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Amazing Video of Semi-trailers Flying Through the Air in Texas Tornado
April 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Check Out the What the New NYC Taxis Will Look Like
April 3, 2012 By 1 Comment
I can’t wait to see these things on the road. They look great and incredibly comfortable. Probably safe to say these will be the most comfortable and fuel-efficient taxis ever.
Census Bureau Gets 22.5 Million Hits in 3 Hours for 1940 Census Info
April 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Apparently the only thing more hotly anticipated than the return of Mad Men or Game of Thrones was the 1940 census data.
“In the first three hours, we had 22.5 million hits on the site,” National Archives and Records Administration spokeswoman Susan Cooper told the Los Angeles Times. “We’re a victim of our own success.”
A note on their homepage pretty much sums it up.
Due to extraordinary demand, this website is undergoing updates to better accommodate users. While these changes take place, you can still use many of the useful features built into this website (search for enumeration districts, bookmark results, etc). We appreciate your patience, as enhancements are underway!
If you want the cliff notes you can check out this infographic bureau put together to highlight some of the more dramatic differences between 1940 and 2010.
Close-up HD Photographs of the Human Eye
April 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment
CubeStormer II
April 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment
A machine built with legos, powered by a smartphone that solves a Rubik’s cube in 5 seconds. Yep, that’s a world record. No biggie.
Study Tracks How Conservatives Lost their Faith in Science
April 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment
“Over the last several decades, there’s been an effort among those who define themselves as conservatives to clearly identify what it means to be a conservative,” he said. “For whatever reason, this appears to involve opposing science and universities, and what is perceived as the ‘liberal culture.’ So, self-identified conservatives seem to lump these groups together and rally around the notion that what makes ‘us’ conservatives is that we don’t agree with ‘them.’”
This is a great study however I do think it overlooks at least one potential for the decline in scientific trust. There seems to be a concerted effort by the elite members of the GOP to plant seeds of distrust against the scientific community. No such thing as global warming…yada yada yada.
We Require Your Facebook Password
March 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I came across this after I posted about the Facebook password kerfuffle yesterday. It seemed appropriate.
via: All Things D
How to Deal with Potential Employers Asking for Your Facebook Login
March 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Having been unable to find proof that the rumors of companies asking potential hires for login information for their Facebook, email and other social media identities I guess it needs to be addressed. By which I mean it needs to be addressed by us, the workforce. Our government is broken enough that we don’t really need them taking time out to make common sense laws that prohibit companies from asking for said information.
If you are being interviewed by a potential employer and the subject of handing over login information to your personal sites comes up there are any number of responses that could be used. Here are two popular examples.
- Thank you for your consideration, please consider this my official notification that I am no longer interested in a position with a company that feels as if a proper employer/employee relationship entails infringing on so many personal freedoms.
- Kindly go fuck yourself.
You’re going to need to make a judgement call on which one works best in your situation.
Chinese Gangster’s Cell Phone Photos Uploaded to Popular Image Hosting Site
March 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Four days ago someone uploaded an album of photos to the image hosting site imgur. The album contained 22 photos and is titled, “Pics from a Chinese gangsters phone”. In four days the album has gotten over 11 million views.
One of the unique features of imgur is that, while you can create an account for hosting your photos, it’s not necessary. Anyone can go there and upload photos without logging in at all. Needless to say, these photos were uploaded anonymously.
You can pretty see for yourself what the life of at least one Chinese gangster looks like. Porsches, piles of cash and puppies to for one. There’s also a few slightly disturbing images of what appears to be a few possible associates roughing up an older man for some reason. Strangely the roughing up session ends with the poor man being forced to pose with a shoe balanced on top of his head, another on his arm and an old plastic water bottle in his mouth.
Instablogg Allows You to Create Anonymous Blog Posts on the Fly
March 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Instablogg is a new, interesting take on a micro-blogging service. IB allows anyone to instantly and anonymously create a blog post, publish it and share it. There’s no need to even sign up/sign in for anything. Once you publish the past you’ll get a unique URL share the link wherever you’d like. You also have the option to make your post public or private. If you make a post public it will be included in a recently updated list of Instablogg posts and other IBers will have the ability to share the post wherever they want.
From the site:
It’s the fastest way to write a blog post. No need to sign up for a blog, customize your theme, build your archive etc. Just start writing. When you’re done, you have a full featured, good-looking blog post, with commenting and social sharing options.
If you know how to send an email you won’t have any trouble creating a post on instablogg. It has a pretty standard, and actually fairly robust, WYSIWYG editor.
For being so simple and anonymous there are actually a couple of cool features for public posts. Each post creates its own custom QR code if that’s how you choose to share. Instablogg also uses the commenting system Disqus making it easy for people to comment on posts.
It will be interesting to see how Instablogg matures and whether or not it’s able to keep interest in the site fresh. One thing I would like to see them try out is having “missions” or ‘projects” for people to write about. For instance have the suggestion that people write about their favorite childhood memory, or their worst first date. It would be interesting to see how people would get into the anonymity of sharing intimate details simultaneously with other strangers.
One other feature I think would fit well with how the site’s content is generated would be the ability to “like” a post or rate them. Make it as easy as possible for people to find the cream of the crop of these posts and filter out some of the others that may not be worth your time to even bother read.
Ass-ley Tisdale
March 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment
I’m allowed to post this because Ashley Tisdale posted this on Twitter using Instagram, both of which are tech companies which I write about.
So yeah, can you believe this? She posts this on Twitter saying, “What a beautiful day”. I know every time I want to share a a photo of a beautiful day that I’m experiencing I pass the camera to someone else, give myself a wedgie, turn around and say cheese.
People are flipping out because Tisdale is a Disney actress but the chick is almost 30 years old! She’s only like 2 years younger than Kirsten Dunst. It’s just that one’s been successful for a while and one was in High School Musical.
Ashley’s website claims she’s one of Hollywood’s most sought after “young” talents. Sought after by pimps apparently if this pic and the rest on her website are any indication.
Get Your Own Custom Domain URL Shortener with Bit.ly
March 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Bit.ly has become pretty much the de facto link shortener for many sites/users on the web. Whether you’re trying to conserve characters for Twitter or just clean up a long, messy URL to share with someone a link shortener is a great tool.
For a while Bit.ly has offered businesses the ability to create custom domains to use in lieu of the bit.ly URL. They also had a beta program testing this when it first launched which was how I originally got mine. I currently use “james.vc” for my URL shortener.
Now it seems as if they’ve opened up the custom domain option for anyone. Creating your own shortened URLs with your unique domain is a very cool way to share things whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook, email or your blog.
Both this http://bit.ly/GWIpff and this http://james.vc/GWYhQt are shortened by bit.ly, both go to the same article but one is obviously from me, the other could be from anyone. It’s a cool way to customize and personalize the content you share online. And, best of all, it’s free. All you have to do is register a domain name.
Go to your registrar of choice (name.com and namecheap.com are two reputable ones) and register a unique URL for yourself. Be creative. You’re probably not going to get a short .com URL that is unique to you. There are are a lot of different TLDs to choose from and you’ll likely be able to find one that works for you.
Once you’ve chosen your domain and registered it you just follow the simple instructions on bit.ly’s site and modify the settings for your domain. These changes will be made in the dashboard of whoever you registered the domain with. If you have trouble figuring it out, most registrars will have either and FAQ or customer service that will help you figure it out.
Once you have your custom bit.ly account setup there are a number of cool ways to use it. Bit.ly has an extension for most browsers that let’s you just push a button and create a custom URL for whatever page you are on. You can then automatically share it on Twitter or Facebook or you can copy the link and paste it elsewhere. Either way you’ll look like a bonafide geek when you start posting your own custom, shortened URLs.
ℂ◉℗⒴ ℘ⓐṨͲℰ Ⓒℌ◭ℝ◬ℂ⒯℮ℛ
March 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Some of my favorite sites on the interwebs are random, niche sites that exist solely to be helpful. Generally these sites are really specific and most people may not ever need to use them but if you do need them, random characters in this case, they’re insanely useful. These niche sites usually don’t have advertising or sell anything, they’re just there for you to use.
There are literally tens of thousands of these kinds of sites that exist because someone had the idea of, “hey wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to easily…”, and proceeded to create a site to solve the problem at hand.
It reminds me of the “spirit” of the World Wide Web. With everything being about apps and in-app purchases, and advertising and pageviews, it’s nice to find these sites that simply exist to be helpful, not profitable.
Big F*cking Deal (Hint: The “*” is a “u”)
March 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment
The rest of the world might have a lot of reasons to poke fun at us right about now but having a badass for a President isn’t one of them. You can actually buy one of these shirts on Obama’s website.
With the exception of maybe Eisenhower, I can’t think of any President in recent memory that would be willing to lay it out like this.
On the Vegetarian Fence
March 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been on what I guess you would call the vegetarian fence. I’ve completely cut out red meat and pork from my diet. The only meat I still eat on occasion is chicken and fish and I think I had turkey once.
I say on the fence because from everything I’ve read about transitioning to a vegetarian diet the main advice is to ease into it. Cutting out red meat and pork are the primary things you should try and start working out of your diet. Once you’re comfortable with that keep subtracting other meats/seafoods as you feel comfortable.
There’s no big philosophical epiphany behind my decision to try and go vegetarian. To be honest it’s mostly a health issue, convincing myself that if I can ultimately hold myself to a truly vegetarian diet that it HAS to be healthier than the diet I’m currently eating. Somehow I imagine if my vegetarian diet consisted solely of cheese pizzas that might even be healthier than some of the decisions I currently make.
As is the case with most everyone, my diet is currently governed, for the most part, by time and money. I’ve found however, that since cutting out red meat and pork I’ve actually noticed a difference in the quality of food I eat. I’ve also been choosing healthier portions and a wider variety of foods.
I definitely have a very long way to go before I’m anywhere near my goal of having fresh, healthy choices come as second nature to me. For now though, I can say that cutting out red meat and pork has made a noticeable difference in how I feel on a day to day basis. And on the upside if I decide to jump on that Muslim bandwagon I’ll already be halfway halal.
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