Concern

Internet Vices

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:43:31 -0800

Internet Vices

youmightfindyourself: bible status. Indeed.

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:28:12 -0800

youmightfindyourself:

bible status.

Indeed.

The Making of Tim Burton’s MoMA Animation

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:19:38 -0800

The Making of Tim Burton’s MoMA Animation

gruber: Animated time-lapse map of county-by-county...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:10:30 -0800

gruber:

Animated time-lapse map of county-by-county unemployment rates in the U.S. since January 2007. Jarring.

Textile woven from spider silk.

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:16:54 -0800

Textile woven from spider silk.

Scroll Clock

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:48:22 -0800

Scroll Clock

Best Answer So Far.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:45:56 -0800

Best Answer So Far.

Photo

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:09:51 -0800

Oh, so it’s that easy.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:34:34 -0800

Oh, so it’s that easy.

"You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life."

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:37:52 -0800

““You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.””

- Winston Churchill (via theimpossiblecool)

systems: ilovediagrams: theoriginaljoefisher: I thirst!

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:56:49 -0800

systems:

ilovediagrams:

theoriginaljoefisher:

I thirst!

youmightfindyourself: 3000 photographs show how a book is made.

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:12:40 -0800

youmightfindyourself:

3000 photographs show how a book is made.

Low Earth Orbit

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:14:47 -0800

Set Google Earth to look down, put the eye altitude at some value (6000 ft?), then drag in a random direction. The camera moves over the surface of the planet, like you were in low, impossibly slow, orbit.

Easily amused? Yeah, sometimes.

Cheers.

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:39:32 -0800

Cheers.

Attempts at a 3D Mandelbrot. Freakishly beautiful images.

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:03:47 -0800

Attempts at a 3D Mandelbrot. Freakishly beautiful images.

trenchant: elzr: The Dream O, to be a maker. Lovely.

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:23:33 -0800

trenchant:

elzr: The Dream

O, to be a maker. Lovely.

Never Gonna Give You Up

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:50:14 -0800

Never Gonna Give You Up:

The worm will not affect users who have not jailbroken their iPhones or who have not installed SSH.

Mightily less interesting than an actual worm that would affect normal phones.

Positive Side Effects

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:15:00 -0800

I have a car, an iPod, and a long commute. I mostly listen to music while driving, and my car (a 2006 Volkswagen GLI) has a useful but quirky way of interfacing with an iPod: the five CD buttons on the radio console are mapped to the first five playlists on the iPod, in alphabetical order, and the sixth button is dedicated to whatever playlist the iPod was currently playing.

The key to making use of this is to use playlists that start with a number 1 through 5, so each button corresponds to a playlist I want to hear. The playlist I use the most, however, is “4 - Haven’t Heard Recently.” It’s a smart playlist, which has the rules:

Match all of the following rules:
Last Played is not in the last 4 weeks
Media Kind is not Podcast
Kind does not contain video
Kind does not contain movie
Last Skipped is not in the last 1 months
Album does not contain Seminars About Long
Time is less than 33:00
Kind does not contain PDF
Genre is not Comedy
Limit to 100 items selected by random

This playlist always contains songs that I haven’t heard in a while, so my music playlist while driving feels fresh (even though there are albums I will play over and over again, but rarely so). I limit the playlist size to 100 items, so when I deplete them, I have to sync my iPod again and “refill” that playlist with more random songs I haven’t listened to recently (either on the iPod, or through iTunes).

One curiosity, though, is that sometimes a song appears again in the playlist, at the very top, even though I definitely listened to it. Why would that happen? It looks like the last-played attribute of those songs wasn’t being updated.

The issue was that duplicate items aren’t updated properly. If a song appears more than once in your library, for some reason the last-played rules from the iPod won’t work because only one of the two items is updated. Find the duplicate item, delete it, and things are back to normal (and you are using less disk space).

See, this side effect acts like a filter on your library. As you listen to music, entries that appear multiple times are caught in this net, and you can deal with them as you find them. Yes, you could write an AppleScript that did the same thing, but that’s not the point: you didn’t start out to filter out duplicates, you started out just listening to music, but filtered out duplicates as a consequence. There must be other examples of this, with greater consequence than compressed music files.

(And, this process also filters out music that I hate, but those songs aren’t quite as well tracked as duplicates)

The Incompetence of American Airlines

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:03:23 -0800

The Incompetence of American Airlines

Video

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:02:43 -0800