Untitled

karagos: The Getting-Things-Done President. Is GTD any way to...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 03:01:50 -0400

The Getting-Things-Done President. Is GTD any way to run a country?

BTW the writer of the article in Slate’s The Big Money site used my popular GTD wallpaper ;-)

prostheticknowledge: Radiohead’s Decade-Spanning Secret...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 03:01:24 -0400

prostheticknowledge:

Radiohead’s Decade-Spanning Secret Album

Taken from Cracked article, 10 Mind-Blowing Easter Eggs Hidden in Famous Albums

Radiohead’s In Rainbows came out on 10/10/2007, 10 years after OK Computer, and there are 10 letters in the names of both albums. Additionally, OK Computer’s original working title was Zeroes and Ones, or “01,” (the mirror image of “10” … obviously). Even that last part alone is enough to make Radiohead fans start looking for a crazy conspiracy, as you’re probably aware if you’ve ever had to spend a long car ride sitting beside one. The scary part? This time they’d be totally right.

This is what doing a whippet on the highway looks like.

There’s a way to combine the tracks from OK Computer (hereinafter referred to as 01) and In Rainbows (hereinafter referred to as 10), to form one huge mega-album. As Puddlegum explains, “To create the 01 and 10 playlist, begin with OK Computer’s track one, “Airbag,” and follow this with In Rainbow’s track one, “15 Step.” Alternate the albums, track by track, until you reach “Karma Police” on OK Computer, making “All I Need” the tenth track on the 01 and 10 playlist.” It’s not that they sound nice together; it’s that these songs were definitely meant to make us shit our pants when played like this. In the way that “Golden Slumbers,” “Carry That Weight” and “The End” all flow into each other on The Beatles’ Abbey Road, these songs all flow into one another as well, as if they were all recorded in one big session.

Don’t believe us? Just listen to it. To get the full effect, you need to set your player with a 10-second crossfade between tracks (more 10s!), but you can notice most stuff without doing that. Then shit your pants.

Is Thom York moody, or is he acting like he just crapped his pants
as a really subtle clue?

This blogger points out that the song “Nude” (10 album), starts with the reverb from “Subterranean Homesick Alien” (01 album) still lingering, and the beats at the end of “Airbag” (01) set the tempo for “15 Step” (10). There’s nothing unusual about that … except when you consider that those songs were written and recorded 10 years apart. The pants-shitting synchronicity also applies to the lyrics. Puddlegum gives some examples and says: “There appears to be a concept flowing through the 01 and 10 playlist. Ideas in one song [are] picked up by the next.” In fact, one of the songs from In Rainbows was originally written for OK Computer and not used for 10 years, and the title of another seems to sum up the whole thing: “Jigsaw Falling Into Place.”

Alternate way to sum it up.

Remember all that “10” stuff we mentioned up top, about the date, the time between albums, the number of letters in the titles and whatnot? Want more? Radiohead themselves announced In Rainbows only 10 days before it came out (which is rather unusual), and the announcement was followed by a series of 10 cryptic messages posted by the band on their website. That’s nothing new: Cryptic messages might be the only way alternative rock musicians know how to communicate. But then Radiohead fans, being Radiohead fans, noticed that the messages emphasized the letter X (one image was titled “Xendless Xurbia”). And, say, isn’t “X” the Roman numeral for 10? Plus, let’s take a look at this cover art real quick.

Oh, look, two 10s. Huh.

The band has never officially confirmed any of this, though Puddlegum claims Thom Yorke was annoyed by how long it’s taken people to figure it out. Come on, dude — not all of us are insane alien geniuses.

Tumblr Lands $85 Million in Funding - NYTimes.com

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 03:00:58 -0400

Tumblr Lands $85 Million in Funding - NYTimes.com:

stoweboyd:

Jenna Wortham via NY Times

Over the past few years, Tumblr, a microblogging service, has steadily built a community of fans and users who like the site’s combination of social networking features and simple blogging tools that lets them quickly post photographs, videos, songs, links and bits of text.

Now, the company has attracted a slew of venture capitalists who are hoping to capitalize on that popularity.

On Monday, the company will announce it raised $85 million in fresh financing. The round was led by Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners, and the Chernin Group, Richard Branson, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital also contributed. To date, the company has raised roughly $40 million in funding.

I need to get a briefing from Tumblr to see what they plan to do with this new tankful of gas.

h/t catepillarcowboy

Recent Articles in the Creek: Scientists Find Explosives in World Trade Center Dust

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 02:25:43 -0400

Recent Articles in the Creek: Scientists Find Explosives in World Trade Center Dust:

By Matt Sullivan / RCFP

Scientists have detected flecks of undetonated explosives in four samples of dust from the World Trade Center catastrophe. A paper just published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal describes the findings of nine scientists after 18 months of work.

infinity-imagined: A time-lapse taken from the front of the...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 02:25:27 -0400

infinity-imagined:

A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the Earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.

SciPak: Evidence From a Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunt

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 02:25:02 -0400

SciPak: Evidence From a Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunt:

scipak:

A controversial mastodon rib, found with the tip of a bone point lodged inside, is 13,800 years old, researchers report. The findings suggest that the hunters who killed this animal lived before the emergence of the Clovis culture, which was until recently thought to be the earliest…

Thing Labs "the blog": Big news! Thing Labs is merging with AOL!

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 22:55:31 -0400

Thing Labs "the blog": Big news! Thing Labs is merging with AOL!:

thinglabs:

We are pleased to announce that as of today, Thing Labs is merging with AOL. This deal has been in the works for a little while, and we’ve been dying to tell you all, but today it’s official!

First things first: Brizzly is sticking around. Of course anything can happen in the…

Where's Gaddafi?

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 22:54:40 -0400

guardian:

Cartoon - Bob Moran on the hunt for Muammar Gaddafi

World leaders call for dictator to give himself up as rebels tighten grip on Tripoli

Pangeekery: Don't Occupy Sydney

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:33:05 -0400

Pangeekery: Don't Occupy Sydney:

elomis:

At the moment in the US there is a collection of affiliated protests, centred on New York city. As with all “grass roots” protest movements, some of the protesters are unemployed or students who enjoy shows of unity and demands for change as a recreational sport. Some of them are people who have…

On Apple's Must-See TV

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:32:45 -0400

parislemon:

All of the reasons Marco Arment lists as to why Apple won’t build an actual television are good ones. But they’re also all good reasons why the market badly needs to be disrupted — and is ripe for it.

The argument that televisions are “an extremely competitive, commoditized market with very slim margins and most purchasing decisions going to whoever has the most features” sounds exactly like the PC market 15 years ago.

Remember, Apple was going to fail at computers because price is all that matters. A decade later, Apple was going to fail at phones because price is all that matters.

Read More

animalstalkinginallcaps: GARY! ARE YOU HOME? I CAN’T FIND MY...

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:32:25 -0400

animalstalkinginallcaps:

GARY! ARE YOU HOME? I CAN’T FIND MY SHOES, AND SOMEONE MOVED THE DOORKNOB! IS THIS EVEN YOUR HOUSE? GARY!

… GARY!

EVERYTHING SMELLS LIKE VODKA AND I WANT MY SHOES!

GARY WHERE IS YOUR DOORKNOB!

ALLIGAAAAAAAAAATOR TEEEEEEEEEEAAAARRRRRS.

Ship or Die: My take on common misconceptions about the Khan Academy

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 04:55:52 -0400

Ship or Die: My take on common misconceptions about the Khan Academy:

shipordie:

With all of the positive press the Khan Academy has received lately, we’ve also started attracting a bunch of new critics. This is a good thing. I can’t tell you how existing in an echo chamber where everyone loves everything you are doing can make a sane person become really paranoid after a…

zodiacheads: It’s My Park: Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads by Ai...

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 04:55:34 -0400

zodiacheads:

It’s My Park: Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads by Ai Weiwei (by NYCParksDepartment)

eatsleepdraw: dali’s cartoons by JAMES...

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 04:55:04 -0400

eatsleepdraw:

dali’s cartoons by JAMES KWAN

http://jamesgoesexploring.tumblr.com/

Up for voting on on Threadless: http://www.threadless.com/submission/361332/Dali_s_Cartoons/showmore,designs

fishingboatproceeds: Apple Visionary Steve Jobs Dies At...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:10:55 -0400

fishingboatproceeds:

Apple Visionary Steve Jobs Dies At 56

Laura Sydell, NPR

Steve Jobs — the man who brought us the iPhone, the iPod and the iMac — has died. The co-founder of Apple was 56 years old. Jobs had been battling a rare form of pancreatic cancer for years.

“It boggles the mind to think of all the things that Steve Jobs did,” says Silicon Valley venture capitalist Roger McNamee, who worked with Jobs.

McNamee says that in addition to introducing us to desktop publishing and computer animated movies, Jobs should be credited with creating the first commercially successful computer.

“Any one of those would have qualified him as one of the great executives in American history,” McNamee says, “the sum of which put him in a place where no one else has ever been before. To me he is of his era what Thomas Edison was to the beginning of the 20th century.”

Jobs was just 21 when he co-founded Apple Computer in his garage in Cupertino, Calif., in 1976. The following year, when Jobs and his partner, Steve Wozniak, released the compact Apple II, most computers were big enough to fill a university basement or came from do-it-yourself kits for hobbyists with soldering irons.

With sound and cutting-edge color graphics, Apple II was the first blockbuster desktop computer. Users could hook it up to their TV sets to play games, and its spreadsheet program made it popular with small businesses.

“It made Apple the biggest computer manufacturer in the nascent computer industry,” says Leander Kahney, author of Inside Steve’s Brain.

But in 1981, Apple got its first taste of serious competition, when IBM released its own personal computer. IBM had the advantage of a well-known, trusted name, and Jobs — a California boy — loathed the kind of conformist East Coast culture it represented.

So he countered with the Macintosh, the first computer to feature a mouse, pull-down menus and icons — thus eliminating the command-line interface.

“Jobs’ idea was that we’ll make it easy enough that anybody can do it … a grandmother, a kid, people who don’t have any experience,” Kahney says. The Mac was an example of the kind of product that would come to define Jobs’ entire career: easy-to-use computers.

That’s the message Jobs sent to millions when he released the Mac in 1984. In an ad that aired once during the Super Bowl, a woman dressed in brightly colored shorts runs into a room of gray-looking people and throws a sledgehammer at a screen where Big Brother — read IBM — is talking. The minute-long reference to George Orwell’s 1984 became one of the most famous television commercials of all time.

It also illustrated Jobs’ belief that computers were tools to unleash human creativity. In an interview for the 1996 PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds, Jobs said, “Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

In many ways Jobs was the poet of the computer world. He’d gone to India and become a Buddhist. He took LSD and believed it had opened his mind to new ways of thinking.

But Jobs’ iconoclastic ideals did not always make him easy to work with.

“He was just a terrible manager and a terrible executive,” says Trip Hawkins, the marketing director of Apple until 1982. “At that point in time I never really thought that he could be a CEO.”

Jobs was eventually fired in a 1985 boardroom coup led by John Sculley — the man Jobs himself had hired to be CEO of Apple. But Jobs was driven to make computers vehicles for creativity, and after he left Apple, he purchased a little-known division of Lucas film and renamed it Pixar.

In 1995, Pixar released the first animated feature to be done entirely on computers. That film, Toy Story, was a huge success, and Pixar followed it with other big hits including Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles and Finding Nemo.

But Apple didn’t exactly thrive in the years after Jobs’ departure. With less than 5 percent of the computer market in its possession and analysts predicting the company’s demise, the board invited Jobs to come back and run his old business.

In 1998, as interim CEO of Apple, Jobs introduced the iMac and once again helped remake the computer industry. According to venture capitalist McNamee, the iMac was the first computer made to harness the creative potential of the Internet.

“The iMac reflected the transition of consumers from passive consumption of content to active creation of entertainment,” McNamee says. “People could write their own blogs, make their own digital photographs and make their own movies. Apple made all the tools to make that easy and they did at a time when Microsoft just wasn’t paying attention.”

Three years after the iMac, Jobs announced Apple’s expansion into the music industry with a breakthrough MP3 player — the iPod.

“This is not a speculative market,” he said as he introduced the iPod in 2001. “It’s a part of everyone’s life. It’s a very large target market all around the world.”

The iPod was a classic Jobs product — easy to use and nice to look at. Apple sold tens of millions of iPods, and the iTunes store became the No. 1 music retailer.

Six years later, Apple released the iPhone — a device whose elegance and user friendliness blew other phone/music players out of the water.

In 2010, Apple created yet another groundbreaking device with the introduction of the iPad. With its color touch-screen, the tablet gave users the ability to surf the Web, send e-mail, watch videos and read e-books.

Book publishers weren’t the only ones to embrace the new tablet. A host of magazines, newspapers and broadcast news organizations, including The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and NPR, created iPad-specific apps that helped showcase stories — and images — in a tabloid-style layout.

And in January 2011, Apple reached a milestone by surpassing 10 billion downloads from its App Store — a sign of just how popular the company’s devices have become with consumers.

“Simplifying complexity is not simple,” says Susan Rockrise, a creative director who worked with Jobs. “It is the greatest, greatest gift to have someone who has Steve’s capabilities as an editor and a product designer edit the crap away so that you can focus on what you want to do.”

Rockrise believes Jobs touched pretty much anyone who has ever clicked a mouse, sent a photo over the Internet, published a book from a home computer or enjoyed portable music or a computer-animated movie.

She says they all have Jobs to thank for making it happen.

Jumo | Blog: Featured Organization: One Difference

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:10:24 -0400

Jumo | Blog: Featured Organization: One Difference :

jumoblog:

This week’s featured organization, One Difference, uses proceeds from their line of health goods—including water bottles, condoms, and soap—to fund projects working to increase access to basic health and nutritional needs in Africa.

One Difference believes that when it comes to changing…

mckelvie: WIP. When it’s coloured it will be my next print.

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:10:05 -0400

mckelvie:

WIP. When it’s coloured it will be my next print.

@boblet: HTML5 structure—div, section & article

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 19:40:57 -0400

@boblet: HTML5 structure—div, section & article:

Note: I’ve moved all my HTML5 articles to http://oli.jp/, so I can walk the walk. I’ll leave this here for posterity, but won’t update it.
→ Go to: “HTML5 structure—div, section & article” on oli.jp

It seems my HTML5 id/class name cheatsheet article interested a few people, so…

sushimonster: timoni: fuckyeahtattoos: via (via...

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 19:40:42 -0400

sushimonster:

timoni:

fuckyeahtattoos:

via

(via fuckyeahtattoos)

staff: The Tumblr Backup app is ready for beta...

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 19:40:19 -0400

staff:

The Tumblr Backup app is ready for beta testing!

Download (Mac OS X, requires 10.5 or higher)

Unlike other publishing sites’ approach to backups, our goal was to create a useful copy of your blog’s content that can be viewed on any computer, burned to a CD, or hosted as an archive of static HTML files.

Wherever possible, we use simple file formats. Our backup structure is optimized for Mac OS X’s Spotlight for searching and Quick Look for browsing, and we’ll try to use the same structure and achieve the same benefits on other platforms.

Release notes:

Sorry, there’s no Windows version yet.

The output is minimally styled in a plain theme to ensure complete backups, zero external requirements, and a consistent data structure. Custom theme code is included in the backup as a separate file.

To view the backup in a browser, open the index.html file.

Photosets are not yet fully downloaded.

The following are notbacked up:
Private tumblelogs

Submissions

Notes

Feed-imported posts

Audio files from reblogged posts

You can launch the app every few days and re-run the backup in the same place, and it effectively performs an incremental media backup: image and audio files are only re-downloaded if they don’t already exist in the target folder. Text content and post data are re-downloaded in full every time.

If you have private posts, be careful if you make the backup publicly available. Private posts are included in a private folder, and their images or audio files are included in the standard images and audio folders.

Are you a programmer? Each post’s XML data, as specified by our API, is embedded inside an easily-parsed-out HTML comment in each post’s HTML file, in case you want to do anything cool with it.

(via marco)