This link has been knocking about my list of stuff to ogle for a while now. It’s the library of Jay Walker, a guy who made millions out of ideas:
ooh! Continue reading ‘Geek Library’
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Fresh, er three years, back from the wastelands of the Western Sahara, we’re back. And this time it’s destination Ulaanbaatar.
Team site can be found here.
Doing it with the “it’s for charity” cover story this time. Namely Christina Noble Children’s Foundation and Mercy Corps, both active in Mongolia in some form or other. Btw I was going to setup a JustGiving account so people could donate online, but did you know they take a 5% cut from all donations!? No thanks, if anyone wants to kindly donate any funds please just get in touch with me and we’ll work something better out…
So after killing my runaway IE processes for the nth time yesterday I decided to download Google Chrome. I was extremely sceptical of their ‘faster browsing’ claim, believing it would amount to illusions similar to their tricks in Gmail – actioning requests onmousedown, etc.
I was wrong.
24 hours into my first Chrome session it still only uses up 50meg of memory – and stayed at ~20 yesterday for most of the day. It refused to choke in an IE-like manner over sites like Ebay, YouTube & Gmail. Flash videos loaded up closer to my PS3 browsers speed (i.e. like something approaching acceptable performance), and as I say, no memory leak. Internet Explorer would have hogged anything up to 600meg of space by now, thus requiring me to save all my current tabs on notepad/to memory kill it then start the shoddy thing up again.
Granted Gmail and other javascript-heavy sites did not seem to run any faster. But they didn’t stall either. It doesn’t come with Java support built in, but I don’t think I’ll risk adding it on – Chrome is my new speedy browsing experience from now on. Firefox still gets the heavy-lifting vote due to the overwhelming array of plugins I’ve slapped onto it.I’ve been critical in the past towards Google and their useless feature-bloat, particularly in Gmail’s case. But with Chrome they seem to have done good.
Update: Too much hope I guess. No sooner had I posted this than I found a bug. Over and above the annoying textbox glitch that seems to be posing quite a problem. It’s treatment of textbox input is faulty when it sends to the server – It removes newline formatting in WordPress 2.2.1. Thus my blog post came out as one long blurb. Bug report submitted.
Watched Heat again last night. For some reason this time round I was struck by how much the tactics of the robbers in the bank heist scene resembled that of military ‘one foot on the ground’ type movement under fire. Until I read this at imdb:
Lt. Hanna is shown “checking chamber” on his handgun in at least one scene. This is a trademark of the character Nick Stone in a series of novels by Andy McNab, who was technical weapons training adviser on _Heat_ . Although not an uncommon thing to do with a handgun, it is rarely given such visual prominence in films. Also, the crew’s tactics in the bank robbery shootout are notably similar to the “response to enemy fire” tactics featured in the book and film of McNab’s Bravo Two Zero (1999) (TV).
Look for yourself:
I arrived late last night to the news that Google has entered the browser wars. First impressions for me – something needs to be done about the slowdown/freezing that js-heavy webapps such as gmail create on IE and Firefox. Having multiple flash based sites open causes similar non-responsive issues. Chrome’s js engine, known as V8, responds favourably in benchmarks - although Firefox minions are countering this.
It would be nice if respective browser teams could fix these issues and quit with the endless ergonomic tabbed browsing memes. No one cares where you put them…
I’ll not be changing from Firefox (2!) anytime soon though. I’ve got too many plugins to drop – Chrome has no framework in place yet. And besides, Chrome is very much beta…
Far be it from me to join the salivating hordes, but the sporadically named Openmoko Neo FreeRunner was released yesterday and I am interested. Although the Freerunner itself is basically just a marketable update on their original neo1973 model, the general idea of an open-hardware phone is something that appeals to me, in a way Google Android and the rest haven’t yet quite managed. And I’ve tried to get into the mobile platform thing. But reading Facebook on the move really doesn’t do it for me. Perhaps something like this will.
Bub and Bob mosaics pop up now and again in cities around the world. Enemies aren’t left out either.
Survival is an ongoing issue.
Was searching for a way of turning youtube’s collection of music vids into some kind of online music player when I noticed the not so new ‘Play All’ feature on quicklist (the list created from clicking on the wee ‘+’ icon in the bottom left of videos you want to watch) that allows you to cycle through the list automatically.
Looks like some people also like this idea, even if it means manually selecting/playing videos each time one ends.
Had been playing around with the idea of bastardising some intermediate flash video queuing page and was wondering if the auto loading of flash movies could be done, but obviously it can. I’d be interested in knowing how YouTube does it
Came across this yesterday via Facebook groups. It really pisses me off when I’m playing catchup on web trends. At least 6 months behind with Lolcats.
Done a bit of Technoratiing. Haven’t really used it much before, it’s search sucks (too much garbage) but it’s aggregation/wisdom of crowd stuff looks useful. Anyway found what I’m looking for I think – BoingBoing.
Quality stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree. And there’s fuckin loads of them
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