Foobar
Fun with the Flickr API
I whipped up a simple Ruby API interface for Flickr using HTTParty and this evening decided to use it to play around with some numbers from my own Flickr account. Just a basic graph showing which hours of the day that I most (and least) take pictures. I did minimal spot checking on pictures and noticed that Flickr thinks that this picture was taken at 3 AM, which can’t be true because it’s a daytime photo from out of doors. I’m sure it’s correct in the aggregate, though… ahem…
Tonight… on MacGuyver!
Season 1 of MacGuyver free on CBS.com! Very awesome
“Don’t tell me you can make a bomb out of chewing gum!”
“Why, you got some?”
Yes We Can
I hate to quote, link, and run but I’m going to do just that:
“We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check,” Obama said. “We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”
Crazy pantsless people!
Whoa, I don’t know what to think of this whole no pants on the subway thing, but you’ve got to watch it all the way through.
Skeletooool!
My website notes that I’m turned on by style and functionality. Keeping that in mind, I hope you can understand why Leatherman’s upcoming Skeletool gives me a raging hard on. It’s simple, sleek, sexy and, oh yeah, carbon fiber.
Plus, I can introduce it people by saying “This is my SKELETOOOOL!” in my Skeletor voice.
Anybody who’s seen Radiohead, either live or in a video, is probably familiar with the particular way that Thom Yorke shakes his head. Rather than shaking or bobbing, it seems to rotate around a point, in the same plane as his body. Generally this also leads to his shoulders rocking back and forth to meet his head.
When listening to their newest album, I’ve been finding myself doing this exact same motion. I think Thom has found something akin to a resonance frequency in his music which has transmitted his waves to me. I wonder if this has anything to do with why the album kicks so much ass.
A Wired article asking “Who in Their Right Mind Would Run Safari on Windows?” got a lot of tech press recently. He complains that Safari sucks and that Mac users don’t even use it, so why would Windows users? I just want to address a few issue I have with it.
First off, I agree with a few of the complaints he has about Safari. I’ve found that it crashes too much. I’ve hit the close button on a window with numerous tabs and it closes without comment. It doesn’t offer a way to reopen the last page that you’ve closed (it has the history, but if the page was open a while ago it can be difficult to find). The problem with this is that they’ve fixed all of these problems in the new version of Safari. It could even be argued that the problems with Safari crashing are being fixed by the release of Safari on Windows (more users means more feedback means better product).
Plus, Apple has added some other really nice new features. One being a elegant way of moving tabs. Another being their beautiful inline page search. Private browsing isn’t new in Safari 3, but it’s always a good excuse for using Safari.
Finally, he says that the Windows browser space is too crowded for another major browser. It’s funny how that sounds like the sort of thing that Internet Explorer users would have said before Firefox became prominent. The group of Firefox users (of which he seems to belong) would say that more competition keeps the browsers involved both innovative and secure. I think that still applies.
Reading between the DIVs
I didn’t stop posting because I said I would take it easy on the Mac stuff and that Mac stuff is all I have to talk about. Things have been a bit busy lately and will likely be busy once more in the near future. For now though, I came up with something vaguely interesting to write about.
There are a number of things I noticed during Job’s keynote at WWDC, but one stuck out to me. When the iPhone was first demonstrated I noticed that zooming in on the NYTimes seemed to work perfectly. You double-tap on a box with a news story and it zooms it to make that box fill the screen. Similarly when Jobs was demonstrating the web clips feature in Safari at WWDC it highlighted boxes on the page when he moved the mouse around (something that didn’t happen in his previous demo of the feature). It seems Safari’s natural awareness of DIVs and (God forbid) TDs is being harnessed for the good of mankind. Neat.
Passported!
Look out rest of the world, here comes America! Fuck yeah!






