There’s an HDTV TiVo on the horizon. What I’m wondering here is whether TiVo will ever figure out that these things need to ship with bigger drives. In my opinion, the current boxes for standard TV don’t have large enough drives. The mass proliferation of upgrades on the net is proof that others feel the same. If this continues to the HDTV versions, TiVo will have some serious problems. [via PVRblog]
I just happened upon the blog at 1976design.com. Not only does this site have an excellent design, but it also uses some advanced CSS techniques that I’ve not seen used elsewhere. Check out the article on site updates for more info.
I thought that I’d lost the link to this site a few days ago. While planning for my upcoming trip to Europe, I realized that it would be nice to have software on hand to make some image composites. This software is probably the best that I’ve seen for what I wish to accomplish. But I had no idea what it was called or who wrote it. Now I do, however: Comparametric by Professor Steve Man of the University of Toronto. Google is a wonderful tool when the brain forgets.
Simon Willison pointed me to some excellent articles on CSS layouts. With these and another article on the same site, I think I finally have everything I need to solve the problems that have been causing my new design to remain unfinished. Just remember, Position is Everything.
Adam Kalsey is fed up with the spam that his website receives on a daily basis. How can a website receive spam, you ask? Well it’s simple—people leave comments for the sole purpose of getting their link out there. His site, like this site and many others, allows a readers to post a link to his own site along with his comments.
The spammers know that if their links appear on popular sites, they will get bonus PageRank points from Google. They take advantage of this by posting comments to discussion pages. These comments are quite often nothing more than a 2-5 word affirmation of the post–if they’re even that relevant. Often the spam is sent by programmatic robots. In this case, the comments are completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
In response to the growing problem of “comment spam” or “blog spam”, Kalsey has written a Comment Spam Manifesto. This is sort of an open letter to all would be comment spammers out there. He sums it all up quite nicely:
“Our sites belong to us and we intend to keep it that way. It will no longer be profitable to advertise through comment spam.”
No site with open commenting is immune. As evidence, this site, oddly, has experienced a bit of comment spam beginning mere weeks after the site opened its doors.
If you run a site that is plagued by comment spammers, be sure to show your support for the effort against them.
Read more about the problems with Google here: PageRank is Dead.
Mark Evanier bought a new Pioneer TiVo DVD Recorder and shared his experiences in a brief review. [via PVRblog]
There’s a new version of SmartyPants out. SmartyPants is, in my opinion, one of the most seamless and useful plugins for Movable Type. It transforms mere dashes into em- and en-dashes (— and –). It transforms quotes into their proper form (“”). It transforms dots into elipses (…). If your Movable Type site doesn’t use this, it should.
Surfin’ Safari is home to Dave Hyatt, one of the developers of Safari. His site gives many insights into the future direction of Safari. And there’s always the occasional ambiguously funny link.
SOHO is producing some fantastic imagery of the sun lately. The animations featured on this page are very impressive. And just for fun, here’s SOHO’s view of current space weather at a glance.
Update: I left out a link: Space Weather Now.
It’s true! Internet Explorer isn’t really the inseparable component of Windows that Microsoft claimed it was. This has now been proven. You can run older versions of Internet Explorer alongside the latest version. No virtual machines; No emulation! This is real!
Simon Willison, always an expert at finding juicy JavaScript nuggets, has done it again. This time we’re treated to Stuart Langridge’s sorttable. This technique makes any table sortable by clicking on a header. All that’s needed is to include a javascript library, give the table a unique id and make it a member of the “sortable” class. Very slick.
Microsoft has just released a large bundle of wireless patches for XP. The patches fix a lot of bugs (no surprise there) and also add support for WPA. If you’re a wireless XP user, you’ll certainly want to download the patches.
It seems that Mac users all over are upgrading en masse to Panther, the latest incarnation of OS X. John Gruber noted a significant number of visitors to his site upgraded within 24 hours of Panther’s release. I haven’t upgraded yet, but the fresh new CDs are sitting right next to my Mac just waiting to be installed.
