Geek Stuff category archive

I was running errands, so I was requested to pick up parsnips.

As I wandered the produce department, i realized I wouldn’t know a parsnip from a parking ticket. I had been told parsnips would be near the carrots. They were, if being along the same wall qualifies as “near the carrots.”

So I whipped out my cell phone, fired up teh Google, and giggled some parsnip pictures.

Viola. Problem solved.

The novelty might be wearing off. Ricky Gervais:

Leaving the microblogging site after less than a month of tweeting, he complained that celebrities used it for “showing off” and he did not need to make “new virtual friends”.

For an example of a twit too fantastically stupid to comprehend, go here.

Brad Friedman in the Guardian:

Free money just to stay stuff, that doesn’t even have to be true, accurate, correct or even coherent is celebrated at Fox. Palin has just landed her dream job.

Bill Shein.

Today at about 11 a. m. EST, Todd Cochrane begins his third (?) annual 24 hour podcast. Jeffrey from Geekazine is scheduled to participate.

Check it out.

I have avoided the Tiger Woods thing for two reasons: It’s boring, and he has never set himself up to dictate the definition of virtue to others.

But it is a reminder:

E-mail is about 27 years old, person-to-person texting 16. Yet smart, powerful, prominent men in amorous situations seem unable to understand the brute facts. As in e-mail is forever. (Even if you melt down your computer, your e-mail is on someone else’s hard drive, too.) As in text messages and voice mail are not secure. Not. Secure.

Warning: Language.

Via the Outlaws.

From Reuters. (Warning: Short commercial at beginning.)

As much as I like OpenOffice, this is Rodent FAIL.

A mouse shouldn’t require a User Guide.

Fab summed it up: “If you don’t have a girlfriend, you’ll never get one if you bring this mouse home.”

Rupert Murdoch has said he will try to block Google from using news content from his companies.

The billionaire told Sky News Australia he will explore ways to remove stories from Google’s search indexes, including Google News.

I love the “explore ways to remove stories from Google’s search indexes” wording. Some exploration to remove old links may be necessary, but, at any time, search engines can be blocked by inserting the following into the header of the webpage (I inserted the period after the first < so the code would be visible):

<.META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

This is news as old as search engines.

What he really wants is to go from billionaire to gazillionaire.

In the meantime, to the extent that, at least in the USA, Fox News doesn’t show up in searches, public ignorance will decrease.

As I sit here at 6 a. m. on a Sunday morning in my robe and into my first cup of coffee, I find it good that the image of the lonely geek with no social skills blogging away in his or her pajamas may not be accurate.

The New York TImes reports on a study that indicates that

. . . people who regularly use digital technologies are more social than the average American and more likely to visit parks and cafes, or volunteer for local organizations, according to the study, which was based on telephone interviews with a national sample of 2,512 adults living in the continental United States.

The study found some less-than-social behavior, however. People who use social networks like Facebook or Linkedin are 30 percent less likely to know their neighbors and 26 percent less likely to provide them companionship.

You can find the full study here.

Read more »

The fridge is not cooling properly. It’s stuck in defrost mode.

The tech says it needs a new motherboard.

Sometimes, plain old relay logic beats hell out of computers.

Details, as well as outtakes, at Scientific Blogging.

Power failure.

At the Guardian.

Error establishing a database connection.

Database maintenance.

I hate databases.

I am a member of this group on Facebook:

We Support President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

(Aside: And I do support the prize. Even though I think it was premature, as I said, it would be incredibly churlish not to support the receipt of such an honor by one of one’s fellow countrymen–but we have no shortage of incredible churls. And, despite the gnashing of churlish teeth, a Nobel Prize is not the type of thing that one turns down.)

The page was created by a fellow from Philly whom I know from DL.

Here’s what’s freaky:

When I Google “We Support President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize,” the link that comes up, awash in all the news links, is the URL for the Canadian Facebook page in French; the page itself is not translated, but the American English headers are replaced with French ones.

Here’s the link again:

http://www.fr.facebook.ca/group.php?gid=180691720019&ref=share

(Aside: Microsoft’s Bing! couldn’t even find that.)

The American English page does not show seem to appear in the first three pages or so of the Google results. Does this mean more French-Canadians than others are searching for the topic?

Inquiring minds want to know.

At the Guardian.

Found one.