Gadgetopia

Sudden Closure of Weblogs.com Strands Bloggers: Three thousand blogs hosted at weblogs.com have gone offline because Dave Winer decided to shut the server down. ...some users protested that they had no warning of the shutdown, and thus were unable to download copies of their sites, including user comments. Winer said ...

I love plugin architectures. Having a well-done method for people to extend your system is a huge, huge benefit that we've discussed and lauded in relation to Firefox and Movable Type. But, there's a dark side. When you update software to a new version, you normally do a regression test, ...

Application UI goes back to basics: Jon Udell discovers WriteRoom, and makes an important point. I'm writing this column on a Mac-based imitation of a 1970s green-screen terminal. Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom, a free program for Mac OS X, advertises "distraction free writing" as its In WriteRoom's default full-screen mode ...

Osirusoft Blacklists The World: Serious ugliness in the world of spam blacklists. This list is used by SpamAssassin, which is one of the most widely used spam filters around. "As of today, Osirusoft, distributer of the SPEWS and open relay blocklists, among others, is no longer operational. Servers using these ...

If I convince my employer to replace my cube with one of these, I believe I become an honorary Dark Lord of the Sith. via neatorama

Does Microsoft want to lose the plug-in patent case?: Very interesting notes on the Eolas patent case. "a dark theory: ...Microsoft might willingly lose the case because doing so would harm its competitors worse than it hurt Redmond."

They say everyone has a dark side. I found mine a few weeks ago. It turns out that it s only about three inches of pedal travel away. You see, the latest Corvette has massive block of power sitting directly under your right foot. Push it down hard, and a ...

I am so grateful that I live in a world where I can get pictures like the one here along with messages like this: There is a frog on my window. Yes, technology has truly delivered us from the Dark Ages. Advancements like this can do nothing but improve the ...

Blackle - Energy Saving Search: Every little bit helps. Right? Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. Image displayed is primarily a function of ...

Cool Wallpapers Gallery for your desktop: I'm not big on desktop wallpaper, but my wife likes it. I was searching for something for her to replace Jason Momoa of North Shore (ever since it was cancelled, it's too depressing to contemplate) when I found this site. Any site that has ...

Boring game? Hire a player: Sweatshops in China are hiring people to play MMORPGs at the early levels to earn money and more powerful characters which they can the sell for real money. That development has spawned hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of online gaming factories in China. By some estimates, ...

Happy Halloween, everybody! Here are a few web goodies for ya: Scariest thing I can think of this Halloween? Steve Jobs as Darth Vader: Steve Jobs was the chosen one who promised to make things right in the computing world. But as time passed, his hunger for power took over, ...

Anna Nicole Smith on the 1900 series switch: I just don't know what to make of this. [q]: Hi Anna, why don't you tell our readers how you became familiar with Cisco switches? [a]: Well, a friend of mine is a diamond salesman, actually he works at Van Cleef and ...

VisitorVille: Web Site Intelligence for Creative Thinkers.: You gotta see the screenshots of this it's Webalizer meets SimCity. Traffic stats are displayed in little Sim-like animations with visitors getting off buses with "Yahoo!" and "Netscape" painted on the top. No...seriously. Look at these screenshots. Buildings grow and shrink in ...

The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) is the largest single optical telescope in the southern hemisphere, with a hexagonal mirror array 11 metres across. Although very similar to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in Texas, SALT has a redesigned optical system using more of the mirror array. It will be ...

Ajax-ified Weblog: This is a neat example of Ajax-ifying Movable Type comments. if you try to submit a comment now, the form fields will go "dark", and you'll see a progress bar as your info is sent to the server. When the server gets the data and processes it, it ...

Wired 11.07: Slammed!: Here's the story that Wired took some heat about. The first page is a harrowing look at the spead of the SQL Slammer virus written in a style that would make Michael Crichton proud. The second page tells you how it works. "By 12:45 am, huge sections ...

The Long Now Foundation: library: This is a really good essay on the lack of longevity with digital media. It's not just the media itself that degrades, but the file formats. Computer scientist Danny Hillis notes that we have good raw data from previous ages written on clay, on stone, ...

Here's an idea I came up with while on a walk tonight. There's a 50-percent chance it's already been invented if it has, tell me where to find it. The world needs a PC projector that will cache the displayed image. Say I'm tooling through my presentation in front ...

A Load of Bollocks: Film Director Uwe Boll sets the web ablaze: Here's a great Metafilter post with a collection of links about Uwe Boll, who is the first film director to specialize in video game adaptions. He apparently buys the rights and produces the films himself. Dr. Uwe Boll ...

Joe's entry on weather stuff yesterday reminded me of a great little app I keep around for getting a look outside even when I can't get to a window. Son of Weather Grok is a freebie from Bains Software: Son of Grok will show the temperature, sky conditions, humidity, wind ...

I first saw a post about this a while back at Neatorama, my first thought was the closing scene in the ancient movie The Red Balloon , where the kid floats away at the end hanging from a bunch of balloons. John Ninomiya, who runs the www.clusterballoon.org website, says that same ...

Sitting outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia is a sculpture called Kryptos. It was sculpted by James Sanborn who was kind (evil?) enough to etch an encoded message on the surface: The message on the sculpture contains 865 characters in total. Sanborn has since revealed that the sculpture contains a ...

I'm working on an app right now with a multi-step form process, and a brilliant designer put step indicators in the design so you'd know what step you are on. So the unstyled HTML looks like this:

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Now, before I knew I could use multiple classes on a ...

About Fog Creek Software: I wanted to send Joel Spolsky an email today, and I was prowling around the Fog Creek site looking his email address when I stumbled onto this "About Fog Creek" page. It's well-worth reading (which makes it a glaring exception to the average "worthless by definition" ...

There's a standard way of handling object updates via HTML forms. Generally speaking, when the user selects an object to edit, you populate an HTML form with all the data from the object, post all these fields when the user presses Submit, then update all the fields of the record ...