Fanboy Scouts has launched a series of Merit Badges for Geeks including achievements for Speedster, Mt. Doom, Tie Fighter Pilot, Away Team, and more.- Privacy in terms of contextual identity. How you present yourself to your friends is not how you present yourself to your colleagues, and what you’re willing to share in each context is going to be different.
- XKCD is probably right about the future of “old-timey” speech. “Forsooth, do you grok my jive, me hearties?” We have a hard enough time getting the mid-twentieth century right, and that’s with people around who lived it!
- Darryl Cunningham debunks the Moon Hoax in comic-strip form.
- The new Kindle looks nice. They’re starting to get to the price/feature/polish point where I’d be tempted. (Well, except for that pesky DRM…) Also, Amazon launched Kindle for Android recently, but I haven’t tried it out. While it will run on Android 1.6, it’s a bit big for my G1 unless I clear out some other apps.
Tag: linkblogging
Links: Yen Droid Mobile Woot Quake!
I’ve always wondered how the name of Japan’s currency ended up meaning “craving” or desire in English. It turns out to be coincidence, probably from the Chinese yáhn or yin, “craving.” Word of the Day: yen.
TweetUp acquires Twidroid and changes its name to Twidroyd “to ensure minimal confusion with products from Lucas Films.” Fortunately no one will mistake Lucas Films for Lucasfilm…
Last month, KTLA reported on a 3.3 earthquake in the Inland Empire. “Dozens of residents” in the region felt it. Dozens! Wow!
I have to agree with @rzazueta: Woot’s Amazon buyout report is an instant classic (via @boingboing)
Chart of the Day presents: What people are actually doing with their cellphones (aside from talking) based on a Pew survey on mobile internet use. (via @ThisIsTrue)
Links: Doomed Data, Web Services, WTF Textbook Questions & More
An experiment: I’ve modified* Twitter Tools to create digest posts as drafts instead of publishing immediately. That gives me a chance to edit a week’s worth of random thoughts and links down to the interesting stuff, clean things up a bit, expand things that could use more detail, and remind myself of items that I wanted to write more about later.
If it works out, and if the plugin still offers digests after it’s rewritten to use OAuth, I’ll probably use this same setup to make sure I keep on top of linkblogging at Speed Force.
*It was pretty simple. I just looked for the function that creates digests, then changed the post_status from publish to draft.
The Links
- Why information storage is hard: The Universe Hates Your Data.
- Interesting analogy: Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone aren’t quite ecosystems. Maybe it’s better to think of web services as governments. (via ma.tt)
- WTF of the week: A book I was looking at on Amazon didn’t have any active discussions related to it, so Amazon showed me some random forum threads. They included this question on used textbooks: “Is it Ok if I used it to bludgeon several people to death with it?” Be sure to read the responses. [Edit: Amazon’s forums have been shut down.]
- I love how Twitter’s status blog describes Wednesday morning’s outage as “high whales.”
- Dear CNN: A 4.0 earthquake in California, especially one that didn’t cause any damage, is not breaking news. It’s more like business as usual. (It’s worth noting that a full day later, they haven’t updated the story with anything substantive…probably because there isn’t anything to add!)
- Very cool: the Sci-Fi Airshow is a gallery of photorealistic images of spaceships from various science-fiction TV shows and movies set at, well, an air show. (via Bad Astronomy and SciFi Wire)
Link Archive 2010
Some interesting links I encountered over the last few months, between the time I stopped importing Twitter digests and the time I started using them for linkblogging.
1…2…3…4…5.
If Your Password is “123456”, Just Make it “HackMe” (New York Times). Security researchers examine a list of 32 million passwords stolen from RockYou, and the most common are…well…pathetic. Things like “123456” (the most common), “abc123”, “password” and even “rockyou” (seriously!)
There’s been some slight improvement in the past decade, when the most common password was “12345” (the kind of combination an idiot has on his luggage). Now it’s got a whole extra digit. (Whee.)
Hmm, I wonder where “Chuck Norris” appears on the list?
(via @dixonium)
Myth-Quotations
Myth Adventures, Phil Foglio’s comic-book adaptation of Robert Asprin’s fantasy/comedy novel, Another Fine Myth, is being serialized as a free webcomic [Edit: no longer available.], in the same format as Girl Genius. I remember spending a lot of effort tracking down the mid-1980s books on eBay, before they finally reissued the collection.
The title of that first novel was originally going to be Another Fine Mess, from the Laurel and Hardy catch-phrase, but someone misheard it and Robert Asprin decided he liked that version better. It turns out that “Another fine mess” is actually a misquote itself, according to this the New York Times article on why we misquote movies (via @johannadc). It was originally “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”
Link: Fandom – There’s more than one way to do it
Worth remembering: Your fandom is not Fandom, by schmevil.
…everybody does fandom differently. Fandom is not fanworks fandom. It is not media fandom, SF fandom, or whatever fandom. It is all of these things and more. There exist fandoms and ways of doing fandom that you have never heard of. Fandom is mindbogglingly huge and varied – I’m constantly discovering new fandoms, and new fannish activities. All of these ways of doing Fandom are valid.