HOME |
RSS | 
Lorem ipsum, the placeholder text derived from Cicero's text in Latin, is so unhip. So what's a hipster to do?
Well, here's an artisanal filler text for your website, courtesy of Hipster Ipsum (available in "Hipster with a shot of Latin" or "Hipster, neat") : Link - via kottke
When people get together and cause trouble, it’s very easy to blame the medium of communication instead of looking deeper. That’s why social networking sites get cited as the cause of so many evils. Why, don’t you know that MySpace is “worse than crack”?
Back in 2006, Ron Vietti, Senior Pastor of Valley Bible Fellowship in Bakersfield, CA, made headlines for being a vocal critic of then-popular social networking site MySpace. He argued the site — which he called both “worse than crack, cocaine or meth” and “My Waste of Space Dot Com” — was luring boys into pornography and making young girls targets of sexual predators. As David Burger reported in The Bakersfield Californian, Vietti said the site fostered bisexuality and called the Internet “the devil’s biggest scheme he has ever inserted into our lives.” He urged his congregation to go to places young people hang out (“like bars”) to convince them to delete their MySpace profiles.
I wonder what the telephone was blamed for in the 19th century. Read other stories of social-media-blaming at mental_floss. Link
Xkcd, the popular “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”, recently posted a strip about the paradoxical in humans trying to create hard to guess passwords.
Through 20 years of effort, we’ve successfully trained everyone to use passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess.
The comic even resulted in a Simple Strong Password Generator.
For those familiar with Anki, you may be interested in Memrise, a spaced repetition system tool that helps users memorize vocabulary in different languages. Word associations and spanned testing reminders are used to facilitate vocabulary recognition and recall. The choice of languages is huge, from Mandarin (narrated by a very sultry-sounding woman) to French and Cherokee (beta mode.)
The learning process is visualized as a plant, so that when a new word is introduced a seed is planted in both your brain and a browser-based greenhouse. To water your seedlings, your memory is tested for the meaning of the word between spaced intervals. Depending on how well you do and how often you visit, your plants may either wither or grow, eventually graduating from greenhouse to garden. Memrise’s sleek web design and enjoyable interface has got me hooked. Besides that–I hate to see my plants die.
Link
Remember Mary Bale, a.k.a. the woman who was tracked down and harassed after someone uploaded a video of her throwing a cat into a trashcan? She’s one of the many people who were taught a lesson by the throngs of angry internet users. You can read more about her and 11 others in similar situations over at Ugo. Fair warning, not all of the people actually deserved what they got.
The people I know in college always add their favorite professors on Facebook, but if they were still in high school and happened to live in Missouri, that would be completely against the law. Granted, it’s a little questionable for a teacher and minor-aged student to be friends on the internet, but do you guys think it should be illegal?
Link Via Geekosystem
It was 20 years ago today that Tim Berners-Lee (left) of CERN built the world’s first website. Here’s how Berners-Lee described the project at the time of its launch:
The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.
The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups.
The web grew rapidly and transformed cultures around it. And it’s just getting started. Imagine what the web — or whatever grows out of it — will be like twenty years from now. One possibility is a concept called the Semantic Web:
The Semantic Web will see metadata, designed to be read by machines rather than humans, become a more important part of the online experience. Tim Berners-Lee coined this term, describing it as “A web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines,” – a ‘giant global graph’ of linked data which will allow apps to automatically create new meaning from all the information out there.
The future is going to be awesome.
Link -via Gizmodo | Photo by Flickr user campuspartymexico used under Creative Commons license
Comments Off
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m a big fan of weird new niche blogs, which is why I love it when Miss C posts her niche blog posts over at Mental Floss. My favorite blog from this roundup is most certainly Black and WTF, which features weird and delightful black and white photos.
Spanning from over a decade ago to this summer’s memes, Ranker has gathered together 35 catchy viral musical videos that swept the internet. You can relive the good old days of “All Your Base” and “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” and also catch up with tunes you may have missed as well. Lyrics in some songs are NSFW. Link
Comments Off Here’s another contender for the title of coolest error page. The site Nosh is about food, but the video on its 404 page is about… a dead page, of course. Link -via reddit
A psychometric consulting firm named AptiQuant asked 100,000 people to take an online IQ test, and then correlated scores with the web browsers used to take them. The blue bars represent test results from 2006 and the red bars test results from 2011. The vertical axis represents IQ points. Link -via Geekologie
UPDATE: The story was a hoax. Thanks to commenter che.
Now, here’s a blog on an extremely narrow subject that many will find fascinating. Fashion It So is all about the clothing and costumes seen on the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Charlie and Anna are having a good time capturing screenshots and coming up with commentary on the fashions of the 23rd century. For example:
This episode opens up with Worf having trouble getting on his Starfleet formalwear:
You know, I think Worf probably could take a Mr. Universe pageant. And by take, I mean UTTERLY DESTROY IN THE FIELD OF BATTLE. In fact, why isn’t that part of the Mr. Universe pageant?
Link -via @JohnCFarrier
I
learned three things about Second Life today. First is that apparently
people still play it (is "play" the right word here, Second
Lifers?). Second, you can breed virtual horse that you can ride. And third,
you can get sued over virtual animals.
Justin Scheck of The A-Hed in Wall Street Journal has the story:
A palomino mare named Star grazes on Debbie DeLouise's clover meadow, hanging out at a salt lick there and frolicking with her foal Holly.
But a legal dispute may imperil their pastoral bliss: It threatens to close the only store where Ms. DeLouise can buy food for Star and Holly. Without their special diet, the horses would waste away and turn green.
"If there's no food, I'm not sure what will happen," says Ms. DeLouise, a Long Island, N.Y., librarian. "I certainly hope no one has to find out."
Star and Holly aren't real horses. They exist only within Linden Research Inc.'s "Second Life," an online virtual world where people can fashion a new existence. But while the buying, breeding and riding of horses happens in the virtual world, litigation over them happens in real-life federal court.
The case brushing up against the horses owned by Ms. DeLouise—whose "Second Life" avatar, or alter ego, is a younger, bigger-haired version of herself—began last fall.
Virtual rabbit maker Ozimals Inc., and Amaretto Ranch Breedables LLC, the creator of Ms. DeLouise's horses, share a similar business model. Each sells cheap virtual animals to participants of "Second Life." Both make the bulk of their money by selling the food these pets need. Demand for the chow is heightened by a secondary animal market, in which bunny and horse enthusiasts breed their virtual animals and sell the offspring—sometimes for hundreds of dollars in the case of beasts with rare colors.
Ozimals, based in Pelham, Ala., has alleged that Amaretto copied its software, using horses instead of rabbits.
Aaron Wood created three propaganda posters featuring social media giants Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Excuse me while I head on over to Facebook to help out my friends' farms (I hear that there's also a war against mafia brewing. My help is needed!): Link - via +PeteCashmore
Comments Off 
Steve Lambert, an artist, set out to create the most awkward 404 error page. That’s what’s generated when a server cannot find a requested webpage. He’s definitely accomplished that goal. At the link, you can view a long video in which Lambert greets the viewer like a house guest who hasn’t figured out that the party is long since over. Link -via The Presurfer
Previously: Brilliant 404 Pages
Pony is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, and “A” is her student in Japan. They do lessons via Skype. As an exercise, Pony sends “A” strange found photos, and she writes a few sentences about each one. The result is a taste of Japanese humor rendered in intermediate English. Link -via Gorilla Mask
Comments Off Remember Mel Gibson’s movie The Man Without A Face? This is what that tale of a isolated and introverted man would be about if it were made today, courtesy of Dan De Lorenzo & Ben Stumpf. -via The Daily What
Image: Photo_History
[Flickr]
Tired of the Keyboard Cat? Perhaps you need this: Banjo Cat. And 'fess up - who hears the Dueling Banjo just now?
Via Panabasis (who has another Banjo Cat sighting)
Hipsters, take note! Owling is so last month and planking is so two months ago. The new hotness is Leisure Diving.
Matthew Inman at The Oatmeal reports on the current State of the Web. Not only does he have new developments, sales and mergers, new products, websites, and software, but he also gives us his opinions on all of it. The big story is, of course, the ups and downs of social networking sites. Some text is NSFW. Link -via The Daily What
Comments Off 
Shiro loves small baskets the way Maru loves boxes. And 9-year-old Shiro has a patient zen attitude for wearing hats and other materials on his head, which leads to many photo and video opportunities. See photos and videos of Shiro and his feline family at the Basket Cat Blog. Link -via Metafilter
Animals have invaded your favorite social networking site -and what’s worse, they have more followers than you do! So what’s all the buzz about? ShortList will introduce you to cats, dogs, birds, and even snakes that Tweet. Maybe you’ll find a Twitter critter you want to follow yourself! Link
Who says internet memes don’t last? Some people have the most fleeting memes tattoos on their bodies. Imagine trying to explain to your grandchildren why those things were so important to you that you had them permanently inked into your skin. Ranker has a list of ten memes, some with more than one tattoo found. A couple pics are NSFW. Link
Geekosystem has a hilarious list of subjects you won’t believe eHow claims it can teach you. I particularly like the one above and “how to use superglue to fix a tooth,” which is conveniently followed by “how to remove superglue from a tooth.” You stay classy eHow.
Phillip Mendonça-Vieira accidentally found himself in the possession of 12,000 screenshots of the New York Times homepage from September 2010 to July 2011, which he arranged into a video for your perusal. There are some stories that were so big you can follow them even at this breakneck speed. At his site, Mendonça-Vieira writes about the ephemeral quality of pages like this, which are rarely if ever archived. Link -via Laughing Squid
Just in time for Comic Con, this Break.com PSA reminds ladies that there are more sexy female cosplay costumes besides the classic princess Leia salve outfit. We’ll soon see if this has any impact on the female cosplayers visiting the convention this year, but honestly, there is always a ton of variety at the convention.
Via Laughing Squid
One of the nice features of Google+ is that you can sort relationships into different categories that you can name anything you want. Happy Place had some fun with this idea and offered suggestions about how you can categorize your contacts. Link -via Swiss Miss
Steven Zezulak developed an application that will create the impression that you’ve updated your Facebook status from a variety of different technologies, food products, or dubious anatomical locations. See if you can trip up your friends. Link and reddit Thread -via Geekosystem
Comments Off
Peter Fletcher of Joyfeed sure does sneeze a lot - in fact, he has counted and recorded over 2,500 sneezes since July 2007. That's right: he blogged about the time and date, location, and "strength" of each and every time he sneezes.
Behold, Sneezecount - via The Presurfer
Remember the dial-up modem? If you’ve ever used one before, then you know the sweet sound it makes when it connects (the "handshake" sound).
There’s not much use for the dial-up modem anymore (except if you’re one of the dwindling clients of Aol still connecting to the ‘Net on 56k), but the folks over at Geektastic discovered one unusual use: as creepy music (when slowed down 700x)
JD Rucker over at Techi has the clip: Link
