Bill Gates, in his transition from Mr. Big at Microsoft, to Mr. Big at the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, has been going around to various college campuses and given a talk “Bill Unplugged.” You can watch the video here if you are so inclined.
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Google Search Terms
Via Digg, an article on hilarious Google searches. Hmm, reminds me of one I discovered a while back. (Below may or may not be NSFW, depending on your level of puritanism. And it can certainly lead to clicking which is definitely NSFW.)
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Leveraging Existing Infrastructure
We’ve seen these demos before, but Johnny Lee’s TED talk still wows:
Not only does it seem that interfaces are undergoing some radical redesigning right now, but also methods to take existing “cheap” products and leverage them into something which would normally cost a lot more, seems to be catching on.
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ArXiv on Your iPhone
For those interested in accessing the arXiv on your iPhone, here is a web based iPhone page:http://arxiv.mobi. Sweet! This has been on my list of things to do, and now I can cross it off without having to do it myself!
Nunchuck Demo
I’m not sure what this is good for, and yet I found it amazingly responsive:
Quake3 on iTouch
One of the reasons I signed up to develop for the iPhone:
Accelerometers are so cool. And I don’t just say that because I’m a physicist.
An ArXiv PDF Mime Fix for Firefox 3.0
Previously, I had found a way to get a Mac running Firefox to not choke on recognizing pdfs correctly when downloaded from the arxiv.org. Commenter Dan has tracked down the reason for this and suggested another way to fix this which should be compatible with the latest versions of Firefox:
Update:
It seems that the source of this bug is the following problem:
Arxiv.org does not like Macs! :-O
Fortunately, there is an easy work around: Using the UserAgent Switcher extension, you fool arxiv.org into thinking your web-browser is running Windows.
Then the PDF download problem goes away! No MIME type hackery is needed.
The technical reasons for this are explained in this thread:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3322008
Thanks, Dan!
ArXiv PDF Mime Fix for Firefox 2.0
As part of my switching to a Mac, I’ve started using Firefox (one reason being that I’m investigating using Zotero for grabbing bibliographic citations from the web.) However, an annoying problem I encounter was when using Firefox and downloading pdfs from the arXiv. The problem was that Firefox failed to recognize the files as pdf files and thinks the pdf for arxiv XXXX.YYYY was a file of type YYYY. Note that this isn’t just a problem of downloading any old pdf, but specifically pdfs from the arxiv. I’ve now figure out how to fix this.
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Notes on Moving to a Mac
A list of observations I found in moving from a PC to a MAC.
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The World Market is Five Quantum Computers
From the bits blog at the New York Times, a list of technology famous quotes which may or may not have been said. Two of which I believe I’ve used before (doh!):
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” This quotation is attributed to Bill Gates, but Mr. Shapiro suspects that it is apocryphal, and is seeking the person who either said it or first attributed it to Mr. Gates.
…
“I think there is a world market for about five computers.” This is a attributed to Thomas J. Watson, Jr., but Mr. Shapiro suspects it of being apocryphal and is seeking the person who either said it or first attributed it to Mr. Watson.