Siftings

Most terrifying article summary I've seen this week

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:25:00 -0800

Summary: Charging the handset overnight can brick a Bold 9900/9930.

I suspect I would lose a lot of these at the moment

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 03:14:00 -0800

Rules:

1) The game starts after everyone has ordered.

2) Everybody places their phone on the table face down.

3) The first person to flip over their phone loses the game.

4) Loser of the game pays for the bill.

via lil-b.tumblr.com

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I support this plan for Blackheath Hill

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:04:00 -0800

But they will no longer have to take the exhausting 35-minute hike up the hillside thanks to a massive, outdoor escalator constructed by the Colombian government.

via abcnews.go.com

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Dwarfs are far away

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:11:00 -0800

via tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com

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My money's on Firefox

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 08:36:00 -0800

I regularly use a program that doesn't follow this rule. The program allocates a lot of memory during the course of its life, and when I exit the program, it just sits there for several minutes, sometimes spinning at 100% CPU, sometimes churning the hard drive (sometimes both). When I break in with the debugger to see what's going on, I discover that the program isn't doing anything productive. It's just methodically freeing every last byte of memory it had allocated during its lifetime.

via blogs.msdn.com

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It's not as bad as it sounds, honestly

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 02:05:00 -0800

The album was conceived as a concept album, taking the Earth from Creation through Judgement Day. Obviously such an ambitious undertaking would be difficult to do well in a single disc, and it isn't really fully realized.

via amazon.com

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Fetus = Vampire

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 05:32:00 -0800

Within the mammals, there is variation in how deeply the fetus sinks its placental teeth into the uterus. […] And others, the most invasive, are hemochorial, and actually breach maternal blood vessels. Humans are hemochorial.

via scienceblogs.com

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This is a fungus I could get behind as a food item

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 05:31:00 -0800

via tentaclegarden.tumblr.com

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Good luck selling this to consumers

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 03:18:00 -0800

Here’s the crazy part: when I am actually using the 4G network for tasks — such as turn-by-turn navigation or video streaming — it will drain 1-percent or more of battery life per minute.

via shawnblanc.net

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They truly are horrible creatures

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 02:26:00 -0800

In 1944 a children’s book club sent a volume about penguins to a 10-year-old girl, enclosing a card seeking her opinion.

She wrote, “This book gives me more information about penguins than I care to have.”

American diplomat Hugh Gibson called it the finest piece of literary criticism he had ever read.

via futilitycloset.com

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A Christmas Creature In My Head

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 02:39:00 -0800

via creaturesinmyhead.com

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Winner of "Most Misguided Football Analogy" 2011

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 03:05:00 -0800

It's wholly acceptable in parts of the Middle East to chop off the hands of thieves but we wouldn't tolerate it here and it's just the same when it comes to racism.

via news.bbc.co.uk

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Do it to a live crab, damnit

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:17:00 -0800

biologists in Kyoto University in Japan have turned the shell of a (dead) crab completely transparent

via architizer.com

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Designers have issues

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 05:02:00 -0800

I like to urge designers to always ask themselves: “Does this logo look like a penis?” The answer has to be a resounding “No”. If there is just a slight hesitation, then it probably does look like a penis.

via underconsideration.com

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Today on "Doomed Before The Words Left His Keyboard" ...

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:29:00 -0800

Instead, I’d just like to plead with my fellow developers. Before you decide to roll your own, please see if there is an existing project you could help improve instead. Consider it a way of repaying for all the open source work you have benefited from. Paving the road for others, like others have paved it for you.

via mikkel.hoegh.org

node.js suffers from the same kind of "cowboy developer" ecosystem that blights ruby. Perl seems to have mostly escaped by standardising on a few core modules that almost everyone uses - maybe the node.js community should collaborate on a page listing the most popular libraries.

"Writing a web service: connect", "Compressing your source: compressor99", "Talking to ... Redis: node-redis, MySQL: node-mysql-carp", etc.

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I love ungrounded futuristic speculation

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 02:43:00 -0800

Say you’re a hungry pedestrian walking the streets of New York and suddenly spot a new restaurant. You then make a gesture with your device to activate its voice assistant, point it at the restaurant and ask: “What rating did the New York Times give this joint?” GPS knows your precise location. The digital compass knows which direction you’re pointing.

via gigaom.com

This is some kind of GPS and digital compass that has yet to be invented if the iPhone 4S experience is anything to go by.

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Rearchitecting, "very smart people" and componentware. What could go wrong?

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 02:31:00 -0800

… he is granted the services of some of the company's "A Team" developers to help. Zope 3 will be based on a "component architecture", which will allow independently developed and tested components to snap into it […] It will prefer composition over subclassing. […] Instead of being a largely monolithic system, like Zope 2, it will be comprised of very small parts that interoperate. The Philadelphia developer is sure it will be great, because very smart people he respects are working on it.

via plope.com (my italics)

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I am officially old: I neither know nor like most of these tracks

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:58:00 -0800

It's December so it must be time to list the best songs of the year.

via metafilter.com

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Every morning

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:57:00 -0800

via sutured-infection.tumblr.com

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Nature: wackier than you can possibly imagine

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 04:13:00 -0800

One toad even managed to swallow a larva, which moved inside its stomach for two hours. For some reason, the toad eventually regurgitated its catch, and the larva, apparently unharmed, killed and ate the animal that had just eaten it

via blogs.discovermagazine.com

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