Month: August 2005
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Oil Shortage, PDF Glut
Fahreed Zakaria on how oil prices underlie foreign instability. But America remains the 800-pound gorilla of petroleum demand. In 2004 China consumed 6.5 million barrels of oil per day. The United States consumed 20.4 million barrels, and demand is rising. That is because of strong growth, but also because American cars — which guzzle the…
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Too Many PDFs on the Web
Accessibility expert Joe Clark on PDF and accessibility: The first thing to do with a PDF …is Google the URL. Seriously. Most of the time, Google does a half-decent job of making a PDF readable in HTML. Poor character encoding, ill-constructed multicolumn PDFs, and document security features can prevent Google from indexing a PDF at…
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Plone, plans, Pycon
I am so out of plone, but hopefully in a week or so I’ll be back to that. I will probably be able to make Pycon 2006 in Dallas in February. By that time, I’ll be zoping all the way. It looks like Plone 2.1 is quickly upon us and possibly Plone 2.2 in November.…
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Slashdot Hasn’t Jumped the Shark…Yet
Although I sometimes think Slashdot has jumped the shark, their Ask Slashdot sometimes has some good specialized topics. See Online Business Publishing Model? and Webhosting Review Site? . Both topics of immense interest to me at the moment.
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Random Web Stuff
Tim Oreilly asks: should one run ads whose sole aim is to use your google juice? Matt Cutts writes an SEO Blog . (BTW, on bloglines he has 220 subscribers. Whoa! He’s been doing it for 3 months; I’ve been toiling away for 5 years and have 5 subscribers through bloglines). Chris Anderson on Just…
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Crazy Proofreaders
Project Gutenburg people talk about crazy passages from proofed text.
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Podcasting, Royalty-Free Music and the Music Business
I’ve been negotiating to use the music of a brilliant Austin-based experimental music group, Many Birthdays for my creative projects. Here’s a few things I’ve learned about music licensing by doing a little googling on the Internet. Iamusic seems to be the main source of royalty-free music, although its prices and contracts are just out…
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Listen to your Voice
Dan Bricklin on podcasting journalists: This switch to audio will be tough for some people trained only in writing. With writing you needed to know how to type (a skill) and manipulate a word processor and email and maybe part of a content management system. Nothing that hard for regular people, and most stuff is…
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Studied Blindness
Sometimes I go back to Lessig’s Free Culture book for a citation and I am blown away by certain passages. Here’s the most recent: But fair use in America simply means the right to hire a lawyer to defend your right to create. And as lawyers love to forget, our system for defending rights such…
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Victorian Public Domain Paintings and William Holman Hunt
Victorianweb Paintings is an exhaustive online collection of British painters from the Victorian period. Apparently the father of Violet Hunt was Alfred Hunt, a noted pre-Raphaalite painter at the time. To complicate things, there was a William Holman Hunt who, though he lived once at the same address, was not related. (I need to verify…
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10 PocketPC Readers
RSS Readers might be a little futile; I keep up with my rss feeds pretty well as it is, but here’s a list of RSS Readers for PocketPC
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30% of Abebook Buyers on half.com Have their Orders Cancelled!
Boy, am I a sucker. I ordered Gabriel Zaid’s So Many Books from half.com for $2.00. I ordered it from Abebooks-half Three days later I receive an email from Abebooks-half saying the order was cancelled because it’s out of stock. Half.com recommended another copy of the book to be sold (for $5 instead of $3).…
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Music and Stuff
Longtime readers may remember that for a year or so I kept a music blog. I still hear some great stuff, and here’s what I’ll pass on: NothingNew by Georgia. Listen especially to Northern Lights MP3). Paul Keeley electronica music Malaysia by Swerve is an amazing ambient piece that lasts forever, but is deeply soothing.…
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In praise of vagueness
Vagueness raised to a philosophical principle: the Sorites Paradox. An interesting way to handle web citations for web-only content.
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Textbooks for Free!
Free Sound, a source of open source sound effects (for video, audio, etc). Unclear how big this library currently is. Anna Weinberg writes about college bookstore prices a new study conducted by the Government Accountability Office… released today reveals that the average college student spends nearly $900 a year on textbooks and supplies, and that…
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Cookies for Sisyphus
favorite games of Jane MacGonigal View Jane game projects. She writes a lot about gaming and theatre (but alas only in PDF) . Her latest project: the artist will spell out Camus’ existential essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” in cookies, one word at a time. each word will be installed in a public location and…