This episode of BoingBoing TV talks about the history involved with the site, LoLrCats. Or at least, thats what I thought it was going to talk about. In all honesty, I think this is more of a spoof video than of actual fact but it’s hard to tell. As a commenter mentioned on the BoingBoing site, one of the comic strips shows one of the cats actually saying the word “PWNED“. However, after closer inspection, it appears as though the cat is walking past a Pawn shop and since the comic routinely left out vowels from words, Pwned was most likely substituted for Pawned.
It’s also interesting to note that this comic may have been well ahead of its time. This comic series is most likely the inspiration behind the current naming conventions of Web 2.0 based companies. Seeing the word PWNED used before it’s time is CLASSIC! And by the way, I still think LOLCats is as stupid now as it was when it launched.
I don’t know what it is that makes me such a big fan of forest photography or forests in general. Every time I see a photo taken from within a forest, it makes me wonder what lies beyond the horizon. If the photo is a pathway, I wonder where that path leads. Occasionally, I come across photos of giant Redwoods that are shrouded in fog with the bases of these massive trees surrounded by the deep green colors of ferns. These are the types of photos that really make me wish I was their at that exact moment, to experience that moment for myself.
Unfortunately, due to finances and other obligations, I don’t have the option of traveling that much. However, one of my lifelong goals is to visit Redwood National forest in California so I can see for myself just how big those trees really are. At any rate, since I can’t travel to the forests of the world, my next option is to turn my desktop into a forest via Wallpaper Images.
Some of the best forest photography that I have ever seen comes from DeviantART. DeviantART is the world’s largest collection of talent that I have ever seen. They have so many categories for creative artists, it’s unbelievable. Here are 10 of my favorite images depicting forests. If you have a favorite, please post a link within the comment section.
Dave Gray of the Roosters Rail blog, sent me an email over the weekend letting me know of a site that was giving out Camtasia Studio 3 for free. Camtasia Studio is an excellent piece of screen capture software created by TechSmith, developers of the popular program SnagIt. Following the directions of the following blog post it appears as though everything is legit. I currently have a fully functional copy of the software on my machine. Another perk worth mentioning is that, when you install Camtasia Studio 3, you can then upgrade to version 5 for half the cost. Not a bad deal when you consider, version 5 costs $300.00 per copy.
Here is a blog I came across the other day. It features pictures of PassiveAggressiveNotes. For example, if you have ever lived with roommates, there has probably been a time when you have had to leave a post-it note somewhere, letting your room mates know how frustrated or annoying they are. Actually, I think the best way to explain the content on this site is to show some examples.
Hopefully, you get the picture. Something that I noticed right off the bat is how many comments these pictures receive. We’re talking over a hundred comments for most of these images. Apparently, people love to try and figure out the meaning and purpose behind the note. At any rate, I thought it was an interesting site that was worthy of sharing.
Aaron of PhotoShopCandy.com has released a free PSD file which contains a slick looking chat bubble. You know, the ones that look like comic book captions. This bubble would look great in online ads, comics, or an animated gif of someone shouting every Web 2.0 buzzword known to man. If your into this sort of thing, be sure to check out his post and download the PSD file. Here is what the chat bubble looks like.
The next time you go shopping for a wallet, think about how nice it would be to replace all of that plastic your carrying with one card. That’s precisely what iCache will allow you to do, once it’s released. The iCache keeps a copy of every card you have programmed into the device and will program the dynamic magnetic strip when you select that particular card.
How It Works:
The iCache will most likely be available first through banks, then through retail locations. After you receive your iCache, you have to register your finger print and the cards you would like to have programmed into the device by plugging it into your PC through a USB cable. The software will prompt you for your card numbers and expiration dates which will then be saved on the iCache device itself. Then, when you reach the cash register, place your finger on the print scanner, navigate to the card to want to use and activate it. The magnetic strip will be programmed for that card, will eject out of the iCache card holder and can then be used to swipe at the terminal. Here is a video I found that goes into a little more detail in to how this thing works.
Security:
You can’t talk about the iCache without highlighting the aspect of security. If you lose the device, it will be no good considering you need to use your finger print before it can be activated. According to iCache, if the device is tampered with in anyway, the data will be permanently deleted. If you choose to store all of your credit card data online with iCache, you can simply plug in your iCache device into your PC and the data will automatically be restored. Notice how I said CHOOSE. Many people are worried that they HAVE TO store their card data online with iCache which is not the case. It will just be more of a pain to restore the data if you choose not to have them store your data.
Which Cards Can You Use:
iCache states that technically, you should be able to program any card that contains a mag stripe. That is, any card with a black magnetic strip that would use to swipe at pay terminals. This includes credit cards, debit cards, prepaid cards, ATM cards, loyalty cards, gas cards, give cards and gift certificate cards. It will be awesome to finally take all of those LOYALTY cards off of my keyring and put them into this device.
When Will It Be Available:
iCache is aiming towards a soft release towards the 2nd quarter of 2008 with a more widespread release near the end of the year. There is no word yet on how much this device will cost but if it’s $100.00 or cheaper, I’m going to pick one up.
Final Thoughts:
I am one of the ones that are extremely excited to see something like this coming down the pike. I’ll admit that I gave my dad this idea a year or so ago. I asked him, what if you could take all of these damn loyalty cards and combine them into one? He said that was a great idea but then, we would probably need to convince retailers to do a major overhaul on their cash registers as their would need to be some way to support the card. I’m happy to see that iCache looks to have gotten around the problem by not changing the dynamics of the card itself.
I’ve checked around the blogosphere and quite a few people believe that giving all of your data information to one company is a recipe for disaster. All it would take is for someone to hack their database or website and the game would be over. I’m pretty sure iCache has safeguards in place such as high bitrate encyption to make that data useless without the decryption keys. It’s also worth noting that you don’t HAVE TO give them your data. You can keep all of that information local.
It seems as though iCache has figured out a way to increase security while at the same time, increasing the convenience factor. I hope they see this post because I for one would love to be a beta tester for this product.
NYSSA has released a free RSS Icon set which sports more of a 3D look than most normal RSS icons. They are available in PNG format and look good on either a dark or light colored background. Each icon is 139X139 in size which should compliment most modern site designs.
VectorMagic is an interesting site that takes raster images and turns them into vectors. Raster images are made up of pixels. A general rule of thumb to remember is that, anything created out of pixels can not be enlarged while maintaining quality because to maintain the quality would require more pixels. However, you can downsize pixel images and maintain an acceptable level of quality because of the number of pixels available for the downsized image.
Vector based images are those that are made out of lines. Think of vector images as one large shape or a series of shapes. An example that seems to make sense to me is that, think of a square as four lines. No matter how you resize the square, the square still ends up as four connected lines. This is one of the primary advantages to using Vector based images. You can make them as big as a skyscraper and they would look the same as if they were the size of a stamp.
VectorMagice works on the basis of tracing the outermost pixels of a raster image and transforming the image into a shape. To test out this service, I am going to use Mike’s avatar that he uses on this blog.
Here is Mike’s avatar as a raster image:
Here it is after going through VectorMagic:
As you can see, it didn’t do a terrible job but it didn’t do a perfect one either. I don’t lay all the blame on the website though as Mike’s avatar image is somewhat complicated and at the pixel level, contains numerous artifacts that affect the outcome. As I was going through the conversion process, VectorMagic provided me with a few questions such as the number of colors in the image, the quality of the image, and whether or not it was simple or somewhat complicated. Then, it did the best it could to turn the raster image into a basic shape. I’m going to go ahead and try a few other images to see if I can get the two to look alike. Until then, if you have a simple pixel based image or logo and don’t have the Adobe Illustrator skills to turn it into a Vector image, give this site a shot.
In the grand scheme of things, Mullenweg said he wants the future of the Web to be open source; and he hopes to get more people using open-source platforms to write their blogs, even if it’s not WordPress. But he’s obviously driven competitively, too. (His blog ranks No. 1 on Google because of all the links back to his site from WordPress.) He recently saw a survey from Google, in which the search giant examined all of the http headers of Web. He found that .8 percent of those pages were powered by WordPress. “That’s how far we’ve come, but we have a lot of work to do,” he said.
Isn’t that amazing? If you compute the numbers, this means that one out of every 125 pages on the web is powered by WordPress. That is a VERY general observation and there is no break down of metrics that state which ones are using WP for a front end, versus which sites are using WordPress as a full fledged blogging solution. Still, this particular stat is amazing and gives credence to the fact that WordPress is on top of their game right now!
While browsing around the WordPress.org plugin database for something completely different, I happen to stumble upon a plugin that was inspired by the Tumblr bookmarklet. It doesn’t have every feature of the Tumblr bookmarklet, but it doesn’t have to.
The plugin is called QuickPost and was developed by a company called Twelve Horses. After downloading, installing, then activating the plugin, you’ll have to go into the QuickPost options area and select a default category for each bookmarklet tab.
The bookmarklet supports the following types of posts: Quotes, Text/Links, Photos, and Videos.
For those that are using FireFox, installing the bookmarklet is as simple as dragging a button to your bookmark toolbar. The process is a little more complicated if your using Internet Explorer.
Dear Internet Explorer Users: Yours is a harder path to walk.. Right click the bookmarklet below and select “Add to favourites”. Your IE will probably tell you that this is an “Unsafe bookmark to add”. Ignore your smart arse browser and click OK. The setup will thus be completed.
Although the bookmarklet doesn’t support every thing the Tumblr version does, I don’t feel as if it needs to. I think this bookmarklet covers the majority of content most people post to their Tumblr blog or regular blog. One thing about this plugin is that it does not allow you to preview the post before it’s published.
There is a checkbox that is part of the plugin options that allows you to use the WYSIWYG text editor but I ‘d rather see the option of choosing between both when making a post. The reason being is that, it’s pretty difficult to post YouTube Embed HTML codes into the WYSIWYG editor without it screwing up. I get around this by switching to the CODE view of the post and making sure that embedding the video is the last thing I do when creating the post.
Thanks to this plugin, I’m seriously considering disbanding my Tumblr account and using this blog as my Tumbelog and everything else blog. After all, lifestreaming seems to be where everything is headed so perhaps setting the site up this way allows me to get a head start on the trend.
P.S. The blog post before this one was actually me testing the QUOTE function of the QuickPost plugin. Apparently, it works.
While browsing around the WordPress.org plugin database for something completely different, I happen to stumble upon a plugin that was inspired by the Tumblr bookmarklet. It doesn’t have every feature of the Tumblr bookmarklet, but it doesn’t have to.
Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff 