Tag: Technology

This Top Ten Weirdest USB Drives list contains some gems. What I wouldn’t do for this fried shrimp one. Although I also love the dimsums and the sushi drives, too. Hell, the sake bottle is fantastic, as well.

(Via Kottke.)

Don Norman’s In Praise of Good Design is a site that highlights usefully-constructed and aesthetically-pleasing products, like the measuring cup above (which, incidentally, I recently saw in my friends Bill and Carri‘s kitchen and promptly became envious of).

Reason’s Kerry Howley says the much-hyped $100 laptop isn’t what people in the developing world really need:

Gifting, we discover every Holiday Season, is an incredibly inefficient mode of exchange. The first week of January is a customer-service-line filled nightmare, our collective attempt to correct judgments people who love us make about what we really want: sweaters two sizes too big, gadgets we have no use for, toys too uncool to engage in public. The developing world, too, has a closetful of gifts it never asked for and couldn’t use: Free food diverted to feed the militias responsible for hunger in the first place, anti-malarial bed nets turned into wedding dresses, newly dug wells abandoned because no one knew how repair them.

…

The laptop wasn’t welcomed with complete uniformity in Tunis; as CNN summarized some complaints: “What people in the developing world really need are water, food, jobs, decent healthcare and sanitation.” But perhaps what people in the developing world really need is for bureaucrats to stop telling them what they really need. As Americans tear open a host of well-intentioned, slightly-off presents this week, the good people at the OLPC might consider the familiar plea of cash-strapped people everywhere: Please just send a check.

Writely is an exceptionally useful Web-based word processor that I recently discovered. I hate having to fire up MS Word each time I want to jot down some notes, and Writely works right in your Web browser. You can edit HTML formatting, save docs as PDFs, manage collaborative editing, spellcheck, access files via multiple computers, and more. And it’s free, too. Here’s a review of the service on TechCrunch.

This sort of application offers a sneak peak at what a Web OS might look like. Bring it on, I say.

Writely, Web+OS

Wow. Yahoo has bought del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site — and a tool I can’t imagine using the Web without. (Here’s a good del.icio.us tutorial, if you’re interested in learning more about it.)

SEOmoz’s “Beginner’s Guide to SEO” — that’s search engine optimization — is a thorough examination of best practices in ensurating the Web sites are listed effectively in search engines. It’s necessarily a little inside baseball, but if you have a Web site or are curious about how search engines work, it’s worth a look.

SEO, SEM, search+engines

Wow:

I have enclosed below a series of pictures to show how the US government starting around 1994 went back in time with remote sensing and holographic radiation longitudinal emf and sound wave holographic energy beams as shown in the movie time tunnel to place different computer generated holographic archetypes of different Nordic, Celtic, and Aryan faces and other attributes around my body as if I were a microcosm of the center of the universe…

(Via memepool.)

I’ve long felt that RSS — a way to subscribe to Web site content feeds — will become mainstream only when Microsoft introduces the standard into its new Vista operating system. Well, it looks like Yahoo is beating MSFT to the punch.

As TechCrunch reports, Yahoo mail will soon support RSS. Users will be able to subscribe to feeds and organize them into folders — the screen shots look really promising.

I’m excited about this because RSS works so well; it has vastly improved the way I use the Web, and I’m eager for more folks to discover its benefits. For an overview of how RSS works, check out my brief tutorial. For more in-depth info, “What is RSS?”, over at Richard’s Notes, is a good place to start.