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Blog Details for "ThansCorner"
ThansCornerThansCornerNews articles, musings, coldfusion, technology, gadget and web design discoveries, code snippets, and Than's commentary on the news of the day - a filter of the news and web through my lens of interest. Not a journal Not a diary. Just commentary. Articles
Dinosaurs
2010-10-09 02:33:00 When I read blogs like Engadget, I skim past all of the laptops and only stop to read about fun things like gadgets and mobile devices. That other stuff has reached a stagnant point where there’s not really much that can be done to make it interesting. I need my toys to be exciting! More About: Technology , Electronics
The economy?s okay, it just needs some time?
2010-10-08 23:07:00 We’ve been working through our ups and downs for a few years now but I think we’re headed the right direction. As a country, we’ve spent too much and saved too little over time and that made this situation much worse than it might’ve been. Putting our intelligence to use, we as individuals and companies ... More About: Economy , Culture , Finance , Time
Employees jumping ship is?.good?
2010-06-11 01:10:00 More employees jump ship as economy improves (AP) This is excellent news. The fact that people have enough confidence to quit their current jobs in search of new ones is incredibly heartening. As we worked our way out of this recession, companies cut back on everything they possibly could to get the bottom line out ... More About: Finance , Employees , Good
Search for Google MyMaps
2010-06-05 21:53:00 When looking for something in Google Maps, sometimes it’s nice to browse. Say you’re looking for a campground in a certain area, or all of the restaurants in a city, or the location of the nearest amusement park or apartments nearby. Or say you’re curious about all of the nuclear waste repositories in the world ... More About: Search
Distraction and Web browsing through life
2010-06-05 20:35:00 I heard an interview the other day with Nicholas Carr, author of the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. The basic idea is that the brain is a flexible machine that grows and improves itself based on how it is used. If you spend a lot of time practicing an ... More About: Education , Technology , Life , Productivity , Browsing
A Whole New World of Photography
2010-05-26 01:27:00 I’ve got a new DSLR and it’s a pretty exciting to finally have so much power and so many features at my disposal after all these years. I ended up going with the Nikon D5000 and I’ve been very happy with it thus far. Take a look at some of my new photos at ThansCorner Photo ... More About: Photography , World , New World
Google Public Data Visualizations
2010-04-24 23:10:00 I was thinking to myself this afternoon that it’d be wonderful to have a Google Maps or Google Finance -style view of economic data. What have unemployment numbers looked like recently and historically, for instance? Well, boy was I happy to find that there is exactly such a thing. Google Public Data provides an interface ... More About: Culture
What?s the market going to do?
2010-04-24 22:49:00 I started investing in August of 2008 – right before the crash for those keeping track. I watched my investment shrink by as much as 40% over the course of those six months, wishing I’d waited a few months to put money into the market. Since then, I’ve made back those losses and made some ... More About: Finance , Market
Adobe Photoshop CS5 Content-Aware Joke
2010-03-27 22:31:00 Content-aware is like the hand of God applied to Photoshop image editing. Simply select a region, hit the delete key, let the software chew on it for awhile, and whamo! It “interpolates” the background content that should be there… Real or not? Take a look for yourself. Content-awareness demo 1 Content-awareness demo 2 I’m actually ... More About: Adobe , Joke , Content , Adobe Photoshop
Stuff
2010-03-27 19:54:00 We are built to accumulate and collect stuff. We’re wired to want things and validate ourselves based on what we’ve got…car, house, gadgets, and so on. As a tech person, I’ve built up the typical boxes of cables (Composite, USB, headphones, etc.), most of which I’ll never use. It reaches a point where it starts ... More About: Life , Stuff
Global Warming ? Straight to the facts, please.
2009-12-19 22:26:00 I’m reminded over and over again how maddeningly unproductive arguments become when the participants throw around unsubstantiated claims and figures. It seems like this is happening more and more in a fast-paced society where no one has the time to dig into the details of an issue. I’m as guilty as the next person of ... More About: Science , Politics , Global Warming , Nature , Facts
How cranes are assembled
2009-09-14 23:18:00 This is really cool. How cranes are assembled is one of those things that would never have occurred to me to think about. As it turns out, it’s a pretty complex and creative affair. Engineers must have spent some serious time thinking through the implications of trying to ratchet such a monstrous and durable item ... More About: Video , Technology
Teaching light to travel around objects
2009-07-31 22:02:00 Looking for an invisibility cloak or a car that blends right into its surroundings? Researchers at Boston College have managed to use what they call ‘metamaterials’ to instruct a beam of light to follow particular pathways. The researchers accomplished their feat by developing a much more precise set of instructions, which create a grid-like roadmap ... More About: Science , Technology , Travel , Teaching , Light
Drive better, save money and help the environment
2009-07-12 06:48:00 (Source eartheasy.com) With auto makers such as General Motors hesitant to adopt fuel efficient designs and paying dearly for it, it’s time to start stepping up to do something about the problem. Though gas prices have dropped down to a pretty reasonable level, the memory of prices greater than $4.00 a gallon is still all ... More About: Environment , Finance , Money , Save Money , Drive
Twitter OAuth for PHP
2009-07-10 20:11:00 For anyone writing a PHP Twitter App to interact with the Twitter API, TwitterOAuth is an incredibly helpful piece of open source code. It handles the secure authentication through OAuth, and then includes function calls for using that authenticated status to carry out any desired GET or POST exchange with the Twitter API. The project ... More About: Programming , Web Design
Stepping Back
2009-07-08 20:00:00 I read a blog post here a few days ago outlining self-imposed ‘internet free zones’ where you choose to disconnect for the sake of focus and freedom from distraction. As I sit on the north shore of Lake Superior at Neys Provincial Park, utterly out of touch with the outside world, I am overwhelmed by ... More About: Life , Productivity , Back , Psychology
Google Chrome AutoRefresh Tabs
2009-06-16 18:16:00 There are a number of plugins for Firefox that I use regularly to schedule regular refreshes on pages like Google Finance that I like to keep current throughout the day. In its infancy, Chrome does not have a built in way of doing this. I found a nice solution here on a forum, posted by ... More About: Tabs
DustyTunes Music Collection Visualization
2009-06-05 19:01:00 Ever wanted to let a friend look through your iTunes music library remotely? Dusty Tunes provides a quick and easy way to index and list your library online. An easy alphabetical listing by Author allows anyone with the proper link to peruse your music collection. Once there, guests can browse, search, and then ... More About: Music , Visualization
Facebook Plugin for Pidgin Chat Client
2009-06-05 18:40:00 Pidgin is a fantastic way to connect with AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google and ICQ contacts. With the help of this plugin, however, Pidgin can connect with Facebook chat as well. I’m pretty sick of facebook’s mess of a website as they’ve added on more and more complex features. I use Pidgin with this plugin to ... More About: Chat , Plugin
Planning your next room
2009-05-29 22:37:00 Have you ever tried cutting out little paper furniture and laying them out on graph paper to plan a space? I’ll be moving to Madison, WI in July so I find myself trying to design an entirely new apartment. Autodesk Project Dragonfly provides a really nice way to lay things out and move them around ... More About: Planning , Room
ReadAir Google Reader Desktop Client
2009-05-28 23:40:00 A cool Adobe Air application designed to display Google Reader posts in a clean 0SX-themed desktop client. It’s not perfect yet (glitches, disappearing scrollbars on occasion) but it’s a project worth keeping an eye on. Download at: http://code.google.com/p/readair/ (note: requires installation of Adobe Air) More About: Desktop , Google Reader
Power Chrome: Keyboard Shortcuts and Omnibar Info Commands
2009-05-28 23:27:00 In addition to the extensions described in the previous post, Chrome includes functionality for a few helpful keyboard shortcuts and diagnostic/status information about browser operations. Keyboard Shortcuts : Many of these are well known but they are all incredibly helpful CTRL-F6 or ALT-d: Select the URL in the address bar CTRL-SHIFT-N: New incognito window SHIFT-ESC: ... More About: Google , Web Design , Power , Info
Power Chrome: Chrome Extensions
2009-05-28 22:58:00 This is the first in a series of several posts outlining ways to take advantage of lesser-known Chrome features. To try out the most recent development version of Chrome, you will need to make a few easy changes to your installation. (img src: popandpolitics.com) Instructions: download the Chrome channel switcher here after installing and running ... More About: Google , Web Design , Power , Extensions
Typing Upside-down
2009-02-25 04:21:00 ¡??q? uo p??oq??? ? ?nq ? ???? ?u?…? ?s?? ??? s? s??? It’s stupid but cute. In the extended alphabet sets of, there is a vast selection of letters. Among these are those that can be used to model normal english characters upside-down. This site has a script for converting text and a key of ... More About: Web Design , Websites , Typing
Buffer ? A data stream for the brain
2009-02-17 00:37:00 After many revisions on the basic to-do list idea, I’ve settled on what is essentially a buffer. I love immersing myself in information – books, music, podcasts, blogs, traditional media, emails, radio, newspaper, tv, etc. but there’s just too much to do justice to. If I tried to find a straight path through the mess, ... More About: Organization , Data , Productivity , Stream , Brain
ASCII Star Wars
2009-02-08 22:35:00 This is ancient and probably old news to everyone out there, but I just discovered this text animation of Star Wars : A New Hope. It’s nothing incredibly special but I found it incredible that after more than 7 years they’re still hosting and running this server. Click here to see the animation If that doesn’t work: ... More About: Video
Make Magazine
2009-01-25 00:08:00 So I found this site. It’s a magazine me and my friends found and it basically has projects in which you use stuff you might find at home and MAKE it into something. They give step-by-step instructions that have been helpful to me sometimes. You can got to their volumes and find an issue ... More About: Projects , Magazine , Make , Hands On
iTunes Plugins ? Cleaning House
2009-01-24 19:11:00 I like to keep my iTunes organized but as it’s grown, there’s just not time to do justice to the job. That’s where iTunes Scripts come in. Apple has made it possible to write scripts for windows that access things like playlists, albums, songs, song info, the iPod and more. Using JavaScript, Perl, C#, etc. ... More About: Software , Music , House , Itunes , Cleaning
Quite an Epic Day
2009-01-21 18:47:00 Yesterday’s inauguration was about more than Obama’s presidency. The country came together to close the door on years of political partisanship, and to remind ourselves once again that it is the American people that make the country great. It is the joining together of individuals from all over the country and from diverse backgrounds and ... More About: News , Politics
Filling a tech job slot
More articles from this author:2009-01-19 19:17:00 New to the field of computer science, I set out this month to find myself a job for after graduation in the Spring. As a new graduate, I’ve been looking for entry-level positions into the field. As my search grew, I became more and more astounded by the degree to which it was impossible to ... More About: Software , Technology , Tech 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 |
