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Archive for the 'Asides' Category

On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness… for Linux

Let it be noted that the first installment of the Penny Arcade video game, On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness, Episode One, has a demo, and a full version available, for not only Mac OS, but also for Linux.

Let is also be noted that using the word “precipice” in the title of your video game may just make it awesome auto magically. Or not. Your Mileage May Vary.

Blamescoble, Day One

I wanted an excuse to build something small with the Qcodo PHP framework, and I had thought the whole mini-meme around blaming Scoble for Twitter’s downtime, and Drew Olanoff’s inspired leap to blame Scoble for, well, almost everything else, were amusing enough to build a microsite around. So http://blamescoble.com was born.

I don’t know what I expected but what happened, so far, is:

Day 1 (May 31 2008): 134 visits.
Day 2 (June 1 2008): 502 visits (as of 8:50am).
Crimes laid to Scoble’s charge so far: 210.

I was a bit concerned about spam, but stripping HTML from the entries seems to make this sort of thing a less compelling platform for spammers.

Gmail: scanning for viruses

As I waited for an attachment to be available in Gmail, I watched a familiar message: scanning for viruses.

It had never occurred to me to wonder before, but… what does Google use to scan for viruses? Does anyone know? Is it a custom solution? ClamAV? A combination of systems?

And if it is a custom Google product doing the scanning, I wonder how long until we could download Google Anti-Virus? (I’m writing this from a Lenovo Laptop; I’m assuming this would only be useful to Windows users. Probably part of the reason I’ve not thought about it before is that I’m not usually using Windows…)

Then again, perhaps I’m just over-thinking (again) — a quick search reveals that Google already includes the free Norton Security Scan and Spyware Doctor with their Google Pack software bundle. Then again, there is no mention in the Gmail Help Center as to whether the software Google is using in gmail to scan for viruses is equivalent to what you can download with Google Pack. For some reason, I doubt they’re simply running Norton Security Scan on every attachment in Gmail.

I’m not sure it matters, but does anyone know what Google uses to scan for viruses in Gmail?

Facebook morphs into… Twitter?

The New Facebook interface.

I’m not sure yet if you must be logged in to see the above; let me know.

Looks an awful lot like a more featureful Twitter.

It still seems pretty incomplete, to me. I can’t find the option to post a link or note at all, only the “Wall” option; and links in your “Wall” don’t actually reformat as links, so that’s a big lose for Twitter-like functionality. I think we can assume this will be fixed, though.

So what do you think? Will this work for them?

Turn FriendFeed Into A Twitter Client

Internet Duct Tape has a great Greasemonkey script which will effectively turn FriendFeed into a Twitter client; adds the ability to tweet directly from FriendFeed, complete with a 140-character counter to keep you within Twitter parameters.

Still “client” is a bit misleading… to be able to see the messages of everyone you follow on Twitter, you would still need to follow them on FriendFeed (if they’re there) or add them as imaginary friends… which as I said before, is actually a really sweet feature. The same source also has a downloadable script to do just that; if you are on windows.

No One Should Be Entertained This Easily

And yet…

Welcome To Twitter! Twitter is down, now.

Heh. So I showed my sister John Hodgman’s twitter page, and she responded by deciding to sign up for a twitter account. We chatted over IM about Twitter for a few minutes, then this exchange took place:

(3:47:03 PM) Shiz: twitter is down over here now
(3:47:07 PM) Shiz: won’t load
(3:47:23 PM) Phil Crissman: yeah. Here too. everywhere.
(3:47:26 PM) Phil Crissman: Welcome to twitter!

I guess it’s good for people to see what Twitter’s all about right away.

All Known Metal Bands

All Known Metal Bands seems to be… just that, and that only. A list of (wait for it… ) All Known Metal Bands.

No more, no less.

It is either an incredibly retarded or an incredibly awesome idea for a book. I’m still undecided which one I think it is. Possibly both.

Also, apparently one can write a book whose contents contain absolutely anything, and it can be published. This in itself is somewhat incredible.

Garfield minus garfield

Garfield Minus Garfield
Garfield minus garfield
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