Gadgetopia

Official Google Blog: Here comes Measure Map: Google gets Measure Map and Jeff Veen from Adaptive Path in one fell swoop. Bringing Measure Map to Google is an exciting validation of the user experience work I've been doing with my partners at Adaptive Path for years. By opening up the ...

Two Selections from Seth Godin: I stumbled on this e-book over at Amazon. It's a short, free, PDF from Seth Godin (Permission Marketing, Purple Cow) about an attempt to improve a specific Web site that sells CD duplication services. Godin claims that too many designers just put up a site ...

Lately, I've struck upon a new benchmark for usability: the extent to which the interface disappears. Let me explain -- My wife drives a Honda Odyssey minivan. This is the Swiss Army Knife of minivans. It's set-up perfectly, to the point where I've often said, "If you need to find ...

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 ...

movabletype.org: News: The new version of Movable Type includes spam fighting features. As a stopgap before we release comment registration in Movable Type 3.0, we've released version 2.66 of Movable Type, which includes some protection against comment flooding. We've included a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP ...

Making Web 2.0 Work For You, Inside and Out The day started with a keynote from a guy from Human Factors International, which is a somewhat legendary usability firm. His talk was dense, but fascinating, so I ll have to dig through the slides later. It was a discussion about ...

Windows Vista Will Be an Important Measure: The next version of Windows has an official name. Microsoft announced Friday that it would replace the code-name Longhorn with the proper name Windows Vista.

Google now has a built-in calculator. "The calculator can evaluate mathematical expressions involving basic arithmetic (5+2*2 or 2^20), more complicated math (sine(30 degrees) or e^(i pi)+1), units of measure and conversions (100 miles in kilometers or 160 pounds * 4000 feet in Calories), and physical constants (1 a.u./c or G*mass ...

Garage Doors Raise DMCA Questions: There s a fascinating test of the DMCA playing out in court right now. Skylink Technologies manufactures a universal garage door opener that can be used to open and shut any type of garage door. Its competitor, the Chamberlain Group, claims that Skylink violates the Digital ...

Brainbench - Predicting Employee Success: Don't like the certifications Microsoft offers? How about this: Looking for the best way to measure, improve and promote your career skills? Brainbench provides the opportunity to earn certifications in over 600 of todays leading skills. While I can't vouch for this particular outfit (can ...

New test would measure students' Web wisdom: The Information and Communication Technology Literacy Assessment will be given to incoming students, and if they believe that a guy in Nigeria really has $19 million to share with them, they have to take remedial classes. "Every single one that comes through the ...

Sites That Suck: This site is worthy of a browse it's a gallery of painfully-designed Web sites (sadly, the site itself doesn't look all that great). I like the use of vacuum cleaners instead of stars to measure how much a site "sucks," and great commentary like this: I ...

I just saw an ad on TV from Bank of America touting a new anti-phising measure. From what I could gather, you can pick or upload a picture. When you're using the BOA Web interface, that picture will be displayed somewhere on the page. The idea behind this is that ...

High-tech buildings use sunlight, sea water to save energy: Interesting article on how computers and technology are making more eco-friendly buildings. If this interests you, see this past post about The Robert Redford Building. At Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, the lights are controlled by sensors that measure sunlight. They dim immediately ...

DISCLAIMER: I cannot be held responsible if your expensive projector takes up skydiving, and meets with negative results. I probably overbuilt it a tad, but since I'm hanging a pretty expensive piece of hardware pretty high in the air, I wanted to make sure everything was solid. Overall, it was ...

Open Source CMS Award: Packt is doing their awards again this year, and I ve been asked to judge in Best Open Source PHP CMS. Go nominate your favorite app. Nominations are open through August 25. Now entering its third year, the Award has established itself as an important measure for ...

I saw a handy little favelet roll across the del.icio.us feed today: By far the most complicated favelet I've attempted, this one fails in MacIE, but works fine in Camino/Chimera & Mozilla, so it'll presumably be okay in other Gecko-based browsers. [...] It shows the mouse's current position in the ...

Kozoru searching for better answers: Yet another search engine is coming. This one aims to put the Web in its place. "And we're putting the encyclopedia on top of [the dictionary]. And on top of that we're putting news. And on top of that, you've got the Web, which is ...

MASSIVE Blog for Sale: Want a well-known blog? Bidding starts at $40,000. (And no, they don't say what blog it is). This is one of the defining blogs in the industry. When I go to conferences and mention the blog, and the author, I get an "oh yeah!" kind of ...

Congress Shuts Pentagon Unit Over Privacy: The Total Information Awareness database project is dead. "The Pentagon spending plan for 2004 adopted by the Senate says that the office, the Information Awareness Office, which had been headed by Adm. John M. Poindexter, should be 'terminated immediately' while a few projects under ...

ClickSpotting: This is a random Google AdWord I followed, but it looks like a pretty clever approach to web site analysis. Their twist is that they don't just look at the fact that users go from page A to page B, but rather exactly where on the page people clicked. ...

I was just looking at a Gadgetopia post, and smack in the middle of it was a promo banner from Lenovo shilling their spiffed up ThinkPad Z60. The promo asks "Which Side Are You On?" and includes an online poll to see whether the black or titanium-skinned ThinkPad is more ...

I heard mention of this a while ago, one of the "non-lethal" weapons the U.S. military is working on: THE US military is funding development of a weapon that delivers a bout of excruciating pain from up to 2 kilometres away. Intended for use against rioters, it is meant to ...

Exposing click fraud: This is why I think that, ultimately, pay-per-click business models are flawed for the advertisers. [...] some marketing executives estimate that up to 20 percent of fees in certain advertising categories continue to be based on nonexistent consumers in today's search industry. [...] Human operations can be ...

Hyperlink Policy: I stumbled across this, the official hyperlink policy for the Athens 2004 Olympic Site. (I found this from one of our readers' sites, but I don't remember which one, sorry...) For your protection and ours we have established a procedure for parties wishing to introduce a link to ...

Replacing my home backup server with Amazon's S3: Zawodny is documenting his switch from local backups to pushing all his data out to Amazon's S3 service. He makes the economic case that shutting his computer off when he's not using it would save him money on electricity and parts. I'm ...

One of the things I've always believed to be true about computer security is this statement: The only unhackable computer is a computer that's powered-down. I always thought that a good, simple way to make your company a whole lot safer would be to simply power down every workstation and ...

Elliot Back has come up with the best anti-comment-spam measure I've heard in quite a while. Taking Matt's stopgap spam solution, which sends precomputed hashes to be echoed back by the user-agent's form, I've added dynamic generation of the md5 hash. Rather than write it to a hidden field, we ...

EZ-D: The 48-Hour, No Need To Return DVD!: We've talked about disposable DVDs before, but I saw them for the first time in truck stops on my way to Colorado last week. They were $5.99 each, and could be watched for 48 hours before a chemical coating on the surface ...

Has anyone else tried the self-checkout systems at Wal-Mart? These are systems where you scan items yourself, then put them in the bag. The system compares the weight of the item in the bag with what the system has on record. If the correct weight doesn't go in the bag ...

AN AUDIOBLOGGING MANIFESTO: This is an awfully good and funny bit of writing (and oration here's the MP3 version so you can hear the irony...). It's an argument against audioblogging, from both a practical and philosophical point-of-view. Ask yourself is the key to making your site more interesting ...

In advance response to those who would misread the title to this article, it's the tricks that are stupid, not the laptop! I just started a new job this week heading up the graphics department of a small printing company. I had become accustomed to having a laptop at my ...

I imagine the little graphs on the lower-left corner of every section of the USA Today would drive Edward Tufte nuts. This man has dedicated his entire life to the art form of charts and graphs what works, what doesn't, and how to make them better. This all comes ...

The 2004 Senate race is starting to heat up here in South Dakota, and with Republicans trying to unseat Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, there's one thing that's certain: We'll get to see plenty of political ads before it's over. It seems that American politics aren't really much about representing ...

We talked about this film way back when Project Aardvark was announced. Fog Creek Software had an idea for a piece of software, and they recruited four college students over the course of one summer to build it. And they filmed them doing it. (They may claim to have made ...