found on reddit

“What Crayolas would you choose to color a vagina-mouthed tumor-worm crawling through a carwash?” (via Coloring Books No Kid Could Ever Want, Including David Lynch’s “Dune” – San Francisco Arts – The Exhibitionist)

See Also: Dune Vindicated

Just noticed that this picture of my refrigerator was used at the Freakonomics blog.

See Also:

Creative Commons Fun

My DIY flash diffuser gets a shout out on lifehacker

I personally don’t get into filing things away hierarchically, and I don’t really find any value in folders for the most part. I use search for everything, and it has not failed me. Much easier than trying to figure out what folder I should put something in.

There is one place that I agree that folders in a general purpose average-user-facing filesystem are important:

Having a file system as its own cross-environmental entity let you mix a bunch of related materials for the same subject, but that are completely different type of media. You can’t have one app for all of that; “app-thought” forbids it and even if it didn’t, it’s horribly impractical. There’s no good solution for this right now except Dropbox integration. iCloud doesn’t change anything in this regard; it just eliminates having to copy things around in some apps.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t solved by some method that hasn’t been dreamed up yet, or in the long run this isn’t just isn’t that important.

See also:

filesystems in gnome and open source

Files are so 1990

Files are so 1990, again

VMware acquires SlideRocket to complement Zimbra?

There are three CMS’s that I am spending a lot of time thinking about lately.

WordPress, Self-Hosted Open source software

The big feature is the community. There are so many plugins and themes. Tons of support resources to find on your favorite search engine. If you want to get started developing, tons of resources for that as well. WordPress has a really mature feature set and user interface. As I was writing this, look what popped up in my twitter stream:

Chances are that if you want to do it, then there is a plugin for it.

The downside to running wordpress is that you will find yourself delving into some set up and maintenance tasks. Running stuff on your own means you need to worry about patching the system, backing up, security, etc. But if you want to run your own site and have total control and build whatever you imagine, then wordpress is a good place to start.

Squarespace

Instead of giving money to web hosting company where you run and manage your own CMS software, you can give your money to a CMS hosting company like squarespace and get a completely managed CMS environment. No worrying about security, software patches, setting up databases, configuration files, etc. No worry about ownership or strange monetization schemes like you would with a provider that is offering their product for free. And even though you are using this specific hosted CMS there are tons more opportunities to customize than I have been able to dive into. I am guessing someone willing to invest in really learning this system could do almost anything with it. I really think this is the future of CMS hosting – getting web site maintainers and designers higher up the stack. Don’t worry about sys admin or software developer tasks. Let that be abstracted out to a provider. Just as amazon and other cloud computing providers have removed physical infrastructure from the equation for web service providers, Squarespace is removing CMS installation and maintenance from the equation for web masters.

tumblr

I love tumblr because it provides a social network and completely friction free posting. I love that instead of having comments, tumblr instead pushes users to post a response on their own blogs. Being part of a network has advantages. A big part of tumblr culture is following other blogs and reblogging content from other blogs. Rather than just static site sitting there, don’t you want to create engagement through adding your content to a network where it will be seen and have an opportunity to travel and be talking about in a community – with no friction. If you are not trying to engage an audience, what is the point? I think I would want this kind of engagement for any website I might want to create.

TechCrunch reported that tumblr has seen dramatic growth over the last year:

The larger shift here that comScore is talking about is this: users are gravitating towards new ways of sharing the things they care about with anyone who shares the same interests as them. They’re still sharing private things like showing baby photos or party pics to real friends on Facebook. They’re just also falling in love with the new simple, public tools that these other companies offer.

Honorable mention: Jekyll / Octopress

There is something about composing your posts with a text editor, and generating a static site from the collection of files that is just wonderful to me. I know it has no business for the mass of people, and the web had become so rich due to ease of posting. But for someone like me, I am so intrigued by cutting out all the complications of databases, scaling, using web-based editors. At the same time, I also like some dynamic components on my site – like comments.

The kids call the dog “the old man.” “Why is the old man barking?” “Where is the old man going?”

“A program that I mostly use for note taking is called called iAnnotate. It requires the lecture slides to be in a .pdf format, and then you download them into DropBox and upload them straight into the program on the iPad,” Rutledge said. “You go on it, click on the file name, just take your notes on there. It automatically saves it, no hassle, and very easy to do.”

The student calls it easy, but this sounds exactly like something Apple would want to tackle and make perfectly seamless.

Student’s classes were requiring so much printing, it costs a single student 15 dollars a week. That would 450 dollars after two semesters. The iPad doesn’t seem too expensive compared to that.

If the iPad is going to make new inroads in education, let alone transform it, I think it will be by way of specialized apps that take advantage of the many great capabilities of the iPad, not through an augmented-textbook model that reanimates the corpse of Microsoft Encarta.

via Apple for the Teacher – Kieran Healy.

Is an electronic book a contradiction in terms? Is it trying to shoehorn the media of the old, the book, into the electronic age? Seems like that to me. Apple’s iTunes U is more interesting to me – it constructs a learning experience by aggreagting specific resources and tool from across the web. Nothing new there, but it is a more modern approach. Of course the downside is that not all the resources one might want to use are in electronic format. That is where iBooks and iBooks Author come in. It is trying to close the gap. It is also possible to think that if iPads, iBooks, and iBooks author gain a certain level of adoption, a new form will emerge. Think of how the rise of the iPod led to podcasting.