Teleute

It gets really frustrating when my ISP is down or there is some sort of disruption in the telephone lines in my area, which knocks out my ADSL connection. In such an instance it becomes quite a nuisance for me to use any wireless alternative, as the wireless signals in my neighborhood are second to none. Most if not all of us have faced a situation where we have been left stranded with our PC without access to an internet connection. This is particularly the case when we are traveling to a place which is close to Mother Nature, which always seems to deprive us of any chance of online connectivity. Offliberty is a website that allows users to view online content offline to rescue us from such perpetual deprivation. In a nutshell, it only makes online media content available offline. Or in layman’s term, allows one to download the online media (in both audio and video formats) for offline usage.

If you don’t already know, Facebook has a Download Your Information feature (Account => Account Settings => Download a copy of your Facebook data. => Start My Archive => Start My Archive). Until recently, this feature simply bundled your personal data in a large zip file and made it available for download. Unfortunately, it was more of a backup file than something that could be imported by other programs: the data was next to useless. Now, developers can access a user’s Facebook data outside of Facebook and its Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and in a format that’s more consistent with the rest of the Web. Facebook is, however, warning developers that exporting social data from Facebook should be done by asking users to download and submit their Download Your Information archive, rather than using the Facebook Platform. Developers that try to export data from Facebook via Platform apps will have their apps disabled. By adding microformats to the HTML included in the zip file, Facebook is helping users and applications parse the data in a meaningful way.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409) which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing. We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world. Our first product is about the size of a credit card, and is designed to plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. The expected price is $25 for a fully-configured system.

This is a list of pods (Diaspora servers) run by Diaspora community members. Remember, when you join one, you always log in to that site. But you can follow friends on any pod, including the pod run by the project founders at joindiaspora.com. This list is rather static. While it can be used as a reference, we recommend that when you are choosing which pod to sign up for, you also consider: PodUp - sorts pods by uptime and will give you an idea of how stable a given pod is. Podupti.me - similar service to PodUp, run by the fine folks at diasp.org.

Because, guess what, you’re not their customer. You’re their product. It cost millions of dollars to set up a large centralized services like Google or Facebook, and they are going to make that money back by selling to their actual customers. Those would be the people who want to send you targeted advertisements based on the volumes of information that can be collected from your posts and comments, the things you “like” (or “ 1”) and the groups you join. To say nothing of the demographic fields you’ve filled out. And it’s not just corporations trying to sell you porn or popcorn — some of their customers are government agencies who want to keep tabs on citizens to make sure they don’t get too far out of line. They want to know what you think and where you live so that if you think the wrong things, they can do something about it.

Over the next few months we’ll be shutting down a number of products and merging others into existing products as features. The list is below. This will make things much simpler for our users, improving the overall Google experience. It will also mean we can devote more resources to high impact products—the ones that improve the lives of billions of people. All the Googlers working on these projects will be moved over to higher-impact products. As for our users, we’ll communicate directly with them as we make these changes, giving sufficient time to make the transition and enabling them to take their data with them.

2. You don’t have to just Like something — now you can [verb] any [noun]. Remember when all you could do to something on Facebook — a video, a comment, a product, a person — was Like it? Pretty soon that’s going to seem laughably antiquated. The social network has launched Facebook Gestures, which means that Facebook’s partners and developers can turn any verb into a button. So you’ll start seeing the option to tell the world you’re Reading a particular book, for example, or Watching a given movie, or Listening to a certain tune. In turn, as many observers have pointed out, this is likely to lead to an explosion of oversharing — and far more information on your friends’ activities showing up in your news feed than you probably cared to know.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (9 December 1906 – 1 January 1992) was a U.S. Naval officer, and an early computer programmer. She was the developer of the first compiler for a computer programming language; at the end of her service she was the oldest serving officer in the United States Navy.

1. The Police (3)
2. Slash (3)
3. Matchbox Twenty (3)
4. Lucinda Williams (2)
5. Melanie C (2)

Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz

This UK Wild Flower Finder is searchable by colour, month, habitat, number of petals, flower symmetry and includes 1000’s of clear photographs. Plus structural formulae of hundreds of plant compounds: dyes, herbs, poisons, pharmaceuticals, smells, etc. Make sure you stretch the site out horizontally such that you can see the fourth column entitled ‘SUBJECT INDEX’

Application iNap uses your location-aware iPhone to set off an alarm to alert you when you’re nearing your destination. Say, for example, you’re riding the train to work but want to catch some shuteye on the way. Just fire up iNap, set your stop as the destination, and let iNap worry about the rest. You can tweak the alert radius to make sure you’re up in plenty of time, from 0.1 to 100 miles. iNap works with any iPhone, but the results will be most accurate with an iPhone 3G. Also, you’d definitely want to make sure you’ve got a signal near your destination; the app obviously won’t work if it can’t determine where you are. iNap costs $1 from the iTunes App Store.

None of the above indicates any particularly sinister or malevolent intent. The goal of this essay is not to suggest Google has ulterior motives. To the contrary, the amazing services Google provides enrich the lives of millions daily. However, very few of these millions are even faintly aware that they are exchanging very private information about themselves to a corporation which faces little to no regulatory or independent oversight. Google may not have a shadowy basement full of dusty dossiers on every user of their services, but they do have something much more powerful and intimate provided by the users themselves. Despite the huge volume of information you may have given Google in exchange for their services, there is no real way to generate a personal report of what Google knows about you. Most likely some of what Google knows about you not even your closest friend, parent or spouse knows.

On Diaspora it’s possible to format your text in statusmessages, comments and conversations using MarkDown. This page sums up all the allowed formatting codes.