Digitivity » Digital Life

ClimateGate II Emails Dumped

Digitivity — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 19:03:00 +0000

Remember the original release of (depending on your perspective) emails hacked or released by a whistleblower regarding global warming research alleged to have been tampered with? Well, now the same folks have released another 5000 emails. The new emails also contain quotes which are likely to prove embarrassing for the scientists involved.

Crowdsourced Occupy Wall St Ad on TV

Digitivity — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:13:03 +0000

Perhaps unhappy with media coverage of late, Occupy Wall St. has come out with an ad being shown on national networks (ESPN, Bloomberg, CBS Sports, Fox News and others). It seems to be either make or break time for the movement after being evicted from Zucotti Park in New York City.

The interesting thing is that the ad was paid for not by George Soros, but by people across the country through a new ad crowdsourcing initiative, LoudSauce. It’s sort of like ChipIn, but for ads:

Is this the future of political advertising? And is it only meant for “progressive audiences” or will conservatives and libertarians take advantage of this approach, too? Will this turn the tide of public opinion?

Google Streetview to Go to Inside Your House

Digitivity — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 17:18:49 +0000

So Google Street View is moving indoors, allowing business to have pictures taken of their shops. But that’s not all.

A little birdie told me Google Street View is also coming to your house. Want to know what’s in the fridge? Don’t get up off the sofa, go to maps.google.com.

Can’t find the kids? Google Live View.

Don’t know where you put your car keys? Don’t worry, volunteers with too much free time will already have labeled every square foot of your abode on WikiMapia.

Want a Free iPad? Go to the Local Library

Digitivity — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:56:04 +0000

Posted in Articles

If you want a free iPad, you might want to check out your local library. It’s not just books they’re loaning out anymore. They expanded a long time ago into lasing CDs. But now they’re also loaning out the devices you need to play them: iPods, iPads, laptops, digital cameras Related posts:Attack of the Linux [...] Related posts:

Eggcorns: Funny and Unintentional Puns

Digitivity — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 17:38:00 +0000

For all intensive purposes, the English language is changing a lot these days. Chock it up to the Worldwide Web and the fact that more and more people are writing these days rather than merely reading. When they write, they write what they’ve heard. But sometimes they’ve heard wrong, and so they write wrong, too.

Linguists are calling such garbled prose “eggcorns“, after the name some people call “acorns”. Once such site that tracks eggcorns is the Eggcorn Database. There are more of its elk, too.

The best way to keep your brain healthy and avoid old-timers’ disease is to exercise it. And what better way than reading about funny eggcorns instead of hack-kneed expressions?

Netflix Kills Qwikster

Digitivity — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 17:24:00 +0000

David Inviglio counts the reasons Netflix killed Qwikster, after having just split up its DVD-rental service into the new company about a month ago:

1. It was going to be hard for people to use both.

2. It didn’t pacify customers.

3. Some customers actually prefer DVD.

4. Netflix split off Qwikster to sell it, but maybe no one wants it.

Now let’s see if they also rollback the price increase.

Google Cache Links Turned Off?

Digitivity — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:25:29 +0000

It used to be whenever you searched for something on Google, there’d be a link “Cache” right next to it. It would go to the Google Cache for the URL result.

But I just noticed that they’re not there anymore. I don’t know how many days (weeks?) it’s been, but it’s not there now, as far as I can tell.

Granted, Google’s always experimenting, sometimes with subsets of the population (even depending on which browser you use) and I can’t say be certain I speak for everybody, but I’m not seeing the links.

It used to be that sites that were particularly touchy about copyrights could set something in robots.txt to turn off caching, but that would only be a site or two in the SERPs, not all. But now, even for innocuous searches like “ibm“, there are no links to the Google cache.

I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere, either.

Anybody have more info? The cache links used to be mighty handy when Random Site X would be unavailable.

Why Netflix is Splitting Itself Into Two: An Oatmeal Parody

Digitivity — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 15:51:00 +0000

Posted in Images

Netflix is being widely panned for its weird and sudden decision to split into two, with one company handling streaming and another DVD rentals. Here’s a well-deserved and funny parody of the whole situation. Related posts:NetFlix Messes Up Again: More Expensive and Harder to Use Related posts:

NetFlix Messes Up Again: More Expensive and Harder to Use

NetFlix Messes Up Again: More Expensive and Harder to Use

Digitivity — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:51:58 +0000

As if it wasn’t enough to raise their rates and then insult customers by referring to the price increase as less than the cost of a latte, Netflix has now split its DVD service into a separate company, Qwikster.

Time highlights how it’ll be harder to use if you want to use both DVD delivery and streaming:

When Hastings says the businesses will be separate, he really means it. They’ll have separate websites, and if you subscribe to both services, you’ll need to manage your queues separately. If you rate or review a movie at Netflix, it won’t show up at Qwikster, and vice-versa. On your credit card statement, you’ll be billed separately by Qwikster and/or Netflix.

HotAir quotes Bill Gurley surmising that the studios forced Netflix to change its pricing model because they wanted a fee for everyone who could access streaming regardless of whether they used it or not. Of course, that’s the one thing that Netfickle’s CEO didn’t mention as the reason for all the changes (which in marketspeak amount to “all this to serve you better.”)

So will you be staying with Netflix or moving to something like Redbox?

Free Webhosting

Digitivity — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 16:29:30 +0000

Well, everyone likes getting something for free. Here’s free webhosting if you want it. (Links below.) The catch?

Well,

There’s no dynamic anything.
No PHP
No MySQL or other database
Not even SSI (server side includes)
No email
No custom domain (you get a subdomain of something like hdfree.in

If you can live with all the above limitations, it’s a great way to speak your mind with straight HTML files. Free and old school.

It’s provided by HostDime, and here are the links for various countries (I don’t think you have to live in that country to sign up, but your free domain will have that country’s country-code top level domain.):

India Brasil Mexico Latin America