Unfortunately, Google offers to way to turn off this feature. It’s insulting, and for the first time ever, I was moved to use another search engine.

Lo-and-behold: Yahoo tries to be helpful, but not in an overbearing way.

Google: in your quest to be helpful to the illiterate masses, you’ve begun alienating those of us who made you popular in the first place. For shame.

To use it, drag the following link to your toolbar.

YouTubeFullScreen

When viewing any page on youtube, click it to go fullscreen mode.

**Problem:** I have too much music on my iPod. I collect music faster than I can listen to it all. When I listen to my ipod using the “shuffle songs” mode, I often have no idea what I’m listening to. Having to constantly retrieve my iPod to learn the artist/track name is inconvenient and bothersome.

**Proposed solution:** Create a 3rd-party hardware device that uses voice synthesis to periodically “read back” artist and song names. Other features:

* It would allow you to set the frequency of song re-caps. For example, I could set it to only interrupt the music every 3 songs.
* It would allow you to specify whether you want to hear just song names, artist names, album names, or a combination.
* You could also specify if you want the information read before or after a song plays, or randomly.
* It might also provide some basic voiceover data, where applicable, such as the time, or miles run (if being used with the Nike accessory).
* It could contain an “interrupt alarm” which the user could set.
* It could allow the user to select one of 3 or 4 voices to use, and well as reading rate.
* Configurations and settings would be done via the ipod (similar to how the Apple FM receiver attachment works).

I envision it connecting through the data connection on the bottom of an iPod, and be sandwiched between the iPod and the headphones, like so:

Song recaps would be short and formulaic, such as:

*”That was **song3** by **artist3**. Before that we heard **song2** by **artist2**. Starting us off in this set was **song1** by **artist1**. The time is now **time**.”*

What do you think? Are there others out there that would find this useful?

Keep in mind that this is a widely syndicated strip, that by all counts appears to be publicly denouncing religion.

Personally, I think it’s refreshing to see a counter-point to B.C.’s occasionally overtly religious (and occasionally hate-filled) themes.

Thoughts?

(Okay, truthfully, I don’t know how to solve a Rubik’s cube. This is a hoax. See if you can figure out how it was done.)

Here’s a really easy way to do it.

1. Make sure Safari is installed (Windows users probably got it during a recent iTunes update)
2. Go to” Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced”
4. Make sure “Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar” is checked.
5. click X to close the popup
6. Go to “Develop -> User Agent -> Mobile Safari”
7. Go through the AT&T signup page, and you’re done.

Happy surfing, while it lasts!

Related Links:

Stay tuned for notes, pics, etc…

There’s a couple of shades of grey and blue, an ugly shade of green and pink, and an “invisible” white option. There’s really not much to choose from.

Even stranger, Apple chose not to include a color picker. Why they did this is beyond me.

Here’s a screenshot of the Desktop Preferences windows illustrating the available solid colors:

What this means is that if you want, for example, a solid red background, you have to go into Photoshop or some other image editor and create an image from scratch. And you’d need to do this every time you wanted to change colors. For many, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

So I decided to automate the process using a little PHP wizardry. I built a very simple tool, located here, that dynamically builds a variety of colored image swatches, simplifying the process of generating new solid colors for desktop backgrounds.

Simply visit the tool, generate some images, and then use “File -> Save Page As -> Webpage, Complete” to download the image files. Then move the image files to this directory:

~/Library/Desktop Pictures/Solid Colors

They’ll automatically be recognized in your desktop preferences, which will now look more like this:

As a bonus, the tool I created allows you to customize the color schemes of generated images… so you can get a wide variety based on your preferences: dark colors, light colors, “websafe colors” or whatever. I also allowed for the adjustment of swatch size, in case anyone has other uses for this.

Here’s a link to a zip file of all the “websafe colors” in case someone just wants to quickly download it: websafe-color-swatches.zip

The post contains a link to [this CNN video of a woman attempting to outrun a train](http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/09/07/pkg.mom.train.cnn), and not succeeding. Two of her children were killed. [Watch video](http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2007/09/07/pkg.mom.train.cnn)

The resulting comment thread ranges from name-calling to discussions about removing stupidity from the gene pool. [One comment](http://lasterjames.blogspot.com/2007/09/stupid-bitch-kills-children.html#comment-5168720213218077975) nicely sums up the other comments:

> Nice to see the moral majority out in full, judging a woman they don’t know from the security of their computer chairs. It does give one a warm feeling to make smug self-gratifying comments about a critically ill stranger who has just lost her two children, based on a CCTV tape of the worst moment in her life. Let’s all give ourselves a pat on the back just for not being her, safe in the knowledge that a woman on life support will be chastened by the judgements of the news watching cognoscenti.

But I couldn’t help myself, and felt the need to chime in. But instead of focusing on this one incident, I think it’s worthwhile to use this incident as a reminder about cars in general.

We can all agree that trying to outrun a train is stupid. There’s no denying that this decision was extremely short-sighted, with tragic and irreversible consequences.

But… we don’t know this woman, and it would be bad for us to jump to the convenient conclusion that she was some stereotypical idiot, label her a “stupid bitch”, and move on.

Every day, I see educated, upper-middle-class commuters demonstrating examples of similar stupidity on a regular basis.

I’m referring to those people that are immersed in their cell phone conversation instead of giving attention to pedestrians on crosswalks. Or those that are “multi-tasking” while driving. Or those speeding as if their lives depended on reaching their destination sooner.

According to the [National Safety Council](http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm), the odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident are 1 in 84. Motor vehicle accidents are the 4th leading cause of death for Americans, following heart disease, cancer, and stroke.

But contrary to the old adage, driving is rarely viewed by Americans as a privilege; instead it’s perceived as a right and a necessity.

Like naive teenagers, too many drivers also seem to suffer from an invincibility complex, as if the 1-in-84 statistic doesn’t apply to them.

Sadly, this mother just added 2 of her children to that growing list of statistics.

My point: This is not just about one woman. Or at least it shouldn’t be. It should serve as a wake-up call to all of us, reminding us about the power we wield when we get behind the wheel.

Instead of taking recognizable photos, it is now only capable of producing abstract blobs of color and digital artifacts.

Here are a handful of examples:

(Click each thumbnail to view high-res versions):

And here are some slightly larger, vertical ones:

I’ve found that by by pointing the camera at different colored sources, under different light intensities, you can somewhat influence the resulting image.

Normally, the news of a broken camera would be upsetting, but I find some of the images aesthetically pleasing. Perhaps I will have one or two of them printed out and mounted, sortof like a 21st century Rothko. Or, alternately, they might make nice desktop backgrounds.

As for the cause, I really don’t know. Anything from accidental exposure to magnetics/radiation/lasers to mechanical failure is entirely possible.