An iteration or so of the website ago I hacked in a random art generator into the background of the title of my website using ContextFree.js by Aza Raskin. Â It was a cool little hack, but what would be really nice is to make it shareable.
I’d like a WordPress Plugin that finds the heading of your website and inserts a little Canvas element, includes either processing.js or contextfree.js and picks a sketch, then plops it in the background of your website’s title. Â How cool would that be?
Once there was a hacker who needed to rescue a beautiful princess from her prison on a creaking ship moored in the middle of the sky.  He made it onto the noisy old ship, slipped past the guards and tiptoed down the swaying halls to the room where she wept, chained to an excel spreadsheet.
Continue reading The Magic Ruby vs the Url of Excel: a short story with long code
The good folks over at Wild Bee have an excellent article about how you can use your computer to help the world while you sleep. Lotsa people run SETI@home – I think it is because of the screensaver. Instead of a looking for aliens, you could help political dissidents in repressive regimes, protect anonymous whistleblowers, and even protect our intelligence agents overseas. Install TOR and volunteer your computer for global privacy.
I love the Bergen stop on the F train. Someone is always improving the terrible advertisements. This one was too good not to share.
Here’s me: I have an android phone, I can program, I use LibraryThing for tracking my books. Here’s how those things come together. Continue reading LibraryDroid tracks your books
The mighty Jeff Crouse just made us all a bunch of spacey Church Music. All the glory, but now hot and synthtastic.
Seriously – here’s a hot sample.
St. Anne’s Prelude
Sometimes on the web people think that they can deliver images or music to your computer for you to look at or listen to, but somehow keep you from possessing.  They can’t.
Continue reading How to snag images that someone doesn’t want you to get in 4 steps.
I just noticed that Paul Carr has released his new book, “Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore” as a Creative Commons BY-NCÂ licensed download for the US. And the, um, rest of the internet.
I’m going to read it on my hot new Droid phone, but there’s only a PDF version and an HTML version. I want ePub format, so I converted it. You can download the ePub version of “Bringing Nothing to the Party” here.
It looks like Paul has put a CC-BY-NC license in his blog post, but has put also ND in his text. He’s also been thankful for a derivative work before, so I think he really means BY-NC. Regardless, if he asks me to take down the ePub, I will. You gotta make sure CC licenses actually match up with what you want.
Nate Whitten wrote in with a suggestion for Better Berkeley Webcasts. He wants to save all of the files to check them out later. He’s using a download manager like Down Them All 1, but Berkeley’s files are named poorly, so he doesn’t know which one to watch first.
Even better, he sent in the fix for it – he’s numbered the download links.
You should download it from me, or over on the UserScripts.Org page. As always, you’ll need Firefox and Greasemonkey.
I really like to overdo things. Â In the overdoing spirit of the Thanksgiving season, I overdid something recently.
When I clicked on an irc link to a chatroom, it didn’t open in my preferred IRC client, which is on my webserver. Â I like to run my applications off of my webserver because I don’t have to worry about carrying thumbdrives or dealing with install policies on strange computers. Â If I’ve got a browser, my own private cloud just works.
A little digging, a little coding, and I wrote up a handler. Â Yes, that was a bit more work than I expected, but this way I can give thanks to you by giving you this gift of a very small effort.
If you’ve followed my advice before about getting your own webserver, this could be a 15 minute task for you. Â Install CGI:IRC, install my little handler, baboomp. Â Then we can chat on IRC
Say hi!