Your Tool: Crewdrill
Previous Tools: Ching, Chinter, Paner, Radisk, Mortisk
Yesterday I wandered in to town and sampled the Apple Magic Mouse. While it may not literally be magical, it does have a certain surreal aspect, being so smooth and featureless as to look more like a small sculpture than an input device. I got to play with it a bit and the imaginary scroll wheel works nicely.
I also watched a performance at the Fudge Kitchen, where they sell only fudge, and that fudge is all fudge that has been cooked, sculpted and sliced in front of the shoppers.
If a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words …
Neven and Gus both expressed interest in “NaNoDrawMo” (see previous blog post) and three people is all you need for a conspiracy, right?
Loosely defined goals are: 50 individual works/drawings produced between Nov 1 and Nov 30. Extra points if they work together to tell a story or otherwise share an overall theme (people you know, people you saw on the bus, etc).
There is no quality requirement — really the main idea is to force a certain amount of practice by setting a high quantity goal. Also, it’s not a competition (except with yourself). Any medium is OK, as long as you can get it onto Flickr somehow.
We are going to use the Flickr tag “nanodrawmo” if you want to follow us or join in. My Flickr gets reposted here, so you don’t have to do anything special to follow me if you are already subscribed to my blog.
Some terrible science fiction technologies
Robodroids
Lasergel
Metaphones
Mr ferociousj has a strange hobby: he invents names of things that don’t exist. The thing is that fifty percent of the time they are so apt I find myself wanting immediately to use them in a story or something.
Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server - Much lower power consumption than a tower server (though there do exist servers with even lower power draw), compact, stuffed with discs, and with Mac OS X Server, which is reputedly quite nice to work with. If you were setting up a small office or even an overqualified house network, then this would be a fine way to go about it.
Last night as I was making my somewhat delayed supper, I was listening to a Radio 4 programme about The Migration Habits of Stones, what its author Alyson Hallett calls a project, but which might qualify as the largest art installation (work in progress) on Earth: three stones (of a planned seven) taken from one location, inscribed with the same seven-word excerpt from a poem, and installed at another location in imitation of the erratics left behind by glaciers. So far this work includes stones in woods in Bristol in Britain, a retreat in Great Barrington, USA, and a viewpoint of Kanahooka Point in Australia. Apart from the aforelinked articles there’s an article with poems in a magazine website called Resurgence.
Mr. Berners-Lee smiled and admitted he might make one change — a small one. He would get rid of the double slash “//” after the “http:” in Web addresses.
–NYTimes.com via Daring Fireball
Mr Berners-Lee has neglected to remember the countless developer-hours wasted because the ampersand (&) is special in both HTML and in URLs.
The problem with SEO is that the good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work, and it’s poisoning the web. I’m going to tell you about the problems, and then tell you the one true way to generate traffic on the web, based on my own 14 years of hits and misses.
– Derek Powazek - Spammers, Evildoers, and OpportunistsApple have made a fuss about presenting music nicely with cover art and liner notes. You can already do this with Bandcamp, much more nicely than with (say) MySpace. You (the musician) can choose which tracks are free, and which ones are sold for money, and even let fans set their own price in the style of Radiohead’s Rainbows thing. Fans can easily embed your tracks in their blogs and you get stats and stuff. Bandcamp
