books] Meanwhile, in Islington Waterstones… ‘Horror’
27 March 2013
[funny] The Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense … ‘In my gross over simplification the vast majority of the multitude of evidenced-free beliefs at large in the world can be crudely classified into four basic sets or bollocks. Namely, Religion, Quackery, Pseudoscience and the Paranormal.’
28 March 2013
[life] I Went to the Playboy Mansion (and It Was Kinda Depressing) … what a writer from Vice found when he wandered off around the Playboy Mansion … ‘Wandering through the house gave me a feeling not too dissimilar to when a relative dies and you have to go to their place and figure out what to do with their things. Except for, in this case, that dead relative was the magazine industry. Or something. I don’t really know what I’m talking about. But the mansion was really, really sad. And it smelled like old man.’
31 March 2013
[scary] 25 Scary Easter Bunnies Of The Past …
