jnman

Shared 18 times Noah sez, "An interview with the man who designed the ambient sound at Disney World, ensuring a constant experience rather than one that ends with the end of the ride. It was initially a little uneven, with sound changing volumes depending on where you stood, so they used algorithms to position 15,000 speakers around the park so that the levels would never change." I like the way there's often running water or waterfalls between different soundscapes to act as a white-noise buffer. It's subtle but incredibly effective. You almost never hear two contrasting soundscapes at once. In the mid 1990's, the park started researching the problem. It would eventually find no existing solution, so the engineers had to design and construct, on their own, one of the most complex and advanced audio systems ever built. The work paid off: today, as you walk through Disney World, the volume of the ambient music does not change. Ever. More than 15,000 speakers have been positioned using... - jnman

Shared 46 times rampantheart said: ROTFL - jnman

Shared 28 times We sort of knew this would happen as soon as we heard about that iPhone wallpaper hack in the Netherlands -- a hacker named ikex has created what's apparently the first iPhone worm, and it's currently infecting jailbroken iPhones across Australia. The "ikee" worm, as it's being called, takes advantage of the fact that jailbroken iPhones with SSH installed all have the same default root password of "alpine," and once in the system it changes your wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley and then tries to install itself on other jailbroken iPhones on the network. Sophos says it hasn't confirmed any infections outside of Oz, and to be clear, this worm can't get to stock iPhones or jailbreak owners who haven't installed SSH -- but if you're running a hacked phone we'd say you should change that root password right away just to be safe. Get to it, kids. [Via PMP Today; thanks to everyone who sent this in] Filed under: Cellphones First iPhone worm rickrolls jailbroken phones... - jnman

Shared 14 times It is completely legal to photograph the Los Angeles Metro System. On October 31, 2009 while on my way home from the Hollywood and Highland area, I was unlawfully detained for 25 minutes by LASD Officers Richard Gylfie #2955 and Bayes #456 for taking two photographs of the turnstiles located at the Hollywood and Western Metro Station — an act that is completely legal and occurred in public space. As you can see in the video (which can be viewed on YouTube, Vimeo, Liveleak, Flickr and discarted.com), Officer Gylfie #2955 and Officer Bayes #456 took it upon themselves to ignore established law and Metro policies in order to bully me, humiliate me, and detain me for conducting a perfectly legal activity in public. More important, by illegally detaining me, Officers Gylfie and Bayes violated my constitutional rights, which protect me as a photographer and against unlawful stops, searches, and seizures. Be sure to Digg the video here, and leave a comment on YouTube. To... - jnman

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Shared 18 times On Thursday, Google caught the eyes of Web developers around the world with the company's move to open source its Closure JavaScript compiler, library and template system to the Web community - the very same tools that power popular applications, including GMail, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Reader, and no doubt many others. The Closure tools optimize Web code to be compact and high-performance, essentially reducing page load and redraw times while also enabling uncompromising capabilities. Around the Web, you could see the release elated geeks both inside and outside Google, many of whom previously worked with the tools while working for the Mountain View tech giant. To better understand these tools, and get a real-world perspective on Closure, I reached out to Mihai Parparita, an engineer on the Google Reader team, to hear of his experience. He was gracious enough to extend a very thorough overview, explaining the tools' origin and use case, by e-mail, much of... - jnman

Shared 17 times Earlier today in response to my post about Nimbuzz, a good pal emailed to find out why the service didn’t work over the iPhone’s 3G connection. After all, a few weeks ago AT&T announced support for VoIP over 3G with much fanfare, a move that was widely applauded, including kudos from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. A month has passed since the decision was announced, and there is still no support for VoIP over 3G. “Apple actually did not approve the 3G calling — so they completely broke their promise of allowing VoIP calls on 3G,” a Nimbuzz spokesperson said. Even Skype doesn’t work over 3G (see attached screenshot). Truphone is not working either, much like Fring. I am not sure if these services work over 3G data connections in Europe and other parts of the world, but it looks like Apple is the one putting in the roadblock here. - jnman

Shared 29 times Filed under: Multimedia [Our regular Sunday night Talkcast is cancelled due to a sick host. Sorry, and we'll see you next week. -Ed.] Let's face it: Flash on the Mac is a dog. Actually, that's an insult to dogs, which are known for running fast. Flash for Mac is such a an unoptimized beast that you can expect it will suck up as much CPU as possible, even for the simplest of videos. My first line of defense is ClickToFlash (which I've mentioned before), but the folks over at NeoSmart have another solution, at least for YouTube: HTML5. By using the newest version of HTML, they have devised a system to send YouTube videos directly to any MP4 decoder on your computer. Simply go to their custom web page and paste the YouTube URL into the field. In a moment you will be presented with a clean window showing you the video, as well as a download link for the MP4 version. They also have a Greasemonkey/UserScript available which will add a link to all YouTube pages. That's nice,... - jnman

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Shared 25 times Calls to ChildLine reporting sexual abuse by woman is rising five times faster than calls about male attackers, the charity reveals. - jnman

Shared 17 times Image based on Kevin Van Aelst’s original. Since it’s apparently all the rage to design your own features for Twitter now, I figured I’d build on my success with the hashtag and crank out a few more. All of these are simple conventions for adding more standard metadata to a post in a specific, uniform way. The Slasher First, I’ve decided to migrate from encapsulating my metadata in parentheses to using a slash delimiter (”/”), which, for shits and giggles, we’ll call “the slasher”. This saves you ONE character, but hey, those singletons add up! Now, the pointers. “Pointers” are short words with different intentions. A group of pointers should typically be prefixed by ONE slasher character. You can daisy-chain multiple pointer phrases together, padded on both sides with one whitespace character. There should be NO space following the slasher. Hashtags should be appended to the very end of a tweet, except when they are part of the content of the message itself and... - jnman

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Shared 17 times We recently told you about the Flickr App garden and gave a list of five interesting apps we found using this new section of the site. One app we didn't find - and one that brilliantly appropriates the Flickr API in a delightful, infectious user experience - is Noticings. Part game, part geotagging app, part photoblog, Noticings asks users to upload geotagged photos of interesting artifacts to Flickr. Users tag the photos "noticings;" those photos are then imported, analyzed, and scored, with extra points being awarded for those who post every day in a given week, who post photos of lost objects, or who post the first pic from a certain neighborhood. It is, as the site states, "a game of noticing the world around you." Sponsor "Many of us are moving so fast through the urban landscape we don't take in the things around us," the site reads. "Noticings is a game you play by going a bit slower and having a look around you. It doesn't require you change your behavior... - jnman

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Shared 29 times Mom Fail Milfs Seen on Facebook Picture by: Mark Blaauw Submitted by: dunno source via Fail Uploader - jnman

Shared 15 times Windows/Mac: Libox makes it easy to share music, movies, and photos with your friends in a private P2P network. After installing the Libox media browser and importing your media, you can share with... - jnman

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Shared 16 times TwitCritics leverages the constant flow of positive and negative movie references on Twitter to give a peek at public opinion on what's playing at theaters. By cataloging references to currently playing movies according to negative or positive wording within tweets, TwitCritics builds an index of movie popularity. Clicking on a movie gives you a view of the movie poster, the current rank, and a list of the most recent tweets related to it. The system isn't perfect of course, if you send out a tweet that says "I love cheese. I wouldn't see 'The Box' again anytime soon." it can throw the system off. Thankfully TwitCritics has a simple feedback mechanism for reporting inaccurate rankings—although from our casual browsing of movie reviews, the system seems accurate enough to give you a solid overview of public opinion on current movies. Have a favorite way to get a sense of what movies are worth buying a ticket for? Let's hear about it in the comments. TwitCritics [via... - jnman

Shared 25 times Those of us who manage online communities have learned to crowdsource a big chunk of our work: identifying user contributions that deserve a higher profile - and those that deserve to be dropped in a deep, dark hole. But there has to be something more nuanced than just thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. And so... Sponsor More Noise to Signal. Discuss Kate said: Wow! Its a complete description of people I encounter on LJ on a daily basis! - jnman

Shared 26 times An anonymous reader writes "Instead of spending the next 10 years trying to find a Flash implementation for Linux or OS X that doesn't drain CPU cycles like there's no tomorrow, NeoSmart Technologies has made an HTML5 viewer for YouTube videos. It loads YouTube videos in an HTML5 video container and streams (with skip/skim/pause/resume) against an MP4 resource, and an (optional) userscript file can update YouTube pages with the HTML5 viewer. The latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are supported. Personally, I can't wait until the major video sites default to HTML5 and we can finally say goodbye to Flash." Read more of this story at Slashdot. - jnman

Shared 28 times If you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone, listen up: a worm is reported to have broken out in Australia that targets owners who have not changed the default password after installing SSH. The worm’s behavior is somewhat amusing: it changes your background to a photo of Rick Astley, then looks for other phones on the network to infect. That said, the exploit could easily be used by hackers with malicious intent for more nefarious purposes. If you have a jailbroken iPhone and you’ve installed SSH without changing the default password (from “alpine”) you need to do so to avoid such attacks. If you have not jailbroken your iPhone or iPod Touch and installed SSH, you are not affected. Sophos writes of the exploit: SophosLabs is analysing the worm’s code, which suggests that at least four variants have been written so far. One of the attributes of the latest variant (labelled the “D” version) is that it tries to hide its presence by using a filepath suggestive of the Cydia... - jnman

Shared 36 times AT&T might be suing Verizon for misrepresenting its network in ads, but that doesn't seem to have dissuaded Beg Red from using that same map image in this new spot, which casts the iPhone away to the Island of Misfit Toys. Hard to argue with the premise, but here's the real question: why not just sack up use a real iPhone, instead of this KIRF piece? Check the ad after the break. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Continue reading Verizon takes another swing at AT&T, puts iPhone on the Island of Misfit Toys Filed under: Cellphones Verizon takes another swing at AT&T, puts iPhone on the Island of Misfit Toys originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | Email this | Comments Lenn said: Ouch ... its getting a little rough around here ;) - jnman

Shared 25 times So, the hype got to me. Yesterday I headed to Verizon and bought a Motorola Droid, which runs Google’s Android operating system. Last night my friend Luke Kilpatrick came over and we compared the Droid to the Palm Pre and iPhone. He’s a bit biased toward the Palm, and ran the first Palm Pre Dev Camp but he’s also a mobile freak and has an iPhone and an HTC Hero, which runs an older version of the Android OS. Plus we get together with other people at the Ritz and compare phones regularly and I know he is fair and knows his stuff. Why did I buy the Droid when I’m a happy iPhone? Because for the past two days Dave Winer has been praising the Droid and because I want to stay up to date on what’s going on on the Android OS. It’s one thing to try a phone for a couple of minutes, it’s a whole nother thing to force yourself to use it. For instance, if you see it in the store you might not see that the battery door keeps popping off. If it does that after only a few hours of... - jnman

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Shared 22 times Online, free personality tests have been a favorite pastime in the past two decades, beginning with the mushrooming of personality test websites and followed by the current popularity of Facebook Quizzes. Are you a navel-gazing narcissist? Optimist or pessimist? Argumentative or agreeable? Everyone likes to know how their friends perceive them and these tests often provide a glimpse that can help you introspect. Needless to say, all free personality tests should be taken with a grain of salt, which is to say, not very seriously, and certainly not as a replacement for professional psychologists. With that disclaimer out of the way, we can now present our hand-picked selection of the Top 8 Websites with cool tests that measure your Personality Traits! #1: Signal Patterns Big Five Test The Big Five is the leading industry personality model, shown to work across different cultures, geographies, and languages. It is the model most used in psychology and by human resource... - jnman

Shared 28 times Comments Enkrates said: "Unrelatedly", we canceled out NYT subscription this week. Robin Howlett said: << NYT vs TechCrunch on Zynga - jnman

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Shared 33 times If you are anything like me, at any point in time you have several browser windows open at once, many different tabs open in each browser, and several other programs lurking in your computer’s task bar which you are constantly switching between. I work on my computer a lot. I use many different programs depending on my task at hand. I am constantly monitoring different sources of information, from RSS feeds, several different email boxes, social networking streams, and different blog commenting threads. All of this means that I have a lot going, computer-wise. Sometimes all of this going on at once really puts a damper on my productivity because I have a severe lack of ability when it comes to multitasking. What I finally tried the other day has given me hope that this mass confusion and ill-fated attempts at getting things done can finally have an end! I finally broke down and tried to set up dual monitors in my home office setup. While I am still learning to use it... - jnman

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