- 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. 🙁
Tag: linkblogging
Recent Links: 2012, 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?
- World IPv6 Day: firing up the engines on the new Internet protocol.
- Comic: Huey, Dewie and Chewie (Rhymes With Witch, by the author of Something Positive). Be warned: the rest of the comic strip archive includes some sick and twisted humor (and may not be safe for work).
- 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)
- No, Betelgeuse is not likely to explode in 2012 (or even ~600 years before 2012). It could go any time in the next 100,000 years, and when it does, it’s too far away to hurt us here on Earth.
Links: Paper, Flickr, D&D Advice, etc.
Some interesting links I’ve encountered over the past week or two.
- Help! My Half-Elf is Pregnant! – The 11 strangest Dungeons and Dragons questions from the “Sage Advice” Column
- 15 things worth knowing about coffee by The Oatmeal.
- Photos: When Niagra Falls Ran Dry
And now some techie stuff:
- Interesting idea: Paper.li extracts links posted by Twitter and Facebook accounts you follow, then creates a daily newspaper page featuring headlines, links and excerpts from the top stories.
- Thomas Hawk’s Open Letter to Carol Bartz, CEO Yahoo Inc. on why Yahoo! should consider Flickr a core product.
Edit: Not a link, but I should mention: between a bug in Akismet and me not having time to go through it, I ended up with more than 2,000 comments in the spam folder just from the last 3 weeks. I don’t have time to look through that many items for false positives, so I just cleared it all out. If you left a legitimate comment that hasn’t shown up on the site, I apologize.
Book a Day and Bogus Ads
How To Read a Book a Day by The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent. (via @johannadc) – I don’t think this will work for the new Wheel of Time book.
Belly Button Lint and Bogus Ads – a marketer on refusing to participate in campaigns that mislead or flat-out lie about the product.
Links: 1.0 Releases, Sci-Fi and Science Fact, The Missile that Wasn’t
- Matt Mullenweg on Apple, WordPress & tech release strategy. 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number
- Robert J. Sawyer on the relationship between science fiction and science fact: The job of sci-fi isn’t to predict “THE future,” but “to suggest a smorgasbord of possible futures, so that society may choose the one it wants.”
- Mystery California missile turns out to be a contrail lit by sunset, seen almost end-on so that it looked vertical. The photo actually reminds me of a contrail I once saw.
- A fun recreation of George Seurat’s painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jette. The photo was staged back in 2006, but I hadn’t seen it until it popped up on Reddit a few days ago. I find it amusing that people have been posting lyric fragments from Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George in notes on the photo. There’s also a side-by-side comparison of the painting and the recreation.