Today the Australian Broadcasting Corporation released an ‘infographic’ (imgur mirror here) outlining the Gillard government’s projected budget surplus for 2012-2013. I’ll get to why I’m using quotes around the word, but first let’s talk about what an infographic is supposed to actually do. Normally an infographic is perfect for presenting this kind of data, because …
Today, (the last day of SXSW Interactive), Ben Silbermann (executive at Pinterest) is doing a Q&A on the company he co-founded. I hope someone asks him about the categories. All half-joking aside, the categories really do suck. And so do a lot of other things about Pinterest, the startup world’s latest attempt at commercialising hipster …
I almost can’t believe I’m writing this. It sounds like a pretty crazy thing to wish for, right? No matter who you are, you wish batteries were better. Cheaper, smaller, lighter, higher-capacity, faster to recharge. Cheaper batteries would usher in more renewable energy almost everywhere, which everyone (at least in principle) says they like. They …
I haven’t bought a new camera since summer 2005. At the time I was searching for a nice balance of price, size, flexibility and image quality, so I ended up purchasing a Sony H1, a camera that still boasts relatively decent specifications considering its age: 5.1 MP, 36-432 mm EFL, f/2.8-3.7, optical image stabilisation, a …
A couple years ago I began very carefully tracking web browser usage on indianapublicmedia.org, the main website for Indiana Public Media. Aside from the fact that it’s one of the few large sites whose Google Analytics I have access to, the site’s also an interesting case study of browser popularity because of its demographics. There …
A couple weeks back I put together a list of News Corp-owned domains and posted it on Reddit in case anyone cared to use it to block those sites, perhaps in their hosts file. It got a few dozen upvotes and I figured it wouldn’t amount to anything. Fast forward a few days and others …
I just re-enabled SpamAssassin on my server after a couple issues required turning it off for about a day, and it immediately flagged its very own ‘now enabled’ email notification as spam: Received: from localhost by box584.bluehost.com with SpamAssassin (version 3.3.0); Thu, 24 Mar 2011 09:28:54 -0600 From: “Spam Assassin” <spamassassin@localhost> Subject: ***SPAM*** X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.3.0 …
Today I discovered that COVE can generate oEmbed JSON for at least some of their videos. To use this in WordPress, all you have to do is us wp_oembed_add_provider(), like so: <?php wp_oembed_add_provider( ‘http://video.pbs.org/video/*’, ‘http://video.pbs.org/oembed/’ ); ?> The easiest way to do this is just stick it in your theme’s functions.php file. Let’s try it …