Archive for August, 2005

Flick off

Tuesday, August 30th, 2005

Yahoo bought Flikr and now as it usually does after a buyout it is integrating the service into the mother ship. However, some Flikr users don’t like it and are planning on dropping out (or committing flikicide).
I have nothing against Yahoo and I am not a Flikr user although I have looked at some of [...]

Wikipedia

Friday, August 26th, 2005

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia. It’s getting huge. Over 700K articles so far.
Most of the articles are pretty good and they cover lots of things that regular encyclopedias have a hard time keeping current.

Phishing

Friday, August 26th, 2005

Well there’s a no brainer (i.e. being down on phishing). Phishing for those that don’t know are attempts to make you think you are going to an authoritative site and reveal personal information. It’s a basic form of identity theft.
Here’s a good shockwave video on what happens if you click on the email link and [...]

Dueling formats for next generation DVDs

Wednesday, August 24th, 2005

In the blue corner: Sony and Matshusita/Panasonic (product: Blu-ray)
In the green corner: Toshiba, NEC, and Sanyo (product: HD DVD)
The goal: a new format for DVDs that will hold about 10 times the amount of current DVDs and will be big enough to contain High Definition movies.
The two sides have failed in [...]

Fantastic Four

Wednesday, August 24th, 2005

I thought this movie was good but not great. Not enough action for me as the FF spent most of the time aquiring and learning about their powers and not enough actually using them (I guess that’s for the sequel).
I did think they did a good job with the special effects on Mr. Fantastic (elastic [...]

CommandN

Monday, August 22nd, 2005

Videoblog/cast CommandN is getting better. In particular, Mikey (the one of many nicknames) is starting to look somewhat comfortable in front of the camera. The pacing is getting better, too. And, oh yeah, content: the content (tech news, how tos, web site picks) is good, too.

Beer ratings

Sunday, August 21st, 2005

I thought that I would give my opinion on the top-rated beers so I googled several likely candidates but only found promotional websites (we’re number 1), industry surveys for sale, and various rankings by readers of specific websites. Typical is a survey from ratebeer.com that has 7 US beers in the top 10, 2 from [...]

Microsoft patent

Saturday, August 20th, 2005

Microsoft is trying to patent the smiley face? What’s up with that? Sounds more like an April Fool’s joke. But it’s real. Here’s a link to the patent. Here’s the main claim:
A method, comprising: selecting pixels to be used as an emoticon; assigning a character sequence to the pixels; and transmitting the character sequence to [...]

JibJab

Saturday, August 20th, 2005

JibJab is my favourite site for funny political animations. I wish they could create them faster.
It seems that US elections are their best source of inspiration so I guess I have to be patient. However, it wouldn’t surprise me if they do something on the Supreme Court nomination.

Location-based applications

Thursday, August 18th, 2005

Here’s a list of location-based websites based on combining google maps with a source of locations. Things like showing the location of apartments for rent or gas stations with their price for gas. This is just the beginning and there are going to be an explosion of applications in this space.
Thanks to Google for releasing [...]


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