An Easter Egg in Google Reader
Open Google Reader
Type “up up down down left right left right b a”
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Spoiler alert!
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A ninja will appear behind your listings. But one thing my sources didn’t mention, even in one source with screen shots, is that all of the “new items” change to 30. In other words, I had 30 new items in each feed. When you do the code again, the ninja disappears and the new item counts reverted to their original numbers.
Super Mario Reloaded
You might have to suspend your knowledge that Mario and Luigi are bothers while you watch this (or maybe you don’t, could Neo and Agent Smith been brothers? I’m not sayin’… I’m just sayin’).
Free Food Tastes Best
Until May 15th, Carls Jr. is giving you a deal on a Western Bacon. Buy one, and get the drink and fries free.
(I know the coupon extends underneath the side bar… get over it.)
EDIT: Ok… I forgot IE doesn’t do layering well. I shrunk the image. Click for full size.
I Must Give Credit Where It’s Due [Hat Tip]
I’d like to tell you that idea for the domain name and title of this blog was entirely the result of my own creativity and brain power, but, as I’m sure you’ve assumed from the title of this post, it was not.
Actually, to confess, I’m not very creative. This isn’t to say that I steal all my ideas, but I do often need to observe the work of others in order to “spring” off of into my own ideas.
The “spring” for this blog came from a combination of my own desire to give back to the Internet community and most notably from French blogger Jean-François and his blog 365Questions.org.
I first discovered 365Questions.org October 17th, 2006 (The comment I posted on that day; the only way I knew the date). I’m not sure what I was searching for, all I know is that I ended up on 365Question’s popular compilation of creative 404 pages. I read some of his other entries and decided I liked what I saw. This is also about the same time I discovered the magic of RSS, so I added his blog to my reader.
I don’t know where Jean-François got the idea for his domain name, but I liked the name, and since I already had some “philosophy” for this blog regarding discovery before I had constructed it i thought a “365-site” would work well with the philosophy.
So, consider giving 365Questions.org a read if you’re interested in discovering oddities from different corners of the Interwebs from a different perspective!
Splogs Suck
This site has only been up for about a week and already a splog, or spam blog, had gotten a hold of it.
Splogs are “fake” blogs whose content is usually entirely stolen from legitimate blogs. In this case, I wrote a post last week that cited Wikipedia and contained a tag for Wikipedia. I believe this is how the splog in question ripped off my content. Splogs I’ve had experience with will re-post information from any blog that shows up in a Technorati or Google Blog Search feed with a particular tag or keyword.
The splog will attempt to get my content indexed in search engines to generate traffic to the splog’s site which is usually inundated with paid advertising links (read: pr0n).
Often, too, the splog will send a pingback to the original blog. Pingbacks (also known as trackbacks) are used to notify a blog that another blog has cited information from a particular post. The pingback will appear as a snippet of the new post in the comments section of the cited post. This a great feature because it allows easy link trading between bloggers with similar interests, and it gives credit to the original author.
The problem with splogs sending pingbacks are now the sucker gets a link in my comments to his/her rip-off of my post. Fortunately, Akismet is catching on to these and will file it as spam before it hits my blog.
There’s nothing I can do about the bastard stealing my content (except to change the content, or play the sucker), really, but the silver lining in spam blog is that I know my site is being searched and indexed!
Splog in question: http://wikipedia.doorwayblogging.info/ (NSFW)
Panoramic Photos on the Cheap & Easy [AutoStitch]
I’ll being filing this one under “Shared Discoveries” because I didn’t find this program all on my own; A friend of mine introduced it to me a couple of years ago on a trip down Highway 1. For some reason he wanted to take a panoramic photo so I tried setting my cheap digital camera to pano-mode. It’s supposed to make pano shots easier by allowing you to take a photo and then show part of that photo on the LCD screen so you can line up the next shot. However, as everyone knows, manual panoramic shots either with a built-in camera function or later trying to line up those shots in a photo editor are just awful.
So my friend starts taking random shots of this eroding hillside along the highway. There was no rhyme or reason, just snapping shots of the hillside. Then, he ensures me that this program he’s telling me about will be able to take all those photos and make a perfect panoramic photo out of it. I was skeptical, but sure enough, it did!
The program? From the project home page: “AutoStitch is the product of two years of research by Matthew Brown and David Lowe at the University of British Columbia.” And from Wikipedia, “The software uses the SIFT- and the RANSAC-Algorithm. This program differs from others such as photostitch in that it automatically stitches together even unaligned or zoomed photographs seamlessly without user input, whereas others often require the user to highlight matching areas for the photographs to merge properly. The only requirement is that all photographs be taken from a single point.”
In other words, AutoStitch is a free program (or “free-to-try” for non-commerical purposes) that takes a selection of separate photographs and “stitches” them together to make one large photograph. The resulting photograph doesn’t necessarily have to be a traditional panoramic photo. AutoStitch will make sense out of photos taken in any order, location, or size of particular scene. AutoStitch will also perform needed contrast, brightness, color and level image adjustments in order to create the seamless image.
Here I offer a couple of examples of AutoStitch’s work on photos taken by me on a recent trip to Yosemite National Park. Continue reading »
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