New fave
Posted: December 5, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: rocking out, sweet vids Leave a comment »Reason why I love Twitter No. 37: You may randomly e-befriend a professional lock picker who will introduce you to an English new rave band that you love in all its hipster glory.
Please do not ever fall for this
Posted: October 27, 2010 Filed under: Hacking, Internets, Security, Teh Google | Tags: Gmail, Gmail hack attempt, Google 1 Comment »I just got an email in my inbox from “Gmail support” with the subject “Important Update.”
That was the first red flag, as Gmail almost never sends important updates through email, they embed them directly into the site, usually in an alert banner across the top that you can dismiss, or links in the upper right hand side.
Another red flag is that it didn’t have the “verified” padlock symbol net to it, an option you can enable in Google Labs to ensure you that emails from sites that malicious hackers often try this stuff with, like PayPal and eBay, are actually sent from those domains.
Opening the email, I noticed, as did Wired Science Blogger Rhett Allain, that the email didn’t automatically open with images. An email from the Google staff would have. Clicking “view images” presented this email:
New Fave
Posted: October 26, 2010 Filed under: Fierce broads, Hell Yes, Musica, Videos Leave a comment »Sometimes I get obsessed with songs/videos and listen to/watch them on repeat. This is the latest. I love everything about this.
A(nother) tale of two phones
Posted: October 25, 2010 Filed under: Products, Technology, Teh Google | Tags: Nexus One, Palm Pre, smartphone 9 Comments »When I first entered the realm of smartphone existence in June of 2009, I went with the Palm Pre. I made a really bad decision for a few good reasons:
1) One of my very close friends works as a mobile technology analyst for a very large bank. He anticipated that, based on the initial reviews the Pre was getting, it could be the phone to finally break the iPhone’s choke hold on the smartphone market. I am a fan of dark horses.
2) Being one of the first-wave adopters was a risk, and I am a risk-taking sort of person.
3) My contract with Verizon was up and the Pre was just about to be released.
When I first got it, I was ecstatic. I still appreciate many of its features: Its Linux-based Web OS operating system is sleek and intuitive, its universal address book flawlessly syncs information between your online and mobile contacts, and its battery life is pretty good once you learn that searching for signal and the GPS are what drains it (putting it in airplane mode when you’re out of range and disabling the GPS fixes this).
But it didn’t take long before I started to encounter some deal-breaking problems. On multiple occasions (including right now), it would seemingly arbitrarily decide to stop syncing my email. The first time this happened, hours on the phone with tech support and two trips to the Sprint store could not remedy the problem, and I ended up getting a replacement phone. Sprint’s tech support is so abysmal that the next five times this happened, instead of stressing myself out by dealing with those people, I simply went without email on my phone until the problem seemingly arbitrarily fixed itself after a few days/weeks. It’s gotten extremely sluggish over time, with the touch-screen commands executing a good 5 seconds after they were initiated, sometimes more. The camera phone app now takes minutes to open, if it does at all. And finally, the PHONE APP broke, so I haven’t been able to make or receive calls for about two months.
It soon became clear the Pre was not the dark horse some had hoped it would be. Aside from the hardware problems, or maybe because of them, mobile application builders stopped investing time and resources on WebOS aps. And the app catalog was a mess to begin with, and nobody ever cleaned it up. I could get by for a while, but then even the facebook app stopped working and I couldn’t post photos to the web anywhere with my phone. After Twitter changed its authentication method to OAuth, none of the Twitter apps for the Pre worked anymore, and still nobody has bothered to fix them or make new ones.
Me = Fed up.
Thankfully, my friend Dave Winer, after seeing me suffer in a state of smartphone limbo for quite some time, gave me a spare phone he had as an early birthday present. Thank you X a million, Dave!!!
Obsolescence
Posted: October 16, 2010 Filed under: Brooklyn, Technology, Thinkers | Tags: obsoleted 2 Comments »Saw this walking home from the Lorimer L stop the other day:
Ten years ago, this was cutting edge. O to think what the future may bring…
The Hackers 15th Anniversary Party, Saturday October 2nd
Posted: September 30, 2010 Filed under: Hell Yes, New York, WIN | Tags: Hackers, Hackers (the movie), Hackers 15th Anniversary Party Leave a comment »After a month of planning, the Kickstarter drive is now closed. We set out to throw the party of the year and we raised almost twice our $5k donation goal to do so. This is happening FULL ON this Saturday. I hope to see you there.
And since 3 people bought “The Slave” package for $500 each, I will be wearing a dress.
HACK THE PLANET!!!111!!!11!
FOUND at the Internet Garage: WTF is in that bag?
Posted: September 11, 2010 Filed under: Found, The Internet Garage, WTF 3 Comments »Shortly after I started this blog a little over a year ago, I started the FOUND at the Internet Garage series to share all the amazing crap I find at the charmingly dysfunctional Internet cafe where I work on the weekends.
This one takes the cake.
Today I was sitting at the help desk, Internetting and stuff, while my coworker Mike dug around in the shelves behind me looking for a part for the laptop he was fixing.
“Yo, need any birth control pills?”
“Probably.” I said, turning around to find him holding two months worth of Yaz. “Oh, nevermind. That stuff makes people crazy. Why do you have that?”
“I don’t know, someone left this bag here the other day,” he said, holding up an Urban Outfitters tote bag.
I got up to examine the contents and found the most perplexing combination of items I have encountered at the Internet Garage to date. I immediately went to the scanner to document the contents, as I usually do when I find strange things in that place.
Wanted: Mildly sadistic editor with egg timer
Posted: September 9, 2010 Filed under: Entropy, Writing 3 Comments »In my 11th grade AP English class, we used to begin every day with an exercise in response writing. Mrs. Smith would write a word, phrase, or provocative quote on the black board and set an egg timer for three minutes. In those three minutes we had to write a “journal entry” in a notebook solely dedicated to those exercises. The deal was, we could write about anything, and she would never read our journals. She would just flip through the pages a few times throughout the semester and check them off to make sure we’d actually been writing while the timer was running.
The point of this exercise was to build up confidence in our ability to churn out content. It was a skill that was highly necessary on the standardized tests we were all constantly preparing for, but I had a hunch that Mrs. Smith had other reasons for her assignment as well. After all, this was the teacher who one day, after we had all gotten situated and were waiting quietly for class to begin, blared Barbara Streisand’s “People” on the CD player, to our horror, to break us of the habit of using the word repetitively as a subject (people think this, people do that, etc..). She once broke the sacred “teachers don’t swear” rule to illustrate her opinion of how the word “fuck” was the epitome of classlessness and that there was always a better word choice. She tended to go to extremes to drill important lessons into our heads.
T-bagging at the Glenn Beck rally in DC
Posted: August 29, 2010 Filed under: Adventuring, Photography, Politics, Thinkers | Tags: Glenn Beck, Restoring Honor rally, Sarah Palin, tea baggers, tea party, Washington DC 32 Comments »
I was in Washington, DC today and attended Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally. I didn’t know what I was getting into two months ago when my mom asked me if I would meet her in DC for a “veterans’ memorial event” and I agreed. Both of my grandparents on her side of the family were WWII vets and, not bothering to look up the event, I just assumed it would be a boring speech by a general or something. Needless to say, I was stunned when I realized that she’s tricked me into attending a tea party rally led by one of the most hateful bigots in the media.
But I’m the kind of person who will try to make the best out of any situation, and walking to the Lincoln Memorial from the Arlington Cemetery subway stop, I passed this couple that gave me an idea of just how to do this…
They were posing for a picture for someone else, and I just kind of walked by and snapped one too, wondering to myself how much the people who made those t-shirts profited from this rally.
Then I started to notice more and more people with full-on tea bagger gear, so I made it my mission to photograph T-shirts with the most idiotic things I could find on them.The closer I got to the stage, the better (read: more absurd, unbelievable) they got.
If “Jesus Is The Standard!” doesn’t that make you and everyone else sub par?
FOUND at the Internet Garage: A Williamsburg sampler platter
Posted: August 14, 2010 Filed under: Found, The Internet Garage | Tags: The Internet Garage 1 Comment »
Left in the scanner. We really don’t fuck around with our stereotypes in this neighborhood.
