I read Technology Review’s February profile of aging research advocate Aubrey de Grey, but missed what Paul Boutlin calls their “bitchy” editorial slam of de Grey, But what struck me is that he [de Grey] is a troll. For all de Greys vaulting ambitions, what Sherwin Nuland saw from the outside was pathetically circumscribed. In…
March, 2005
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At Boing! Boing!, Xeni Jardin links to this Greasemonkey script which is designed to remove all of Xeni’s posts from Boing! Boing!’s page. I tested it just for fun and it works quite well (scary well, in fact). Hmm…roll-your-own web-based killfile. Excellent.
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Back in November, I mentioned the Fiona Apple fans who were starting a Free Fiona campaign asking Sony to finally release an album that Apple finishes a few years. Sony had decided to simply not release the CD apparently because it doesn’t quite fit in any of the pop cliches of the moment. This week,…
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For the most part, I’ve never been impressed by the American Atheists (and I am an atheist), but AA’s David Silverman really made Sean Hannity look like the idiot he is on Hannity & Colmes. The topic was the Easter Bunny — apparently some shopping malls in Florida are doing away with the “Easter” part…
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The debate over the Google Toolbar’s Autolink feature — which adds links to ISBN number and other text — has now moved on to debating the merits of Greasemonkey and Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Greasemonkey script Google Butler. Google Butler is like Google Toolbar on steroids. Load it up and it strips the text ads from…
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Somebody really needs to write a book called “The Joy of Search.” Heck, maybe I’ll do it. Anyway, what I’m really excited about here is ThinkSecret’s claim that Apple is going to release OS X 10.4 aka Tiger sometime in April. If Tiger lives up to the hype, I’m seriously considering switching at least for…
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Steve Levy has an odd article about the supposed “A-List” bloggers who, untolerably, are all white males, Viewed one way, the issue seems a bit absurd. These self-generated personal Web sites are supposed to be the ultimate grass-roots phenomenon. The perks of alpha bloggers—voluminous traffic, links from other bigfeet, conference invitations, White House press passes—are,…
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I’m a big fan of free things, so when Kembrew McLeod posted a Creative Commons-licensed PDF of his new book, Freedom of Expression, I downloaded it, printed it out and read it in about three days. Here’s the bottom line about the book — its a bunch of good ideas and insightful commentary sandwiched by…
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The other day I mentioned ConvertLit, a program designed to rip DRM-protected Microsoft Reader format e-books into HTML. Then from HTML, you can usually convert the e-book to pretty much any other format. This week I got around to testing ConvertLit and was very pleased with the results. First, I went online and bought two…
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Glenn Fleishman whines about BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen’s presentation at SXSW, Unfortunately, Bram has very little joy in his life, as a colleague remarked to me after the session was over. He speaks in an affectless voice, offers terse and often somewhat offensive replies to many questions, and doesn’t seem to have much interest in…