While sifting through comment spam, I stumbled upon this cry for help:
I’m conflicted.
From the category archives:
Web
Hold on tight, this is important.
If you hold down Left Arrow while watching a video (in the new player), you can play a snake minigame:
The video has to have focus/be ‘active’ in the browser first; the easiest way to accomplish that is to pause and resume the video, then holding down left arrow — or pausing, holding down left arrow, then hitting space to resume the video.
Not that you’d need to play Snake while watching this interesting talk on MINIX 3 by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.
Google just announced Google TV at Google I/O today. It’s basically a giant TiVo with Chrome built in:
Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.
It’ll be interesting if they can keep the streaming quality high. YouTube certainly doesn’t have the best track record in that department.
These devices will go on sale this fall, and will be available at Best Buy stores nationwide. You can sign up here to get updates on Google TV availability.
A U.S. federal court has established that the
A federal court threw the future of Internet regulations and U.S. broadband expansion plans into doubt Tuesday with a far-reaching decision that went against the Federal Communications Commission.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC lacks authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks. That was a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company, which had challenged the FCC’s authority to impose such “network neutrality” obligations on broadband providers.
TIME writer Steven James Snyder notes that there’s no reason why this couldn’t escalate to tiered internet services:
The FCC could appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, though its quite uncertain that the high court would agree to hear the case, nor how they would fall on the Net neutrality issue. (Many Net neutrality advocates actually believe that a 2005 Supreme Court decision, which upheld the FCC’s deregulation of broadband, already gave too much freedom and control to the Internet service providers).
And then there are those who see a tiered Internet culture rapidly approaching on the horizon. Imagine a scenario in which your Internet access paralleled your access to cable television. For your basic fee, you get access to most basic web sites. But now Comcast can restrict which sites you access, and could charge a premium rate for premium access.
I, for one, think this scenario isn’t just possible, but likely. Providers have been fighting for some time to create preferential pricing models, to get the more aggressive Internet users to pay more for unlimited data. And after Tuesday’s decision, if I was in charge of Comcast, I’d already be devising ways to divvy up access, brainstorming how to squeeze more bucks out of more users. You want YouTube? Then order tier 2. Hulu? Tier 3? BitTorrents? Tier 4.
Forget philosophy or ideals; in an unregulated market, it just makes good business sense.
While experimenting with the Google Similar Pages addon for Google Chrome, I tried it on this site:
I blame the addon’s “beta” label.
Speaking of, Google Chrome Extensions are out, and they are great — except for ‘Similar Pages’, of course.
Google has just launched a DNS service similar to OpenDNS, which I’ve written about previously. The service, dubbed “Google Public DNS“, aims to make domain name lookups (i.e. “What does www.google.com mean?”) faster, and is one of the steps in their plan to make the internet faster — or taking control of it, depending on how dramatic you want to sound.
You can test it by setting your computer or router’s DNS settings to the following DNS server IP addresses:
- 8.8.8.8
- 8.8.4.4
For instructions, see the Google Public DNS configuration instructions.
Unlike OpenDNS, which supports itself by providing advertisement-powered search pages for unresolved queries, Google promises that it will never do any form of redirection. A little strange, considering Google runs the largest advertisement service on the planet, but perhaps they genuinely just do want to make the internet faster.
In my tests, Google Public DNS had a significantly faster response time than OpenDNS from my location in Stockholm, Sweden (Europe). If you’d like to find out which DNS servers are right for you, Google also recently released a DNS server benchmark tool called namebench, which tells you just that, factoring in all of the major public DNS services as well as regional ISP DNS servers.
Note that you should never use DNS servers that you don’t trust. DNS providers have full control over what ‘google.com’, ‘gmail.com’, etc. mean to your machine, and can redirect connections to these websites to malicious websites without your knowledge.
Readability is a bookmarklet that sanitizes web pages not designed with readability in mind, like the vast majority of blogs. I can’t remember how many times I’ve caught myself reading eye-fraggingly small text on a site with a left-oriented, 10% width content column, and wondered why I need such a deliciously large monitor.
Go to the website, customize your design, drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar, then go to a non-aesthetic web page and click the bookmark — voilà! Hopefully, you should feel no need to use the bookmarklet on this site. If you do, though, let me know why.
Check out the Arc90 Lab for more stuff from the authors of Readability; they make some pretty cool stuff. I especially like HashMask and HalfMask.
I have 10 spare Google Wave invites which I’m handing out. Write a comment indicating you want one and make sure the email address entered in the email field is correct and I’ll send one your way! First come, first serve!
All out of invites — thanks for playing!
Haha, this is great. FeynTube is a Greasemonkey script that does something amazing: it makes reading YouTube comments worthwhile by replacing them all with quotes from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.
FeynTube is a small Greasemonkey script that transforms the atrocity that YouTube comments are into reasonable and smart quotes that are actually readable without causing unexpected damage to your enjoyment, mind, temper and any vital organs (because with YouTube comments, you never know). (Greasemonkey, in turn, is a very nice Firefox extension that allows you to customize webpages.)
FeynTube achieves this accomplishment by doing the only conceivable thing: removing all YouTube comments (from your display, unfortunately they’re still on the servers) and replacing them with actual quotes from famous Nobel Prize physicist and elaborate skirt chaser Richard Feynman.I wrote it because I actually like watching videos on YouTube, but, despite better knowledge, sometimes just couldn’t restrain myself from scrolling down and reading some of the comments–with horrible consequences. So I wrote this small script. Now, everytime I scroll down to the comment section, I can read something worthwile.
Blind Search is one of my favorite new toys. It lets you search for something on Google, Bing and Yahoo simultaneously, and lines up the results in three columns. The catch? It doesn’t tell you which search engine each column of search results comes from — rather, it asks you which results you think are the best. I’m pretty sure the results are going to surprise you.
-
- Before voting
-
- After — Oh!
One thing is for sure; whenever I turn out voting for Bing, they’ll gain significantly more of my respect than when they tried to turn me over with a $1.15 meal and a ten grand hidden treasure, especially since the guy behind Blind Search works for Microsoft. It’s too bad that the site isn’t officially endorsed by the company — what better way to win over users and market your product than to empirically demonstrate its prowess?
