Geuh. I'm not a fan of phone verification ( Read more... )

Google announced the Google+ project today, which is a collection of features to make it easier to connect and share with people you know. At the heart of this is circles: groups of people that mirror some of the groupings we make in real life. There's the straightforward "I don't want to share the pictures of Saturday night's party with my ( Read more... )

Colorado's online tax filing site used to be a super-ugly but oh-so-simple web 0.9 series of text fields with a submit button and some JavaScript to automatically calculate some stuff ( Read more... )

I don't use the telephone very much. Partly because I feel awkward on the phone and prefer to write emails. Partly because I dislike all the phone companies in the U.S. I was considering switching from using a Virgin Mobile prepaid plan (20 cents a minute in bi- or tri-monthly $20 payments on a super-simple cellphone) to a T-Mobile prepaid plan ( Read more... )

I was using Firefox with NoScript for a couple weeks and noticed that following links from my LiveJournal friends list generally required two clicks. I chalked it up to either misclicking my MacBook's trackpad or something funky with an overloaded Firefox (I had a lot of crap open). I recently quit Firefox and opened Chrome and noticed that my ( Read more... )

There's been a lot of noise in developer circles recently about Apple's new unusual iPhone developers agreement, particularly section 3.3.1. Briefly, Apple declared that you're not allowed to write iPhone/iPad/iPod software unless you use their tools to do it. Specifically, you're not allowed to write it using a level of abstraction that lets the ( Read more... )

With Panopticlick, the EFF is pointing out how websites could track you even if you don't have cookies enabled. If JavaScript is enabled, website authors can figure out things like your set of plugins and fonts. But when I visited with NoScript enabled, my browser fingerprint was unique among the first 425,722 seen. I guess of the 35 visitors ( Read more... )

My goal for the evening: cancel phone service, power service, and change my address, all on the web. Verdict ( Read more... )

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. -- Frank Zappa

Some facts about my music collection:

• In the past ten years, I have legitimately acquired nearly 500 albums of music.
• The vast majority of these CDs I purchased used at one of the many fine independent music retailers in the Boulder/Denver area. I hope the RIAA takes note of ( Read more... )

A month after leaving Xiamen, my travels in China are on the web in word and image forms. There's more details I want to write and pictures I want to caption, but what's there covers most of what the mollybee and trevorbear did. Please let me know if any links are broken, words are misspelled, or the pages look stupid in your browser.