ars technica: Safely whitelist your favorite sites and opt out of tracking.
“Many were more than happy to unblock Ars, but many others had difficulty doing so due to the complicated nature of many ad blocking solutions. Dozens of you asked for help, so here it is. In the first of many articles we plan to produce about these topics, we’ve attempted to collect information on how an informed Web user such as yourself can safely and responsibly whitelist websites that you support and trust.”
ars technica: Why new hard disks might not be much fun for XP users.
“A rather surprising article hit the front page of the BBC on Tuesday: the next generation of hard disks could cause slowdowns for XP users. Not normally the kind of thing you’d expect to be placed so prominently, but the warning it gives is a worthy one, if timed a bit oddly.”
Panic Blog: The Panic Status Board.
Brilliant. Via Bump’s Twitter.
Macworld/MacUser: Are Macs really cheaper to manage than PCs?
“Macs in the enterprise aren’t just cheaper to manage — they’re a lot cheaper, according to a new survey released today by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance.” After switching back from PC to Mac a year ago, I concur wholeheartedly.
appstorm.mac: How To Find Your Files Faster with Tags.
I should use tags more. I still have to wade through my backlog of photos and tag them all ...
FakePad: iPhone development is for addicts.
”We know that Apple can barely keep up with the success of the AppStore. Due to its organic growth, the AppStore has become this hairy ball of half-assed technology & random processes.” Sounds like what Steve says about Flash ...
Lifehacker: Foot-Controlled Power Strip.
Finally, someone’s thinkin’.
Macworld: Taiwan earthquake may send LCD, chip prices higher.
“One analyst in Taipei called the impact on global supplies minimal, but said the impact depends on what kinds of chips were affected. TSMC and rival United Microelectronics make a wide range of chips, including mobile phone chips for Qualcomm and graphics chips for Nvidia and ATI.”
cloudkick blog: 4 Months with Cassandra, a love story.
”We initially used PostgreSQL, but as we added billions of rows, the performance quickly degraded.” Some real numbers here.
CNN: Topeka ‘renames’ itself ‘Google, Kansas’.
“This isn’t the first time Topeka has switched its name to mark a cultural trend. In 1998, former mayor Joan Wagnon temporarily changed the name of the city to ”ToPikachu, Kansas,” in reference to the Pikachu anime character, from the show and game called “Pokemon,” which was popular at the time, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.” Who says the Midwest doesn’t have an eye for the latest trends?
Rockett St. George: Vintage Typewriter Keyboard Stickers.
Oh, lord ... I need a set of these for my old Toshiba.
Miller-McCune: Will The Past Last In The Digital Age?
“Once upon a time, news stories were entombed in newspaper “morgues” and rarely saw the dusty light of day. Now the news never dies. Millions of people can search the archives online — an amazing benefit unless, perhaps, you’re someone who was actually in the news.”
NY Times: Macmillan’s DynamicBooks Lets Professors Rewrite E-Textbooks.
This will be a problem in the future, IMHO. Lose physical books, how do you warranty that a text is ‘original’? All code can be hacked.
Digital Photography Review: CompactFlash cards to offer petabytes of storage.
“Enabling 48-bit support (as against the current 28-bit), the new specification theoretically allows for an increase in the maximum capacity to 144 petabytes (1PB = 1000 terabytes), up from the current limitation of 137GB, as well as data transfer speeds of up to 32MB/s.” I need more/bigger hard drives ...
Engadget: Infinitec details Infinite USB Memory Device functionality ahead of launch.
“We’re told that the company is gearing up to officially launch the stick soon, promising ad hoc streaming from any Windows-based PC to just about anything you can think of: Blu-ray players, media streamers, printers, and practically any other gizmo with a USB port.”
CNN: Steve Jobs’ six sneakiest statements.
Macworld: Create a splash screen for your iWeb site with Keynote.
Don’t. Please.
dynaTrace Blog: The Real Performance Overhead of CSS Expressions.
“CSS Expressions are evaluated very often – especially when scrolling or moving your mouse over the document. Using the dynaTrace AJAX Edition on this document and moving the mouse over the document showed that IE is constantly re-evaluating the CSS expression, recalculating the layout and redrawing the page – for every pixel the mouse moves ...” Sounds like a very good way to get yourself booted off a shared server.
Gizmodo: The New BlackBerry WebKit Browser: Yes, It’s Actually Good.
“RIM’s showing off BlackBerry’s new WebKit-based browser, and yes, it’s fast! JavaScript actually loads!” General note: I’ll be keeping one eye on the mobile market from now on.
SilverlightHack: Top 10 Reasons why HTML 5 is not ready to replace Silverlight.
“This article aims to cover what is in HTML 5 (as of February 2010) and how some features in the spec are lacking compared to RIA like Silverlight. This is not a complete overview of HTML 5, nor is it a ‘HTML 5 vs. Silverlight’ article. Below is a quick list of items that I will be covering to try to prove my assertion that HTML 5 is not ready to replace RIAs like Silverlight ...” Good points that hold true for Flash, as well. I particularly liked the well-reasoned arguments in 5) Productivity.
NY Times: Do E-Readers Cause Eye Strain?
”Doctors and researchers note that in most instances, paper can offer more visual sophistication than a screen. But certain types of paper, including inexpensive newsprint and the paper in softcover books, can actually provide an inferior reading experience for our eyes than the electronic alternatives.” As we get older, more light is always better for reading. The bigger factor is: physical books aren’t crippled by DRM.
ComputerWorld: Apple’s Aperture 3 causing significant memory leak for many users.
“Apple’s support forums are filling up with users with similar problems: When they leave Aperture 3 to import their photo libraries, their page file balloons until they run out of disk space. The system then becomes unstable. Some users start seeing their swap disk file size balloon almost immediately after launching the app.”
ReadWriteWeb: Adobe Prepares for a World without Apple’s Blessing.
Adobe Prepares for a World without Apple’s Blessing.
Our Blog Log: Joomla vs Drupal , The Sad Truth.
”It’s the Pepsi versus Coke debate for open source CMSes. Okay, that’s overstating a bit, but you get the idea.” I’m getting more and more calls from people who’ve had their sites set up in Joomla and Drupal, asking me if there are any CMSs out there with *usable* administrative interfaces. J and D are just too dense or complex for the level of employee companies want administrating them.
Build a Bug.
Bug Labs: modular, open source hardware. Legos for techies.
