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Encrypt Evernote
using a encrypted sparse bundle and some moving of the core database. Clumsy, but it works.
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Map of antipodes of the world.
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First Waffle House, Atlanta GA 1955
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You read books, eh?
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Type like a hacker.
So cheesy. So much fun.
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$5 Chess Game, Best-of-Three, Zuccotti Park.
A growing number of people in America know what it feels like to be in zugzwang. For some of them their whole life has been one long zugzwang, they can’t remember ever having any good options. Without catching a lucky break, a lifetime of hard work for most people results in just that—a lifetime of hard work. For others they maybe once thought they had it all—a good job with a pension, a nice house with a payment they could afford, set for life. Then in an instant it all disappeared. House is underwater, ARM is popping on the loan, pension fund bought a bunch of mortgage-backed securities. All that’s left is utter, hopeless zugzwang.
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Protect the Internet
Congress is considering two well-intentioned but deeply flawed bills, the PROTECT-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
As written, they would betray more than a decade of US policy and advocacy of Internet freedom by establishing a censorship system using the same domain blacklisting technologies pioneered by China and Iran.
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A brief survey of URLs
When designing websites, what the URL looks like (and how memorable it is) is just as relevant as what the content of the page actually is. Here are some screenshots of URLs and titles of webpages as examples, ranging from close to perfection to downright awful.
The way I generated these screenshots was as close to how a naive web user would: I googled the name of the company or product, and kept clicking on the first link I saw that took me to the product till I got to the product page. I tried to choose flagship products, like the MacBook Pro from Apple or the D3X from Nikon.
Apple
Score: 10/10
The good:
Short, no junk.
The not so good:
Since the navigation is Apple>Mac>MacBook Pro, it could be apple.com/mac/macbookpro (or apple.com/mac/bookpro)
Alienware
Score: 5/10
See the junk beginning to creep up? What’s “p”? What’s “~ck=mn?” Why am I seeing this? Why can’t it be “www.dell.com/alienware/aurora”?
Dell
Aaargh! What is going on here? Can the fine folks at Dell not come up with a better name than “New Inspiron 15 (N5040)”?
Score: 5/10
HP
Oh no. Why “www8”? “Product detail”? Really? Why not “hp.com/probook/6560b”?
Fail. 4/10.
Adobe
Score: 8/10
“products” is pointless. (-1)
the “.html” at the end serves no purpose, and just shows poor design. (-1)
Amazon
Before you say Amazon is a retailer with a zillion products, let me remind you that I’m looking at their own product: the Kindle. Same rules apply.
Score: 6/10
The bad: URL so long you can’t see the end of it. Junk visible: “dp”. But at least the URL is descriptive.
Barnes and Noble
Score: 7/10
Oh, so close. Of only it had been “barnesandnoble.com/nook/”. I’m sure that number is meaningful in it’s own way.
Nikon
The good: all of it is visible.
The bad: it’s got “lineup” in the URL. The man who wrote that worked in a world of Excel sheets and business-speak, and never thought about what a customer would think about.
7/10.
Olympus
Sigh. Just “E-5” in the title? Oh, we all know what a cpg section is. And sure, every time I think of the E-5, I remember it’s the 1525th product. Try this: “olympus.com/e5”
3/10.
Canon
Score: 4/10
Junk, more junk. Redundancy: “cusa” is Canon USA, something that’s already there. Why “slr_cameras” instead of “SLR”? Also, look at the title: A flagship DSLR comes under Consumer and Home Office? Really?
Daring Fireball
Yes, I know DF isn’t a company that sells you products. Nonetheless, it’s interesting how a link blog handles so many URLs. Answer: it handles them well.
Score: 10/10
GMail
This is the URL we all see when we log into GMail:
It’s nice, clean, and short. It could be nicer, cleaner, and shorter, but come on, it’s OK.
Score: 9/10
And here’s the URL for a specific email message:
Longer, with a weird number, but hey, that’s the point.
Score: 9/10 (points off for /u/0..”)
Finally, this very page.
Hmm, not as good as it could be. The “post/weird number” is annoying but generated by Tumblr.
Score: 6/10
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"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind."
