Author Archives: Ben

SOPA Roundup

Here are a few smart things people are saying about SOPA and PIPA. Jeff Atwood gets at the key political takeaway: So yes, join us in fighting the obvious insanity of legislation like SOPA and PIPA that threaten the open, … Continue reading

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Coal Energy Drink: Keeps You Running Until It All Runs Out

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The Paradox of Backyard Hens

James McWilliams on some problems with keeping backyard chickens. For those without the fortitude to self-slaughter, keeping older hens as companion animals is also an option. This choice, too, has a downside–one that applies to the chickens while they’re laying … Continue reading

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Rushkoff on Unemployment

Douglas Rushkoff has a great piece on CNN about whether we ought to view unemployment as a problem. This reminds me of Robert Anton Wilson’s RICH Economy, written thirty years ago and seeming more prescient all the time. America is … Continue reading

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What I learned from reading the Android user manual

I love my Nexus One Android phone and, in general, I’ve found the user interface to be very intuitive. However, I recently discovered that there’s a 340-page user manual for Android. I decided to read the whole damn thing and … Continue reading

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“I’m Vegan” Documentary Shorts

My friend Eric Prescott has posted the first five of his I’m Vegan profiles. Eric traveled the country and filmed interviews with vegans from all walks of life. There are many more to come and they’ll all be on Youtube … Continue reading

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Memory will be the real performance bottleneck on your VPS

This well-done benchmark comparison of several Virtual Private Server vendors gives me warm and fuzzies that I chose Linode for my new hosting provider. However, the benchmarks chosen mostly test CPU performance and the bottleneck when hosting a dynamic web … Continue reading

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‘We Are All Connected’ (ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye)

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Carl Sagan – ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)

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Implementing Markdown with Regular Expressions

Jeff Atwood has a post about something I’m intimately with, implementing a subset of Markdown using regular expressions. After years of tweaking and user contributions, the regexps in the Markdown Vim syntax file are now so complex, even I don’t … Continue reading

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New Hosting

I’ve finally finished moving this site to a new hosting provider, which was one of the things keeping me from posting lately. Expect blogging activity to resume shortly.

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backgammon free casino money free craps game play free black jack craps video poker strategy play black jack online how to win video poker casino game online uk best casino online casino secure online gambling jackpot casino online casino black … Continue reading

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The RIAA is halting file-sharing lawsuits and instead hopes ISPs will do its dirty work for it. The new tack seems even more nefarious to me. We need collective licensing.

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Funny excerpt from Carrie Fisher’s new autobiography.

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Nissan’s plan for all-electric roll-out.

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