Geeky Friday: Hack this!

Possibly an urban legend, but somehow I doubt it, the story of a "Dangerous Hacker!."

I wish somebody would track down this idiot by his IP address and ISP and find out what happened after he disappeared offline.

Geeky Friday (part 2): Aardvark Firefox Extension

Just when I had recently discovered how easy it is to edit the CSS of a web page using the Web Developer Extension for Firefox, I discover the Aardvark which does much of the same stuff -- but more easily when all you want to do is to print just the main content of a page (without the navigation bar, ads, etc.).

Click through to the Aardvark page and click on the "run the demo" link at the top to see how it works without even installing. (Out of curiosity, I loaded the page in IE and the demo didn't work. I didn't really expect otherwise, but I just had to try.)

T-Mobile service maps

T-Mobile now has a "Personal Coverage Check" site which shows signals strength on street-level maps. I've already determined that I'll have decent coverage when I go to my cousin's wedding this summer in Nebraska.

How to get that perfect shave

Via LifeHacker, "How to get that perfect shave", a long how-to article which tells you how you can get a perfect shave. The most amazing thing for me is that the author felt the need to keep your face wet "with plenty of hot water before, and during, the entire shave." Is that why I know people who have trouble shaving? I thought this was obvious.

The Same (New) Story

Did you hear that Adobe is acquiring Macromedia? As I wrote about back in January, I can keep up-to-date on more news sources because I use an RSS aggregator. The downside to following more news sources is that they sometimes repeat the same story. So far, I've seen this headline from MetaFilter, OSNews, Slashdot, NY Times, Ika's Weblog, Scripting News, and The Server Side.

(Want something more substantive in this post? I didn't link to any of the above sites because I now have an automatically updating list of my bloglines subscriptions viewable at http://www.wemmick.net/blogroll.php)

More on the Unitarian Jihad

So I posted my Unitarian Jihad name, but it wasn't until Bork reposted that link that I actually bothered to read the article. I can't say that I don't support their cause, especially when they promise that "Pockets of reasonableness and harmony will appear as if from nowhere!" and that "We will require all lobbyists, spokesmen and campaign managers to dress like trout in public."

Mobile Wikipedia

Finally found a mobile-friendly interface to Wikipedia. Palm/Treo users can start here (this is just a light HTML version so you can load it in other browsers as well), or go to their list of other starting pages for other WAP or HTML devices.

It's not clear to me if this is a dynamic interface to the live site or if they've downloaded a snapshot of the wikipedia database.

[Later... after using this site to look at a page I edited today, I am fairly certain now that this uses a weekly snapshot, but it appears to be the latest as I found articles updated as of April 6, 2005]

Unitarian Jihad

Two words that you just don't see together very often ever: "Unitarian Jihad".

My Unitarian Jihad Name is: Brother Howitzer of Looking at All Sides of the Question.

Get yours.

Improv Everywhere

Last weekend I heard most of an episode on the NPR radio show "This American Life". Act 2 was about a group called Improv Everywhere that "causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places." This includes stunts such as repeating the same 5 minute scene twelve times in a Starbucks (prompting some patrons to ask if they're in a time warp), or entering subway trains without pants and pretending it's normal. In addition to these, the radio story dives deeper into a couple which are arguably more disturbing to the beneficiary/victim of the "mission".

DCist on Spring in DC

On DCist.com, Mike Grass waxes eloquently about spring in Washington DC. He includes a nice quote from Alistair Cooke's discussing DC's seasons including a comparison of DC's summer to "those outposts on the Persian gulf where bad vice-consuls are sent to rot".

Screenit.com review echoes reality

We rented Closer this past weekend. I wish I had been more up-to-date in reading my weekly mailings from screenit.com. If I had read the newsletter from March 25, I would've read this review:

"CLOSER" (2004) (Julia Roberts, Jude Law) (R)
Drama: The lives and loves of four strangers (including Roberts & Law) become hopelessly intertwined as desires, deception and self-centeredness drive them into unexpected directions and relationships. Based on the popular London stage play of the same name, the film comes from director Mike Nichols ("Working Girl," "The Graduate") who knows a thing or two about character relationships. While his work, the script and especially the work from the four leads is solid to terrific, I just wish that their characters and the overall film didn't leave such a bad taste in your mouth and/or lead to the urge to shower after watching it due to all of the ugliness that's present.

The boldface part describes perfectly my thoughts about this film.

If you don't already know about Screen It!, try it out. They have fuller reviews the "Our Take" and a full description of everything you might not want your kids to see (or might not care -- they're not judgemental). For example, the description of profanity used in Saved starts with "At least 1 "f" word, 1 "s" word, 1 possible slang term (that's mostly drowned out) using female genitals...".