I'm finding my brain is tickled in a special way when I learn of events via Web logs. Or "blogs," in the Net vernacular. Take the most recent big power blackout in the Northeast. Oh, sure, the other Times, CNN, et al, ran some glossy, well-framed shots but they lack the gritty humanity that makes such a story cogent. Take this site, for instance. Because it's a blog, it will certainly be updated by the time you get to it, so scroll down to the Aug. 14 entry. It's loaded with on-the-ground pictures of New Yorkers mostly being nice to each other. Very special.
Forgive me, modem users, for this site absolutely requires high bandwidth to be effective. It's a multimedia rich, Macromedia Flash-enabled educational wonder that might well appeal to your inner nerd. It shows you how things such as airplanes, jelly beans, glass bottles and golf clubs are put together. It's thankfully lacking in arty slickness but has an easy to use, well thought out interface.
Pixel is one of those words we throw around without giving much thought to its origins. Armed with nothing more than a search engine and an ability to click like a demon, I was thrilled to stumble on this page that goes into well written yet painstaking detail on the humble pixel's heritage. Born in 1954 in New Jersey, the then-monochrome marvel went on to gain color attributes and other world-changing properties.
I adore my new Zire 71 PDA. I've been resisting the "build a camera into everything but the fridge" phenomenon because it is, frankly, a stupid trend. But the Zire is a great PDA and also takes funky, low-fi pictures. It coats each with an almost surreal lighting quality that I'd have a hard time duplicating with Photoshop. Mostly because I can't work Photoshop. And in that spirit, consider the cultish Lomo Kompakt camera from a company in the other St. Petersburg. It's so bad it's actually quite good and takes Technicolor-drenched shots in a similar fashion to the Zire. No really good online Zire galleries I'm afraid, but here's one of the best Lomo editions.
I'm obsessed with unsolicited e-mail because it clogs my mail servers and tries to bypass my filtering software. I've tried a white-list approach that was largely unsuccessful and have settled with the rather brilliant SpamAssassin as part of my arsenal. But I was shocked and awed by the sheer number of spam-fighting solutions when browsing this site. If you're deluged with ads to make everything bigger, this well-done site might be just what you need to slim things down.
