Month: May 2007

  • Charging Your Portable Devices

    What’s more inconvenient: Bringing the appropriate cord, or wearing a breathing-powered USB charger?

    Yes, yes, I know that perfect utility is not the point behind the MAKE movement or Instructables, but this still struck me as a silly, yet cool device.

  • Computers Are Trying to Kill Us

    The Master Control Program has it in for humans. Or maybe it’s Skynet. Or maybe WOPR

    Whatever diabolical digital entity it is, it’s paring us down using our satellite navigation systems against us.

    Thanks to Transport Blog for alerting us to this menace.

  • Eric Rudolph is a Dolt

    Eric Rudolph, the convicted abortion clinic bomber and the perpetrator of the backpack bomb at the 1996 Olympics here in Atlanta, is sending out hate mail from prison.

    BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Victims of Eric Rudolph, the anti-abortion extremist who pulled off a series of bombings across the South, say he is taunting them from deep within the nation’s most secure federal prison, and authorities say there is little they can do to stop him.

    I’m not sure why this is news. Here is a man who is obviously not on the same path as the majority of Americans, who will probably never be convinced that what he has done is evil, yet is protected by the First Amendment. He may write whatever the heck he wants, and having AP articles pop up about it is just media masturbation.

    What causes the title of this post is the supposition that a man, who will die in his cell, can “get back” at the families of his victims. To anyone who is angered or disturbed by this man’s writings, especially the victim’s families, I say: “He will never ever breathe a free breath of air again.” To Eric Rudolph I say: “You are a dolt, dude, who is in prison. Congratulations on your letters, though.”

  • This Week in Traffic: 15 May 2007

    Highway of the Future

    This article links to a Disney video depicting the highway of the future. This ranks right up there with Where is my Jetpack.

    Comprehensive Alternative Transport List

    Want to try something new while getting from A to B? Kristi Keorkunian has a list.

    Using Available Traffic Congestion Resources

    I live in a congested city with numerous resources for tracking that congestion. Do I make use of it? Not as often as I should.

  • Museum of Useful Things

    Next time I’m in Boston, I’m going to the Museum of Useful Things. Rock on!

  • Website Story

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    You must check out this website. It will bring whole new meaning to your kitchen.

  • The Fame of Flickr

    Since I started using Flickr with regularity, I’ve noticed a few trends in the viewing of my images (there is a counter below each image that tells me how many unique urls or Flickr users have viewed them).

    Firstly, an intro for you non-Flickry users: When you post images to Flickr, they are viewable sequentially in the order you placed them at your home page. You can also place them in thematic “sets”, i.e. my Tour de Georgia set. You can also assign tags to each image, text markers that allow searching and grouping. For example, if I take an image at work, “work” gets thrown into the tag list. If it’s of a road, “road” is in there. The 2007 Georgia Marathon received “Georgia” and “Marathon” as well as “georgiamarathon”, “georgiamarathon2007”, and “inggeorgiamarathon2007.”

    These basic facts have a few consequences. Your most recently posted images are the most likely to be viewed by random people. If you load a bunch (enough that it overflows onto page two) the second page gets a bit neglected. Anything I post into my blog gets more hits than usual, and anything that is the header image of a set also is viewed more than normal.

    There are some things that attract more image views, though:

    Girl at GlassTake pictures of girls. This is one of my most popular images. It doesn’t have that much to recommend it, but people keep going to it. It’s probably that “girl” tag I used.

    GTD while not GTDUse very popular words. This image has only been up for two days and it’s being hammered (by my standards). I guess using the phrase “getting things done” or “GTD” (see previous post) will get you lots of hits.

    JellyfishTake highly saturated color photos. These get lots of attention when they pop up as small thumbnails on the most recent images pages. They usually get at least a few clicks just to see what all the color is about.

    Sensor DustUse an image as part of a popular thread on a popular flickr group. This is attached to “how to clean your camera sensor.” Click through for more info.

    JennUse the tag “redhead”. My wife does this and she gets slammed all the time on her 365 Days Project. If she weren’t including the “redhead” tag in her photos, I bet the views would drop.

    Brian WatersLastly, take good photos. The occasional good photo I throw up on my account gets more than its fair share. I find that to be heartening. People surfing around flickr do stop at images that are well-composed and lighted.

    So, to summarize the actions necessary to garner eternal flickr fame: Take excellent highly saturated color photos of redheaded girls with tags like “sex” and “GTD” then post them to popular message boards.

    Either that, or keep soldiering along as usual, building a base of viewers with interesting photography.

    2220 Edit:
    Stretching JennI placed this up on Flickr today at 1446 EDT, and it’s received 18 hits since then. Other images uploaded at the same time have received between 4 and 8 hits. The REDHEAD tag works like a charm. I threw redhead on this one just to see what would happen.

  • Google Maps Hack for Route Mapping

    Thanks to Tom, I’ve been alerted to gmap-pedometer.com. It lets you manually enter routes (say) for running and calculates your mileage to a degree that is way more accurate than you need. It gets you down to the 1/5th of a foot, which is a bit silly, in my opinion.

    Here is an example, if you want to run along the Silver Comet Trail in Georgia.

    This is neat, although time consuming if you don’t live in a place with absolutely straight routes. You need to click on each curve point, or Google will draw straight lines across the intervening territory. While this would be an entertaining run, I don’t advocate it.

  • Enhanced Fujita Scale

    Matt Rosenberg alerts us that the Fujita Scale, used to measure the intensity of Tornados (F0 through F6), has been superceded by the Enhanced Fujita Scale.