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July 03 2009
Idiocracy
Humanity doesn’t have a nice future from now on. Smart people stop having children while dumbasses have one after another. While homo sapiens de-evolute, an average soldier and a prostitute hibernate due to a unsuccessful military project (Think Futurama’s Fry). When they woke up 500 years in the future, society is dumb as hell and the average soldier is the smartest man on earth (for good and evil). As for the prostitute, almost nothing changed.
It’s a nice adventure in the future, a future that resembled Wall-E’s, and among some dumb-dumb-dumb stuff, the way they handle the rest of the world is entertaining, and I really rolled on the floor when he did his Scoffield-trick to break jail.
Oh, and the end is predicable, amused me nevertheless.
Custom Newspaper
Newspaper Club is a project that aims to give everyone the chance to make their own newspaper with content from online sources, in paper.
They are still developing their system, and blogging it!, and the biggest problem in my opinion has already being mentioned there: printers aren’t prepared to print such small numbers of each edition. But luckily they realize it’s the future and are willingly to try work it out.
When ebook readers are starting to get to alpha-geeks (and some targeting newspapers, like Amazon Kingle DX) it’s surprising to see some paper love around geeks.
Viagem na Auto-Estrada deserta
Não sou propriamente fã de Miguel Sousa Tavares, mas adorei ler a crónica desta semana no Expresso (via @pfig) sobre as apostas dos governos em matéria de transportes e inovação.
Casa da Moeda pode ter de destruir milhares de livros
Shared by Alcides FonsecaVárias centenas de milhares de livros editados há mais de quatro anos pela Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda (IN-CM) poderão ter que ser destruídos caso os autores ou seus herdeiros não os adquiram, reclamem ou permitam a doação.
WTF? Bibliotecas Municipais....?
You Have Got To Be Kidding Me: Sears Tower Unveils Glass Balconies on 103rd Floor
Shared by Alcides Fonseca
Alex, lê a parte sobre urina atirada do 103º andar partir cimento...
The Sears Tower opened "The Ledge" to the public today. The Ledge is a 4-foot glass balcony that's suspended 1,353 above the ground on the 103rd floor. It provides a panoramic view of Chicago, provided the walls aren't covered in accidents. Fun fact: urine spilled from the 103rd floor can break concrete on the sidewalk below. And not just if you drank a jackhammer, but it helps.
Hit the jump for a couple more of the NO I AM NOT AFRAID OF HEIGHTS.
July 02 2009
Placebo - Battle For The Sun
Battle for the Sun is the newest album from Placebo. I’ve been a fan of the band since I’ve first listened to Special K (9 years ago) and this one is pretty good. I’d recommend this For what it’s worth and Battle for the Sun.
Karas
Karas (Corvo, em Português) é um OVA de 6 episódios lançada também em dois filmes de 3 episódios cada.
Para além dos humanos, em cada cidade existem também demónios (Yōkai), embora que não sejam normalmente vistos. No entanto existe um pequeno grupo, os Mikura que começam a atacar hospitais para se alimentarem de sangue humano. Esse grupo é liderado por Eko, o Karas da cidade desde o Período Edo. Karas é o protector da cidade, um humano que ganha poderes especiais ao ser escolhido pela Yurine, o espírito que representa a vontade das ruas.
Esses ataques começam a preocupar a população, ao ponto de criarem um grupo na polícia para investigar esses casos paranormais, e isso traduz-se numa nova Yurine e num novo Karas, que vai tentar proteger a cidade do seu predecessor.
A primeira parte do Anime integra-nos no cenário: os ataques dos Mikura, os primeiros confrontos entre os Karas, a forma como os humanos lidam com estes incidentes. Isto faria-nos esperar que a segunda parte fosse o desenlace da história, com uma batalha épica, mas o que encontramos é um aproximação mais profunda a cada um dos elementos da história e um final bastante inesperado! (Raro nos dias que correm)
Apesar de bastante interessante a história, grande parte do valor desta OVA é o estilo usado. A cidade é mostrada como sombria, lembrando Gotham City, e os personagens são vistos de forma séria, sem os chibis tradicionais do anime. Finalmente, Karas conta com a melhor integração de CGI que já vi alguma vez em anime! Nas cenas de batalha envolvendo um Karas, os efeitos 3D são aplicados de forma a fazerem parte do desenho anime, e não uma mudança brusca. Juntamente com o resto do filme, fazem uma OVA a não perder.
We're losing the sense of communities
5 years ago my internet history would reveal a list of online-communities to which I belonged. Each community website was a CMS (PHPNuke, phpBB with a lot of plugins, or e107 if I was the admin) and had all the content related to that theme. The latest news, the downloads (or torrent) section, a forum for us to discuss stuff, a gallery, some articles and miscellaneous things that vary from scene to scene.
Today I get all my downloads from ThePirateBay (at least until now), all my news from Google Reader, I write all my long stuff in my blog (wether it is portuguese politics, music or even geeky posts), I write all my short stuff to twitter, and all my photos to flickr. Although there are tagging capabilities, you cannot group people and friends, so you share everything that matters to a specific group. The sense of online communities is dying with these services.
The only service in which communities play an important role is the one that survived from the Ice Age of the Internet: Email. I subscribe to a few mailing-lists and almost all of them are themed. I really want communities back, and services that empower them. The Internet is either getting Semantic and abstracting a lot of stuff, or it is going back from services to hosted applications.
I do miss the way I met new people with the same interests. Much more personal than adding the people facebook suggested you.
July 01 2009
Os correctores ortográficos foram actualizados para poderem ser instalados no novo Firefox 3.5.
(Obrigado Nuno)
Via versus RT
For those using twitter there are three main ways of representing a retweet:
RT @person: original twit
original twit (via @person)
♺ @person: original twit
The last one is clearly the shortest one (in twitter size does matter), and it’s the one I don’t really use. And I use the other two for different purposes, and I propose people do the same, since it makes easier to understand what kind of twit it is. The first form is used when you write exactly the same twit without change. The second form is used when I want to re-share a link (but could be other thing) and I add or modify the comment, but still want to credit the author.
What do you think?
Ian Hickson on Codecs for the HTML 5 and Tags
Shared by Alcides Fonseca
Shit!
The goal was for there to be at least one standard video codec that would work across all HTML 5 browsers — one format that would work across browsers and platforms with no plugins.
But, alas, the result is an impasse. Apple won’t support Ogg Theora, and Mozilla and Opera won’t support H.264. (Google, admirably, is willing to support both in Chrome, but they don’t consider Ogg good enough to use for YouTube.) So there will be no standard HTML 5 video codec. So it goes.
(Let it be said that Ian Hickson is the Solomon of web standards; his summary of the situation is mind-bogglingly even-handed and fair-minded.)
Why Pre-Shared Keys Suck
1. Guest comes to Owner's place and asks for wifi key.
2. Owner tells Guest that the password is "flibble".
3. Guest logs on.
4. Guest leaves and tells the world that Owner's wifi key is "flibble".
5. Owner must now change his wifi key from "flibble" to something else and then inform everybody else who uses the wifi (both humans and devices which store the pre-shared key) what the new key is.
6. Goto (1)
The alternative to pre-shared key systems is to have a user account system.
1. Guest comes to Owner's place and asks for wifi key.
2. Owner logs onto administration panel, taps in username and generates a password, then gives that to Guest.
3. Guest uses.
4. If Guest tells the world his wifi username and password combo, you revoke the password.
There is no reason why this setup should not be used in consumer wifi routers, except for the fact that the existing standards for wifi authentication are designed for mouth-breathing idiots who share their fucking MySpace passwords with each other and then wonder why their account gets "hacked".
And before anyone says FreeRADIUS, that's too complex. Yes, I can set up FreeRADIUS on my Linux box. But username/password authentication with integration at the OS level with Windows and UNIX (including OS X and Linux) should ship on consumer-level wifi routers. That wouldn't suck. Pre-shared keys do suck and are actually worse than useless.
Another thing I don't understand about wifi: why is it that the only way to get encryption of your packets across the air is to turn on authentication? Sometimes I want unauthenticated wifi but that doesn't mean I don't want my packets encrypted. Think of it like a club: just because there's no guest list doesn't mean that you don't need security. In fact, you probably need more security.
The evolution of Gmail labels
When I joined the Gmail team, I was surprised to learn that only 29% of Gmail users had created any labels. At first, I thought perhaps conversation threading and search made the need to organize our mail less important. But when we talked to people who use Gmail, we got a different story. People often asked us to add folders to Gmail, assuming no system of organization existed. As one person said in a usability study, "What are labels... and where are my folders?"
We realized that if you didn't know about labels, it would be easy to assume Gmail had no way to organize your mail. Not only were "labels" unfamiliar, they were kind of hidden. So, we set out to make labels more accessible, as well as more powerful. Most of the changes have been in Gmail for a while, but we're adding some new features today. We thought you'd enjoy a peek at the method to our madness.
The first thing we did was make labels look more like the sticky notes you use in real life. Making the interface mimic things you interact with outside the computer can sometimes improve ease of use.
We also made it easier to remove a label from an open conversation:
Then we worked on the actions you take to apply and remove labels. Before, to put a label on a message, you had to look under "More actions> Apply label." Not only was this option hidden in a generic menu, but the language wasn't what people are familiar with when it comes to organizing mail. We explored several alternatives:
We also learned that if we made labels sound too much like folders, people got confused. For instance, while "Copy to" and "Add to" were easy to use, these terms made people think they were creating multiple copies of a message. "Move to" was familiar but didn't lead people to think they were creating copies. And people seem to have picked it up fast! Since the launch of the new menu buttons in March, we're seeing a 50% increase in new Gmail users trying labels in their first 2 weeks. And overall usage of the "Move to" menu surpassed that of the "Labels" menu within 7 weeks of launching:
For our latest set of changes, we looked at how you access labels on the left side. In other email applications, folders get the royal treatment and are given a seat at the top near your inbox. But in Gmail, labels were stuck in a box below Chat — almost like we were telling people, "you don't want to use these." In testing, we discovered that it worked best to remove the terminology altogether and just place custom labels right under the system labels (e.g. "Inbox"):
The last step was to add drag-and-drop. Now, you can drag mail into a label, or even drag a label directly onto a message:
Making it easier to process and organize your mail requires more than just labels, but we hope these changes start to improve the process. We have much more in store, so stay tuned and keep the feedback coming.
Posted by Michael Leggett, Gmail User Experience Designer
It's British Rail 2.0. (well, sort of)
The British government is set to renationalise the east coast rail route, which connects London, York, Newcastle and Edinburgh, after National Express complained that it can't afford to run it and went to the government begging for a bailout, to which the government said no. Of course, the government, desperate to avoid accusations of it reverting to the bad old days of brown-suited trade-union bolshevism ("Old Labour"), has expressed its deepest regret at the unfortunate necessity of taking such a socialistic course of action and committed itself to selling off the franchise as soon as is possible.
This is not the first time part of Britain's railway network has fallen into public ownership since privatisation; a railway operation in the south of England was taken back by the government a few years ago after the operator, Connex, was found to be rubbish. (Incidentally, the names of the operators will hold special relevance for Melburnians; both Connex and National Express have forfeited commuter rail franchises in Melbourne, in somewhat similar ways.)
I wonder what branding the new government-run rail franchise will use. I'm guessing they can't call it National Express, and will avoid calling it British Rail (or National Rail, which is the same only with less Helvetica) or anything that suggests a permanent nationalisation of the railways (because that would be socialism, and Socialism Is Always Wrong), so presumably they'll come up with some brand. I hope that they keep the web site, though; it has one of the nicer interfaces for booking tickets in the UK.
¶ business national express railway thatcherism-blairism uk [1 comment]
Encontro de Jogos de Tabuleiro de Coimbra
Shared by Alcides Fonseca
Apareçam :)
Pronto, cartaz virtual "afixado"!
Pessoal só para lembrar que é já este domingo! Apareçam nos Jardins da AAC para uma tarde bem passada!
June 30 2009
Marco Arment on Firefox 3.5
They keep making things Awesome™ for the fringe of uber-power-users instead of fixing the common issues that frustrate everyone else and drive average users away from Firefox every day.
Arte com tipografia
Um belo trabalho com fontes desenhadas manualmente. Autoria desconhecida. Via ShareSomeCandy.
Clique aqui para ver maior. Detalhe:
Um herói das antigas “tipografado”. Via meu querido liquidificador.
Detalhe:
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
