It’s been a long while since I’ve posted, but hopefully, there are still one or two of you out there who understand the value of a good RSS feed. I’m back to write about a book I’m enjoying, with the following cryptic title: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 If this line of BASIC code […]

On Twitter, there are a lot of bots that will auto-follow you if you say certain magic words. This is easily accomplished using the Twitter API – I’ve done it for fun (try saying “Beetlejuice” on twitter), and I’m definitely not the first. I’m sure some of you have experienced being mysteriously followed on twitter […]

Today, I accidentally discovered the game of Facebook-whacking (remember Googlewhacks?), in which you find various search phrases for which your friends are the number one result, when you search on Facebook. You can accomplish this by stringing out-of-context words from the “Info” section of someone’s facebook profile. The more TV shows, bands, and movies they […]

If you’re a command-line-happy nerd who likes to use scp (secure copy) to copy files to one or more remote web-servers, you may come to love this script, which I wrote a few years ago, and which I use numerous times every day. It saves a lot of typing when I’m updating files on my […]

Many computers measure time as the seconds elapsed since 1970. This number is shown below, in universal time. In a few hours (6:31:30PM ET) it is expected to reach the magic number of 1234567890 ( Update: You missed it! – reset your computer clock to reexperience it! ) You are advised to celebrate exuberantly, which […]

At our company Christmas party, I helped set up two monitors to display an endless stream of amusing short videos, including cartoons, psychadelic eye candy, and various shorts of guys in Santa Claus suits doing extreme sports and other interesting things. The videos were chosen so they could be watched silently, while loud party music […]

My ears burn when I see boldface type. You’ve probably googled yourself before. Being a huge egomaniac with access to power tools, I’ve turned googling yourself into a colossal waste of bandwidth. Pathetic, really… but perhaps you’d like to wallow in your own navel as well? I use various services to monitor for mentions of […]

After having used a Windows machine for my principal desktop machine for the past 7 years, I am glad to say I’m back to using a Mac for my main machine, as I did for most of the 90s. One of my favorite tools on my new Mac is Quartz Composer, which makes it possible […]

Martin Wattenberg’s The Shape of Song provides a series of graphic analyses of MIDI files. The arches link musical phrases that are repetitions of each other, and provide a striking guide to the structure of the music. The above image is Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” The site contains images of varying styles of music ranging […]