Via #!/usr/bin/girl:

Time: Character Actors: Time has a fantastic photo essay of 8 actors doing what they do best: showing the range of human emotion. I only wish there were more pictures.

She’s right. These are some really great photographs. Two things I noticed: Kelsy Grammar does creepy really well and Christopher Lloyd kinda looks like my Uncle Taylor.

• Mac Geekery - Hacking the Migration Assistant
  Handy tip on getting more use out of the built in Migration Assitant
  (tags: mac osx hack)
• Woodflame Delecto Grill: Gas and Charcoal-Free - Gizmodo
  Cool little grill that burns recycled wood instead of gas or charcoal.
  (tags: cooking cool bbq grill)

Via Gizmodo:

SmackBook Pro:

I gotta admit, the MacBook Lightsabre was pretty cool, but the SmackBook is even cooler, and actually useful. This little mod utilizes the motion sensor to swap between desktops on the MacBook. The sensor was originally included in the MacBook to protect the hard drive against hard drops and falls, but the SmackBook is definitely more useful. Just don’t smack the MacBook too hard. Check out all of the instructions for your own smacking over at the medallia blog. Travis HudsonSmackBook Pro [medallia]

Holy crap. I thought the alarm I mentioned was a very cool PowerBook/MacBook hack. This SmackBook hack trumps it by being not only fucking awesome, but actually useful too.

EDIT/UPDATE: I removed the embedded Youtube video because 1) it’s ugly and 2) you can just click here for it.

• Write101
  02 Know How to Write Well
  (tags: writing reference howto)

It’s pretty rare that I click through on ads on the web. I try to make an effort to do so occasionaly on websites and services that I use frequently, to support them. I never click through on annoying flash ads, however.

Recently, some designer stumbled across the ultimate ad design that would prevent me from clicking. Pictured here to the right, they expected me to stop Mike Tyson from beating up George Bush.

Not bloody likely.

I did, however watch the animation to see if Tyson even KO’d Bush. Sadly, he did not.

While driving, working, playing, sleeping, showering, whatever, I day dream about odd projects. One of plethora of these vapor-projects was a Yelp-like site that focused on alcohol. It started with beer, really. I thought it would be cool if you had a place to rate and log beers you had tried and share that data with friends. Then I realized that it needed to be about all alcohol. Scotch, Tequila, etc all need their love too. Then I thought about wine and the little thought bubble above my head turned into a rain cloud.

I love wine, but it magnifies the complexity of the task by a factor of ten. And so, yet another project that never really had a chance to seeing the light of day was even further doomed.

Fortunately, and not unsurprisingly, I wasn’t the only one with the idea. Cork’d is a site feature exactly what I mentioned. Well, except it’s only about wine. And it has more features. And it exists.

Via Uncrate:

Cork’d - It’s super tough to find good wine. Between the wine snob at store and the incomprehensible reviews in the wine magazines, there’s not much out there to help us normal wine drinkers. Luckily, Cork’d is…

So, while I don’t agree with the Uncrate guys about the difficulty in finding good wine (the difficulty comes in avoiding bad wine, which is a different task) I’m pretty stoked about their find.

Cork’d features a place for your tasting notes, reviews, shopping list, wine collection and friends. It’s really a great idea for wine enthusiasts. I’m glad someone with the time and, well, gumption, to follow through had the idea.

In-game advertising — a marketing frontier long on the periphery of most brands’ radar — is poised to take its place center stage.read more‘|’digg story

Coincidentally, my buddy Eric has a post on this very topic today, which was prompted by this post on Chris Carella’s blog about some poll data on the topic.

On the surface, Eric’s take on it is similar to my own, but I have some misgivings about the concept and considering the nature of advertising, I figure the worst possible scenario is the closest to a true prediction. So, I am going to break it down a bit and show what I see as the areas for concern are.

Read more »

Via NBC11.com - Local News:

Bay Area Minutemen Chapter May Form: SAN FRANCISCO — A group that wants to crack down on undocumented workers hopes to launch a Bay Area chapter of the Minutemen on Monday night in Fremont.

The Minutemen is a national organization of citizens who volunteer to patrol the border.

Local organizers said California cannot handle its current influx of immigrants.

[SNIP]

What exactly do they plan to “patrol” up here in the Bay Area? The Target parking lot where the day workers gather, hoping to get a job? Maybe they’re going to drive around Saratoga and demand “papers” from all the gardeners?

<sigh> A civilian organized patrol vigilante group. Yeah. Not much can go wrong here, eh? >.<

• Mac OS X: What Are All Those Processes?
  (tags: mac osx reference)
• Reflection.js
  Cool image effect via javascript. Available as a WP plugin. Very web2.0. Oo! ;)
  (tags: javascript webdesign design images)

A few weeks ago, my site was hit with comment spam bombs. Essentially, there was a crater where my blog used to be and a mushroom cloud of spam above. Of course, it didn’t look like this to any readers, since comments from unapproved users get shoved into a queue and await my blessing. Behind the scenes, however, I unleashed a stream of profanity that would’ve made George Carlin blush.

So, I went looking for anti-spam tools. Akismet is the one WordPress seems to recommend, so I started there. And, so far so good. Akismet captures about 98% of the spam. (It’s true, I did the math. It’s exactly 98.1% over the last week.) It claims to have caught 932 comments since I installed it, however I know that it’s stats are off because I’ve been loosely keeping track and therefore I know that it’s lowballing it. It’s actually caught closer to 1600 comments. What’s even more impressive is the fact that I’ve seen zero false positives.

So, let’s see… what was the point of all this? Oh yes, fuck you spammers. Fuck you in the neck.