Watch as a Saskatchewan woman saves the day for a perplexed porcupine. I really can’t put it better than TheWhiteSkull did: That porcupine video is basically the Canadian Voight-Kampff test. [Via MetaFilter]
Category: Uncategorized
‘Smart’ Homes, Dumb Users?
I meant to post a link to The House That Spied on Me, a Gizmodo story that looked a little deeper into just how much data a ‘connected’ household is leaking, when I restarted this site a few weeks ago: Our 1970s apartment building did not offer enough electrical outlets for this 2018 smart home,… Continue reading ‘Smart’ Homes, Dumb Users?
Story idea
James Nicoll shares a story idea with the world: Aliens redone as a struggle between the alien and the ship’s cat to commandeer the ship’s human crew for their own purposes…
Driving tools
Who would have imagined that increased use of automated navigational information could have a down side, with more widespread use of automated mapping serving to push individual drivers into a nominally less busy route that turns out to be anything but if everyone else is getting similar advice about how to avoid a traffic snarl-up… Continue reading Driving tools
Clever monkey
The very fact that the Guardian was able to put up an article devoted to the best Stephen Hawking quotes says a lot about his fame. “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”… Continue reading Clever monkey
PDF forever?
The Portable Document Format, or PDF, is everywhere. But it’s still a format that causes headaches for the average person. […] It’s not often, of course, that the PDF gets this level of notice. The PDFs origin story is a bit more boring than that of the MP3, which was built around the contours of… Continue reading PDF forever?
Speaker-to-Animals speaks
Paul Ford is at it again in Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, explaining Bitcoin (and why the notions that lie behind it are simultaneously batty and beguiling to those who may be susceptible to Engineer’s Disease) to civilians. [note]Or should I say, given the nature of Bloomberg Businessweek’s audience, to wannabe managers.[/note] [After a basic explanation of… Continue reading Speaker-to-Animals speaks
British. Not entirely Great.
Mary Beard is right: the new set of 10p coins do look awfully ‘Theme Park Britain.’ I get the urge to keep the designs simple, but English Breakfast followed by Fish & Chips isn’t a very inspiring combination, and World Wide Web is utterly uninspired. [note]Not to mention, Tim Berners-Lee is unquestionably English, but he… Continue reading British. Not entirely Great.
Beneath the Shorteners!
Russell Davies thinks we’re missing out when our browsers hide URLs from us: [For a while…] domain names and URLs became part of the fun of the web. While the more commercial parts of town got excited about the money changing hands for cars.com, the bohemian quarters were creating baroque constructions like del.icio.us or mucking… Continue reading Beneath the Shorteners!
Yearning for Shoggoths
In the wake of Guillermo del Toro’s big night at the Oscars, here’s hoping someone will finally give him the money to show us his take on an Old One: [From a New Yorker profile written when he was between films, having left the ill-fated effort to film The Hobbit and not yet turned his… Continue reading Yearning for Shoggoths