The VISCO SF Cover Explorer was quite a hit this week, making a number of large blogs, including BoingBoing, UserFriendly and MetaFilter. Now, I’ve gone and made a few more of these things, which I’m calling CoverPops. Here are the 1,001 best selling graphic novels from Amazon. Here’s Doug Gilford’s entire collection of MAD magazine […]

I must admit that as a married man, I really shouldn’t be reading a book about pickup artists. But there is a certain vicarious thrill to be had from Neil Strauss’s The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists; really far more than just a guide to picking up women. It’s a master class […]

I had a new idea for exploring large photo archives a few weeks ago: put all of them on an enormous virtual coffee table,
arranged by color and time. I had some free time on Saturday so I finally got around to implementing it, using the wonderful images from the Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover Art (VISCO), courtesy of Terry Gibbons.

I am on Los Angeles TV today, filling the role of “obsessed sudoku fan” for a KNBC-4 news segment on the puzzle craze. If you’re visiting this site because of the show, welcome! The free puzzles are over here. Enjoy!

Mark Andreessen’s new project, Ning, went live today, just in time for the Web 2.0 conference, where it is likely to be a hot topic. If you haven’t yet seen any opinions about Ning, it’s because Ning is a little hard to grok at first glance. I made an attempt to grok it today, and here’s what I came up with:

In an amusing review, StereoTimes, compared the the Sonic Impact T-Amp (shown here), a new $30 dollar digital amplifier, just slightly unfavorably to audiophile equipment costing $5000. The T-Amp’s perceived clarity allows sound-staging and stereophony to reach hallucinatory stereoscopy: near-field listening with the Celestion F15’s revealed a stereo illusion that would satisfy even the most […]

Sudoku is a game of pure logical deduction, just like Kakuro and other Japanese number puzzles. Unlike games of luck such as card and bingo games, guessing is never required. I’ve now learned a number of methods for solving tough Sudoku puzzles by hand, including X-Wing, Swordfish, Jellyfish, Squirmbag, Turbot-fish, XY-Wing, XYZ-Wing, Conjugate Pairs, Bowman […]

Flickrini Strzelecki writes: My fridge is now covered in flickr posters. They are cool mosaic type collages of photos posted to flicker groups. I sometimes find myself standing there, fridge open drinking from the milk bottle drawn to looking at the miriad of little pictures in these collages. Want some posters for your fridge? Get […]

There’s a drug rep riding up in the elevator with me to Doctor Schott’s office, a pretty young woman in her 20s. I know she’s a drug rep because in addition to a shopping bag with a big box that says Protonix on it, she is carrying a tray with four different Starbucks beverages on […]

Check it out! Paul Bausch, the author of Amazon Hacks and Yahoo Hacks, had one of my posters laminated! I think this means he likes me! Well, that, and he agreed to co-write the forthcoming Flickr Hacks from O’Reilly, with me. I’ll be working on some of the more technical hacks, and I intend to […]