Really, the only reason you shouldn’t be using Firefox is because Firefox 2 was released today. Get it while it’s hot.
Category: tech
The friendly folks over at Worldchanging have a shiny new book coming out in a couple weeks: Worldchanging: A User’s Guide.
Great Zeldman post and excellent comments about Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0.
A New York Times feature on the tortured life of Friendster.
So the sun rose this morning… and Google launched another beta… but Google Docs and Spreadsheets has to be one of the worst product names I’ve ever heard. It’s a good service, so why such a lame title?
We all know hypertext, but hypervideo, hopefully, is not too far away. [via jb]
Steven Johnson writes about pop culture and the Long Zoom, a way of seeing and understanding over immense ranges. “It is, by any measure, a difficult way of thinking, in part because our brains did not evolve tools to perceive or intuitively understand the scales of microbes or galaxies… But a decade or two from now, when we look back at this period, it is more likely that the work that will fix the long zoom in the popular imagination will be neither a movie nor a book nor anything associated with the cultural products that dominated the 20th century. It will be a computer game.”
Play a bunch of NES games online. No need to download emulators and ROMs, keeps your hard drive evidence-free. Sweet. [via lh]
Ditto this: “Feel free to use real paragraphs and explain stuff. I have time.” I absolutely agree that the listing thing is getting a little old.
There are many who enjoy worshipping the presentation skillz of Apple head Steve Jobs. Daring Fireball shares a video of one odd little tick/ trademark/ crutch/ catchphrase: “Boom.”
Gina Trapani compiled a year’s worth of the bi-weekly Geek to Live posts over at Lifehacker.
Hmm. In its digital cameras, HP now offers a “slimming” feature to make people in photos appear thinner than in reality. What do you think? Harmless gadgetry? Symptom of cultural decay? Somewhere in between? [via df]
“Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text.” This looks really cool. I like that it consumes the screen to block out all the other software I use for procrastination.
Recently I switched over to using Notepad for just about all of my word-processing. With all those formatting buttons and menus in Word (even after I customize and pare down the options), the distractions were just too tempting. Too many things to fiddle with. Notepad lets me focus on generating ideas–essentially a faster version of pen and paper. I save all the tweaking, proofing, and formatting for later.
The Music Animation Machine MIDI Player creates cool, simple, colorful visualizations for MIDI audio files. For examples of the output, see Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and or check out Debussy’s Clair de Lune.
Looks like some folks need to brush up on the whole “managing sensitive information” thing: a Google search for [confidential “do not distribute”].
–It seems like people like to click on eyes and brightly-colored things. I’m not sure what this means for society in the long run.
—USA Today reports some religious demographics in the United States, highlighting those who don’t belong to any church. Apparently, Washington is where all the heathens go, with some 25% in the “no religion” category. Close on its heels were most of the other western states in the 20% range. I was surprised that 97% of the respondents in good ol’ North Dakota claimed a religion of some form. The Glenmary Research Center also does studies of this type, providing some maps for religious populations, so you can find all the Amish hot spots. [via digg]
—I suppose this is reason enough to go to Hong Kong. What an incredible skyline.
–Emporis went through the trouble to rank skylines drawing on a little formula and a database. Atlanta makes #32. Hong Kong wins easily.
Mark Larson 
