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This may be good news for startups like SmagMug, MediaSilo and SlideShare who use the Amazon Simple Storage service for hosting content. Amazon has reduced the storage prices for S3 service though the cut will no effect on small customers who manage only a few gigabytes of data.
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Economist Kevin Nguyen explains the country’s economic woes to his younger sister, using Pokémon as an analogy. Seriously.
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See if you can tell Tina Fey & Sarah Palin apart.
Mike Cohen
Loreena McKennitt's new album
One of my favorite singers, Loreena McKennitt, has a new album called A Midwinter Night’s Dream, now available for pre-order from her website. The album is available as a CD, digital download, or two special editions featuring a DVD.
John McCain's Rage
This is why McCain must not be our next president. An erratic hothead like him would be even more dangerous than Bush.
links for 2008-10-08
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Apps on the iPhone can ship a ‘default.png’ in their bundle. When you start the app, it’ll first show this image, then load the rest of the app. The idea is, you can ship a picture of the start state of your app, and it’ll appear to have started very quickly. This is why some apps are unresponsive just after they start – they’re not actually started, you’re just looking at a picture. Some of Apple's applications can change the default.png to show the last session, but there's no way for a third party application to do that.
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During a 1983 bankruptcy case he referred to a federal judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race." Martin, who in the past was known as Anthony Martin-Trigona, is one of the most notorious litigants in the history of the United States. He's filed hundreds, possibly thousands, of lawsuits, often directed at judges who have ruled against him, or media outlets that cover him unfavorably. A 1993 opinion by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in Atlanta, described these lawsuits as "a cruel and effective weapon against his enemies," and called Martin a "notoriously vexatious and vindictive litigator who has long abused the American legal system." He once even attempted to intervene in the divorce proceedings of a judge who'd ruled against him, petitioning the state court to be appointed as the guardian of the judge's children.
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Great remix of the video, with lyrics changed to reflect the action in the video.
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Imagine if the Obamas had hooked up with a violently anti-American group in league with the government of Iran.
links for 2008-10-07
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Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."
Yoono makes Firefox more social
Although Flock has some nice features for integrating your social networks and media, it also has some very significant drawbacks. It always lags behind the current Firefox version for security updates & other fixes, and bookmarks work very differently (which I personally dislike).
Yoono is a Firefox plugin that gives you the best of both worlds. It adds a sidebar which provides much of Flock’s more useful functionality. Combined with Scribefire for blogging, you can have most of Flock’s functionality with a more mature & well supported Firefox browser.
links for 2008-10-06
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she basically says, "If you don't support me, you're going to hell."
The real Obama
Here’s a story that gives some good insight into Barack Obama’s personality. I couldn’t imagine John McCain doing anything like that.
Mary Menth Andersen was then 31 years old and had just married Norwegian Dag Andersen. She looked forward to start a new life in Åsgårdstrand i Vestfold with him. But first she had to get all her belongings to Norway. The day was 2 November 1988.
At the airport in Miami, it was busy as usual with long queues at the check-in counters. When it finally was Mary’s turn, and she had put the luggage on the conveyor belt, she got the message that would break down the bubbling happiness.
– You must pay 103 dollars in overweight if you want to bring both suitcases to Norway, the man behind the counter said.
Mary had no money. Her new husband had already gone to Norway, and Mary had no one else to call.
– I was in completely despair and tried to find out which belongings I could do without. But the suitcases were filled with my most precious belongings, Mary says.
Mild and friendly
Although she explained the situation to the man behind the counter, he showed no signs of mercy.
– I started to cry, the tears cascaded down and I did not know what to do. Then I heard a mild and friendly voice behind me say “I’ll pay for her.”
Mary turned around and there was a tall and dark man she had never seen before.
– He had a mild and friendly, yet determined, voice. My initial thought was: Who is this man?
Although the incident happened 20 years ago, Mary still remembers the authority this man radiated.
– He was good looking and fashion right with brown leather shoes, open cotton shirt and khaki pants, Mary says.
She was happy to get both her suitcases to Norway and assured the stranger he would get his money back. The man wrote his name and address on a piece of paper and gave Mary. She thanked him repeatedly. When she finally went to the security check he waved goodbye to her.
Rescuing knight
On the paper it was written “Barack Obama” and his address in Kansas, which is the state his mother came from. Mary had the paper piece in her wallet for many years, but she finally threw it.
– He was my rescuing knight, Mary says and smiles.
She paid back the 103 dollar to Obama after she came to Norway. At that time he had finished the job as a low paid environmental worker in Chicago and attended law school at the prestigious Harvard.
In spring 2006, Mary’s parents heard that Obama was considering to run for President, but that he had yet not decided. Therefore, they chose to write a letter in which they stated he would get their votes. At the same time they thanked Obama for having helped their daughter 18 years earlier.
In a letter to Mary’s parents dated 4 May 2006 and marked “United States Senate, Washington DC,” Barack Obama writes back:
“I want to thank you for having written such kind words about me and for reminding me of the incident at the airport in Miami. I am happy to have helped and are happy to hear that your daughter is doing well in Norway. Please send her my best wishes. Sincerely, Barack Obama, United States Senator. ”
Google translation & link to original article here, thanks to @cdespinosa on twitter.
Pandas & Rainbows
The latest meme seems to be pandas vomiting rainbows, first seen at Flickr’s explore page.
XBMC on my AppleTV
I used atvusb-creator to install XBMC & Boxee on my AppleTV.
It’s very easy: create a patch stick with a USB flash drive, power down the AppleTV, insert the flash drive and restart the AppleTV. It will boot from the flash drive. You’ll see Linux startup messages and in a few seconds it will be finished. Shut off the AppleTV, remove the flash drive, and when you restart the AppleTV there will be a new menu item for XBMC & Boxee. You’ll probably need to run the update before using it the first time.
XBMC works beautifully. It lets you play additional media formats not normally supported by the AppleTV, including AVI, and adds some nice new features like weather & news.
Unfortunately I had some difficulty with Boxee – it won’t respond to the remote, so there’s no way to even log in.
Update: Restarting seems to have fixed it. I was able to log into Boxee, but now I found a different problem: it truncates file names on a SMB share, so it can’t open any files from my server.