evan orensky › Comments

No pun intended Mr. Jobs, but by licking your copper Macbook from time to time your liver will thank you ;-) - jcunwired

But Steve wouldn't want you to keep it long enough for it to get a patina. That's the opposite of planned obsolescence, and bad business. - evan orensky

In 2003, William Koehler of Pittsburgh, Pa. lost his job as an electronics technician. He lost his health insurance, too, but he'd been lucky enough to have the defibrillator battery in his heart changed just the previous year. - evan orensky

Tragic story of one survivor of the Holocaust, a young girl -- the daughter of one of the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising -- who was "saved" and brought to the US. The blogger, Mike Shatzkin, relates the girl's story, which was also his family's story. Inspired by the death of Marek Edelman, another Warsaw Ghetto leader. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009...) - evan orensky

Listen to New Order - True Faith on Singles (disc 1) for free on Grooveshark - evan orensky

Listen to X - 4th Of July on Sounds Of The 80's: RSC: 1986-1987 for free on Grooveshark - evan orensky

Evolving source of datasets from the US Federal government's vast catalog - evan orensky

Solid explanation of "just war" and its illogical persistence in philosophy, as well as varieties of pacifism. Uses the characters and situations of the Coen Brothers film to illustrate concepts from Burke, Kant, J.S. Mill, M.L. King and Richard Norton, along with Clausewitz, Sun Tzu and J. Krishnamurti. Entertainingly educational. - evan orensky

Pretty darn thorough guide to having a successful garage/yard sale. Via lifehacker. - evan orensky

Listen to New Order - True Faith on Singles (disc 1) for free on Grooveshark - evan orensky

Very good blog, focused on Web development and WordPress, with some lovely themes -- and excellent support for the themes! - evan orensky

"The descriptions in this blog entry of the ubiquity of walls -- in the world news, national news, economic news, in the neighborhood, in literature -- go a long way toward explaining the need for an exploration of the subject. Walls have become so commonplace, they've become nearly invisible, and that explains why we keep bumping into them. Definitely vote for their project here: http://www.nameyourdreamassign... ..." - evan orensky

Funny reversal of best practices in web design. Uncomfortably close to some of the instructions on a recent real life project for me to really laugh about it, though! - evan orensky

Through a Firefox plugin and a corresponding page on the Facettes site (accessible by adding "user/[your delicious username]" to the end of this link), this MIT project gives you the ability to look at your delicious tags from a variety of... facets. Easier to explore than explain. - evan orensky

Interesting calculator to figure out how much you need to charge hourly to meet your financial targets. The only thing I'm not certain about is how this calculator accounts for taxes. - evan orensky

I've been wearing glasses since I was 7 years old and without them, I would be incapable of reading, writing, driving, or performing any of the jobs I've trained for. Professor Silver's invention is brilliant and simple, and the US$1.00 per pair will do more to bring about literacy in undeveloped countries than any computer ever could. "What if it were possible, [Oxford Professor of Physics Josh Silver] thought, to make a pair of glasses which, instead of requiring an optician, could be "tuned" by the wearer to correct his or her own vision? Might it be possible to bring affordable spectacles to millions who would never otherwise have them? More than two decades after posing that question, Silver now feels he has the answer. The British inventor has embarked on a quest that is breathtakingly ambitious, but which he insists is achievable - to offer glasses to a billion of the world's poorest people by 2020." - evan orensky

If I ever get around to doing my portfolio site, this is an interesting take on presenting a limited number of choices attractively and in one "page". (And if I ever get out of the house, I might make it to the January Refresh Bmore!) - evan orensky

[OPEN_P]COVER STORY [CLOSE_P] [OPEN_P]John Lennon is shot to death at 40, and a bright dream fades [CLOSE_P] [OPEN_P]Just a voice out of the American night. "Mr. Lennon." He started to turn... - evan orensky

"Straightforward and thorough. It runs long, but that's because it leaves nothing out. Very useful!" - evan orensky

Ridiculously simple -- and therefore brilliant -- site to get characters and symbols into your text. Click a character to copy it to your clipboard. Like so: ⁂ Follow them on Twitter for updates: http://twitter.com/copypas... - evan orensky

Uh... surely we didn't need a survey to point out those rather basic facts? - Juha Saarinen from FriendFeed MT Plugin

I love how this post generates so many comments. It shows that more people care about language than we may think. I'll forgive typos and a few spelling mistakes. But not if it becomes too distracting. I've given up reading a few blogs because of too many errors. And that's a shame -- they were informative but badly written. - Joy-Mari Cloete from FriendFeed MT Plugin

<p>Following is <a href="http://www.goosegrade.com/reader-...">gooseGrade's abstract</a> introducing the results of their study. I've made several corrections (original in <b><i>bold italic</i></b>) to grammar and spelling.</p> <blockquote><p>ABSTRACT: It appears that grammar, spelling, factual, and other errors do affect <b><i>(reader opinion)</i></b> readers' opinions as well as how likely they are to share or link to an article. These errors also seem to dictate the <b><i>(readers)</i></b> reader's opinion of the author's skills as a writer. 65.86% of internet users say that a tool like gooseGrade would increase their confidence in the content they are reading. Filtering further shows that 9 out of 10 newspaper readers say that a tool like gooseGrade would increase their confidence in <b><i>(author's)</i></b> authors' content. This <b><i>(merrits)</i></b> merits further investigation of newspaper readers and could show a path for new media to take more market share.</p></blockquote>< - evan orensky from FriendFeed MT Plugin

Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know/ He's in the best selling show/ Is there life on Mars? - evan orensky

US newspapers have been consolidating and going out of business and shutting their doors since the beginning of the last century, facing loss of readers to radio, then newsreels, then television, and now the Internet. The problem this time is that the most avid news consumers are not interested in the fate of newspapers, even though it is those organizations and their corps of journalists who provide the bulk of the news which powers the information culture. Our love for news and our unwillingness to pay for it may prove fatal to quality journalism. "The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes in April 2009 that are expected to make it the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day." - evan orensky

Very clear and useful tips for anyone who decides to try creating a theme for WordPress. Many of these tips are basic enough that they apply to someone building a theme set for just about any blogging or CMS-type platform - evan orensky

The focus for many bloggers has changed over the past year or three from, "I want to communicate" to "I want to make a living by blogging." That wouldn't be so terrible if so many of the bloggers had remembered that the original point of blogging was communicating, rather than finding the latest tricks to maximize your SEO and PageRank and click-thru rates. Like a big Ponzi scheme, the first in are successful and the latecomers are blaming themselves for their lack of success. And meanwhile, all the "tools" of the schemers -- Twitter, delicious, StumbleUpon, and the like -- have been polluted with noise and meta-nonsense. Naomi captured this disaster-in-the-making perfectly! Six months on, it's gotten even worse. - evan orensky

"HathiTrust is a bold idea with big plans. As a digital repository for the nation’s great research libraries, HathiTrust (pronounced hah-tee) brings together the immense collections of partner institutions." The University libraries collaborating with Google's Book Search have joined together to combine and share their libraries' holdings (over 80Tb at this point) on the web, giving them the ability to use the enormous database as befits each institution's own mission, without being required to conform to Google's (ultimately) commercial aims. - evan orensky

Microsoft -- yes, Microsoft! -- makes it easy to download and install open source apps like Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress on the Microsoft Web platform. By bundling an installer and configuration tool, Microsoft hopes to make WISP a strong alternative to LAMP for open source apps. - evan orensky

McCain-loving journalists continue to insist that the Arizona senator is an honorable, unwilling victim of his own campaign. - evan orensky

You never heard of reporter Rob Caldwell of WCSH-TV in Portland, Maine, and Senator MCain probably never heard of him either. So McCain's usual friendly rapport with his fan-club in the mainstream press didn't really help him in this interview. - evan orensky

Cool tool! Webpage displays live list of installed fonts in your system, then allows you to type a short string of text and move through your fonts comparing fonts. A click on the "X" banishes a font from the list and allows you to winnow your selection. No undo or way to export the final list, but... Also available as a downloadable Adobe AIR app. - evan orensky