Gill found these instructions for making plasma in a microwave by carefully cutting up a grape and then nuking it. I finally got around to trying it yesterday, and it’s awesome. Even better than microwaving a light bulb in a glass of water. Check it out:
Making plasma in a microwave!
(Published to the Fediverse as: Grape Plasma #etc #grape #plasma #microwave #video Video of grape plasma in a microwave (be careful if you try this from home). )
…after a five year break and while it’s true that you don’t forget how, your knees can stop being quite so flexible. I’m eyeing up the dog’s glucosamine laced treats quite enviously.
CNET stopped being a useful source of downloads for me ages ago. Over the lifetime of my account I’ve had nearly 100,000 downloads through CNET, but these days it’s one or two a week. I left my products up there anyway, but I’ve just asked them to remove everything they have listed for Catfood Software.
The reason is that CNET has rolled out a download manager that wraps every single download. Instead of the customer getting the product they thought they were downloading they are dumped into a CNET experience that tries to install a toolbar and push Bing / MSN into your browser defaults. Yuck.
It’s one thing for a vendor to partner this way. It’s quite another to roll it out site wide with little notification and no opt out, let alone a revenue share. CNET sell this as being about analytics. Of course it’s all about referral dollars. This isn’t the experience I want for my customers and so I’m pulling the plug on download.com.
(Published to the Fediverse as: Download.com goes nuclear #etc #download.com #cnet Download.com hijacked my download to install some toolbar and so I'm leaving the site. )
My first and last foray into being a TV production company. Tragic that this never got made…
(Published to the Fediverse as: Cam of Fortune! #etc #letters #cam #cams #channel4 A proposal for the ultimate STEM game show, unfortunately rejected by Channel 4. )
Oh no:
My phone keeps running out of space. A little sleuthing under Manage Applications shows that Contacts Storage is using over 32MB. Can’t move it to the SD Card – I guess this makes sense, although it would be nice to cache some of the non-essential data there. I’ve no idea if this is a HTC problem or an Android problem (I have a HTC Aria), but some Googling would seem to indicate that it’s not uncommon.
In the People app choosing View from the menu allows you to pick which sources to use to display contacts. I had 5,854 contacts from Twitter, despite having configured the Twitter app to only sync with existing contacts. I also had a bunch of Facebook contacts, with the same configuration (existing contacts).
I tried deleting Twitter from Accounts & Sync. This warned that it would remove contacts (great!) but after blowing it away Contacts Storage had more than doubled to over 70MB.
Time to go nuclear. I backed up existing contacts and then deleted all data from Contacts Storage. My phone is happy again.
Contacts and sync in general is the worst part of the Android experience. HTC Sync is a contact-duplicating, pop-up-and-wave-my-arms-in-the-air-every-time-I-do-anything piece of Adobe Air uselessness. Google really needs a better answer for people who live in Outlook on the desktop. Or maybe they’ll eventually grind me down into GMail…
Kate has a VTech Move & Crawl ball. From the name you can guess it’s supposed to help encourage crawling. Actually she was terrified of it for a couple of days, and now she likes to pick it up and interrogate it.
I can’t wait for her to get bored and move on to a BigTrak. The ball is going to get some spray paint and be reincarnated as Sargent Major Zero:
(Published to the Fediverse as: Toys #etc #vtech #bigtrack #terrahawks My abandoned plan to turn a VTech Move & Crawl ball into Sargent Major Zero. )
I used to work in Woodley, a small town on the outskirts of Reading in the UK. The town center has a pub, a café, a newsagent, etc. It also had something truly remarkable – two shops that combined fabric and general haberdashery with pet supplies.
I never found out exactly how this came to be. I imagine that there was a fabric shop and a pet shop. The fabric shop was struggling and decided to start selling some dog food. The pet shop responded in kind. Both businesses ended up with no real focus, chasing the competition instead of doing one thing really, really well.
Either that or there was a really messy divorce…
(Published to the Fediverse as: Convergent Evolution in Retail #etc #woodley #reading A brief tale of two stores that sell both haberdashery and pet food in Woodley, Berkshire, United Kingdom. )
Give me an extra character for every year that I’ve been with Twitter.
Another extra character for every tweet that gets retweeted more than a couple of hops outside my social circle.
Ten more characters if I #AskObama and he answers.
Etc.
(Published to the Fediverse as: Twitter: Put some status in status updates #etc #twitter A modest idea to fix Twitter without needing any blue checks. More relevant now than ever! )
I just got on Google+, and the Circles concept definitely moves the ball forward, but my heart sinks a little at having yet another disconnected social identity. It’s been said before, but it’s worth saying again – social networking needs to be an open, core internet standard like email. You can live on Facebook, Google, Twitter, wherever but your social graph should be independent of any specific service.
I don’t mean this in any (well, OK, a little) granola crunching open source way. Companies should compete to the death on their social graph implementation and added value. But the actual data on who your friends are should belong to you and should be both portable and interoperable. I should be able to friend someone on Google from within Facebook and share core items in both directions. If I get fed up of Facebook I should be able to move my graph and central identity elsewhere.
We’ve got OpenSocial, strangely not mentioned in the same breath as Google+, and Open Graph which is open for things but not people. Also FOAF, XUP, and other possible foundational standards. Of course the barriers here aren’t technical.
Altly wants to be Pepsi to Facebook’s Coke. I’m waiting to see what it tastes like, but it doesn’t sound like they’re itching to change the game.
Diaspora is an interesting project, but running instances (pods) of a social network is the wrong level of abstraction.
Of course ‘owning’ the graph is tremendously valuable and it’s hard to see Facebook giving this up anytime soon. If Google really don’t want to be evil they should use Google+ to liberate us from the tyranny of walled social gardens. Unless it turns out to be another Buzz or Wave in which case it’s down to us.
(Published to the Fediverse as: Circles #etc #google #facebook #twitter #socialgraph #opengraph #opensocial #foaf #xup #altly #diaspora #buzz #wave Did the Google+ Circles concept revolutionize social networking, and what we should have instead. )
I’ve been working on an update to Catfood Earth. Several people have asked me to draw the International Date Line on the time zones layer but I’ve struggled to find a decent source for the coordinates of the line segments. I finally ended up manually digitizing the version of the line that appears on Wikipedia. The original is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported so I’m making the coordinates below available under the same license:
| Longitude | Latitude |
|---|---|
| 180.0000 | 90.0000 |
| 180.0000 | 75.0000 |
| -169.2500 | 67.7356 |
| -169.2500 | 65.0189 |
| 170.0500 | 52.6863 |
| 180.0000 | 47.8353 |
| 180.0000 | -0.9000 |
| -159.6500 | -0.9000 |
| -159.6500 | 2.9000 |
| -161.8500 | 2.9000 |
| -161.8500 | 5.0000 |
| -155.9500 | 5.0000 |
| -150.6500 | -7.8000 |
| -150.6500 | -10.0000 |
| -156.0500 | -10.0000 |
| -156.0500 | -7.8000 |
| -178.0500 | -7.80000 |
| -172.7500 | -15.0000 |
| -172.7500 | -45.0000 |
| 180.0000 | -51.1815 |
| 180.0000 | -90.0000 |
This looks great for Catfood Earth. Please take the coordinates with a pinch of salt if you’re designing a cruise missile guidance system or something.
(Published to the Fediverse as: International Date Line Longitude, Latitude Coordinates #etc #internationaldataline Longitude and Latitude Coordinates for plotting the International Date Line, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. )
Accessing Printer Press ESC to cancel
International Date Line Longitude, Latitude Coordinates
Is it safe to open securedoc.html (Cisco Registered Envelope)?
Google Photos killed my Aura Frame
3D Printing a 72-58mm step down Camera Filter Adapter
Animation of US PM2.5 Air Pollution in 2023
Chromecast won't connect to wifi - finally found the fix
3D Printing a discreet wall mount shelf for the Aura Carver Mat
3D Printing a Window Mount for a Google Nest Indoor Wired Gen 2 Camera
