Pretty cool: A client wanted to use a font exactly like a font they had spied in another site’s banner image. I had no idea what it was. Got thinking there must be some kind of font recognition service out there. I was thinking like a forum of fontography fanatics you could pay to analyze an image for you. Googling “What’s that font?” took me to myfonts.com/WhatTheFont, which let me upload the JPEG image directly. Seconds later, it had broken the JPEG up into constituent letters and asked me to fill in the blanks for the ones it couldn’t guess. Two seconds after that it spit back 14 possible matches - and the first few hits were dead on.

Of course, the top suggestion turned out to be a $240 font they were ready to sell me on the spot. But the second suggestion was so close as to be virtually indistinguishable. And available free.

Is there nothing that infernal interweb can’t do?

Tell me you don’t want one. “The RIOT Wheel is a huge, heavy motorized single-wheel vehicle, originally
built for Burning Man, the natural home of deviant vehicles.” The version currently being worked on is actually a hybrid (take that, Toyota!). The weight of the rider out front is counterbalanced by the weight of the engine, which hangs freely inside the wheel. An adjustable crane lifts the engine up and down, changing the angle of the dangle and thus its leverage. Apparently it’s steered by leaning, though it apparently steers like an oil tanker. Coupla videos here. Not too zippy in those vids, though inventor dude claims to be working towards a land speed record (his own, I imagine).

Music: Mahmoud Ahmed :: Belomy Benna

Gorgeous photo by Amy of Miles showing off a wind-up whale he found in a geocache at Mt. Diablo last weekend. Today he asked what “chaos” meant and I told him. Then he re-defined the concept for me: “Chaos is when dogs are howling and light poles are bumping into each other and the toilet is walking around the house.” Later, talking about how you could turn a mistake into part of the project while making art: “If an artist makes a mistake she can just bonk her booby bone on her head and then her bones will be gone and she’ll flop over like a jellyfish.” It’s more or less an endless string of delightful dada platitudes around here, punctuated by meltdowns and small miracles.

Ignore this post if you’re not a WordPress user :)

There’s an interminable discussion going down on the WP-Hackers mailing list about one of those little semantic issues that snowballs perniciously into a major debate. WordPress’ back-end lets users manage URLs for inclusion in the sidebar. This area is usually used for the site’s blogroll, but many people use WordPress for non-bloggy purposes. The debate is over whether to title the administrative interface for this external URL manager “Links,” “Bookmarks,” or “Blogroll” (though “Blogroll” isn’t really on the table - that’s what it’s called now, and no one likes it).

There are a dozen good arguments on either side, but we’re trying to take the temperature of the WordPress user community. Helping out a bit by posting a poll here. Which term seems more intuitive / palatable / sensible to you?

&tChina Digital Times (a J-School-hosted site) links to a stunning pair of images showing an algae bloom in China’s Lake Dianchi so intense the water seems to have turned to paint (here’s how the lake used to look).

Salon.com picked up and expanded on the post: Invasion of the great green algae monster, quoting Ming Dynasty poet Yang Shen:

A windy lake is Dian yet never any dust is seen,
The newly green isle Ding in the far horizon lies.
Beauty one enjoys here as in land south of the Yangtse River,
A vast rippling lake in spring with distant foam lily white.

The bloom is stunning - and tragic - evidence of the consequences of China’s economic boom and rapid industrialization. While it’s common (and largely true) to point out that China’s boom has been marching on heedless of environmental considerations, that’s not quite the case here.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect to the current algae explosion is that Lake Dianchi has been a target for environmental cleanup for more than a decade. The days when the city of Kunming simply dumped nearly all of its raw sewage and garbage directly into the lake are more or less over. Landfills have been created, sewage plants erected, waste water treatment facilities put into place.

But efforts to clean up the lake have come too little too late, insufficient to offset years of abuse. “The struggle is vast: Cleaning up Lake Dianchi means nothing less than bringing to heel the entire economic revolution that has swept China over the past three decades.”

What kind of poem would Yang Shen write, if he were alive today? … Would he observe, in tones of the darkest gloom, that a jewel of China’s environment that has been treasured for centuries upon centuries has been made unfit for human beings or fish in the space of one lifetime?

To quote BTO, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

A battle between a pride of lions, a herd of buffalo, and two crocodiles at a watering hole in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. You can smell the animal adrenaline. As Lebkowsky says, “This is the herd I want to join.”

Scanning the Groundspeak forums for threads on the weirdest things people have found in geocaches, came up with a short list culled from several threads:

• A metal artificial hip
• A dime-bag
• A specimen cup
• A speculum
• Bottle rockets
• A $50 JCPenney gift card
• A large turd
• A turtle
• A stun gun (non-working)
• Religion
• A roach. Not the insect.
• A personal pleasure device for women (hot pink)
• A used Brillo pad
• An old sock
• A piston from a small engine
• A varnished alligator foot
• Surgical gloves
• Emergency water packets with instructions in Japanese
• A bag of molt from an iguana
• Mini chess pieces put in an ear plug case
• A urinal cake
• A plastic squeaky toy figure of a Nun in black robes
• Leopard-spotted furry handcuffs
• A kangaroo scrotum
• A pregnancy test kit
• A jar of the cache owner’s dog’s ashes (as a travelbug)

So far Miles and I haven’t been treated to anything quite so outrageous, though we have found some excellent items (a French wooden submarine model kit still tops the bill), but I look forward to the day when I’ve got some ’splainin’ to do.

Amy: “Would you mind if I got ruby grapefruit dish soap next time, instead of crisp cucumber?”

Me: “No, why would I mind?”

Amy: “Because it might not go with our kitchen walls.”

You think I’m making this up.

If your inkjet printer says it’s out of ink, don’t believe it for a second (until the ink goes faint on the page). Most printers lie like a rug, claiming to be out of ink long before they actually are. Epsons are the honest-est, reporting “empty” when down to about 20%, while some Kodaks report empty when only 36% of the ink is gone. Not to mention the problem of multi-cartridge printers claiming to be out when only one color has run dry.

It’s the old “Give away the razor, sell ‘em the blades” (Gillette in days of yore) thing, aka the “Give away the camera, sell ‘em the film” thing (Polaroid in days of yore). Only razors and cameras didn’t lie about the need to replace consumables like printers do.

Which is one reason why we only use a b/w laser at home, and send out for color prints when needed. Inkjets only look cheap.

Interesting new hack in the wild - embedding PHP (or other*) code inside an otherwise valid image file. And why would anyone do that? Think of a site that allows users to upload avatars or icons or other images, then displays those images back to the public. If the site isn’t taking sufficient precautions during the upload and display stages, a hacker could create an image file with PHP embedded in the byte stream, then name their file myfile.gif.php. A site that then sloppily displayed whatever images were uploaded to it would then display the image inline, and its embedded code would be executed.

The kicker is that even if your site is doing common checks to verify that it’s dealing with a standard image file, such as running the getimagesize() function on it first, those tests may yield a false positive, since the first n bytes check out just fine. You need to verify the filename extension as well, and not serve images from a directory that’s PHP-interpreted. Other suggestions in the article at PHP Classes.

* There’s no reason this same hack wouldn’t work with .ASP or .NET or ColdFusion sites as well, or with image formats other than GIFs.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Hilltop Harvest — our first farm site!

Hilltop Harvest is a 4th generation farm owned by the Pless family and located in the fertile farmlands of southwestern Minnesota near Redwood Falls. During the summer, hundreds of people come to our farm, enjoy the fresh air and sunshine, and of course, our mouth-watering strawberries and raspberries.

Hrm… I wonder if they’d trade a few crates of jam for a year of hosting? :-)

I’ve been enjoying listening to archival episodes of Sonny and Sandy’s congenial Podcacher podcast, packed with helpful geocaching tips and adventure stories. I find the geocaching community’s obsession with FTFs (first-to-finds) and high-number finders annoying, but enjoy the deep-woods or out-to-sea live recordings and occasional semi-philosophical musings. In a show from last March, Sonny talks about something near and dear to my heart - the concept of “Flow.”

OK, the topic is a little fluffy-fuzzy, but there’s something important to human happiness here. The bit focuses on the ideas of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, “who has devoted his life’s work to the study of what makes people truly happy, satisfied and fulfilled.” Csikszentmihalyi’s idea is that “flow” is achieved in the balance between challenge and skill. A pro snowboarder on the bunny slopes is bored because skill is high and challenge is low; an amateur on a black diamond run is anxious, because skill is low and challenge is high. But an amateur on a bunny hill and a pro on a black diamond both experience the same balance between challenge and skill, and thus both experience the same state of “flow,” where time and cares slip away, and the activity becomes total, consuming.

The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

The conversation is focused on geocaching of course - a game where skill and difficulty levels vary hugely from cache to cache - but any activity, properly balanced, can lead to a sense of flow. Even walking through the city, if attention is focused, can deliver this sense of timelessness and involvement. I often have similar thoughts when biking, or navigating through crowds on foot.

This is exactly why I get so annoyed (experience anxiety) when people stand on the left side of the escalator, or try to get on the train before others have gotten off. These things feel to me like cultural apathy toward any sense of collective flow. I want to feel like we’re all psychically coordinated, a school of fish thinking as one, rather than a bunch of atoms bouncing off each other in chaotic Brownian motion.

Loose thoughts for a Saturday morning.

What’s more insightful and hilarious than a stack of Sunday papers with all the Family Circus cartoons cut out, sans captions? That same stack paired with a pile of Friedrich Nietzsche quotes, sans context. The Nietzsche Family Circus has it all: Guile and wit, philosophy of mind, charmless drawings paired with penetrating reflections on the will to power. So very hard to pick just one.

Sometimes I feel like I must have eaten some bad fish, had a few terrifying hallucinations, and woken up in Victorian England. CBS 5:

A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting. Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called “Gay Bomb.”

And here’s an ABC News story on Bush’s top pick for surgeon general James W. Holsinger Jr.: Homosexuality Isn’t Natural or Healthy: “Bush’s Choice for Top Doc Compared Human Genitalia to Pipe Fittings and Said Homosexual Practices Can Cause Injury or Death”

An alien landing here would think reality imitated Saturday Night Live, not the other way ’round. File under: Not Funny.

The video demos of new features in OS X Leopard are pretty chill — OK, more than chill — some of them are downright amazing. But I’m trying to wrap my head around the release of Safari for Windows.

With iTunes for Windows, it was a slam dunk - you can’t sell iPods and tracks to people who can’t reach your platform. But with Safari, it’s not so clear cut. What are they selling? Ostensibly, it’s about giving Windows developers access to the browser that will be running on the iPhone. But I’m not buying that that’s the whole reason. Developers are just too small an audience to warrant the work it must have taken to do the port, and to support it going forward.

There’s the old “gateway drug” argument - give Windows users enough tastes of Mac elegance - and in this case a faster browser than anything available on Windows right now (Apple claims Safari 3 is twice as fast as Internet Explorer 7 on Windows, and 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2) - and eventually they’ll wander over to take a closer look at the whole enchilada*. But how many Windows users are going to care? Those who care enough about security and extensibility to try another browser are already using FireFox, and Safari doesn’t have FF’s thriving plugin landscape going for it. Speed alone isn’t going to cut it.

So… they’re going to end up with a tiny percentage of developers and geeks running Safari on Windows. And this benefits Apple how? Maybe I’m wrong - maybe the need to provide a platform for Windows iPhone developers is reason enough, but somehow that doesn’t ring true. I think there’s another shoe ready to drop, lurking stage left.

* Update: I wrote that bit about “elegance” before seeing any reviews of Safari/Win after it was released into the wild. Now that the opinions are starting to roll in, I think it’s safe to say that this beta was released long before it should have been. By all accounts, Safari/Win so far appears to be a steaming pile of $%$%!@ with little to recommend it.

Ben Franklin’s Moral Precepts:

1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.

6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.

7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

9. MODERATION. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.

11. TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.

13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Via Weblogsky, who considers Stewart Brand to be today’s closest living analog to Franklin (though I don’t think he means it in the moral context).

Time is running an excellent photo essay depicting the amount of food consumed by various families in the course of a week, from 15 countries around the world.

In Chad, this family living in a refugee camp spends around $1.23 per week, mostly to make soup with fresh sheep meat.

In North Carolina, this family spends $341.98 per week on spaghetti, potatoes, sesame chicken (piles of pizza and soda also involved).

The photos are stunning, as is the variance in weekly expenditure, from the $1.23 in Chad to the $500 spent by the Bargteheide family on fried potatoes with onions, bacon and herring, fried noodles with eggs and cheese, pizza, vanilla pudding. Of course, every family is different, and there is no attempt to portray anything like a “typical” family.

With breathtaking attention to detail, Jake von Slatt has created an amazing steampunk monitor and keyboard. See it all put together here. His RSS Sounder project converts well-formed XML to a mechanically clacking telegraph. The project description covers construction of the device in every detail, from cutting metal and winding coils to interfacing the Magpie RSS parser with text2morse. All so romantic!

&tConvening themes: The world viewed as a network of digital photographers collectively shooting every square inch of the globe, the ability to stitch those images together into a cohesive, navigable, continuous view, and the world-changing cognitive power of zooming through scale, now becoming commonplace.

Dan Sandler points out that Google Street View (which is mind-blowing both in its power and its privacy implications) is not only one of the few Google apps to require Flash, it’s also “the first Google app to feature the Be Man:”

Thanks for the images Dan.

Humor, history, and coincidence aside, Street View changes the world, just a little bit for the better and a little bit for the worse. For the SF Chronicle, Mark Morford on Street View as invasive: I Can See Your Thong From Here:

Ah, Google, you great wicked benevolent super-cool vaguely disturbing Big Brother überbitch mega-company, quietly taking over the entire goddamn Net universe and most of the terrestrial world, too, one cool but simultaneously unnerving innovation at a time. … The question has been raised: How much is too much? How much implied privacy should we have as a society, as a community, as a city, and do we let this sort of technology run free simply because the draconian creepiness of it all is so easily offset by how damn fascinating and helpful and nifty a utility it so very obviously is?

Posted last August about Photosynth, a product emerging from Microsoft Labs designed not only to be a digital photo album conceptually way beyond iPhoto or Aperture, but that is also capable of intelligently stitching together images from disparate sources into zoom-able, photographic, 3-D representations of places on earth. In this video from a recent TED conference, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demonstrates a 3-D, navigable reconstruction of the cathedral at Notre Dame created by stitching together images scraped from Flickr — photos taken with everything from cell phones to high-quality SLRs, by photographers who have never met one another.

I’ve been playing a bit with Flickr Maps and looking more into the options for geotagging photos, but Photosynth blows the doors off the concepts of 2-D image-place connections, opening up a realm where all photographers on earth are unintentionally collaborating on a single, global, steerable, zoomable view that never ends.

Steven Berlin Johnson did a fascinating seminar for The Long Now Foundation (available both as podcast and as a summarized blog entry) on what he calls “the long zoom” — an entirely new way of grokking our world, started by the famous Powers of 10 and now becoming almost de rigeur thanks to emerging photo / video / vector technologies. What once blew your mind (and all previous senses of scale and proportion in the universe) with “Powers of 10″ has become an increasingly commonplace quick swoop around Google Earth to find a business address.

We live in amazing times.

Mid-day tomorrow, the time will be:

12:34 5/6/7

(at least for those of you who render the date as day/month/year). Australia’s just lived through it, and reports little damage. Please synchronize your watches, fasten your seatbelts, and play those Andreas Vollenweider records loud.

Ryan Sholin knocks one out of the park: “10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head“. Pretty much mirrors a lot of lunchtime conversation at the J-School over the past few years, with the discussion seeming somewhat more urgent lately (because the writing is on the wall for dead-tree distribution). I liked #7 especially:

Bloggers aren’t an uneducated lynch mob unconcerned by facts. They’re your readers and your neighbors and if you play your cards right, your sources and your community moderators. If you really play it right, bloggers are the leaders of your networked reporting projects. Get over the whole bloggers vs. journalists thing, which has been pretty much settled since long before you stopped calling it a “Web blog” in your stories.

… though all of his points are spot-on. John Battelle has some interesting commentary in a similar vein. On where newspapers are falling down (this was directed at the SF Chronicle, but could be applied to many/most municipal papers):

400 reporters and what is the paper DOING with them? Not much, I’m afraid. The paper should OWN the Valley Tech story. Does it? No. It should OWN the biotech story. Does it? No. It should OWN the real estate/development story. Does it? No. It should OWN the California political story. Does it? No! … I agree that Google and others should be more engaged in helping shore up and - GASP - evolve the fourth estate. But assuming the way to do it is to support more of the same - the approach that gave us a bloated newsroom that puts out a product fewer and fewer people want to read each year - is to ask for tenure over evolution.

Had a gas writing Speak to Me of Love for Stuck Between Stations this week, on an album that’s been in heavy rotation at our house recently - “Parlez-moi d’amour” by Les Chauds Lapins. Steamy songs about love and sex from pre-war France, performed with sincerity and verve by a New York quintet led by a pair of banjo ukuleles. The music is absolutely wonderful, and so is the recording quality. Les Chauds Lapins even let us offer a few tracks for download. Get this music under your skin.

Great time geocaching with Miles around Kensington today - pegged three caches in one day. First two pretty easy urban and park finds, but the third was a level-3 difficulty hike - a creek bed at the bottom of a steep canyon with no trail to speak of - bushwacking and slip-sliding our way down, holding onto roots and vines. Miles keeps up without complaint, loves the challenge. I swear the kid is a mountain goat in a boy’s body.

Once at the bottom, had a really hard time getting coordinates from the GPSr - couldn’t see the sky for the trees, and the steep canyon offered a much smaller horizon to scan. But using provided hints, finally honed in and M scrambled into position. Nothing really special inside this one aside from an autographed picture of Brad Pitt, signed “I was here”; it’s all about the fun of the hunt. Ecstatic day.

Not all goes well when East meets West. The U.S. patent office has been granting patents (yes, patents) on yoga postures and practices, and India’s government isn’t happy about it.

Searches of the database of the United States Patent and Trademark Office show dozens of yoga-related patents have been granted, including one for a breathing exercise, and more than 1,300 such trademarks have been registered.

First of all, I find it almost impossible to imagine that American practitioners are busting moves or other yogic practices that have never been conceived in 5,000 years of Indian tradition. Second of all, is nothing sacred? Third of all, the absurdity of patent overload has been going on for years, but just keeps getting sillier. Except it isn’t silly. It’s bad.

via Weblogsky

Birdhouse Hosting congratulates long-time user (and frequent commenter on this blog) Jim Strickland, who just had his first novel, Looking Glass published by Flying Pen Press.

Dr. Catherine Farro, or “Shroud,” as she is known online, is a 40-year-old paraplegic. She works in a virtual reality tank on the security team for a large discount store chain. Friday, payday, she is attacked in the virtual world, where violent hackers run rampant. …

Way to go Jim! Huge congrats.