I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave | Mother Jones I feel guilty about shopping with amazon (and other internet-only retailers). Not guilty enough to stop, yet, but guilty nonetheless.
Just how big are porn sites? | ExtremeTech YouPorn apparently accounts for around 2% of the web's traffic (by volume) per day. Personally, I'm interested to see that they're using a lot of the obvious technologies, rather than anything really ultra-custom.
Rogers’ “Cybersecurity” Bill Is Broad Enough to Use Against WikiLeaks and The Pirate Bay | Electronic Frontier Foundation Americans! Are you aware of CISPA? Here are the facts: it is not a replacement for SOPA. It is however, badly drafted enough that it could very likely be similar in effect. Please write to your representatives, and make the point that while you don't necessarily oppose the aims of CISPA (many of them are actually quite sensible), the problem is that that bill as currently drafted is absolutely as bad as SOPA was. Seriously: if you got up in arms about SOPA, you need to write to them about the current draft of CISPA.
iTunes: Time to right the syncing ship | Macworld "When it comes to hardware, Apple is bold in replacing popular old products with something new that’s different, but better. It’s time for the company to do the same with iTunes." Time, and more than time. I want a lightweight media library manager, a lightweight store and a lightweight sync management tool. iTunes has become slow and painful to use.
ANU Quantum Random Number Server An actual random number generator! Really random numbers. That's quite exciting. The next time I need a cryptographic salt, I shall be coming here.
Space Jam Do you remember what the promotional websites for movies used to look like? Here's one from 1995!
Why the New Aesthetic isn’t about 8bit retro, the Robot Readable World, computer vision and pirates | If you've been wondering why the New Aesthetic looks like 30 year old computer graphics (or if you haven't heard the term, but have wondered why half the fashion industry appears to have fallen down a pixelated 80s hole) then here is one possible answer. Short version: what computers can see and understand (in realtime) now is at about the level of 30 year old graphics. Where it gets interesting is where it talks about what we can extrapolate this to mean for machine vision over the next decade or so.
Cartes Infernales by Ariana Osborne — Kickstarter Every time I see Kickstarter used for something cool, I die a little inside, because I cannot contribute, because Amazon are a bag of dicks. So once again, I do what I can, and point you at yet another project that I would love to contribute to. I've used the Dictionnaire Infernal as a source of inspiration many times in the past, and would love a deck of these to use a a prop. But instead one of you will have to stump up the cash, and let me look on in envy. Which is kind of appropriate, I suppose.
Learn Touch Typing Free – TypingClub I was asked if I touch type while away in Northern Ireland. I don't, but I've always wanted to learn. Might give this a go, if I haven't go too many bad habits from my self taught typing.
When the cops subpoena your Facebook information, here’s what Facebook sends the cops – Phlog Not actually posting this as a dig at Facebook, it's just interesting stuff. I'm not personally wild about the fact that subpoena relating to getting information relating to one user can result in the forking over of messages relating to unrelated users – I would prefer it if they were required to specify that they were interested in correspondence between parties A and B, rather than just getting all party A's correspondence, but I know that's not how the world works, and that's not actually Facebook's fault. See? I can be rational about this stuff, if I try hard!
The Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes by Jess Nevins — Kickstarter Jess Nevins is crowdfunding his next volume of stupendous cultural research. I own his Encyclopaedia of Fantastic Victoriana, and it is *brilliant*, as well as being large enough and heavy enough to stop a charging rhinoceros. No, I'm serious. I've actually used it to do that. Anyway: you should fund this. And even if it doesn't sound like your sort of thing, you should fund it on my behalf, because I'm sick of not being able to fund things on Kickstarter thanks to amazon's fuckery. Someone pay Jess on my behalf.
I hereby resign – raganwald’s posterous Worth a read, if you're at all concerned about this whole employers-requiring-interview-candidates-to-give-them-access-to-their-Facebook-account business. The short version is that it wil create *far* more trouble for employers that it will solve.
What Lies Beneath: Excavating Crossrail’s tunnels | In-depth | The Engineer This is fascinating reading. Example facts from this piece: tunnel boring machines go at about 100m per week, and have a turning radius of 250m. Inpressive enough, but in places the tunnels these things are cutting are passing with 1m of existing tunnels, which, obviously, it would be very bad if they were to hit. "Lads, we've got to start turning now, so that we're in the right place in 2 weeks time. If we're out by over a foot, were going to cause major damage to something expensive. No do-overs. Everyone ready?"