SnapShots
Category Archives: web stuff
“The Gettysburg PowerPoint”
One guy wondered what would have happened to the Gettysburg Address under the influence of PowerPoint. The result made my day. Enjoy.
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Amazon Marketplace Items
I’ve added a link to my Amazon Marketplace items to the “Links” section of the site. I have several dozen books for sale on various subjects. I’m trying to get rid of some books I don’t need any more as … Continue reading
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Amazon Grocery
I was surprised to see today that Amazon.com has started selling groceries via the internet. From what I remember, that was a big deal during the dot com boom back in the late 90s, but every company that tried it … Continue reading
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Dial with your iPod
Here’s a cool idea: use an iPod (actually a number of different digital audio players would work) to generate a touch-tone signal and place a call over a standard analog line. This scheme can even store address book entries using … Continue reading
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Artificial AI: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
This website is quite bizarre on first glance. It doesn’t do much better on second or third glance either, but it’s intended as a demonstration of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online service, which offers an interesting model for humans to accomplish … Continue reading
Posted in computing, science, web stuff
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25 Worst Tech Products
PCWorld.com judges The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. It includes such awful products as RealPlayer, Windows Millennium, and Microsoft Bob, all well deserving of their places on the list. Pride of place, however, goes to AOL as the … Continue reading
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“Random” book
How can a book of 600 pages literally contain absolutely no information? Here’s how. (In a technical sense, information is a means of quantizing a population’s deviation from randomness, so by definition a string of purely random data is completely … Continue reading
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Woot.com
Woot.com has an interesting marketing idea: offer only a single product each day, generally purchased wholesale and sold at a steep discount. Recent product offerings range from mundane to ultra-cool with everything in between. The vast majority of their stuff … Continue reading
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Unexpected fame, cont.
The improbable saga of Guy Goma continues: he’s got his own fan website now. I have a feeling he’ll more than make up for the embarrassment once the endorsement offers start rolling in. How much do you suppose he got … Continue reading
Posted in media, web stuff
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Tour the world?
Here’s a site that demonstrates just how revolutionary Google Earth has been over the past < 1 year. It's inspired a number of imitators (from Yahoo and Microsoft for instance), but great features and Google’s inclusion of an open geographic … Continue reading
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