- Those early Priuses are still going strong, ten years later.
- Never put critical private information online unless you are certain it’s protected. Your tax documents could show up in search results.
- Optimizing a Screen for Mobile Use (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
- Why bad science reporting matters: Churn The Other Cheek
- Homeopathy vs. Science: A Metaphor
Category: General
Recent Links: Recalls, Ticket Meltdowns and More
- XKCD: ( – it’s true!
- TicketLeap dissects the technical bottleneck [archived] that caused last weekend’s Comic-Con sales meltdown. (TLDR version: Hostname lookups were turned on in the database, and it was blocking on DNS.)
- Looking for a new business idea? Try the random start-up generator! [Edit: it’s gone, but archive.org sampled ykombinator.com 31 times, so you can still check out some of the random buzzword/gibberish mashups.]
- Who would have thought that something called Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Chew Bars would be bad for you? Candy Dynamics Recalls Toxic Waste® brand Nuclear Sludge® Chew Bars (via @ThisIsTrue, originally linked to FDA recall release, link updated to point to NPR article. Apparently it was too much lead in the “hazardously sour” candy.)
- Even NASA engineers didn’t find any electronic problems causing sudden acceleration in Toyotas. It looks like the sticky pedals and floor pads were it.
All right, all right! ) Happy now?
Links: Humans.txt, Nighttime Photos, Evaporating Cloud and More
- Very cool! 175 Photos of Day Taken at Night
- Humans TXT: We Are People, Not Machines. Cool idea, but I’m not sure how practical it is without (ironically, I know) a machine-readable standard. If we can’t get most people to watch the credits on a movie, who’s going to go looking for a text file that’s referenced in a hidden link?
- The Android Market is finally viewable on the web! I love being able to look for and download an app directly on my phone, but sometimes the desktop environment is just easier to deal with.
- What happens when the cloud evaporates? Flickr: Too big to fail (We hope?) at ZDNet. (TL;DR case study: Flickr accidentally deleted a photographer’s entire account with 4,000 photos. He had his own copies of the pictures themselves, but all the account structure: links on his blog and elsewhere, titles, descriptions, labels, etc. were lost until they were able to dredge it up out of system backups.)
- Webcomic SMBC asks: Where’s the ball?
- Sad balrog has no one left to play with. 🙁
Recent Links: Citation Needed, App Store, etc.
- Snowflakes Under an Electron Microscope (via @ThisIsTrue)
- The United States of Autocomplete (Strange Maps) – What happens if you type each state name into Google and see what the popular searchers are?
- See something? Cite something! (How to share content on the Internet)
- I agree that “App Store” is too generic to be trademarked, but it’s funny to see Microsoft — the owners of such products as “Windows,” “Word” and “Flight Simulator” — making the complaint against Apple. (via @ThisIsTrue)
Recent Links: CMS Nirvana, $1M Comma, Voltron as a Band
- Dougal Campbell asks: are WordPress & Drupal converging on CMS Nirvana?
- A cautionary tale on the importance of punctuation: the million-dollar comma.
- 1980s cartoons as concert posters by Steven Thomas. Voltron, MASK, Silverhawks and more.