ExpanDrive

I got to pull apart some bolts with an Instron strain tester in college, but this looks way more fun. Here’s video two and three.

Ze Frank is doing a new weekly show for Time Video. Those of you that watched The Show know that this is something to be excited about. (Those of you who didn’t watch The Show wasted your 2006, but you can make up for some of it by watching the Brain Crack episode.) So far Ze’s first two videos have had all the creativity, wit, and insight that his best commentary had on The Show.

Unfortunately, the only RSS feed I can find links not just the Ze Frank videos, but also every other boring, watered down video that runs on Time. Fortunately, we live in a world where Yahoo Pipes lets you solve this problem in about 45 seconds. Double fortunately for you, I’ve already made the pipe that filters out only Ze Frank’s videos from the Time feed. And here’s a direct link to the Pipe’s RSS feed.

PS: I’ve made analogous Pipes for Mindy Kaling on her Things That I Bought That I Love, and Dan Savage on The Stranger Blog.

As soon as I saw Menlo I knew it was going to be my new favorite programming font. Just a couple weeks ago I gave Bitstream’s Vera Sans Mono a try, and it didn’t work for me, so I wondered what the difference was. You’ve probably seen the high resolution comparison already. But I don’t code in size 64 font; I program I code in size 11 font. Here’s an animation of some real code switching between Menlo and Vera Sans Mono.

Menlo is the one with the slash through the zero, while Vera Sans Mono has a dot in the zero. You can see that a lot of characters (“M”, “N”, “l”, “#”, and all the punctuation) look way too light and blurry in Vera Sans Mono, but look great in Menlo. The just look at how blurry that octothorp is in Vera Sans.

Update:

When Gruber asks, who can say no?

Here’s a comparison of Vera Sans Mon and Coda’s variant. Coda has the higher, longer underscores and the slightly lighter weight. I don’t really like how Coda is so thin that anti-aliasing kind of greys out the text. If you blow it up (or look at it with Digital Color Meter), then you’ll see that very few of the pixels are close to black.

And here is an image with all three. Vera Sans, Menlo, and Coda in that order. Menlo has the zero with the slash, so you can keep track of which is which. (I intentionally omitted a key from the image, because I wanted to focus on how the text changed without distraction.

You can download the gifs and open them in Preview if you want to page back and forth manually. It will give you each image as a separate page, and you can switch back and forth using the arrow keys. (This is also a great way to do an impromptu slideshow. Open a directory full of images, hit ⌘-A to select them all, and hit ⌘-O to open them in Preview.)

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre (六四屠殺). Consider reading the Wikipedia page, and also the page on Tank Man. The New York Times published a great retrospective with the photographers who took pictures of Tank Man, as well as a previously unpublished photo from the street.

BBC has a story about reporters being blocked from entering the square today. It includes some humorous video of un-uniformed agents blocking the cameras with umbrellas. Also, a website claims that an unusual number or Chinese social networking websites are “down for maintenance” today.

Where can I apply for this job?

(RT @cottonduck)

Braid, the breathtakingly beautiful indy game by Jonathan Blow has finally been released for the Mac. I have had a troubled and unhealthy relationship with video games, and so for the most part I bind myself to the mast, but I think I’m going to make an exception today. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game that looked like it had a better ratio of fun to not-fun.

You can buy it on Greenhouse for $15.

We thought we were pretty tough when we coerced FTP into working like a filesystem for ExpanDrive, but someone on GetACoder.com thinks they can get FTP to do a lot more.

Budget: $ 300-1000
Description
Hello, I need a FTP Client which can view all the directories and files on a specific server WITHOUT logging in with the FTP details. It must be able to show me the server IP and all other details given below. It must be able to get all the MySQL Databases connected to the pages. It must collect the user name, password and host name and give it to me. It must also allow me to connect with the MySQL User Name, Password and host name to any database in the world and have a SQL editor to take actions. It must be able to download the file stored on the server (not the client-side preview but the real code on the server!). Regards, Akshit Soota

This is an upside down version of a freshman year physics problem I had from K&K (problem 3.17, search for “hydrant” on Amazon ‘inside the book’). Another video on YouTube has more information on the jet pack.

“Gary” directed by Clément Soulmagnon, Yann Benedi, Sébastien Eballard, Quentin Chaillet (the French like to have a lot of directors). It’s 7 minutes long and spectacularly beautiful. You’re going to want to click on the link and watch it in HD on Vimeo, rather than in the embedded player. I don’t speak French, but it really didn’t hold me back.