Oh my! For at least the remainder of 2006, skype is offering no strings attached, free calls to any land line or moble phone as long as both where you’re calling from and to are in the US. This is your chance to try a landline, VOIP, or Vonage alternative!
Category: Link of note (page 1 of 6)
Send a text message like “Taxi 56301” to 46645 (googl on most phones) and you’ll get a text message response of local a few local taxi. Works for pizza, phone numbers, area codes etc. Basically it’s free 411 and you don’t have to talk to anyone. More info here: google.com/sms/.
Who didn’t see this coming? Give a guy an inconspicuous, tiny camera that he carry’s with him anywhere and everywhere – guess what he’ll use it for? Yup, taking pictures for mobile asses dot com.
If you’ve never heard of eggpost, here is a snippit:
Now, don’t the wrong idea, I’m not pasting these in to mock anyone, I actually have a simple message: Dear teenaged males of America, with your baggy pants and ironic nerd hair: You have turned all the teenaged females of America into lesbians, good work. Do you think there were this many teenaged lesbians 10 years ago? Sorry, there weren’t. I am not judging you, just letting you know.
And here are the archives. I saw this on a.wholelottanothing.org but it’s waiting for me in my inbox too.
I was searching on the movie database at IMDB.com and busted a gut when I saw the Celebrity Photos banner ad that they have on the left hand side of the page. Someone just doesn’t fit the profile. Click the images and see if you can pick the one that doesn’t belong?
Have you seen the Bush and Blair duet? Careful, it may bring tears to your eyes.
A 1980 article in the Washington Monthly entitled “Beam Us Out of This Deathtrap, Scotty!” gives a scary description of the heat resistant tiles on the ship. Here are a few quotes:
“Columbia must be fitted out with 33,000 of these tiles, each to be applied individually, each unique in shape… they’re also a bit of a letdown in another respect–they’re so fragile you can hardly touch them without shattering them. “
“Fixing them to the Columbia without breaking them is like trying to eat a bar of Bonomo Turkish Taffy without cracking it. Most of the technicians swarming over Columbia are trying to glue down tiles. The tiles break so often, and must be remolded so painstakingly, the installation rate is currently one tile per technician per week.”
“The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as “safe life.” That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable. The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. (Verdict: Can’t be done. You can hardly do it on the ground.)
So, even if the Astronauts went on a space walk and saw the damaged tiles, they couldn’t fix them.
“According to the computers, as long as you can bring the shuttle back into the atmosphere, you can fly it to the airfield even if the tiles are damaged. Former Apollo astronaut Richard Cooper doubts the computers know what they’re meeping about.”
” Computers have never flown with the unpredictable combination of damaged tiles that a shuttle may experience. They’ve never been whacked by a sudden, nonprogrammed gust of jetstream wind. They’ve never flounced like a twig on the crazy rapids of “bias”–the bland physics term for unexplained variations in the earth’s gravitational and magnetic fields. These are the wild, uncharted rivers of space. Unknown; unknowable; beyond programming.”
“Some hookers were line dancing at the end of my street.
One of them tripped.
So we had a ho down.”
[via AKA Cooties]
And the URL of the day goes to…
www.i-want-a-divorce-so-buy-these-freakin-italian-charm-bracelets.com/
Here is an excerpt from Andrew Orlowski’s interview with the CEO of Sun.
Q: “When’s the last time you spoke to Gates, when did you last have a conversation?”
A: “I haven’t talked to Gates recently. I talked to Ballmer – we played golf. I was one round behind him – but I didn’t hit him.”
It appears Kazaa is stealing from smaller sites (mine included). Here is a description from the gnome of the low down dirty tricks kazaa plays:
Since Napster’s death, fans of P2P and file sharing have mostly migrated to software like Kazaa and morpheus. The newest version of Kazaa contains code which will rewrite URLs to sites like Amazon.com which allows affiliates to earn commission from sales they refer to Amazon. If you were to have this software installed and click through one of Lockergnome’s book links to Amazon, Kazaa would end up getting credit for any sales that may have resulted from your visit to the site.
Kazaa claims it’s all legitimate since they told users about it in the EULA, and it’s not really stealing from the end user. The problem is that it is stealing from the smaller sites that may depend on referral commissions to stay afloat.
TrackBack, a feature conjured up by the smart folks at Movable Type, could get interesting. It’s a way for web pages that are talking about each other or linking to each other to have links back and forth, as well as expanded to a further context. Basically a way of collecting links to all the people that are talking about an item, automatically. Matt has an in depth explanation here.
The top site of the Weblogger Top 100 (by far) was Modelsearch Benelux, but it’s in like… a whole other language.
If you’re the kind of person who has to have the latest tech gear, but are sick of hearing about the stuff that is released in Japan way before it comes here (read: every cool cell phone ever). You are in luck. Dynamism is a website that buys stuff in Japan, marks the price up, and then ships it to you. They even load an english version of windows and install drivers for you if you get a laptop. They also have those spiffy keychain sized Cubik digital cameras for a decent price.
“Three years after Napster unleashed the first wave of music-trading over the Internet — and a full year after the company was shut down by a court order — the labels are coming to terms with the notion that Internet file-sharing is reshaping their business, and they must compete with piracy or risk losing a generation of customers.”
This is just a reminder to myself and other bloggers. We should read this at least once a month.
“The mere idea that someone else might be able to hear the noises which often accompany a particularly strenuous urination and/or defecation session can be a source of excruciating embarrassment and intense anxiety for deeply neurotic people all across this great land.”
Sounds like a job for the Toilet muffler.
I think this is the most creative referral link I’ve ever had the pleasure receiving, but compared to his main page, it’s nothing really.
Personal Reminder: Check to see if Oddpost is restricted by the proxy at work.
There’s a real liquor store in Salem, Massachusetts called Bunghole Liquors. “We’re not #1, butt we’re right up there!. Nice. I think I will start a collection plate for novelty bunghole memorabilia (rather than those tacky pay pal tip jars) Bunghole Can Koolies are high class. [via E.S.]
Did you know if you type an address into Google it will recognize that it as an address and display links to the correct map at either yahoo maps or mapquest? Google is smart like that.
“People who bemoan the lack of quality web content and those who wax nostalgic on the ‘good ol’ days’ of the pre-AOL/Time Warner web really piss me off. For one thing, 90% of everything is crap. Even on the web. The ratio of quality to crap on the web is finally starting to match the real-world ratio of quality to crap, and this must seem threatening to those who stake some part of their self-worth on being a ‘weblogger’ or something like it. Get over it. The web isn’t a refuge from the stupids. It’s all of us now, stupids included.” [via Nubbin]
Ever wondered what particular font it is that you’re looking at? No? Well I work at a print shop so it happens to me, all the time. Identifont is a website that narrows down what font you are looking at by asking simple questions like how does the tail look on the letter Q or does the top of the 4 connect (with nice images to explain). It has all the major type libraries including: Adobe, Agfa-Monotype, Berthold, Bitstream, FontFont, ITC, Letraset, Linotype, P22, and URW++. Handy – at least for me it is.
but I’ll tell it later. Hint: it involves fire, and clothing.
I’m sure this Klicker lady is a great salesperson, but the damn flash splash on her site is annoying on many levels. One: it hides your cursor and mimics it. Two: It has a sad dance mix. Three: It isn’t skip-able. .
If you want to see a flash interface done well, take a look at this. Fast. A splash screen with function beyond splash. Good.
I was playing with the Ben Brown creation called RSS Monkey. It’s a versatile perl script that formats RSS feeds from syndicated websites. PHP-Nuke, B2, Radio, powered sites all have RSS syndication built in. It can be used with SSI’s, PHP, ASP, or even from the command line if you’re so inclined. There are literally thousands of RSS feeds out there, but there hasn’t really been a fool proof way to add support for a standard users site without building your own support for them, RSS Monkey changes that. Just keep your eye out for links that say syndicated or the standard orange gif that says xml on it. (rss files are stored as xml files)
In a few minutes time I was able to make an RSS feed page that accepts URLs of feeds and displays them, but I gave it a google theme. (all I did was copy google’s html). Enter a RSS URL into the search area and hit google search. The result displayed will be the contents of the syndication. Simple.
I hadn’t actually planned this, but it could be a good way to read weblogs or news sites at work, but make it look like your just searching google. I just threw it together so don’t go clicking all over the page because most of it is just faux-google.
Here are a few quick examples that use my theme with rss monkey:
A company called AdAge bought AdCritic.com. I think it’s a good thing.
As if I needed another reason to want an iPod, here is a glowing review that justifies the purchase in a few ways you may have overlooked.
It’s long been a Internet tradition to do something special for April Fools Day. Here are a few that I’ve seen so far:
Google (Follow the ‘secret behind our pageranking’ link)
Let me know if you find any others.