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flickr Leech allows you to see a huge amount of flickr photos at once, sorting by “interestingness,” user name, photo set, group, and other search terms. It’s definitely hard on the bandwidth (and was down briefly after landing on digg’s front page), but you get to see lots of cool stuff on one page…
Michael Crichton’s New York Times (registration required, link will break soon; sorry) op-ed piece This Essay Breaks the Law makes an appeal for common sense in patent law. Too bad common sense rarely prevails in such situations…
As if the limitations of DRM-crippled music weren’t annoying enough, Boing Boing reports that the extra computations cycles necessary to decrypt DRM can actually drain your battery:
Playing DRM-crippled music will shorten the battery life of your music-player. Listening to DRMed iTunes songs on an iPod shortens the battery life by eight percent; playing back WMA-crippled files on a device from Creative Labs can knock 25 percent off the life of your device’s battery. The extra battery-drain is attributed to the computation necessary to decrypt the files and verify their licenses.
The full article at MP3.com goes into detail about battery life claims of mobile music players.
TuneFind is “working to become the Internet’s comprehensive list of music and songs appearing in television and movies.”
del.icio.us is finally offering private bookmarks:
Because many of you have asked for it, we have just rolled-out a beta of our private saving feature. To try it out, go to “settings” and click on “private saving” to activate; you’ll then see the new option whenever you save a page.
Check out the Google Video Tomcat Tribute, which includes five minutes worth of awesome footage of the Grumman F-14 Tomcat.
As many of you may know, the F-14 is nearing the end of its active service life, being phased out in favor of the McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) F/A-18E/F Hornet. I’m quite sad to see it go…
OK, so some geeks modified a Roomba so that it could be controlled with a laptop via Bluetooth. One green t-shirt and several drinks later, and we have Roomba Frogger on the streets outside. Poor thing never had a chance… 😉
Check out this aircraft carrier made entirely with legos, incorporating a below-deck hangar and pretty authentic-looking aircraft…
First of all, Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
Most Guinness purists scoff at the idea of drinking it from a can, even if it does include a widget designed to replicate the delicious creamy head the stout is known for. Well, now the Guinness Surger (looks like the links to the official Guinnesss site are down at the moment) may yet make converts of those purists, as the stand sends ultrasonic pulses into a glass of Guinness Draught Surger Beer, supposedly doing a decent job of imitating a good pour. Seems this is only available in the UK right now, so I can’t attest to its effectiveness, but it sounds pretty neat…
And now to celebrate with some good Jameson’s… 🙂
Damn Interesting’s post Shortness of Dark puts forth the interesting theory that man’s invention of the light bulb may serve to counteract some of the benefits of the circadian rhythm:
Before the incandescent bulb began to proliferate in the early twentieth century, human sleep schedules were largely governed by the Earth’s day and night cycle. But once humans possessed the technology to ward off an appreciable chunk of nighttime, we soon extended our usable waking hours by an average of 13%. Some researchers believe that this modern convenience, credited with bringing the human race in from the dark, may also be responsible for numerous ills.
