I’m not sure what the whole point of this exercise was. My brain sometimes goes off on wild tangents and it must know the answer before I can move on to my next task.
I wondered tonight how many letter o’s I had to add to Google.com in order to register a domain name. Maybe there’s some trickle web traffic that can be gained by someone who fell asleep while at their keyboard, pressed the letter “o” for a while, wakes up, then presses “gle.com”.
Turns out the answer is a bit scary. In fact, I don’t know the answer because GoDaddy limits the # of domain name characters to 63, so the longest I could check is gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com and guess what? All of the domain names from gooogle.com up to that one are taken. It’s a strange world out there… and now my mind can rest.
Boston Dynamics has just released a brand new video of their DARPA-funded Big Dog robot.
This robot must be seen to believe… watch it all the way as it is kicked (and recovers), slips on ice (and recovers), jumps, climbs, and does all sorts of eerie things. It’s so cool!
Last week when Apple announced its iPhone SDK, I immediately downloaded it and began playing around with it, even though I don’t know how to develop a single line of code in XCode. It was still worth the time because it is actually very cool, especially with the iPhone emulator. At the same time last week Apple announced their iPhone Developer Program. Again, I immediately applied–which was a simple process of filling out a form and waiting for a response. Today I was excited to receive and saddened to read this:
Dear Registered iPhone Developer,
Thank you for expressing interest in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enrollment request. As this time, the iPhone Developer Program is available to a limited number of developers and we plan to expand during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time.
Thank you for applying.
Best regards,
iPhone Developer Program
Looks like the response was so overwhelming, even during the first few hours, that a lot of people will have to wait, including me!
If you have FireFox, oh boy do I have an add-on for you. Thanks to Tek for this tip… it’s such a great find I had to break my blogging drought and say something about it. It’s called PicLens and what it does it turns your desktop into a full 3D browser for the images on the page or in the gallery you are viewing, such as Flickr, Google images, Smugmug, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace, and many others.
It’s hard to explain exactly what it does–you just have to believe me that it is the most incredible photo viewing interface ever. If you don’t have FireFox, you need to go get it just to try this thing out. Just install the add-on, then go to Google Images and search for photos, or go to a Flickr gallery. Once you see the thumbnail images, mouseover one and you’ll see a play button appear. Click it and you will be immediately immersed in an incredible photo viewing environment.
Now that the iPhone and iPod Touch allow a user to save a WebClip bookmark to your site on their Home Screen, most web developers are wondering, “How do I customize this so it doesn’t look so horrible?” To specify a bookmark icon for all pages of a web site, place a PNG image named “apple-touch-icon.png” at the root directory of your web server - similar to the “favicon.ico” which appears to the left of your URL in your web browser.
To override the site bookmark icon on a specific web page, insert a <link> element similar to <link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”/apple-touch-icon.png”/> within the <head> element of the page.
The bookmark icon dimensions should be 57×57 pixels. If the icon is a different size it will be scaled and cropped to fit. My examples are shown to the right. Design tip: leave space around your artwork since Apple crops the edges to make the icon round.
Safari will automatically composite the icon with the standard “glassy” overlay so it looks like a built-in iPhone or iPod application.
Note: I have noticed that the <head> element is not needed for this to work. Just put the .png file in your root folder! Perhaps this isn’t needed if you use the default “apple-touch-icon.png” file name in the root folder? I went ahead and did it anyway, just to be on the safe side.
Since I switched over from Windows XP to Mac OS X Leopard this past November one of the more puzzling things has been how to add desktop shortcuts. This was real easy in Windows’ Internet Explorer. Just Right-click your desktop and select “Create Shortcut”. On a Mac (FireFox or Safari) this is not an option.
I finally found the answer, and like most things on the Mac, it’s easier than the PC.
You may have noticed while surfing around that when clicking text on a page it sometimes turns into a box, one that you can drag. I know I did, and I always wondered what I could do with it. Now I know.
You can drag any text link from a page onto your desktop to create a shortcut. Also, if you want to make a desktop shortcut of the current web page, just drag the icon that appears to the left of the URL in the address bar. This is by default a globe icon, but a site can customize it so it may look like some other 16×16 image. Either way, just drag it to your desktop and it will create a .webloc file. Just click it to open it up in your default browser!
Works great in both FireFox and Safari.
Just click and drag the icon to your desktop when it turns to a hand icon.
The latest WordPress, 2.3.2, frustrates me. It used to be where I could add any plug-in and it would work just fine. A few weeks ago after I upgraded to 2.3.2 I noticed that many of my more interesting plug-ins no longer worked, such as the comment preview plug-in, a few Flickr photo plug-ins, etc. After trying to get them to work on my own without success, I simply de-activated them.
I’m not sure if removing the comment preview plug-in was helping, but now I am getting more comment spam than ever from bots. I’ve tried a few plug-ins documented on the WordPress spam plug-ins page, but nothing seems to really work with 2.3.2. I have tried Did You Pass Math? which did not work (generated an error upon activation), Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin which also did not work (showed the form, but did not enforce the math), as well as Ajax Comments which changed nothing.
I’m not a bozo when it comes to this stuff, or at least I don’t think I am. I am a web developer by profession. I understand PHP and how WordPress works, and all I know is that it’s not working very well these days. I have a ton of plug-ins that I have de-activated because they no longer work with this update.
Is anyone else having problems with WordPress? I am using Akismet for spam protection which works great, but I still have to delete a lot of spam marked as suspect at the end of the day and I’m hoping another plug-in like a math or CAPTCHA question will help.
If you are a TiVo user and have a Mac, you are probably using Roxio Toast 8 Titanium. This is probably because there are no other solutions out there to transfer programs from your networked TiVo boxes to your Mac. It’s great software, but upon upgrading to the latest version of Toast 8.0.3, I encountered a problem. The “TiVo Transfer” option was still on the Extras menu, but it no longer worked. After searching the ‘net for answers, I didn’t find anything. So I did some troubleshooting on my own and found the answer. Hopefully this will help others.
Apple’s home page today features a different kind of Mac vs. PC commercial… featuring ol’ St. Nick in classic stop animation like the old classic Christmas shows we’ve come to know and love from Rankin-Bass.
Are you looking to score an iPod Touch for the holidays but finding the $300-$400 price tag a bit hard to stomach? mp4nation.net is selling the Optimus Touch (how Transformers-sounding is that?) for a mere $109. So how does this differ from the iPod Touch?
Optimus Touch lacks WiFi, has a touch screen that is stylus-friendly only, has a small memory capacity (2gb or 4gb), and a smaller screen than iPod Touch, to name a few major differences.
It does, however, have a FM tuner, miniSD slot, supports DivX and XviD movies, and a 1.3MP CMOS camera that can also act as a webcam.
Watch the video below. You can see the build quality is not up to par with Apple standards, but what do you expect for a $100 knock-off that isn’t from Apple?
Remember all those really cool Nintendo classic games like Donkey Kong Jr,Super Mario Bros., and Galaga? Well I do, and those are three of my favorites.
Nintendo8.com now has all of these games online, right now. They are all Flash based. Up until now you had to download an emulator to play on your Mac, PC, PDA, phone, or other device. Finally, someone took the time to figure out how to do it online, technically and legally.
One of my other all-time favorites, Donkey Kong (not Jr.), is not yet available. Someone please let me know if it ever does get added!
Now this is innovation… Amazon has just done for books what Apple has done with the iPhone: innovate to a whole new level. This is the iPod for readers. You can download books, newspapers, blogs, and even your own content to a hand-held device that has an innovate new newspaper ink-like display, plenty of battery life to keep you going for a few days, is lighter than most paperback books, and check this out: it comes with free EVDO wireless (not WiFi). There’s no subscription, no wireless plans, no contracts, nothin’. Just turn it on, and you’re on a fast high-speed data network (Apple, are you listening?) You want your paper pushed to you electronically every day before you even wake up? This will do it.
Now that is amazing!
With all of these breakthroughs, you’d think they would have made this new hand-held device a little bit sexier, though? Plus, what’s up with the stark white color? It’s bound to be the recipient to quite a few coffee stains and oh, does that fancy new electronic ink rub off? Newsprint finger prints will be everywhere (har har).
Currently $400 direct through Amazon, with free 2-day shipping. Out of stock, obviously, with the holidays and all — good luck getting your hands on one. There’s always eBay, for $600-$1,000.
I’m not sure what the whole point of this exercise was. My brain sometimes goes off on wild tangents and it must know the answer before I can move on to my next task.
Last week when Apple announced its iPhone SDK, I immediately downloaded it and began playing around with it, even though I don’t know how to develop a single line of code in 
Are you looking to score an iPod Touch for the holidays but finding the $300-$400 price tag a bit hard to stomach? mp4nation.net is selling the 
