Gadgetopia

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.

Dave Winer has exposed his subs.opml file. If you ever wanted to know what the grandaddy of blogs has subscribed to, here it is. One-hundred ninety feeds, none of which is this site.

Google pushes 100-mpg car: Dave, you may get your 100 m.p.g. car after all. Google said Tuesday it is getting in on the development of electric vehicles, awarding $1 million in grants and inviting applicants to bid for another $10 million in funding to develop plug-in hybrid electric vehicles capable ...

Dave Winer keeps mentioning something called "Channel Z." No idea what it is, but he's been dropping hints like this one for about a month now: Channel Z status -- I'm using it every day, in fact I'm using it to write this post. At some point I plan to ...

There's a new version out of Dave's Quick Search Deskbar, which is a terrific addon toolbar for your Windows taskbar. Dave's Quick Search Deskbar is a tiny textbox that Dave Bau designed for search hounds with weary mouse-fingers. Unlike the Google Toolbar, this little deskbar lets you launch searches without ...

CSS, Accesibility and Standards Links: Great set of CSS links. (Thanks Dave.)

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 ...

At some point, I think every web jockey has scoped out the CSS Zen Garden for a little inspiration (I dig this one). It's a great example of the power that comes from the separation of style from content, and the proper use of semantic markup. Judging by this link ...

Weblogs Compendium - RSS Readers: Big 'ol list of aggregators. Via Dave Winer, who was irritated that Radio wasn't in the list.

Miguel de Icaza of GNOME fame made some interesting observations regarding Microsoft's recent decision to release certain Longhorn technologies (mainly Avalon, the new UI framework) for Windows XP. My prediction is that Avalon v1 will be a throw-away: it is not really the foundation on which you will build applications: ...

Ray Ozzie's Weblog: Ray Ozzie gets medieval on the future of email here. "Anyone who is doing a critical business process online that involves substantial dialog between individuals should NOT be using email at this point in history, and many no longer are." That Ray feels this way shouldn't be ...

Well, here we are at #4,000. This puts us just 1,000 posts away from our stated goal of 5,000. Along with the 4,000 posts, we have 6,050 comments as of this writing, and that's very cool. We appreciate all the interaction everyone has with the site. Interestingly, we hit 2,500 ...

Sushi Disk: These are tailor made for Joe and Dave. These USB drives are hand-made-in-Tokyo sushi replicas. The convincing USB sushi drive comes in several flavors. Thanks to Paul for this one.

Law of Demeter: I just finished reading "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Dave Thomas. I didn't think the book was all that good (see below), but it did talk about a really great principle that I've seen articlulated numerous times before. The Law of Demeter (LoD) is a simple style rule ...

Microsuck: Just for Dave. "After four years of being known primarly as [ahem]Microsoft.com, the flagship site of the Microsoft Eradication Society now sports a new, slightly more family-friendly name: Microsuck." When you go to the site, you actually get a pop-up that says: "Pssst. Hey, you wanna buy a school?" ...

A few new developments in the Shelfari saga Josh Hug, the CEO of Shelfari, posted a comment on my last post, he had this to say: This is Josh the CEO of Shelfari. I look forward to seeing your reviews of our future designs. I am sorry we have ...

Can't Edit Without A License From Amazon: Nice. "...the USPTO granted another single-action ordering patent to Amazon that also covers the use of buttons to expand/collapse sections of a form, as well as the use of an EDIT button to (you guessed it!) present data to the user for editing..." ...

Linux kernel swear counts: Someone grepped out all the bad words in the Linux kernel source. If I'm reading the graph right, "crap" appears to be the clear winner, appearing about once every 130 lines of code in the 2.6 kernel. Sadly, this method lacks the eloquence of the commenting ...

Enclosure Extractor: For $14.95, you too can have viruses delivered via RSS. "Enclosure Extractor allows you to easily extract and download enclosures from newsfeeds. The bulk of feed readers do not support enclosures fully. Enclosure Extractor fills this gap by letting you enter a newsfeed (either a single RSS file ...

Interesting things are happening at UserLand. John Robb has left, and Dave Winer is hinting that big changes are coming. Two theories abound: (1) they will open source some or all (Frontier, Manila, Radio) of their products, or (2) they will be acquired. With Google's purchase of Blogger some months ...

Here's a crazy little tidbit that you should probably never use on a normal web page: Thanks to RFC 2397, some browsers include the 'data:' url type, which lets you embed data resources right in your page. For instance, the image attached to this post looks like this: Mozilla folks ...

DeanSpace: He's got his own software development team. He's a shoo-in. "DeanSpace is an open development community providing powerful web-tools, quality support, and expert advice to Howard Dean's grassroots supporters. Our goal is to better interlink existing web activism, bring new citizen participants into the political process, and assist individuals ...

You might want to hold off on that Panther upgrade: "Mac users are roaring in rage because of a nasty installment glitch that erases data on external hard drives. After upgrading to Mac OS X 10.3, better known as Panther, they are finding external FireWire drives are no longer recognized ...

Mac vs. PC: The Truth About TCO: This article about which platform is more expensive to run Mac or PC includes this good point: The Apple theory is that cost savings in support far outweigh the initial higher machine cost, giving Mac a lower TCO. However, noted Kay, ...

A batch of Creative Zen Neeon (their spelling) music players left the factory with some bonus software: Looks like somebody turned off the virus scanner at the Creative production plant--it would appear that about 3,700 Japanese 5GB Zen Neeons shipped since July might have possibly been packing a W32.Wullik.B@mm payload. ...

Five myths about 'Wronghorn': Tony McCune "translates" Microsoft's announcements on Longhorn from PDC (I still haven't figured out what "PDC" stands for). Microsoft served up another dose of rhetoric that inevitably encourages locking developers and customers into Microsoft products. As far as I can tell, Longhorn is yet another Windows ...

Philly schools get Microsoft brotherly love: Bill Gates just bought his first school. (Sorry, Dave :-) "Microsoft is teaming with the School District of Philadelphia to design and build a new high school wired with the latest in educational computing tools. The District and Microsoft announced plans on Friday to ...

Patent office to re-examine Eolas patent: It looks like the W3C's trip to the patent office may have paid off. "The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has stepped squarely into a fight roiling the Web by agreeing to re-examine the Eolas patent for a browser plug-in, a development likely to ...

Scripting News: Does anyone know what Dave is talking about? Why would someone do this? "Can you believe it there are weblogs that turn away traffic based on referrer. This is bad practice. These people seriously need to take a refresher course in what the Web is about and ...

Share Your OPML: Top 100 Feeds: If you're new to RSS or are just looking for some new feeds, Dave Winer's "Share Your OPML" site has an OPML file of the Top 100 feeds that you can download and import to your aggregator. This site allows people to upload their ...

As good a time as any: Dave Winer announced today that the kernel of Manila and Radio the object database code will be open-sourced sometime in the next few months. To fans of UserLand Software it must seem inevitable that the kernel will go this way, it sure ...

The Story of the PING Program: Finally, the guy who wrote the ping utility backs up my eternal assertion that it was named for the sonar similartiy, and not for some stupid acronym that no one remembers. I always knew this, but people kept trying to correct me. From my ...

Tired of the seemingly endless stream of "Is Linux Ready For The Desktop" articles? OK, I have a question for you: Is BSD ready for the desktop? DesktopBSD says "We're getting there". DesktopBSD's main goal is to provide a desktop operating system that's easy to use, but still has all ...

RoadMap - Sam Ruby's Wiki: This is a consortium of some of the A-list bloggers to standardize what a Web log is. They're trying to distill the basic elements of a blog, and develop a standard to which blogging tools can adhere. While that seems unrealistic in the vast blogging ...

Audiophile: A short list of products that hardcore audiophiles spend way too much money on. At one time, Dave posted about a $3,500 set of speaker cables. I can't find that post, but these guys have found a set of cables for $11,700. Here's what they had to say about ...

Cruise ship 'used sonic weapon': Interesting details are emerging about the pirate attack Dave posted the other day. Apparently the cruise ship was somewhat geeked out. The crew of a cruise ship attacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia used a sonic weapon to help ward off the attackers ...

Apple has put a new spin on their logo as part of the upcoming 'Panther' release of OSX. "It is not clear whether Apple will adopt the new silver logo for product design, marketing and packaging, or simply restrict it to the new software. Whatever Apple decides to do, the ...

Scripting News: Dave Winer, creator of RSS, is immersed in a continuing battle over the blogging standard and the Echo project. I still can't figure the whole dispute out, but Winer is apparently upset that people are trying to re-write RSS...or something. I don't know, but Winer is a smart, ...

Macintosh OS X 10.3 Panther: no Microsoft web fonts?: Ho ho, you may build a better OS, but you can't have our fonts! Try to imagine a world without verdana, Dave, just try. "I'm not sure about this, but Apple may have stopped including the Microsoft core web fonts in ...

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 ...

Dave's post from the other day reminded me of another great game with a weird name; Sokoban. (and wouldn't you know that the Wikipedia entry hits at number 9 on a Google search, further reinforcing Deane's Standard Reference theory!) On the surface it's a fairly simple game... Sokoban (Japanese for ...

If you have a four-digit name (or less), there's a new pastime called "Vanity TinyURL." If you remember, TinyURL is a redirection service that cuts down any URL by keying it to a code at the root of the TinyURL site. They're up to four characters now, so you can ...

Payloads for RSS: A long time ago (in Internet time), there was a short-lived start-up called LoadTV. You installed the LoadTV viewer, subscribed to some channels which had content you wanted to see, and it downloaded full-motion video in the background all day long. The best part was that whatever ...

A car that could save the planet -- fast: Here's an in-depth CNN article about the electric car Dave posted about a while back. All of this on batteries? Insane. Last November, Wright towed the X1 to a racetrack near Sacramento to see how his prototype would do against a ...

Review: Testing anti-spyware programs: CNN tests spyware removers. No clear winner he did the best by running two different progams at the same time. [...] I tested Webroot Software Inc.'s Spy Sweeper, LavaSoft's Ad-Aware, Tenebril Inc.'s SpyCatcher, Spybot Search & Destroy and Computer Associates Inc.'s eTrust PestPatrol. To ensure ...

Plaxo's Personal Card: An Apology: We never liked Plaxo much and I doubt this will change our opinion, but it's a start. To everyone who hated getting Plaxo update messages, felt we were generating acquaintance spam, or otherwise were harmed by the service, I personally apologize on behalf of all ...

Harvard Weblogs: What makes a weblog a weblog?: Here's an awfully interesting attempt that succeeds in defining just what a "weblog" is. It's written by Dave Winer, who should know since he founded Userland. "At Berkman we're studying weblogs, how they're used, and what they are. Rather than saying 'I ...

I was reading the Wikipedia entry for Bill Gates, and I stumbled across this tidbit about his home: According to King County public records, as of 2002, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $113 million, and the annual property tax is just over $1 million. ...

Ariel Motor Company: Dave posted about this already, sort of. His post was mostly about an electric version that someone made, but I was intrigued enough to seek out the original. This is apparently an amazing little car. The gem of the site is a video from Top Gear, where ...

Google cache raises copyright concerns: The NY Times is raising a fuss over the fact that Google's caching feature allows people to view archived articles that they would have to pay for over at the Times' site. "Through a caching feature on the popular Google search site, people can sometimes ...

Let's get ready, now: This is a little look into what's shaping up as a political battle over RSS. Apparently the major blog systems can't settle on a standard, and Dave Winer has a brutal (yet probably accurate) explanation on how Bill Gates is going to use this to his ...

That post I made about attribion got me thinking about the format and content of blog postings. The way I see it, there are basically three types of postings. Original Content, No Target This is where you actually write something yourself, and there's no "target" of the post no ...

Geeky Microsoft wants a TV makeover: Apple has always been very strong with product placement, and now Microsoft wants the same thing. "Microsoft is promoting its Windows products on popular TV shows like Fox's '24' and HBO's 'The Wire,' airing this fall, as part of the software company's push to ...

Sci-fi geeks rejoice: there are two fan films available on the Net based on subjects near and dear to our hearts. "The Fanimatrix" is a 20-minute story based on the world of "The Matrix." It was produced by two New Zealanders (awesome): "'The Fanimatrix' is a fan-made, zero-budget short film ...

In the days before OS X, if you had trouble with a hard drive, you could simply stick a utility disk in the CD drive & boot into a working Finder, fix the problem, plus a whole lot more, just booted from the CD. With OS X, you can still ...

ActiveWords: If you don't like all the mousing around Windows, ActiveWords aims to eliminate it. ActiveWords adds words to Windows, providing a personal, portable, context free user interface with immediate response. Your words launch programs, jump to websites, send email, substitute text, and more. Receive information about any word or ...

Wired News reports on Transitive Computing, which is set to unveil a new software called QuickTransit, which claims to be the ultimate platform emulator. A Silicon Valley startup claims to have cracked one of most elusive goals of the software industry: a near-universal emulator that allows software developed for one ...

The Apple Store has a Special Deals section where they sell refurbished hardware, and there are some sweet deals going on (don't let the word "refurbished" scare you off; you get what is basically new hardware and the standard warranty without the new hardware price.) For instance, you can pick ...

Applications have patterns -- ways of doing things that have stood the test of time. These aren't object modeling patterns, about which books and books have been written, these are...best practices for how to solve a particular type of functional problem. Around my city, you see a certain style of ...