February 2012
55 posts
Oil and Apples. →
The Day Apple Left The Tech World’s Collective Mouth Agape | TechCrunch. Do you remember when Apple was, well. Kind of a joke? Fit only for fandorks and whatever-we-used-to-call-hipsters-back-in-the-90s? I do. What the hell happened? Oh, that’s right. Apple starting making good shit. Fancy that.
Feb 24th
Bad habits breed bad habits.
The idea of teens sharing passwords didn’t come out of thin air. In fact, it was normalized by adults. And not just any adult. This practice is the product of parental online safety norms. In most households, it’s quite common for young children to give their parents their passwords. With elementary and middle school youth, this is often a practical matter: children lose their passwords pretty...
Feb 24th
5 tags
Feb 23rd
29,045 notes
Christ mouse and keyboard controls are...
randomredux: How do you people stand it? I stopped playing that staircase game because after 45 floors the only thing of note that happened was my arm falling uncomfortably asleep on the trackball. … Trackball? There’s your problem…
Feb 23rd
3 notes
Evil is relative.
So why are we calling this evil? Because Google changed the rules that it defined itself. Google built its reputation, and its multi-billion dollar business, on the promise of its “don’t be evil” philosophy. That’s been largely interpreted as meaning that Google will always put its users first, an interpretation that Google has cultivated and encouraged. […] Google’s philosophy speaks...
Feb 23rd
1 note
1 tag
Feb 22nd
Your side has propaganda too.
None of that is bad. But it does get bad when you get huffy and go, “Well, that’s not a message! That’s just the way things should be!” Which is exactly the same goddamned thing fundamentalist Christian parents say when they flood their kids with Veggie Tales and Davey and Goliath. They’re not trying to give their kids a message, they’re just showing them how the world works. Right? Why The...
Feb 22nd
Feb 20th
2 tags
Apparently the people supporting Jennifer Hepler...
thessalian: I want to support her. I just don’t know what I could possibly say in 140 characters. This is the problem with Twitter. Personally, I think this entire lot of bullshit is a bunch of whining, immature fuckheads (all unfortunately male, but I don’t want to tar the whole gender with the same brush) who are having a complete hissy-fit at having guuuuuuuuuurls move into their clubhouse....
Feb 20th
70 notes
Feb 19th
52,314 notes
4 tags
Feb 18th
2,939 notes
Feb 17th
Sadly we have them here, too. →
MARGARET COURT, TRANSLATED. | Mike Stuchbery. Translating Evangelical Christish.
Feb 16th
I’ll just be here, locked alone in my... →
Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale Test – SAS. 30 fear, 30 avoidance for a score of “moderate social anxiety”. Thanks, highly-accurate internet test! A lot of these are weird questions for me, though, because they vary a lot as to whether I’m working in a personal or professional capacity. Like the one about meeting new people; fine at work, terrifying outside of it. Or the ones about working while...
Feb 16th
It’s more of a guideline, really.
Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that’s a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results. Their search engine doesn’t necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portal’s results. Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It’s a very...
Feb 15th
Nails for the culture industry. →
Dim Sum Thinking. On iBooks, Author, and Amazon and Apple muscling in on the publishing world. Honestly, I welcome our new long-tail friendly overlords. Big Books will always be Big Books, but the current publishing industry (like most Culture Houses) is almost impossible to break into for small players. Reducing barriers to entry and increasing portability and accessibility? Not gonna complain...
Feb 14th
You know you’ve been blogging too long when: →
You end up writing a script to archive any posts or comments older than seven years in a separate database, in order to clean them out of your live blog. This is actually the first time I’ve split my blog archive in that way in over a decade. I’m such a hoarder, but it got to the point where having posts still around from 1999 (no, seriously) was more embarrassing that it was cool. So now there’s...
Feb 14th
It’s probably not just WordPress, to be...
The WordPress ‘setup-config.php’ installation page allows users to install WordPress in local or remote MySQL databases. This typically requires a user to have valid MySQL credentials to complete. However, a malicious user can host their own MySQL database server and can successfully complete the WordPress installation without having valid credentials on the target system. After the successful...
Feb 14th
Okay. On the plus side, [game redacted] has finished downloading. On the minus side… It’s 2:30am, really? Must we be this loud? Damn beta.
Feb 13th
Feb 13th
4 notes
Today in FUD… →
Is your smartphone telling every website you visit your telephone number? | Naked Security. In short, probably no. But things like this are only going to get more and more prevalent…
Feb 13th
A melancholic core. →
Invasion Day/Australia Day: Unity/Disunity. 200 years and counting, and we still haven’t figured out exactly who we are. Maybe that’s not a bad thing; certainty always seems to breed douchebags, after all.
Feb 12th
And all this without SOPA!
We’re not pirates, we’re just providing shipping services to pirates. Coyote Tracks – The enemy of my enemy. Megaupload CTO Mathias Ortmann. (via)
Feb 11th
See also: Jesus was kinda a douche.
Here’s the one great truth you need to know. The bible is a bad book. It’s a nearly unreadable mess of contradictory stories, ancient political propaganda, arcane tribalisms, bizarre rituals, and the bragging of petty provincial bullies. There are occasional scraps of genuine literary quality imbedded in it, but it is 95% shit…and unfortunately, the book has been granted such extravagantly...
Feb 10th
Internet, y u b grindingly slow this morning?
Feb 10th
2 tags
Anonymous just took down the CIA's website →
Feb 10th
278 notes
What if the ads are served by DoubleClick? →
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Page layout algorithm improvement. As the place I got this link from pointed out: What about the default WordPress theme? I mean, it’s graphical header is pretty, yanno. Big. (Not to mention other sites like, oh just for example, this one…)
Feb 9th
Feb 9th
50 notes
More valuable than free.
In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can...
Feb 9th
2 tags
I need a rape culture beta for a scene in "Rabbit...
deefic: It’s not huge and it’s not explicit and it’s not long, but it’s been bothering me, and a loan of another set (or some other sets) of eyes would be appreciated. Prior knowledge of either DA2 or Rabbit Heart not required, just someone who can give me an opinion on a few hundred words… Reblogging here, too, for the 20x more potential eyeballs…
Feb 8th
1 note
Musical talent, what’s that? →
Chrome Web Store – Pulsate. Very nice and easy way to create soothing ambient music. I have to admit to loving things like this, being totally naturally musically inept myself (despite playing the trumpet for, like, four years).
Feb 8th
1 note
5 tags
Feb 7th
1,517 notes
Ubuntu + XBMC + widescreen TV in the bedroom = winning! Now if only we had a cable to make the sound work…
Feb 7th
1 tag
Feb 7th
So apparently Ubuntu is still pretty easy to install when falling-down drunk. Kudos to whomever developed the installer!
Feb 7th
Super pissed and installing Ubuntu. NERDCORE!
Feb 7th
… No. →
Pseudonyms on Google Plus? Wrong. | ZDNet. Second go-round on the ‘nymwars. Google still demonstrates they don’t have a fucking clue.
Feb 7th
Art. →
Tim Noble & Sue Webster – Double Header Double Pleasure, 2000. Quite likely NSFW, in that it’s sort of a picture of a pile of dildos. That you’d see in an art gallery. YMMV.
Feb 6th
2 tags
randomredux replied to your post: As if this is even a question. Have they ever SEEN the internet, and how many content creators are doing it for the joy of just creating? There’d be music, films, books, radio… it just wouldn’t be the industry/commercial stuff! Sssh. Don’t tell the culture industry moguls they don’t actually have a stranglehold on all creative output. You’ll...
Feb 6th
1 tag
geewhathappensnext replied to your link: Lies, damn lies, and Google+. I registered only for DA Legends a few days ago, and don’t plan on doing anything else with it, If I could just shell out and buy they game I’d be happier as the fees are nuts, Having neither a Google+ nor a Facebook account for privacy reasons, I will truly never know the joy of DA Legends. Woe. Or, yanno. Pretty much all...
Feb 6th
2 tags
randomredux replied to your photo THAT’S A PRETTY AWESOME SHIRT YOU HAVE THERE. As well as the Doctors tee pictured I also have the Arrow in the Knee and DA Cast shirts!
Feb 6th
I’d buy that for a dollar! (Hint: No.) →
Introducing: Highlighted Posts Every now and… | Tumblr Staff. … No. Seriously?
Feb 5th
Urgh.
It’s also time for everyone to stop distancing themselves from the effects of violent rhetoric by attributing violent action to ‘crazy people.’ Members of the anti-abortion movement are not crazy. They are domestic terrorists who are willing to stop at nothing to achieve a political aim, and they use their rhetoric to inflame their movement, justify their actions, and draw followers. This is...
Feb 5th
Feb 5th
4 notes
Cue the conspiracy theories… →
Is This The Real Reason Why MegaUpload Was Shut Down? – Forbes. Tinfoil hats, but still…
Feb 5th
1 note
Feb 4th
5,291 notes
Science: Still frequently kinda goddamn racist. →
elle, phd: This Story Is Too Bootylicious for Me. … no, seriously. Someone did what?
Feb 4th
1 note
Lies, damn lies, and Google+. →
This post on Google+ statistics is a billion* times better than any other post | VentureBeat. So hands up: Who still actually, actively, uses their G+ account?
Feb 3rd
2 notes
TW: Homophobia, bullying, suicide.
Sam’s death lit the fuse of a suicide epidemic that would take the lives of nine local students in under two years, a rate so high that child psychologist Dan Reidenberg, executive director of the Minnesota-based Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, declared the Anoka-Hennepin school district the site of a “suicide cluster,” adding that the crisis might hold an element of contagion; suicidal...
Feb 3rd
1 note
Cockroach, get out of my pants. I’m sorry but I’m just not attracted to you in that way.
Feb 3rd