Casual Friday: Link Roundup
Links, you say? Like what the Internet is made of? You’re doing the link thing again? I SMELL A SHARK JUMPING.
No, you don’t. Chill out. I’m the easily excitable one here, not you.
You see, I am a professional web nerd. That means that while you are putting slides together for your big PPT or messing with pivot tables in Excel just to prove to your colleague that you are the Excel Jedi around here, not him, I am bouncing around my RSS reader, five cups of coffee deep, and saving stuff left and right that I find interesting. I’ll spare you the totally nerdy stuff (viz, the Minecraft wiki, into which I am neck deep these days, but DON’T YOU JUDGE ME), but give you the best of the best, because that’s what you deserve. You totally do. You look nice today. Buckle up, because this is going to be a random ride. And those are two words you don’t see together often: random and ride. Am I right?
So yeah. Anyway.
Have you seen the teardown of the iPhone charger, the little white cube that plugs into the wall? It’s amazing in that it’s a super tiny switching power supply that can take AC input between 100 and 240 volts and provide 5 watts of clean 5 volt power. It’s a feat of innovation that people just take for granted.
Ben Valentine’s Perfection is a simple experiment: you draw the most perfect circle you can within the box, then submit it to compare your effort to thousands of others. I would tell you that I did this once and clicked the tab closed, but that would be lying. I did this at least 50 times and eventually totally nailed it. There’s a reason it’s called Perfection, methinks.
Here’s Joe Smith at TEDx Concordia/Portland talking about how to use one paper towel. Like him, I have noticed that when most people use a paper towel roll or dispenser, they take 2–4 towels to dry their hands. (I did this myself until recently.) Smith points out a ‘shake and fold’ method which works exceedingly well, but shaking your hands 12 times at a public sink is a great way to have a stranger jab you with an epi-pen because he thinks you’re going into anaphylactic shock. Go for six shakes and stay out of the hospital is what I say.
James Maher went on a fishing trip and his Fuji X100 camera got soaked in salt water despite being in the ship’s dry bag. The death of fine electronics notwithstanding, it’s amazing how corrosive and invasive salt water is. In the name of investigation, Maher tore apart his X100 to investigate the damage.
This is old news by now, but a show with zefrank is back. Let me be clear about this: zefrank is doing arguably the best work on the web right now. I loved his show during its first go-round, and it’s even better this time. The spirit and missions of the show are uplifting, the presenation is smart, honest, funny and sometimes absurd, and they engage community in a postive way. Ze has a way of getting to the fears all of us have, the insecurities we’re all too afraid to admit. Here’s is episode one, called invocation. If you like what you see, subsequent episodes are on the left hand side. Just keep clicking up the list to watch them. NOTE: there is some language in some of them, so be careful. This is what genius looks like, and I don’t throw about that term casually.
13 things a burglar won’t tell you. I love the tip about keeping your car keys next to your bed and using the remote’s panic button if you need an alarm in the middle of the night.
Have a good weekend, everyone.
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More links:
MIPRO Consulting main website.
