Here and here – videos from Prof. James Duane and Officer George Bruch about why talking to the police is almost never a good idea.
software
omploader – A place to upload files. It can also be done with a firefox extension or in a script.
Paperback, from the OllyDbg guy. This lets you store data on paper (about 500 KB for A4 at 600 DPI).
web
HTML5 Canvas Experiment – Perhaps good for comparing different Javascript engines. It chokes on Firefox 3.5 on my Atom 330, but works well on 3.6.
drop.io – A file sharing site which Wired mentioned because of its ability to set an expiration date on any file you upload. It also appears to have a collection of other, much cooler features for collaboration.
programming,linux
Bash cures cancer – Some helpful stuff for commandline Unix/Linux. It seems to have not been updated in about a year though.
Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! – My friend Lincoln showed me this. It’s a decent Haskell tutorial with some very oddball illustrations.
How to Design Programs – A book, freely available online, which teaches software design using Scheme (or is it DrScheme?)
How to Design Worlds: Interactive Programming in DrScheme – Another freely available book from the same guys that made HtDP, but this one is about writing interactive applications using pure functional programming.
games
Kongregate – A large collection of rather addictive online Flash games.
books
The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto; the full text is readable for free online. I haven’t read it, I just noted the link, so I can neither agree nor disagree with the contents of it.
Wishcraft by Barbara Sher; I came across this motivational book from Havi Brooks. I haven’t read this either, but I should at some point. It’s free as a series of PDFs.
Queen City Discovery – An interesting blog about urban exploration in Cincinnati that some guys in Hive13 told me about
Amidst a pile of other new-age and holistic bullshit in some free magazine, I miraculously discovered an ad for the “Uptown Farmer’s Market” at Garden Park – 3581 W. Galbraith Road, Fridays 12-7, Saturdays 10-2, 513-238-6616
MapReduce – I don’t care what your opinion of MapReduce is or how much it might suck, I am just putting this here so I will encounter it later and remember that it exists.
Balance of Power – A geopolitics game by Chris Crawford (also with his interesting essay/article here).
lit,historical
We the People Network – I was searching for an image of the Declaration of Independence here and discovered they have rather high-resolution scans (like, the Declaration is 63 megapixels) of that and many other historical documents too.
So, I’m on a quest to find a photo organization tool for Linux (or, on a later note, for any OS) that does some things like…
Allow me to apply metadata to images, like comments and groups and tags (preferably hierarchical)
Store the metadata IN THE ACTUAL IMAGE, IN A STANDARD FORMAT. This also means it will probably need to support IPTC or XMP, preferably XMP. (No, shut up about GQview, it doesn’t cut it.)
Allow me to set metadata as a batch operation. I am thoroughly uninterested in having to manually go through the process of setting metadata for each individual image. And when I say “batch operation”, “batch” really needs to be more generic than “all files in a directory.” (No, shut up about scripting it with ExifTool or Exempi or Exiv2. Yes, they can edit XMP data on groups of files, but scripting doesn’t cut it as a solution unless someone can show me how to make this integrate with a GUI.)
The built-in editing features and plugins are handy and quick. I’m kind of cheating here because I’m already pretty familiar with digiKam.
Searching capabilities are pretty good.
Only wants to edit IPTC/XMP metadata one image at a time.
All its metadata (besides IPTC/XMP that you do one image at a time) is stored in an SQLite database, not in the image
Interface can get pretty slow sometimes.
imgSeek:
The interface works okay but it’s a little clumsy, and sometimes things are slow (I loaded about 10K pictures).
Finding pictures based on similarity to other pictures or to a hand-drawn image is an interesting feature.
The grouping/batching features are powerful, but a bit slow.
I am unsure if imgSeek lets me add IPTC or XMP data easily.
There is no easy way I can see to search based on date.
F-Spot:
I’m told the IPTC/XMP support in this isn’t that great.
I have yet to try this program.
LightZone:
This is proprietary, but they have a 30-day trial.
“Linux users will especially enjoy access to the new LightZone Relight Tool l which can achieve HDR effects from a single negative revealing hidden HDR detail in both the highlights and the shadows, using just a single exposure. For instance, you’ll see both saturated colors of a sunset and bright detail in the face of a back lit subject that was formerly lost. Achieving such stunning results from a single exposure without LightZone would require multiple flashes, reflectors and shades at the time the photograph — if it could be possible at all.” . . . sorry, but if you honestly believe this, you don’t have the slightest understanding what HDR is. Oh well, it’s all marketing.
Having tried this software, I cannot see any batch metadata editing capability, or any reason why I’d want to pay for this.
PicaJet FX:
This is proprietary with a 15-day trial.
I tried this software and could not find any batch-editing features for XMP.
Lightroom
This is the expensive stuff from Adobe ($300, but there’s a 30-day trial). Some people in #photogeeks on Freenode recommended it.
This is a “workflow app designed for professional photographers” and it’s from Adobe. If anything at al supports XMP batch-editing, and a billion other features, this would have to be it.
Razuna
I don’t know. This is an open source, web-based Digital Asset Management application.
It looks very nice (check out the videos there), but I don’t think it’s what I need for this task.
Any application I failed to mention: I either ignored it on the basis of provided specifications, or I ignored it because I’m just too lazy.
MediaCoder – “a free universal batch media transcoder, which nicely integrates most popular audio/video codecs and tools into an all-in-one solution.” Only natively works on Windows, but came in handy trying to re-encode some video at work after I found that fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/[Avidemux] liked to either crash or screw up the encode (on Windows at least as I know I’ve used it without problems on Linux)
CamStudio – An open source screen recorder (screencast?) application. Only works on Windows, but works pretty well.
Is Scheme Faster than C? – An oldish article about some interesting performance benefits found in Scheme
hack,wii
http://www.smoothboard.net/ – Interesting thing from my friend Lincoln. It uses a Wii remote, IR transmitter, and PC (with Bluetooth) to “Transform your screen into a user-friendly interactive whiteboard with Smoothboard.”
Well, after my computer exploded and my hard drive became an orphan, I finally built a working computer again and fixed up my scripts so they didn’t suck. Now I shall attempt to post the giant piles of stuff that have accumulated.
No Nonsense Self-Defense – This is a helpful site. The author gives a vast collection of useful, well-informed articles about self-defense – and why too much of martial arts completely misses the point of it.
food,photography
http://www.tastespotting.com/ – My friend Cassie sent me this link. In its own words: “Think of TasteSpotting as a highly visual potluck of recipes, references, experiences, stories, articles, products, and anything else that inspires exquisite taste.”
game,geometry
The eyeballing game – Another link from Cassie… it’s a Flash game that’s sort of interesting, related to one’s ability to eyeball something and tell if it’s straight
Nomic Game – A paperwork table game that looks a bit complex to actually play. The object of the game is to change the rules of the game.
Probably related to Dunning-Kruger effect – “…people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”
The Zen of Drinking Alone from Modern Drunkard Magazine. I can’t say I’ve ever heard of Modern Drunkard before, but this is a surprisingly cogent article about the value of… drinking alcohol alone, or “using alcohol to find your inner monkey”.
Well, more of an essay than an article… On Liberty by John Stuart Mill is something I should probably read at some point
music
Jake Speed and the Freddies – just saw them at the Southgate House and was extremely impressed, despite that ordinarily I’d never listen to “folk blues” voluntarily.
StumbleAudio – I don’t really know what this is. but I wrote it down, so maybe it’s good. “Guide to discovering music and sharing great new music.”
Scratch: “Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web. Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills.”
Finnix, ‘Finnix is a self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution (“LiveCD”) for system administrators, based on Debian testing”; I came across this while looking at what common distros were out there for PowerPC since I recently acquired an iBook.
Open64, the Open Research Compiler, “an open source, optimizing compiler for the Intel IA-64 (Itanium), AMD Opteron and Intel IA-32e architecture”
GCC UPC – extensions to GCC to provide a compilation and execution environment for Unified Parallel C
“UPC is an extension of the C programming language designed for high-performance computing on large-scale parallel machines, including those with a common global address space (SMP and NUMA) and those with distributed memory (eg. clusters).”
Lemote Fulong miniPC (Linuxdevices story) – powered by a 666 MHz Loongson 2E
Rather similar to the $150 YellowSheepRiver “Municator” (Another Linuxdevices story) based on a 500 MHz 64-bit Godson-2
Lemote YeeLoong, a laptop with completely free software (including BIOS and firmware) and a power usage of about 12W, based on an 800 MHz Loongson 2F; Richard Stallman supposedly uses one of these
