August, 2008

  1. Using Photoshop to Reimagine One’s Past

    The New York Times ran an article a couple weeks ago about people who use Photoshop — or more likely pay others to manipulate their photos in Photoshop — to remove unpleasant aspects of the photos, such as ex-husbands, Removing her ex-husband from more than a decade of memories may take a lifetime for Laura…

  2. WordPress Mini-Meta Widget Plugin

    The Mini-Meta Widget plugin is, not surprisingly, a replacement for the Meta Widget that ships with WordPress. Among others things, the Mini-Meta Widget makes it possible to easily put the logon form in the sidebar itself (and then redirect to whatever page the user was on after logging on).

  3. Just How Large Is the Gold Farming Industry?

    The BBC reports on a study of gold farming that concludes the practice may be a $500 million/year industry that contributes a significant amount of activity to developing countries’ economies. Prof Heeks said very accurate figures for the size of the gold farming sector were hard to come by but his work suggested that in…

  4. But Science and Religion Do Inherently Clash

    An article from the New York Times — Teacher shows that science, religion don’t have to clash — seem to have been linked to widely across the Internet as an example of a teacher doing a good job of demonstrating natural selection to his students in a country where sympathy for creationism seems to be…

  5. Is Aging Just an Accident of Evolution?

    DailyGalaxy.com highlights the work of Stanford researcher Stuart Kim who, along with colleagues, has been studying aging in the C. elegans worm. Essentially, Kim claims that C. elegans does not age because it is exposed to environmental stressors that gradually wear its ability to maintain itself down, but rather that as it ages, So it…

  6. WordPress Plugin to Regenerate Thumbnails

    The other day I realized I had accidentally set thumbnail generation in WordPress to be exactly 150×150 even when that wasn’t a proportional resizing of the larger graphic. Ugh. I reset the pref to the proportional setting, but what to do about the existing thumbnails? Well, this is WordPress so you have to use a…

  7. Would You Really Trust Everything to Pixily?

    Pixily is a new web-based service that promises to help customers go paperless. The idea is you store all of your documents with them, and they provide a rather elegant looking interface for tagging and searching said documents. They even have a service where they provide you pre-paid envelopes that you mail in. Pixily, in…