ExpanDrive

Don’t get me wrong, Foursquare is a fun little social network and beautifully adapted to the iPhone platform. But their points system incentivizes some activities that I think are detrimental to the environment as a whole.

So in the interests of making things more awesome, I’ve designed some Foursquare Badges intended to shame users into more appropriate behaviors:

A must-have if the Boston Top 10 is any indication.

You’re checking into the venue “Phone Booth in front of Whole Foods” from your cell phone?

Obviously, Foursquare would have to add a relationship status for this to work.

For the Mayor of your local “Starbucsk Coffee”.

Make friends with Cosmo on Foursquare and buy some shirts or mugs featuring these sweet badges.

Apple’s web browser, Safari, has a feature euphemistically named “Private Browsing…” When enabled, private browsing makes it so that the sites you visit aren’t stored in the browsers history, and cookies from those sites are deleted when “Private Browsing…” is turned off. In short, there’s no record left on your computer of what you’ve done on the web when “Private Browsing…” was enabled. If used judiciously you can be confident when guests borrow your computer and type www.you into the browser location bar, Safari will always suggest the completion tube.com and never porn.com.

In light of the recent news with Tiger Woods, I wonder if there might be demand for a similar feature on the iPhone. Users could, in a password protected configuration panel, flag certain contacts with a special setting. Incoming, outgoing, and missed calls for these contacts would simply not be saved, and text messages would be deleted automatically after they’ve been read. A contact with this setting would look like any other contact that you never called or heard from. Apple could call the feature “Private Calling…”, or maybe they could come up with a better name.

I love the “Automata” series they’ve been working on at Penny Arcade. Gabe’s art is gorgeous, the world is imaginative, and the story is fascinating. I don’t want it to end.

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.

James Iry posted a really amusing “history” of programming languages over on his blog, One Div Zero. I laughed till I cried. He bills it as “mostly wrong,” but he’s not far from the truth.

Just for a taste, here’s one of my favourite quotes from the History

Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem”

Good times

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

Ever worked on a project which necessitated IE6 compatibility? I have. It’s the worst. Joe Lifrieri, a freelancer who runs Hugs for Monsters, thought better of the problem and made some concept art for IE6 landing pages.

via Calculated Risk

The Onion [hilariously] hosts a panel to discuss if the Government should stop dumping money into the National Money Hole.

“No reasonable person is advocating we stop destroying money – but the American people earned that money, they have the right to decide how it should be destroyed… let the free market decide the most efficient way of destroying money”

Long-standing Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens was indicted today on federal corruption charges. Among the Senator’s more quotable statements was this doosy:

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Elsewhere on the market, big truck futures were up in heavy trading.

Maybe you heard earlier this week about Apple taking out a patent on some solar cells, so soon we can all have solar powered MacBooks and iPhones and blah blah blah.

Look: that might do it for my cousin Irene with the gold pigtails and a frilly pink dress, but that sure as hell doesn’t do it for me. I demand MORE POWER. And like John McCain, who’s so tough he wouldn’t even use a solar-powered sundial, I know exactly where to get it.

That’s right, I’m talking about a nuclear computer. I’m sick of being behind the Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys in generating what is obviously the manliest form of power on earth. And don’t bother whining about “feasibility”. If we’d let weenies like you take over during the 60s, there’d be a Russian flag on the moon and the national pastime would be badminton.

A Mac Pro weighs almost 50 pounds, and enough fissionable material for an a-bomb weighs only 11—still sound impossible to you? Sure, you’d need turbines and a cooling system and crap like that, but Apple’s always bragging about how awesome its designers are. Now it’s time to put up or shut up.

On top of just being frickin’ awesome, nuclear computing would all but solve the national energy crisis. When you were running some pansy application like Mail or iWank or whatever, you could use the power supply in your PC to run the rest of your home, and even sell power back to the grid.

Look, I love the environment as much as the next guy—wind turbines, recycling, bottle deposits, hybrid SUVs; the whole nine yards. But solar’s simply not a viable solution for power users; I mean, what are you gonna do when the sun’s not shining?

Let’s say you’re playing Quake IV in your bedroom at 4am, and somehow fighting back the entire Korean Peninsula with a single measly railgun—do you want to get gauntleted because a “low power warning” pops up and ruins your FPS? Or do want your power supply to get so hot from rendering ultra-high-res blood spatter that you have to huck it in the bathtub to prevent a meltdown?

The choice is yours, people. Don’t let Steve Jobs talk you into buying an inferior product.

Image: MacNuke, created by author. From original work by Gmn wnr. Free use under cc-by-sa-2.5.