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Amazingly, someone has finally done something visually innovative with RSS and publish dates.
Grab bag: Improving Stuxnet
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Opportunities abound for improvement in the state of the art of malware.
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Beautiful, elegant description of key strategies for managing highly detail oriented people.
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“Six months, thought Litvinov. By then Schwimmer could have all three yellows if I don’t prevent it. Schwimmer, Litvinov’s former partner, had recently passed Go and was liquid. He could build. Litvinov, for his part, held two gray properties, Vermont and Connecticut, but his ex-wife Jessica owned Oriental, and he knew she would never trade it to him.”
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There is a sense of hope for the future of political discourse in this country in this piece that I wish I could share.
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Yikes. Again.
links for 2011-01-14
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Fairly astute prediction of what Google's decision to drop H.264 support in Chrome means (more Flash for Chrome users).
Grab bag: Spoofs and Strangers
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Someone spoofs the National Portrait Gallery over the Wojnarowicz incident. Anonymous?
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On point.
Grab bag: bricks, vaccines, and Beowulf
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Brick your phone! No, really!
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Look at the table summarizing differences between the MMR – autism study as published and as reviewed, then read the full text. There is not a single shred of evidence in this paper that vaccines led to autism or other issues. If you are a parent who refuses to vaccinate your children because of studies like this, you are endangering your kids and mine with no valid reason.
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After looking for a long long time, I finally found someone who could explain why the medieval Christmas carol “Nowel: out of your slepe” calls Mary the “empresse of Hell.” In this case it means the earth, as in the Norse _hel_.
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Hwaet! The Beowulf manuscript in your pocket. This is kind of a nice app–interesting price point though.
Grab bag: Wilson in the Virginia Glee Club
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New stuff in the Google Books index for 2011, including an item from an 1879 UVA Magazine article about Woodrow Wilson in the Virginia Glee Club.
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The infrastructure beneath all major cities forms a completely different layer of reality. It’s the difference between how people perceive cities and how they really operate.
Grab bag: Hidden complexity
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Like anything else, the destruction of the Saddam statue in the center of Baghdad was a more complex act than it appeared at the time. The article shows that it wasn’t orchestrated but places heavy responsibility on the media for the distortion of what happened.
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New version of the convenient one-button hack to enable AirPrint for shared printers on your Mac. Now no longer redistributes Apple files.
What I did on New Year’s Day
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Short version – a different DVD navigation library gets around the Track 23 problem.
Password fails, continued
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A nice trick to try the next time you’re penetration testing a website.
Google DNS and iTunes
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Not a conspiracy, just a consequence of Apple (through Akamai) optimizing for distributed DNS, and Google’s DNS servers being centralized.
AppleTV second gen: initial usage notes
I got a nice gadget under the Christmas tree this year: a second generation AppleTV. Short take: I am way more impressed than I thought I would be.
This fall we experimented with hooking an old MacBook Pro up to the TV in the living room and using the FrontRow UI to watch movies, but the user experience was less than ideal. Knowing the limits of the machine, I copied movie files locally to it so that it had no network lag, but there were still occasional hiccups and delays as it tried to play back movies through FrontRow. Also, because it was essentially working as a disconnected island, only the movies and TV shows I copied to it were available. Oh, I could try to share data from my main MacBook, but for some reason things were so sluggish as to be unbearable.
I had an idea that it might be nice to try an AppleTV someday, if for no other reason than for the simplified UI, integrated rentals/Netflix/Youtube, and smaller form factor. But I had filed it away as a nice-to-have. So I was delighted when I opened it up on Christmas morning. (Thanks, hon!) By Christmas evening I had set it up and was putting it through its paces.
First notes: make sure you have an HDMI cable handy. (Duh. Fortunately I did.) We tried out the UI, which makes FrontRow look like a college art project, and were impressed. Then we tried playing back some of the short movies from my MacBook. This was the first hiccup–startup times were long even for brief movies; for half-hour TV shows I was usually waiting 15 minutes or more for playback. What was going on?
A little network diagnostic (aside: I cannot recommend iStumbler highly enough) and I found the cause. I have an Airport Extreme 802.11n base station, but the rest of my network configuration is somewhat unorthodox, including a pair of older Airport Express units that only speak 802.11g and which rebroadcast the main network via WDS. On a hunch, I turned off the configuration option on the Airport Express units to let wireless clients connect, and restarted them. The signal to noise ratio on the main base station improved about 10% immediately, and AppleTV performance was likewise improved–TV shows began playback immediately, movies after a second or two. Problem solved–and now my network is generally snappier.
And now is the interesting bit. I’ve had the AppleTV for about four days, and am now for the first time contemplating something that would previously have been unthinkable: ripping my DVDs to hard drive storage. It’s all about convenience and being able to access the movies (and TV shows, and Looney Tunes cartoons) on demand. Of course, in the eyes of Hollywood, this makes me a criminal, but then I’ve never had much sympathy for the studios’ position in trying to keep their hardcoded crypto secret. So I’m checking out HandBrake as a possible solution. While reports of its user-friendliness are somewhat exaggerated–I’d welcome a single setting that says “make the movie look good on a big screen TV”–initial results were pretty good. It might take a while, given that it’s taken me 40 minutes to rip 30 minutes of DVD footage, but I think it’ll be worth it to get instant access to stuff. Particularly when my four year old is waiting.
Grab bag: All AppleTV edition
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Streaming via VLC and the command line.
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Realtime DVD streaming from a Mac to an AppleTV.
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Two hacks to stream video both ways between a Mac and an AppleTV.
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Interesting tip for transmitting the entire Mac screen to an Apple TV.
You better not pout, ’cause I have ICBMs
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The history of NORAD’s Santa tracking activities, from a typo in a Sears ad.
Grab bag: 19th century Glee Club edition
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In 1891 the Club was received with little enthusiasm. Includes a season schedule.
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Notes about a “Glee Club” at UVA in February of 1870!
18th century beer
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May have to find some of that TJ’s Tavern Ale.