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links for 2010-10-08

  • Google just announced that it plans to shut down 1-800-GOOG-411, its voice-powered directory assistance service, on November 12. GOOG-411, which launched in 2007, was the company's first foray into voice-powered search. According to Google, GOOG-411 "provided a foundation for more ambitious services" on smartphone platforms like Google's own Android and Apple's iPhone. Interestingly, today's announcement also notes that Google plans to put all of its resources "into speech-enabling the next generation of Google products and services across a multitude of languages."
  • A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do. It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted their expensive device back, the student told Wired.com in an interview Wednesday. The answer came when half-a-dozen FBI agents and police officers appeared at Yasir Afifi’s apartment complex in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday demanding he return the device. Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, cooperated willingly and said he’d done nothing to merit attention from authorities. Comments the agents made during their visit suggested he’d been under FBI surveillance for three to six months.
  • You can quickly create a seamless background texture in our online image editor Phoenix. First import, and select your seamless tile with one of the selection tools. Next use the "Define Pattern" functions under the Select menu to set it as the foreground fill. Then use the paint bucket tool to fill the canvas with the new pattern.
  • Did you ever feel like there just weren't enough hours in the day? Have you ever stayed up late because you weren't tired enough to go to bed? Have you ever felt like you didn't get enough sleep and it was, too soon, time to get up? Have you ever wished for more free time to pursue different activities and goals? If you can relate to these feelings, you will be interested in the 28 Hour Day. Under the 28 Hour Day system, the current week would remain at exactly 168 hours. (24×7=168) However, this 168 hour period would be divided into six 28-hour days rather than 7 24-hour days. Some of the benefits of extending the length of the day are relatively clear: you would simply have more time to do the things you wanted to do. Everything you do now in a typical day could be done for a little longer: you could sleep longer, work longer, spend longer blocks of time with your family and friends, and have more leisurely meals.
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    links for 2010-10-07

  • I graduated from college in 2006 and moved to San Francisco where I landed a job as a product manager at CNET, working on GameSpot.com. It was a fantastic job, great place to work, and I learned a lot. But being an employee just isn’t me, and I quit after 11 months to start doing freelance web development work full-time. I didn’t have much experience and had done very little client work up to that point, so the transition was rough. The first couple years were hard, and I almost caved several times and just got a job. But going into 2010, things started to really shift in a perceptible way. I’ve had enough people ask me for advice that I figured I’d write up a quick guide. These are a few of the things I’ve learned along the way; hopefully you’ll find them useful as well.
  • Every few weeks I see a post on Reddit about how great this series was, and inevitably there's a lot of moaning and gnashing of teeth that we can't play them anymore, if only LucasArts would re-release them with new graphics… Well, STFU. There's a great modding community out there for these games, and updated models are available for most of them. So download them (they're in the public domain now, so it's legal to download), and try out these awesome updates!
  • USO | GiveBack10 encourages every American to take 10 minutes to learn about the issues facing wounded warriors, tell 10 friends or give 10 dollars. They gave. Let's all give back.
    (tags: news donate)
  • Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food. Now, a unique partnership — of military scientists and entomologists — appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two. A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One. Exactly how that combination kills bees remains uncertain, the scientists said — a subject for the next round of research. But there are solid clues: both the virus and the fungus proliferate in cool, damp weather, and both do their dirty work in the bee gut, suggesting that insect nutrition is somehow compromised.
  • Click and drag downwards to "flick" the ball across the table–try to get it to straddle the goal line for a touchdown. To kick a field goal after a TD, click the football to get the moving bar as close to the green zone at the top, then click again to hit the green zone at the bottom.
  • Just over a year ago, web development was a completely new concept for me. I started off wanting to build something for fun and it turned into something I actually get paid to do! Not quite turning my love of basketball into a position in the NBA, but I’ll take it. As with any new endeavor, I hit my stumbling points. I started out with a respectable dent in my bank account and reduced space in my apartment because of the massive amount of web-related books I bought at Borders. Don’t get me wrong, one of them was great (yeah, one). I soon learned the best tool was free. The online community quickly became the mentor I needed to help me understand web development, which is why I would like to share the seven most valuable web development websites in my arsenal.
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    links for 2010-10-03

  • A couple of days ago I noticed one of my apps was producing an usually high amount of revenue via ads. When something like that happens I'm really interested in finding what's causing it. So first thing I did was logging in to AdMob and examining the reports for this application. This is what I found:
  • The table below shows the 104 elements currently in the HTML5 working draft and two proposed elements (marked with an asterisk).
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    links for 2010-10-01

  • Piano player eager to learn how to play those long-cherished Mario themes and sound effects, your quest ends here! A few months ago, I too was looking for quality sheet music of the original Super Mario Bros from 1985, and after frantically searching the web for days and closely examining the Mario sheet music available on dozens of popular results, I came to the realization that there simply was no definitive score of Koji Kondo's masterpieces. Nintendo has never published an official version, and high demand for Mario sheet music has led a number of fans to release their own amateur transcriptions, none of which succeeded in doing justice to the original Koji Kondo creation; while some of these attempts were fair approximations and captured the gist of the tunes, they were often simplified or interpreted versions, with missing or extra notes, inaccurate rhythms and poorly-chosen notation; furthermore, they hardly looked good when printed on paper sheets,
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    links for 2010-09-29

  • Technology is opening up new opportunities for people who want to work at home. Finding and landing profitable work isn't easy, but we've listed some options. These jobs will give you the flexibility you want and the income you need to keep paying your bills and maintaining a health credit score.
  • The film adaptation of 'The Lord of the Rings' prequel has suffered multiple setbacks — the latest a worldwide union boycott. Is it time to throw in the towel?
  • Other than the frenzied anticipation for the coming breed of tablet PCs, the one topic that dominates the mindspace of the technorati these days is the world of e-readers. More specifically, a great debate is brewing; each of the e-readers and their associated online book stores favor differing standards and file formats, and we may have another good ole fashioned format war on our hands. (Nothing gets a techie's blood pressure going more than watching as competing technologies duke it out.) Format wars are to the tech world what elections are to politics, or what playoffs are to sports: a chance for competing candidates to go big or go home — based on the preferences of the masses. The most cited example is the great Betamax vs. VHS war of the early '80s (in which the objectively better standard got trounced), but, in truth, battles over standards have been with us since the first wheel was chipped from stone.
  • Last week I talked about 960 Grid System is Getting Old. Surprisingly a lot of comments have been made. It seems like people are using 960gs because of the "golden ratio" — all numbers are even. I’m a designer, not a grid scientist. Why restrict your layout so that it can fit into this 960gs? A grid is supposed to help you in design, not to limit your creativity. The 978 grid, that I mentioned before, is not just about increasing the page width, but to loosen the gutter space so users can read it more comfortably. Today, I would like to write a follow up post to further ellaborate on some of the points I brought up initially.
  • Designing and critiquing logos for web-based companies and startups is a pursuit of endless fascination for many of us. Over the years, we’ve seen enough startups come and go (and rebrand and merge) to fill a volume with how and how not to develop and execute a logo for a web company. We’ve also picked up some knowledge about trends in this field. Some of the trends are good; others, regrettable. Others still are simply overused, which is the saddest scenario of them all. We hate to see a good design trick or typeface grow hackneyed over the course of a few months, but it happens all the time, unfortunately.
  • While we all know the importance of the content of any webpage, what we often ignore is the first impression that the visitor forms when visiting any webpage. It is of paramount importance to know that the first thing that any visitor looks at is the look of the page. If the look is appealing enough only then does the reader move on to read the content. Graphic designers today are laying a huge importance on typography to make a webpage look attractive. When creating items like E-Books, brochures and pamphlets, it is important that the design and layout of the font is managed well so as to make any webpage look attractive. At earlier times, typesetters used manual modes to perform this action but with the advancement in technology, it is now possible to design fonts on the computer. There are some fantastic typography tools that are available for use now that enable the webpage creator to create some fantastic font styles to attract the readers.
  • Monet’s paintings evoke a sense of energy and life, they leap off the canvas with color and contrast, but Monet somehow managed to avoid using the color black for nearly his entire painting career. By avoiding black in your own designs, you can replicate some of this dynamism.
  • Amazon’s Kindle can do a lot more than just buy and read Amazon-sold e-books. This is often a surprise. I usually wind up in conversations where someone says “I’d like to try a Kindle, but it can’t _______.” Usually, it can. I was actually surprised when I bought my Kindle not just by how much it could do, but by how well it did it. The Kindle suffers from two things: 1) it’s never going to do everything that a full-fledged computer or even a color touchscreen tablet can do; and 2) the Kindle 3 has improved on a whole slew of features that were either poorly implemented in or entirely absent from earlier iterations of the Kindle. Here I want to gather up knowledge generated from and circulated by many of my favorite e-reader blogs, just to try to give you an inkling of all the things that a new Kindle can do.
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    links for 2010-09-28

  • AND NOBODY IS SURPRISED.
  • Today is September 26th, Petrov Day, celebrated to honor the deed of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov on September 26th, 1983.  Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, take a minute to not destroy the world. The story begins on September 1st, 1983, when Soviet jet interceptors shot down a Korean Air Lines civilian airliner after the aircraft crossed into Soviet airspace and then, for reasons still unknown, failed to respond to radio hails.  269 passengers and crew died, including US Congressman Lawrence McDonald.  Ronald Reagan called it "barbarism", "inhuman brutality", "a crime against humanity that must never be forgotten".  Note that this was already a very, very poor time for US/USSR relations.  Andropov, the ailing Soviet leader, was half-convinced the US was planning a first strike.  The KGB sent a flash message to its operatives warning them to prepare for possible nuclear war.
  • Movie trailers are liars. If they’re not using the only two funny scenes to make you think the entire movie is funny, or splicing scenes together to misrepresent the movie, they’re using scenes that don’t even make it into the movie. The New York Times once ran an entire story about how many scenes in the National Treasure: Book of Secrets trailer weren’t in the finished film. (We expect more from Nic Cage.) Why do the suits who market movies create misleading trailers? Because they’ll do anything to convince suckers like us to shell out for a ticket.
  • Tonight, Jon Stewart tackled the subject of Stephen Colbert's recent congressional testimony. In the process, Stewart ripped Congress itself, Fox News (and its anchorbot, Megyn Kelly), "arrogant douche" Tucker Carlson, and more, before showing just how useless Congress has been.
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    links for 2010-09-27

  • In my grouchier moments (one of which I am having right now), I am considering a public relations campaign to make fun of people who can't do simple math and shame them into either acquiring some fundamental skills or staying quiet and not bothering the rest of us with their ignorance. I've devoted a significant part of my career to education: working with K-12 teachers, teaching at a university, developing programs for the public.  I'm beginning to wonder whether we are not all just wasting our time and we would do much better to focus on developing an elite cadre of high-powered science literate researchers who will discover wondrous things and save us all from ourselves.  Of course, that won't work because the people who know the science will be prevented from fulfilling this task by the science-ignorant who comprise the public, as well as the executive and legislative branches of the government.
  • When it comes to logo design a lot of designers find it difficult to combine a lot of ideas in a small icon, if the logo have a symbol, or to make a unique typeface that tells you all you need to know about the business it represents. And the truth is that logo design is not easy. Here at ProDesignMedia I try to make designers’ life easier. This time I want to help the logo designers. A tip can save you a lot of time and efforts. It’s easier to hear a tip from someone than to say the tip. To say a tip you must make mistakes; you must try what is good and what is not. The model is the same in logo design. In this article you will find 15 tips which will help you to design logos the right way.
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    links for 2010-09-26

  • "The anti-awkwardness officers brought Awkward Aaron and me in for booking…
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    links for 2010-09-24

  • Michael Dell flashed a 7-inch version of its Android-based Streak tablet at Oracle OpenWorld…but offered no real details. Dell is apparently working on evolving its Android-based Streak tablet: at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, Dell CEO Michael Dell flashed a 7-inch version of the device, which is currently available with a 5-inch display. However, Dell offered no other hard details about the device, including important information like price, availability, and whether Dell still envisions tablet devices serving as fully-functional phones.
  • As far as House Judiciary subcommittee hearings on agricultural jobs go, this one had a bit more celebrity shine. Stephen Colbert, the comedian and satirist, knew that, and hoped his presence would vault the hearings up to "CSPAN 1" status. Here are his opening remarks, which differ from the testimony submitted in advance.
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    links for 2010-09-23

  • I saw that Andy Clarke had added a fluid width YouTube video to a particular page on one of his sites. His code relies upon a wrapping div and then images and video within this wrapper are set to the width of the wrapper:
  • The new cinematic trailer for the upcoming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movie has appeared on YouTube. This is the highly anticipated first part of the epic finale that brings closure to the adventures of the little (O.K., perhaps not so little any more) wizard. Check out the new trailer above. If you missed the first trailer for the movie, you can find it here.
  • DVD and games rental company Blockbuster has filed for bankruptcy protection in the US. The Dallas, Texas-based company said it had made the decision as part of attempts to cut its debts and restructure the business. Agreements with its creditors will allow it to cut its debts from nearly $1bn to about $100m, Blockbuster said. Blockbuster's non-US operations are not included in the bankruptcy, as they are legally separate entities. That includes its 4,000-strong network of stores in the UK, Canada, Denmark, Italy and Mexico. Blockbuster's 3,000 stores in the US will remain open for the time being, the company's statement said. It has also secured a new $125m loan it says will allow it to keep working during the restructuring process.
  • Every three days, more Americans die from sudden cardiac arrest than the number who died in the 9-11 attacks. You can lessen this recurring loss by learning Continuous Chest Compression CPR, a hands-only CPR method that doubles a person’s chance of surviving cardiac arrest. It’s easy and does not require mouth-to-mouth contact, making it more likely bystanders will try to help, and it was developed at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. "This video is worth sharing," said Gordon A. Ewy, MD, director of the UA Sarver Heart Center and one of the research pioneers who developed this method.
  • A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, we heard about a crowdsourced, shot-for-shot remake of Star Wars. Okay, it was actually about a year or so ago, we read about it online, and if you’re going to be an uptight fanboy about it, it’s a remake of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Nevertheless, it’s finally here, and we have not been disappointed. Which in and of itself is saying a lot. Unless you’ve spent the past thousand or so years being slowly digested by a sarlacc in the Great Pit of Carkoon, you’ve probably lamented what’s happened to the Star Wars franchise. Sure, we were able to forgive the Ewoks.
  • Transparency is a core value at Google. As a company we feel it is our responsibility to ensure that we maximize transparency around the flow of information related to our tools and services. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. We’ve created an interactive map of Government Requests that shows the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests for Google to take down or censor content. We hope this step toward greater transparency will help in ongoing discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests. Our interactive Traffic graphs provide information about traffic to Google services around the world. Each graph shows historic traffic patterns for a given country/region and service. By illustrating outages, this tool visualizes disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it's
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