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links for 2009-08-24

  • I'll come right out and say it: Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here's ten. R2-D2 Sure, he's cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion — and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: "Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we'll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That's just madness." C-3PO Can't fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old.
  • Full List Sites to Visit 1. Flickr 2. California Coastline 3. Delicious 4. Metafilter 5. popurls 6. Twitter 7. Skype 8. Boing Boing 9. Academic Earth 10. OpenTable 11. Google 12. YouTube 13. Wolfram|Alpha 14. Hulu 15. Vimeo 16. Fora TV 17. Craiglook 18. Shop Goodwill 19. Amazon 20. Kayak 21. Netflix 22. Etsy 23. Property Shark 24. Redfin 25. Wikipedia 26. Internet Archive 27. Kiva 28. ConsumerSearch 29. Metacritic 30. Pollster 31. Facebook 32. Pandora and Last.fm 33. Musicovery 34. Spotify 35. Supercook 36. Yelp 37. Visuwords 38. CouchSurfing 39. NameVoyager 40. Mint 41. TripIt 42. Aardvark 43. drop.io 44. Issuu 45. Photosynth 46. OMGPOP 47. WorldWideTelescope 48. Fonolo 49. Get High Now 50. Know Your Meme
  • In May 2008 I decided to improve my MP3 collection, by properly tagging all the files (including composer data), adding album cover art, fixing VBR headers, re-ripping albums that have poor sound quality, and more. I tried several programs, but I wasn't happy with how they worked. None of them did all the things that I wanted, and some corrupted the files. Worse, none allowed me to "look inside" an MP3 file, so the best way to see what was wrong with a file was to open it with a hex editor and try to see how some specifications mapped to the various pieces of the file. After a while I decided to give up on the tools I was experimenting with and write my own. The result is MP3 Diags. There are many programs that create and edit MP3 files, and many of them are broken. As a result, many MP3 files have various issues, ranging from values that are not standards-conforming but that are tolerated by all players and tools (so they look perfectly fine to the end user)
  • This Ukrainian Star Wars themed wedding cost a small fortune. I don’t know how Jar Jar got invited but somehow he managed.
  • Over the past century, violent images from World War II concentration camps, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, and many other times and places have been seared into our collective consciousness. These images have led to a common belief that technology, centralized nation-states, and modern values have brought about unprecedented violence. Our seemingly troubled times are routinely contrasted with idyllic images of hunter-gatherer societies, which allegedly lived in a state of harmony with nature and each other. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like, for example, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who argued that "war is not an instinct but an invention." But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward:
  • We don't magically know how to do everything in every program. When we help you, we're usually just doing this:
  • SoTel Systems, LLC is the premier wholesale supplier for business communications products and services. We offer traditional refurbished and unused voice and data equipment, authorized distribution of VOIP equipment, and commercial SIP Services for both inbound and outbound traffic. With nearly 30 years of experience in the telecommunications industry we provide your company with quality products, valuable expertise, and lightning fast delivery.
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