Five new coverpops today, all wonderful vintage covers from the amazing collection
at MagazineArt.org. I think you’ll
love browsing thru these.

Vintage Pulp Fiction

Vintage Mass Market Magazines

Vintage Womens Magazines

Vintage Science & Technology

Vintage Grab Bag

I grew up in the 1970s, and was an avid reader of Mad magazine. I also liked to collect these bubble-gum stickers called “Wacky Packages,” — MAD-style parodies of commercial products of the era that were painted by talented uncredited artists (including Art Spiegelman, I later learned).

My last name is “Bumgardner,” and because of the particular Wacky Package shown on the right (no, my right), my friends took to calling me “Bum Chex” for a few months.

Oh yeah. Those were good times…

Anyway, here’s a Wacky Packages coverpop that I made, for those of you in search of your elusive Bum Chex. The images were provided by Greg Grant, who has a wonderful Wacky Packages archive.

Lots of other new additions as well. Be sure to try the new “Make this a puzzle” button on the right side of each coverpop.

Enjoy!

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 covers.

Here are some mystery, horror, and science fiction books.

More are on the way.

Enjoy!

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 in self-salesmanship, and a funny and observant social critique of how males (or at least how some other males) operate.

An intriguing idea for a photo-archive browser has been burning a hole in my brain for the past couple of weeks: A huge number of micro-thumbnails on an enormous virtual coffee table, arranged by color and time – mouse-over the micro-thumbnails to zoom ’em up to full-sized thumbnails. I’m calling it a “CoverPop”.

I had some free time on Saturday so I finally got around to implementing it, using some wonderful images from the Visual Index of Science Fiction Cover Art (VISCO), courtesy of Terry Gibbons.

This morning, I submitted it to the blog Boing Boing where Cory Doctorow described it as “mind-blowingly awesome.” If you love science fiction art, as I do, you’ll want to spend a little time playing with my new toy.

Here ya go! The SF Cover Explorer.

If you have another large photo archive that would benefit from the coverpop treatment, let me know.

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:

There are a lot of clusters of social networking apps on the net right now that do very similar things. For example, there are a lot of websites that are similar to Am I Hot or Not. At lunch, my friend Geoff likes to come up with interesting variations on Am I Hot or Not. “I have an idea!” Geoff enthuses, “how about a site called ‘Who’s the bigger asshole?’. We’ll put up two pictures of sportcars, and you get to vote on which one is driven by a bigger asshole!” Geoff has dozens of these ideas.

Now if Geoff had the patience, he can probably find a free collection of PHP scripts somewhere that allows him to set up a clone of Am I Hot or Not, but it may not be exactly what he needs, and it will take him some time to learn the particular idiosyncracies of that particular software. Plus he has to take out a domain name, find a host, install the software, yada yada.

I use Am I Hot or Not as an example, but there are tons of other sites which are also cloned heavily. Craigslist, Zagats guide and so on. Some of these sites are not so much cloned so much as they create subcommunities that people would like to copy or emulate, such as the groups on Flickr. The vast majority of successful “Web 2.0” apps tend to have a social component — they tend to rely on content which is created by a large community of visitors to the site.

So what’s Ning? Ning is an uber-authoring tool that enables people to build these kinds of sites. The Ning folks have built an authoring tool, and built numerous copies and variations of many of the more successful kinds of these sites. They’ve built an “Am I Hot or Not” clone, they’ve built a Craigslist clone, they’ve built a Bookshelf, etc. They’ve captured a large part of the feature set that drives a lot of these apps, including message boards, polls, tags, RSS and so on…

As a Ning developer, you can find a site on Ning which is pretty close to what you’re looking for (and this will get easier as Ning grows), and then you can *clone* it. After you clone it, you get access to the source code, and you can change just the parts you need to change to implement your own crazy idea. So, instead of “Choose the prettiest Cat”, you make “Choose the prettiest Llama”, or whatever. As soon as you clone the site, it immediately goes live, and you can create a URL such as llamas.ning.com.

If Ning is successful, it will end up being a hub for a huge collection of interesting (and not-so-interesting) social sites. The more people that create apps on Ning, the more apps there will be to clone. Successful Ning sites will foster imitation. Ning could very well end up being the “Hypercard of Social Sites”. This has both good and bad connotations. It’s good in that Ning would provide a common, easy-to-learn system for creating new social sites. It’s bad in that if you remember Hypercard, you may also remember that “All Hypercard Apps look like they are made in Hypercard” – Ning may suffer from the same problem in that most early Ning apps will have a “cookie-cutter” approach.

If the system is as flexible as they claim it to be, there should be room for more talented “Ning-artists” to produce more innovative ideas that aren’t just clones of other sites. It is very promising that Ning allows users to author in PHP (how they are managing to give all their users access to PHP authoring without huge security holes is an interesting question, and I imagine we’ll be revisiting this issue soon…). At any rate, the good ideas will get noticed and people will clone the good ideas. So hopefuly, Ning will be a kind of crucible in which good ideas for social sites will float to the top and multiply. Well,
maybe not so much “good” as “successful.” I’d like to think this “survival of the fittest” approach will help cancel the Hypercard-effect, although the 225-pixel sidebar that Ning reserves on each page doesn’t help. The Sidebar is necessary for Ning’s revenue model, no doubt. At any rate, most of the existing Ning templates are pretty boring looking. Let’s hope the visual uniformity changes.

Oh yeah… revenue. So how does Ning make money? In short: ads. It sounds like Ning intends to inject ads and such into Ning sites — probably via the Sidebar, although right now, the Sidebar is free of ads. Ning does not allow users to add their own Google Adsense ads into their templates. I don’t know if they prohibit affiliate links to other sites (such as Amazon affilliate links in “bookshelves”) but I would imagine they may eventually want to control those to. On the other hand, if Ning were to allow user/authors to get a little pocket change from their Ning sites, they will probably attract a far greater number of users. Nonetheless, there are probably lots of potential user/authors who are perfectly happy to build Ning sites for free, and those numbers will go up if Ning becomes a successful online community. Fame/notoriety is it’s own reward.

Ning allows user/authors to set up permanent URLs to their apps, which take the form XXXX.ning.com. I imagine there will be a bit of an initial landgrab as cybersquatters grab up some of the more obvious ones. It would be nice if Ning had a policy in place to deal with this, but I imagine, with a project this ambitious, their plates are pretty full — and this leads to what I think is the most flawed aspect of this idea — it’s just too damn big. If successful, Ning has the potential to be a host, provider, authoring tool, and community hub for a huge chunk of web content. The question is, can the company successfully do all these things and do them well? Managing successful communities is a tricky business, and the downside is that when the users get pissed off, you’ve already provided them with an excellent channel for mouthing off about it (for the inevitable whiners, this is an excellent time to reserve “ihate.ning.com” and “ilovewhi.ning.com”).

One thing the Ning FAQ doesn’t make mention of is sex, which is a, uh, huge driving force behind (and on top of) many social networking sites. Judging from some of the example Ning sites that are currently being promoted on the Ning Pivot (the inevitable page devoted to “hot” Ning sites), I imagine Ning hopes to profit from the huge amounts of energy people put into sex, without getting their hands dirty by remaining as “content agnostic” as they can. We’ll see how far that takes them. The evolutionary model they are using will certanly cause more sexually explicit sites to rise to the top. The ones that manage to be titillating without getting deleted will certainly be successful.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the authoring capabilities in greater detail, I’ll post again if/when my developer status gets approved and I’ve had a chance to get my hands dirty in the sandbox, er, playground.

UPDATE: I was granted developer status about an hour ago. It took me about 30 minutes to create three simple apps – pretty impressive! It took me another 10 minutes to figure out how to modify my new bookshelf to use my own affiliate tags instead of the default “24hourlaundry” (Answer: Edit class.AmazonHelper.php).

I am impressed by the degree of control the PHP source provides, and also intrigued by the potential chaos this may create.

Oh, and Geoff – here’s one of your great ideas… Oh, I’m so ashamed…

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 visually-oriented audiophile. The amp is certainly quiet, descent into silence at times so abrupt as to be startling.

Sounds good to me! But did you ever notice that these audiophile guys who talk about the frequency response of their speakers for hours on end never talk about the actual music they’re playing on them? That’s because they’re actually listening to Celine Dion.

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 Bingo, Simple Coloring, Super Coloring and Tabling.

I have not yet found a single website that explains all of these techniques in one location, so I thought I’d provide some links to the various websites where I discovered these techniques.

The Sudoku Strategy page explains most (but not all) of the simpler “pattern-matching” techniques. Techniques explained here include:

• Naked Single
• Hidden Single
• Block and Column/Row
• Block / Block
• Naked Subset
• Hidden Subset
• XWing & Swordfish
• XY-Wing
• XYZ-Wing
• Remote Pairs
• Coloring / Colouring
• Forcing Chains
• Trial & Error

The first 6 methods listed above (Naked Single thru Hidden Subset) are sufficient to solve all the “Easy” through “Challenging” puzzles I provide on this site, and most easy/medium newspaper puzzles. The remaining strategies don’t come into play until the Tough puzzles.

Although the XWing (and Swordfish) patterns are easy to spot, statistical analysis shows they do not occur very often. I’ve found the XY-Wing and XYZ Wing patterns occur much more frequently, and are good weapons to have in your solving arsenal. These strategies are especially good for solving the Tough and Super-Tough puzzles I offer here.

I find the various coloring/colouring and tabling methods to be too work-intensive for human use – they really make more sense for computer solvers, but sometimes they are the only methods you can use to solve a really hard puzzle.

Finally, Michael’s Mepham’s Book of Sudoku contains an excellent 10-page introduction with various solving strategies, in addition to numerous puzzles.

UPDATE: Eduyng Castaño wrote to me about a technique he has discovered called Golden Chains (pdf). The technique is a generalization of XY-Wing, and solves many of the same puzzles that can be solved by other advanced techniques such as conjugate pairs, and coloring, but it does not feel as much like ‘guessing’ as those other techniques. I have successfully used it to solve a number of my ‘super tough’ puzzles. It is particularly effective when a puzzle has been reduced to a lot of squares containing only 2 possibilities.

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 ’em right here…