From: Uliana S <devnn@XXXXXXX>
Date: February 12, 2010 6:07:46 AM EST
To: “shopping@XXXXX” <shopping@XXXXX>, “shopping@XXXXX” <shopping@XXXXX>, “shopping@XXXXX” <shopping@XXXXX>, “shopping@XXXXX” <shopping@XXXXX>
Subject: greetings from me, dear
Privet, my dear friend!
Think of me always and dream of me often [SPAM URL HERE}
You don’t know how much I really do miss you. I’ve opened up a door for love I thought I locked a long time ago. You are always in my heart and on my mind. I know we are so far apart. I can’t explain how all this distance and time apart has made my love for you grow.
I don’t think anyone understands the burden I carry in my heart day by day … until I will be with you. I will be hopelessly in love with you, devoted to being with you. May God reunite us very soon. I am very hopeful that God will lead me to you.
My love, I hope you feel the same, because it would be so much worse if I will be lost in this feeling alone, without you to share it with and to share the thought of us being together. I want to make up for all our time apart.
So long
July
Apple stores don’t have “no smoking” signs. Legally they need them but they “ruin the design of the store”, so for every apple store in the UK they pay £50 a day to keep their windows sign free. Crazy shit.
EDIT: I forgot to include the source, it’s a friend who works in the Apple Store in Norwich, The evidence is the fact that they aren’t actually in the windows.
Working on equations at the office
The plastic-bag attire is good, but the best part is at the end when, failing to board their flight, Mssrs. “Terry Wrist” and “Al Kyder” are paged at the boarding gate.
Tired and sad but happy about music box
Date: November 11, 2009
The Internet Archive and founding companies announce today the launch of 301Works.org, a service to archive shortened Universal Resource Locators (URLs). This will enable redirect services to incorporate these shortened URLs when a member company ceases business activities.
The use of shortened URLs has grown dramatically due to the popularity of Twitter and similar micro-streaming services where posts are limited to a small number of characters. Millions of shortened URLs are generated for users every day by a wide variety of companies.
But when a URL shortening service shuts down, the shortened URLs people put in their blogs, tweets, emails and web sites break. Unless users have kept a record of each shortened URL and where it was supposed to redirect to, it’s not possible to fix them.
A group of URL shortening companies and other interested parties realized the potential for harm to the user community and formed the 301Works.org organization to provide more security for the people who use these services every day. Currently more than 20 URL shortening organizations have participated in an earlier form of this collaboration, and an industry leader, Bit.ly, has already begun donating archives of their URL mappings (pairs of long URLs and the generated shortened URLs).
The non-profit Internet Archive, a digital library with extensive text, audio, video and web collections, will administer 301Works.org as a project of the Internet Archive. “Short URL providers have in the space of eighteen months become a corner stone of the real time web — 301Works.org was conceived to provide redundancy so that users and services could resolve a URL mapping regardless of availability. The Internet Archive is a perfect host organization to run and manage this for all providers,” says Bit.ly CEO John Borthwick. “The Internet Archive is honored to play this role to help make the Web more robust,” added Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.
All participating companies are members of the 301Works.org Working Group, a technical and policy discussion group, but the Internet Archive will manage the over all initiative in a fashion consistent with its charter as a non-profit organization, and supporting the interests of the greater community ahead of those of the participating companies.
Participating companies will provide regular backups of their URL mappings to the 301Works.org service. In the event of the closure of a participating organization, technical control of the shortening service domain will be transferred to 301Works.org in order to continue redirecting existing shortened URLs to their intended destinations.
Stowe Boyd, the well-known blogger and web commentator, has agreed to serve as director of 301Works.org. “The community really needs the stability of an organization like the Internet Archive so that we can trust shortened URLs. I’m honored to participate in the project,” says Boyd.
About the Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as 150 billion archived web pages. For more information visit www.archive.org.
About 301Works.org
301Works.org arose as a working group of URL shortening services in response to concerns about the longevity of shortened URLs. As of October 2009, the Internet Archive agreed to manage 301Works.org to archive and redirect shortened URLs. For more information or to participate, contact the project director, Stowe Boyd, stowe.boyd@gmail.com, or visit the website: www.310Works.org.
On the roof
P103009PS-0290:President Barack Obama plays peek-a-boo with Maeve Beliveau, the daughter of Director of Advance Emmett Beliveau, in the Outer Oval Office, Oct. 30, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.
Marc and Clint are defending ebook readers from the categorical criticism and doubt in blogs over the last few days, sparked by remarks by John Gruber and Jason Kottke.
I got a Kindle 2 in February, mostly so I could make Instapaper work well on it. I expected it to be used mostly as a development device that I would occasionally use to read a book.
The following week, Tiff was packing lightly for air travel, and I made her take the Kindle instead of a handful of books. She thought it was weird and unnecessary, but she semi-reluctantly tried it for the trip.
I just got it back a few weeks ago.
Tiff plowed through more than 20 books on the Kindle. At one point in the middle, she read a book on paper (because it wasn’t available on the Kindle) and absolutely hated it. Her commentary was priceless: she couldn’t easily look up word definitions, she couldn’t change the font size, it was awkward and lopsided to hold near the beginning and end, and it would lose her place if she fell asleep while reading.
Most people won’t instantly jump to buy ebook readers after seeing them in TV commercials or liveblogged keynotes. They need to be experienced in person. (The ability to do this easily will give Barnes & Noble a huge advantage over Amazon.) And they’ll spread via good, old-fashioned, in-person referrals from friends and coworkers.
“Oh, is that the book reader thing? I heard about that… How do you like it? Can I see it?”
And how many Kindle owners have you met who didn’t love it?
This isn’t a recipe for explosive growth. They’re not taking over or killing anything. And techies don’t need to care much for them to succeed. Engadget and Gizmodo can keep obsessing over tiny LCD devices and foldable Acer tablet concepts and are safe to completely ignore this market once it’s no longer shiny and novel. But there are a lot of people — including, significantly, most people over age 40 — who don’t like reading tiny text on bright LCD screens in devices loaded with distractions that die after 5 hours without their electric lifeline.
And this is one 27-year-old with 20/20 vision1 who also prefers it.
Most of Kottke’s problem with ebook readers can be solved in software:
But all these e-readers — the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, et al — are all focused on the wrong single use: books. (And in the case of at least the Nook and Kindle, the focus is on buying books from B&N and Amazon. The Kindle is more like a 7-Eleven than a book.) The correct single use is reading. Your device should make it equally easy to read books, magazine articles, newspapers, web sites, RSS feeds, PDFs, etc.
And I’ve already solved part of that. Despite making an iPhone app optimized for reading magazine-length text, I mostly read long content with my very beta Kindle-export feature (which sucks, and is about to be replaced with a much better version) because it’s so much more comfortable — the e-ink screen really is much easier on the eyes, and much more text fits on the Kindle’s screen than the iPhone’s. (If the rumor consensus is to be believed, the Apple tablet unicorn will only solve the latter problem.)
Writing off an entire category of devices because of easily improved software limitations is invalid and unwise. I love reading on my Kindle, and I hardly ever read books. I’ll do my part to make blog posts, online magazine articles, and news stories just as easy to read as books.2
I don’t expect the ebook-reader market to be the next hot thing. But it’s also not a fad, and it’s not going away. These are great devices for reading, even if you need to use one before you’re convinced, and any objection to their current software limitations is likely to be temporary.
(3)
I have 20/20 vision for now, at least. I know it won’t last forever, but I’ll enjoy it while I can. I wasn’t so lucky with hair, so I’ll take the advantages that I can get. ↩
I’m not including RSS feeds or PDFs in the discussion. RSS feeds aren’t reading: they’re alerting, discovering and filtering. My preferred workflow, which Instapaper embodies, places RSS-inbox-clearing entirely before the reading step as its own process that’s always done with high speed using a native feed reader on a regular computer.
For a variety of technical and practical reasons, I don’t consider PDFs to be a good reading experience on any platform. It’s also not possible to universally transform them well, or even acceptably, to any screen smaller than their intended print size: letter-sized paper, usually. The Kindle DX comes close, but it’s a large, specialized device that’s not as well suited for the mass market as ebook readers with screens in the 6” range.
There’s also always going to be a subset of web and book content that doesn’t work well on ebook readers, such as content with a lot of tables, diagrams, photos, or embedded source code blocks. This matters to some, but lack of good support for this type of content won’t prevent the category from being generally successful. ↩
This is my first use of footnotes. Normally, I hate them. But I’m experimenting to see if I can find a way to make them not suck. Specifically, it should be possible to read the article linearly without jumping to any footnotes, then read the footnotes at the end after you’ve read the whole thing without needing to jump back to the references in the article to remember what they’re talking about. ↩
