My cousin Andy, who had never been to Las Vegas before, was excited to go to The Price Is Right Live! at Bally’s Las Vegas.
As luck would have it, he was chosen at random to go to Contestant’s Row, where it was not his ability to price outdoor space heaters, but his savy game […]
Spot Instances enable you to bid for unused Amazon EC2 capacity. Instances are charged the Spot Price set by Amazon EC2, which fluctuates periodically depending on the supply of and demand for Spot Instance capacity.
–How Spot Instances Work
For batch processing, this new system allows you to trade urgency/throughput for cost. If you have […]
Amanda Palmer liked American Repertory Theater’s "Sleep No More" so much, she announced a performance at the bar within the venue
I highly recommend Sleep No More Don’t think of it as a play with a plot, or a puzzle to be solved, but a series of surreal experiences. Being able to see Amanda […]
I’ve been following The Long Now Foundation for some time, starting with the essay in Wired Magazine in 1995 which inspired it. Its mission is to inspire long-term thinking in a world with an increasingly short time horizon. They organize around several projects, but their signature effort is to build a clock that […]
Facebook announced today that they are allowing users to pick usernames. The primary use of these seems to be vanity URLs, so you can put http://www.facebook.com/JohnDoe on a business card instead of http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789.
You can only pick one username, and once chosen, it is permanent. This is a lot of pressure.
I think I’m going […]
We’re finally seeing a viable rich editor for MediaWiki emerge. Wikia, the commercial venture of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is beta testing a WYSIWYG editor.
It isn’t perfect, but they’re making great progress. You can try it yourself on their test Wiki. It’s built on the open source FCKeditor, but they’ve taught it […]
I saw Steve Sweeney live ages ago, mainly doing the same material he does here. I’ve always remembered his Bostonians’-take-on-weather bit, and it’s been popping back into my mind as people discuss the beautiful weekend weather swinging back into snow on Monday. Starting around 4:10, paraphrased:
“Positive people we are.”
You: “Jeez, it’s a nice […]
No, I haven’t taken up building miniature models of Tuscan towns. This is a digitally processed version of a photo I took in Siena on vacation 2006. Is it convincing?
Enthusiasts have been playing around with tilt-shift miniature faking for a while, but the website TiltShiftMaker makes the process easy as pie.
addthis_url […]
Man, I love listening to rebroadcasts of TED talks on my iPod during my commute. Sadly, I’m not interesting enough to be invited to attend, but by becoming an associate member ($1000), I can access a live webcast of the TED conference and show it to ten of my friends.
This year I’ll be on […]
Peter pointed me to CHDK, a firmware enhancement for Canon cameras, including my trusty rusty SD630. CHDK lets you hack your camera’s software to make it do a bunch of stuff that the built-in software doesn’t let you do. It’s not as scary as it sounds. You just need to put the new software on […]
It used to be that forking the code was interpreted as a failure in leadership. Forking would split the code, community, and users into competing factions and generally make life more confusing for everyone (see XEmacs).
In the world of distributed revision control systems like Git, forking means something different. These systems were designed […]
I was sending someone directions to my office, and I noticed that the placemark that Google Maps puts on the map of the office address is more accurate. It used to be nearby on Route 9, but is now exactly on my building.
Back in November 2007, Google introduced a feature to allow editing of […]
I’m on the design team for MATLAB Central, the MathWorks online community. Whenever we solicit feedback, we always hear from a user "joking" about adding a dating service.
True to form, it wasn’t long after I created the MATLAB fan page on Facebook for similar comments to start showing up on MATLAB’s wall. An […]
Not bad, eh?
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Look carefully at the Wikipedia page on Linda Hamilton. Notice anything strange about the photo? Yes, that is my friend Peter who has his arm around her. Though I am an occasional Wikipdia contributor, I had nothing to do with this. Peter is thrilled to be in this position and calls […]
While walking by Fenway Park last night around 11PM, I saw a stream of sparks raining down from somewhere up on the scaffolding. It was cool, in an industrial sort of way. As it turns out, also dangerous.
I saw this news item on Boston.com. I don’t visit that site regularly, but I […]
IKEA’s America at Home campaign features a sequence of non-traditional images of "home", starting with an Airstream trailer.
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This is a repost of a video that first appeared on this site in December 2002. My camera recorded the video to QuickTime format, which made it tough for some people to play. Between then and now, YouTube happened. You may have heard of it. So here it is again, this […]
Amazon remembers every order you ever placed. My first order was on March 3, 2000. Here’s what it contained:
Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Hedgehog and the Fox : An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, by Isaiah Berlin
Cocktail : The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century, by Paul Harrington, Laura Moorhead
I liked […]
Since last September, I’ve been living in my 2005 25′ International CCD. I couldn’t find much information about how they perform in the cold, but its been relatively painless despite the occasional blizzard. I did have a snag about a month ago. Here is what I posted to The Airstream Knowledge Sharing […]