Gadgetopia

Linux Mark Institute: Interesting. The Linux Mark Institute ("LMI") is an organization established "to protect the public and Linux users of the world from unauthorized and confusing use of the Linux mark and to issue proper licenses to authorized users of the Linux mark." LMI is not designed to generate ...

dive into mark: Eighteen months after he wandered out of the blogging world, he's wandered back in with a heart-warming post about giving his kid a bath. If you don't know who Mark Pilgrim is, read his Dive into Accessbility sometime. It fundamentally changed how I structure Web pages.

Mark Cuban: Web 1.0 s Richie Rich needs some respect: Funny anecdote in this profile of Mark Cuban (which is pretty interesting in and of itself). Broadcast.com s 1998 IPO was a smash. The stock was priced at $18 a share, but it climbed to $62 at the end of the first ...

Cruft-free URLs in Movable Type: Mark Pilgrim has created a great URL scheme in Movable Type for the cleanest URLs I've seen yet. Clean URLs are an anal-retentive obsession with me. I found this via a great page at Brainstorms and Raves devoted to URL beauty. Mark is using MT ...

WrongRoom: Mark Pilgrim gets uptight about the wave of stripped text editors like DarkRoom and WriteRoom which have no controls or anything, and are just green text on a black background. Reading the change logs of these programs is like traveling back in time. Way back. Latest changes in JDarkRoom ...

Every exit: Does anyone know what happened to Mark Pilgrim? This was the last post on diveintomark.com back on October 18, 2004. It's time for me to find a new hobby. Preferably one that doesn't involve angle brackets. Or computers. Or electricity.

Only a 'moron' would buy YouTube, says Mark Cuban: This is kind of a wet blanket. Billionaire investor and dot.com veteran Mark Cuban had harsh words for YouTube, the online site that lets people share video clips, saying only a "moron" would purchase the wildly popular start-up. Cuban, co-founder of ...

The Perfect Mark: Here's a gut-wrenching story in brutal detail about how a seemingly intelligent man got caught up in a Nigerian 419 email scam. The Nigerians were mercilessly brazen -- sucking more and more money out of this guy right up until the end, and beyond. And he fell ...

When is someone going to come up with Fiction Markup Language an XML spec solely for annotating fiction? For example: Take perhaps the greatest novel ever written: Ian Fleming's 1953 classic "Casino Royale." Let's break this down from a big chunk of text to make up something more usable. ...

A True Ninja Hacker Is Like The Wind: A sysadmin gets a notifcation that there's been a physical breach to a server case in his data center. Then another. Then another. The most logical explanation that Mark and the Ukrainians could think of was that an elite team of corporate ...

April 13, 2029 is the date that asteroid 2004 MN4 a quarter-mile wide chunk of rock may hit the earth. (Of course, it's already got a Wikipedia entry!) If you're wondering if that is a Friday, I checked already; it is. The risk rating for asteroid 2004 MN4 ...

Winer Watcher: Mark Pilgrim, who runs Dive into Mark, has set up a page that pings Dave Winer's site every five minutes. It compares what it gets to what it got the last time, then displays the posts with color-coding to show what Dave has added, removed, or changed.

Are emails private? And should bloggers scoop their interviewers?: I did an email interview recently, and I guess it never occured to me to post the transcript before my interviewer did (I never posted the transcript, in fact). "Mark Glaser, a friend and columnist for the Online Journalism Review, has ...

Mark Pilgrim's list of Ubuntu essentials for ex-Mac users: Kottke says Apple should be scared of this. Joe has used Ubuntu and claims that it's borderline amazing. [...] Mark Pilgrim recently switched to Ubuntu Linux after becoming fed up with proprietary Mac file-formats and the increasing use of DRM technologies ...

Controversy about our "Web 2.0" service mark: O'Reilly is attempting to own "Web 2.0," at least when used to describe a conference. I don't know how I feel about that -- I think the term is stupid, but can they really own it? To protect the brand we've established with ...

Here's an interesting situation with a host I use. AOL is getting confused as to the actual source of email marked as spam, and mail forwarding servers are getting dinged as a result. [...] some customers have content filter rules to send all mail for their domain or for their ...

Greasemonkey 0.4.1 (The Next Generation): Apparently Greasemonkey has been gutted and put back together to fix the huge security hole in the last version. I can confim that, despite massive architectural differences, GM-TNG is incredibly backward-compatible, even with complex user scripts like Book Burro, BugMeNot, and GMail Persistent Searches. I ...

Hot RSS [dive into mark]: Mark Pilgrim has a pretty funny post where he subtly and effectively slams CNet for creating a new RSS format, incompatible with any current newsreader. OK, now we're grooving. instead of , instead of ,

instead of . Praise Murphy, and pass ...

David beats Goliath in domain-name dispute: Good to see the little guy win one. This guy registered mattel.org and got sued for it. Mattel, Inc. argued that Gopi Mattel's domain name improperly incorporated its MATTEL registered trademark. Mattel, Inc. asserted that Gopi Mattel had no legitimate right or use of ...

Targeted ads way off the mark: I wonder what AdSense would have put there? And how do you prevent this? These ads place themselves based on the text, not the tone.

Dome Home - Pensacola Beach: Here's a site about a "dome home" in Pensacola Beach, Florida. No, not the geodesic dome houses which never really caught on (but which I still love). This is an actually smooth circular dome house built to withstand hurricanes. After several years of repetitive storm ...

Uh oh I may have started a new addiction... I'm a subscriber to O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf service, which I've discussed before. Tonight, I was doing some heavy reading into Microsoft Sharepoint, and I was getting annoyed at the interface. Reading books online is never fun, but I usually just ...

Apple's iTunes Music Store is down right now; all links redirect to this page. Guess that means Rob's comment is on the mark, and the heat will be turned up a bit for Amazon's Unbox. I'm thinking it'll be better than perfectly adequate.

Gmail Invitation Prices Crash: A good lesson in economics here. On Monday morning, invitations to join the testing of Google's Gmail Web e-mail service were still fetching as much as $100 on eBay closed auctions. By Wednesday afternoon, sellers were lucky to crack the $20 mark. Increased supply is the ...

Iraq seeks '.IQ' domain to make its mark on Net: I want to get the name "ihaveareallyhigh.iq". Iraq is making its first claim for an internationally recognized presence on the Internet. Iraq's media commission and the U.S.-led administration in Iraq want to set up Web addresses using the domain code ...

Boing Boing gets a semi-extreme makeover: Boing Boing made some changes this morning. [ ] the blog has reinstated comments along with a redesign that went into effect on Tuesday morning. Additionally, there s a new Boing Boing Gadgets vertical helmed by former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson. But I m still beating both ...

Accessibility Internet Rally: 2003 Training: Here's a fantastically comprehensive tutorial on making Web sites accessible from Knowability. The thing about making your site accessible is that it tends to improve the site immensely for non-imparied users as well. In the end, this is just a bunch of really good guidelines ...

.NET Rocks! hosted by MSDN: .Net is the only programming language with its own radio show. It's like Letterman for dorks, and I mean that in the best possible way. Carl Franklin and Mark Dunn interview .NET experts and other industry movers and shakers, and answer your .NET questions on ...

FBI, you've got mail -- NOT!: This seems a little...odd, to me. Budget constraints are forcing some FBI agents to operate without e-mail accounts, according to the agency's top official in New York. "As ridiculous as this might sound, we have real money issues right now, and the government is ...

Mark recently reinstalled Windows XP on his laptop. He was kind enough to keep a running diary. My Apple bias not withstanding, I find this rather funny. "34. Update driver. 35. 'This driver is not digitally signed.' OK. 36. 'This driver may cause your computer to become unstable.' OK. 37. ...

SCO to argue General Public Licence invalid: They're apparently going to try and invalidate the entire concept of open-source. "The GPL licence allows software and work derived from it to be copied by anyone at no charge. But according to today's WSJ, quoting lawyer Mark Heise, the GPL is pre-empted ...

Frequent Search Engine Users, Google Is Watching and Counting: Does anybody have this? "Think of it as an odometer for a search engine. The Web search service Google has quietly started placing a counter on its home page for a small number of its most frequent users. Most Google users ...

Effort to Set Electric Car Record Delayed: These guys are having some technical problems this week, but I'm interested to see how it works out. Nevada agreed to shut down a state highway for the torpedo-shaped car's attempt to top 300 mph which would shatter the old mark of ...

Wide-body CSS | silverorange labs: Notes on the "min-width" CSS attribute that IE doesn't support. It would come in handy, along with its companion max-width that [sigh] IE doesn't support either. "The advent of table-free pure CSS layouts has been great for those browsing with non-PC environments (handhelds, ...

Why Oracle must move in on Content Management: About a year ago, Chris predicted that Oracle would buy Interwoven. After EMC's acquisition of Documentum, this doesn't seem as far-fetched now as it did then. And then I read this: Oracle has been promising to make big moves in content and ...

Helping your client maintain markup quality: Interesting concept of a way to help your clients keep their markup clean: style it ugly when it s wrong. [ ] one idea is to make any errors or suspicious markup obvious to the person working on the document. One way of doing that is ...

Clever little sh*t: This is brutally funny. Watch the YouTube video that started it -- I'd have fallen for it if I had seen it. Last Friday a YouTuber by the name of "Mark Erickson" posted a video claiming to reveal an easter egg in Gmail that unlocked an invite ...

Ubuntu Linux now on my new Thinkpad T43p: Wow!: A glowing review of Ubuntu on the desktop. Like Mark Pilgrim, Jeremy is impressed (so is our very own Joe, for that matter). I cannot overstate how important this is: Ubuntu is the first real "desktop" Linux I've ever seen. There's ...

BoingBoing tribe on Tribe.net turns 300: It's kind of serendipitous that I found this posting, because I signed up for Tribe.net a few days ago. I don't know why, but it's kind of growing on me. "A few weeks back, BoingBoing reader Pauly M. and friends created a 'BoingBoing tribe' ...

BBC NEWS | UK | Google calls in the 'language police': Why do companies insist on doing this? Google has called in the lawyers to try and stop people from using "Google" has a verb ("Did you google that new girlfriend of yours?"): "The company's lawyers are trying to stamp ...

Citizendium aims to be better Wikipedia: They're in for a tough road, I think. This has been tried before with Nupedia. It's be interesting, though, to see how the two extremes do. Citizendium has been operating in a limited manner that ends with this week's official launch. Its volunteer base ...

Cisco sues Apple over iPhone trademark: I think Cisco has a pretty strong claim here. The iPhone name was first trademarked in 1996 by InfoGear, a maker of Internet appliances. Cisco acquired InfoGear, and the trademark, in 2000. Cisco sells iPhones designed to place calls over an Internet connection, not ...

New boat aims to make SEALs travels less painful: Apparently, Navy SEALs get their butts kicked by the delivery boats that get them to shore. Fighter jet pilots are subjected to forces up to 10 times the pull of gravity, but the Mark V has produced forces upward of 20 ...

Interactive Fiction Markup Language (IFML): I posted the other day about how I wished there was a Fiction Markup Language for annotating fiction. Well, it turns out there's an Interactive Fiction Markup Language (IFML) and engine for creating text adventure games or "Choose Your Own Adventure"-style Web games. The IFML ...

I use Thunderbird exclusively at home for mail and RSS feeds. It feels lightweight and it does everything I need it to (I don't schedule many meetings outside of work so I don't miss a calendar, for instance). But there are a few things about this application that really irk ...

Google to take down front-page boast about index size: Apparently Google and Yahoo! are counting "pages" differently, and Google takes exception that Yahoo! claims more than they have. Google Inc. will stop boasting on its home page about the number of Web pages it has stored in its index, even ...

I wish this was an April Fool's post, but it's not. CNN Money reports on the CXT, which is basically an attempt to turn a commercial dump truck into a 6MPG diesel grocery getter. "It's not going to fit into the standard garage," said Mark Oberle, a spokesman for Navistar, ...

Cyber sleuths hunt file-swappers: Want to know how the RIAA is going to find you? Probably using this guy: "Mark Ishikawa, a former hacker, is the CEO of BayTSP, arguably one of the most recognised and biggest companies working in the business of patrolling the web to unmask violators of ...

Web 2.0 Service Mark Controversy (Tim responding this time): Tim O'Reilly responds to the "Web 2.0" trademark controversy which has apparently been pretty hateful over the last week. O'Reilly also values its trademarks -- as do other companies and individuals aligned with the values of openness and sharing. (I'll note ...

The Raw Feed is one of my favorite blogs. Mark Elgan has a great rant on email hoaxes over there that's pure genius. He doesn't just whine about the problem, though. He provides a great solution to your relatives that forward you hoax emails: The Anti-Email-Hoax Email Hoax Please be ...

Teens' wireless feat could be world record: Quite a feat took place at DefCon. In the end, their 55-mile amplified connection exceeded last year's winner by 20 miles. Then they turned off their amplifiers and broke the record for an unamplified connection at the same distance. While not yet confirmed, ...

Bill Gates' House: Here's a nice little image map of Bill Gates' house. You can click on certain areas to get enlargements and descriptions. For instance, his pool: The 17-by-60-foot swimming pool has an underwater music system and a floor painted in a fossil motif. Swimmers can dive under a ...

We (Deane) has talked about the utter meaninglessness of the term Web 2.0. Tacking "2.0" onto just about anything must be the cutting edge to do. A few days ago I saw Nissan's shift_2.0 TV ad. (I can't find a link to the ad, but here is an article about ...

Concorde flies into history: This is really too bad. The Concorde always represented something so cool that actually worked. When I was a kid, "The Future" meant we were all supposed to have flying cars. That didn't happen, but the Concorde was something right off the pages of a sci-fi ...

We all know, or assume, that the CIA has some of the coolest gadgets at their disposal: matchbox cameras, hollow buttons, laser seismic recorders. But who would have thought that a couple of their greatest inventions were a dragonfly and a catfish. " The CIA once built a mechanical dragonfly ...

Why Microsoft won't beat Six Apart: A good article on how and why software gets adopted by the masses. Interesting information on what happened with Quark. "I wouldn't worry too much yet, because no team has asked me the important question yet. What's that? 'How do you get the A-list ...

Grand Theft Auto IV Review: Apparently GTA IV is pretty good. This is worth reading at length. I won’t beat around the bush: Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest game to come out for the Xbox 360 so far. I say that without reservation and without consideration for the ...

Surprise, surprise, surprise! The X Prize foundation announced last week that it created a new prize program targeting the automotive industry. Mark Goodstein, one of the founders of GoTo.com, has been hired to coordinate the new X Prize. "The X PRIZE is about changing paradigms," explains Goodstein. "The current paradigm ...

(No, this isn't a duplicate of the previous story different sort of Jobs). The KDE project has come up with a neat way to get new developers interested in contributing to KDE: Junior Jobs. The problem with starting to contribute to a big project like KDE is that the ...

Reader feedback on bizarre no-link spam: A while back, Mark over at Boing Boing posted about some odd spam comments he'd seen that had no URL. If there's no URL, why post the spam? In the last week, several readers have approached him with theories. Some of them are interesting. ...

Whilst pulling some cash out of my wallet today I noticed some red and blue stamps on the face of one of the dollar bills: See where I've been. Track where I go next. WHERESGEORGE.COM So being the curious guy that I am, I went there. What a cool idea; ...

Builderoo User Manual: This is an apparently amazing plugin for Movable Type called Builderoo that let's you things with plain text markup that would be difficult with even WYSIWYG. Specifically: Change text filters in the middle of an entry using Roo tags [...] Use special purpose filters to generate sophisticated ...

Thought experiment: Mark Pilgrim goes on a quick rant about how having Web clients demand valid XHTML is a bad idea. The client is the wrong place to enforce data integrity. It’s just the wrong place. I hear otherwise intelligent people claim that if everyone did it, it would be ...

Rumor site AppleInsider got hit with a lawsuit Wednesday, in the wake of two articles leaking information on what is to be released in the Macworld Expo next week. The suit, filed Tuesday in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, Calif., aims to identify who is leaking the information ...

National Federation of the Blind files Target lawsuit: This is going to be an interesting one to watch. This could have huge implications for Web development. Sexton, 24, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., and the National Federation of the Blind are suing Target on behalf of the 1.3 million blind ...

Looks like spammers are trying to fool Bayesian filters by diluting their text. I got a spam today with two lines at the top advertising "cash freedom" or something, and I noticed that the message scrolled quite a bit. After about a hundred line breaks, I found this: I can ...

Dial D for Disruption: A good article about Asterisk, the open-source phone system. Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of novel features for the phone. With Asterisk loaded onto a ...

One Standard Fits All: Robots Exclusion Protocol for Yahoo, Google and Microsoft: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have gotten together and actually agreed on extensions to the REP the Robots Exclusion Protocol, otherwise known as your robots.txt file. For instance, they re going to allow a new META tag: NOSNIPPET: Tells ...

In 1976, a Frenchman made a film called "C'etait un Rendezvous" consisting solely of some guy driving a Ferrari really, really fast through the streets of Paris. The idea is that the guy wanted to meet his girlfriend (hence the title) and the film ends with him parking the car ...

I've been a Sam's Club member for a while. My dog food comes in 50-pound bags. I only buy toilet paper about twice a year. All good things. I really started using the membership when our local Sam's Club got a 1-Hour Photo center, and I got a digital camera. ...

Essentials : Mark Pilgrim has listed his "essential" software tools for doing his job. I always like to see these the absolute, "can't live without" tools of people who do the same work as me. As the risk of being self-indulgent, here's mine: Email: Thunderbird or Mozilla Mail via ...

I've complained off and on about the lack of user-defined fields in Movable Type. Today was finally the day I got off my high-horse and messed with some code. Here is a method to add a new field to the MT database. The field can store whatever you like, can ...