If you like browsing through Flickr as much as I do (or if you want your son’s latest photos to be your screensaver), get it here. It does what you’d expect it to, plus two tricks:
Because all the hip kids are doing it these days. Join. Why? No idea. I still don’t know what goes on in Facebook groups.
I guess this is the URL to my ever-so-slightly NSFW Facebook photos. I like to troll Japanese BBSes for funny pics not found on the rest of the Internet. Now that I have a place to share them, I wish I had saved more.
Life’s too short to page through someone’s Flickr photos five at a time. Try this!
And those thumbnails look to be just the right size for user icons, a la MSN Messenger or LiveJournal.
Flickr should roll that feature into their site. It’s nice of the guy to offer the service, but ridiculous that he should be paying for it.
I just followed a link from Lifehacker to a blog that review Windows Freeware called freewaregenius. Wow. I could waste days here trying out new and exciting ways to optimize my PC so I can be more productive. Can’t wait to try out IOBit SmartDefrag, (or maybe Auslogics Disk Defrag), Registry Distiller, MagicDisc Virtual DVD/CD, FileMenu Tools, RipIt4Me (Copies those hard-to-copy DVDs such as Curious George and Madagascar), PC Decrapifier (just because I like the name)… Mmmm, geek porn…
To celebrate the release of iTunes 7, last night, for the first time in ages I actually loaded some music on my iPod for a change instead of just podcats. I’m listening to a Ben Folds concert I downloaded from etree.org over a year ago. If you can figure out the technology (namely BitTorrent and how to convert lossless audio formats like flac and shorten into MP3) there’s some great music available. Check out the tracker.
iTunes 7 actually fixed my iPod. It seems to have rebuilt my corrupted database file. Not only that, I could swear the screen is brighter now.
Am I one of the first people to pass along this flavorsome morsel of social viral scrumptiousness or one of the last?
OK, I’ll be kind: Turn down your speakers first, and make sure you’re in a place where it’s OK to pee yourself.
I’ve been slumming around on There.com lately. It’s a 3D virtual world kind of thing.
I read BoingBoing.net every day, and one of the editors, Cory Doctorow, frequently mentions the comings and goings in the online 3D world Second Life. I bought a $10 membership to the place about a year ago but never used it. A few weeks ago, after having upgraded the guts of my PC, I decided to check it out. Maybe I had totally missed out on the reason for its appeal.
Well, I didn’t. At least to me, the place just plain stinks. It’s a virtual world that takes from the worst elements of the real world–sex, vanity, gambling, materialism and consumerism–and lets people go completely out of control with them. Practically every other user-created building in Second Life is a store selling slutty fashion for women. The irony of spending real money on more virtual property than anyone could ever need is completely lost on these people. And all the cybersex that goes on, along with the necessary equipment and scripts to support it, had me scratching my head and wondering, “What is WRONG with these people?” The worst part is the 3D physics and graphics were state-of-the-art about eight years ago.
So I decided to give There.com a try. Back in 2003, they blew through $30 million to develop their world and it shows. The landscape and professionally created structures are pure eye candy. The in-world vehicles are a blast to drive. It’s more difficult for users to make money as developers, so for the most part only the most skilled people can make a living at it, so the landscape isn’t so overrun with virtual crap.
What I like best about There.com is that it’s rated PG-13. I can let my kids play in there–supervised, of course–and not worry about coming across a pair of bare naked avatars performing oral sex on each other. The three of us have spent the past two weekends barreling over the landscape in dune buggies and flying over it with a jet back strapped to our character’s back. I met some people from South America and I’ve been able to use my Spanish (my second language) for the first time in ages. I’m trying to convince my sister in the US to sign on so that her two girls and my two boys can play together.
Yeah, so anyway, I’m sure we’ll get bored with it eventually, but for now it’s pretty fun. For about $4 in accessories, I even got my avatar to look like me, right down to my shoes:
Is that a hoot or what?
My username there is “Pavster,” BTW.
In Japanese Windows 2000 or XP there’s a utility to lookup kanji characters by drawing them with your mouse, but if you can’t draw them well enough you’re screwed.
This site will let you lookup characters by choosing radicals. I just found it and it saved me the embarrassment of having to ask a coworker to read for me. (I hate doing that. It’s a man thing, like refusing to ask for directions.)
http://www.frotz.net/nihongo/kanji.cgi
Plug in your mic, fire up your browser, hit the record button and voila! Instantly you’re the newest member the uber-elite podcasting community.
Actually having something to say that people will want to hear is entirely optional. Welcome to the AOLization of Podcasting.
People like to do nice things for people they like. I like that about people. Part of being charasmatic is letting people do nice things for you.
Someone helped Adam Curry set up a wiki for his show notes. The content is user-contributed, and fanboys listeners went whole hog with the first entry.
Not that I plan on copying the idea–seems like the kind of thing that would work only for the uberfamous like Adam–but it’s an interesting step forward in the evolution intelligent design Flying Spaghetti Monster of podcasting.
I have thought of putting up a forum, but really, I should think first about putting out content a bit more frequently. And fixing that damn comment bug.