- Tor’s e-book giveaway: Someone is WRONG on the Internet
- Tor books recently gave away a batch of free e-books as publicity for the new Tor.com. Many of the books were of the “first in series” variety. Some folks expected to be able to buy the sequels at Tor.com when it launched, and weren’t happy to find they could not. A representative from Tor responded, and it seems thing got a bit heated. An interesting look at an unintended side effect of “free” (be sure to read the comments).
- Zombies attack musician, everyone laughs (including musician)
- JoCo attacked by Zombies an the 2008 New Media Expo
- It’s a tasty thing
- J. Dack posits “Scalzi’s Law”. I doubt this will be disproved any time soon.
- Ballantine Books to Publish Book Inspired by the Webcomic Garfield Minus Garfield
- I enjoy the heck out of “Garfield Minus Garfield”, but I assumed it would go the way of “Dylan Hears a Who”. I applaud Jim Davis and Ballantine Books for embracing the comic strip remix rather than issuing the standard cease and desist notice.
- PDTool
- A sliderule to help determine copyright status.
- A Talk with JoCo
- Five part interview with Jonathan Coulton (both mp3s and transcripts are available).
Tag: video
Links of Interest (June 25th 2008 through July 16th 2008)
- Digital Dickens: How Scott Sigler is changing the way we read
- The Independent (UK) covers the upcoming UK release of Scott Sigler’s “Infected”.
- Leo Laporte Does 24 Hours of iPhone to Over a Quarter Million Viewers
- I always find Leo entertaining. I tuned into this a few times and was amazed at how even with numerous technical faults and no sleep he kept things interesting.
- Human Mirror
- Improve Everwhere fills a subway with identical twins creating a human mirror, and messing with peoples minds.
- Interview: Gaiman, Zelazny and More Coming To Your iPod
- An interview with Steve Feldberg, content director for Audible’s science-fiction/fantasy line Audible Frontiers who have been releasing some very exciting audiobooks (including the upcoming release of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories)
- Story of a Peanut: The TiVo Remote’s Untold Past, Present and Future
- Fascinating history of the TiVo remote.
“Brave Men Run” Web-a-thon Tomorrow
[audio:http://www.mwsmediapodcasts.com/media/bmr/bmr_071308_live_webathon_promo.mp3]
Sovereign Summer Sunday, July 13, 2008
Tomorrow, Sunday July 13th, Matthew Wayne Selznick‘s Novel Brave Men Run — A Novel of the Sovereign Era is being released in a all new paperback from Swarm Press, and he’s asking everyone who can to buy the book this Sunday from Amazon.com. To promote the occasion Matthew will be streaming live video throughout the day tracking the books progress on the Amazon.com charts.
A Teen Movie / Comic Book Mash-up
Brave Men Run is the story of Nate Charters. Born different, unsure of his origins, he’s an outcast at Abbeque Valley High School, a self-proclaimed “boy freak” with few friends and low self-esteem. When the Sovereign Era dramatically dawns, Nate finds himself in a quest to discover the truth: is he more than he seems, a misfit in a miraculous and powerful new minority… or something else entirely?
All New, All Free Sovereign Era Content
Every hour on the hour from 10am Eastern until 5pm Eastern Matthew will be reading brand new short stories set in the universe of Brave Men Run by J.C. Hutchins, Mur Lafferty, Nathan Lowell, Matt Wallace, J.R. Blackwell, P.G. Holyfield, and Jared Axelrod.
You can find more information about the the web-a-thon and what Matthew hopes to achieve here. I will be there! Will you?
Links of Interest (May 9th 2008 through May 29th 2008)
- IETester
- IETester is a tool that runs the rendering and javascript engines from IE8b1, IE7, IE6, and IE5.5 in a single process so you can see how each one mangles your site in it’s own unique way (currently in beta).
- POC : Implementing HTML 5 Video Element using JavaScript and Flash
- A proof of concept allowing use of the ‘video’ tag from the HTML5 draft spec, and having it work, even though browsers don’t yet support it.
- Audible.com and Blackstone Audio Royalties
- SFFAudio shares some information from Robert J. Sawyer on the royalties he receives from audiobooks.
- Characteristic Confusion
- While investigating line-height Eric Meyer used font-family: Webdings to display “Oy!” (Webdings doesn’t contain ‘O’, ‘y’, or ‘!’). Firefox 3 unexpectedly displayed “Oy!”, which, it seems, is technically correct, leaving him asking “which is less correc
- Growl for Windows – alpha now available
- Growl is one of the three apps that excited me enough to buy a Mac, and it’s one I really miss when I’m on my Windows box.
Links of Interest (April 10th 2008 through April 22nd 2008)
- Matthew Wayne Selznick Signs Book Deal
- Author and Podcaster Matthew Wayne Selznick signed a deal with Swarm Press to re-issue his novel “Brave Men Run” in paperback. Congratulations Matt!
- Take notes during phone calls with friends and family
- One of those “that should have been obvious” suggestions. I’ve conditioned my brain to filter out most things that aren’t useful to me right now. This doesn’t mean I’m not interested in people’s anecdotes, and schedules, it just means I’m unlikely to remember them without some reminder.
- Ajaxian Featured Tutorial: Hacking transparent PNG support into IE6 with IE PNG Fix, CSS and jQuery
- Ah, IE6. I’m pretty good at getting it to do what I want, but it’s very existence makes most of the things I have to do harder than they should be. This tutorial deals with one of the harder issues, PNG transparency in positioned background images.
- YouTube – Sigler Book Tour (Seattle Q&A) Part2
- In the second part of the video Scott covers such diverse topics as Sci-Fi Channel’s lack of foresight and how when it appears he has made a mistake it is actually sabotage by J.C. Hutchins.
- Sigler Book Tour (Seattle Q&A) Part1
- I’m not lucky enough to live near any of the book stores Scott Sigler was signing at, but luckily Natalie Metzger captured this video of one of the Q & A sessions.
Links of Interest (January 31st 2008 through February 19th 2008)
- Crime podcast novel gets HUGE boost in advertising
- Video of a digital billboard advertising for Seth Harwood’s “Jack Wakes Up”
- The parseInt gotcha
- I’m pretty sure once you’ve been hit by this parseInt() behavior in javascript you never forget it, but if you haven’t you should learn about it now before you do.
Tags: javascript, parseInt,
- CSS Tools: Reset CSS
- Eric Meyer’s Reset style-sheet (now in its permanent home, with versions numbers). Including this should reduce browser inconsistencies, and help you not to rely on undefined default behaviors.
- CSS Tools: Diagnostic CSS
- Eric Meyer’s diagnostic.css (now in its permanent home). Including this stylesheet will highlight elements that are incomplete and may be degrading the user experience.
- Jason Bateman Confirms “Arrested Development” Movie Talks
- I cannot begin to express how much I hope this comes to pass.
- Amazon acquires Audible for $300 million
- This caught be by surprise. Hopefully it will remain mostly unchanged, although adding stereo support to all the stereo BBC programs they carry would be nice.
Links of Interest (January 28th 2008 through January 30th 2008)
- jQuery Validation plugin overview
- Examples of how to use the jQuery Validation plugin 1.2 to provide unobtrusive Javascript validation to forms.
- The Dissing of SF
- Ever have someone ask you for a favor and simultaneously insult your career? Science Fiction author Robert J. Sawyer had this happen twice in one hour, and he posted his responses.Tags: Robert J. Sawyer, Science-Fiction,
- JavaScript Pretty Date
- John Resig has released a prettyDate Javascript library that can take strings like “2008-01-28T20:24:17Z” and turn them into “2 hours ago”. It works standalone or as a jQuery plugin.
- JavaScript Memory Leak Detector
- Paolo Severini of Microsoft’s Global Product Development team has released a utility to help find Javascript memory leaks in IE. It can be set to detect things that would leak in IE6, things that would leak in IE7, or actual leaks.
- Getting HTML 5 styles in IE 7+
- Possibly the most interesting thing to come out of the X-UA-Compatible discussions was this method for allowing IE7+ to apply styles to elements it doesn’t support.
- Write to Done
- A friend (thanks Kate) recommended this spin off of zenhabits.net which is billed as “Unmissable articles on writing. Twice weekly.” So far it’s living up to it’s promise.
- MD044 – Stan Lee Interview
- Veronica Belmont interviews Stan Lee on Mahalo Daily. I never get tired of seeing interviews with Stan Lee. Maybe it’s his voice.
Links of Interest (January 8th 2008)
- An Interface of One’s Own
- Virginia Heffernan covers alternatives to Microsoft Word for writers including Scrivener (my personal favorite), Ulysses, WriteRoom, and Nisus Writer.
- Future of Ajax.NET Professional
- With the release of VS2008 and .NET 3.5 Michael Schwarz is ending development on Ajax.NET Professional (an alternate Ajax toolkit for ASP.NET that predates Microsoft’s own).
- The Secret Lair
- An all new podcast hosted by Chris Miller and Kris Johnson.
- The transformation of a writer with Mur Lafferty
- Wayne Sutton interviews Mur Lafferty about social media (video).
- IE7.js version 2.0 (beta)
- Dean Edwards IE7.js has been updated after a long period of inactivity. The new version is split in two files IE7.js brings IE5+ into the same level of compliance as IE7, while IE8.js contains further standards compliance fixes beyond what IE7 currently
Links of Interest (August 24th 2007 through August 31st 2007)
- Science Fiction Writers of America abuses the DMCA – Boing Boing
- The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America invoked the DMCA to request works be removed from Scribd even though in a number of cases they had no right to do so, including Creative Commons licensed work.
- Consumer Reports says ‘keep that car’
- Driving one car for 15 years is cheaper than buying a new one ever 5 years. Nice to see I’ve been doing the right thing all this time.
- YUI Theater ? Joseph Smarr: ?High-Performance JavaScript: Why Everything You?ve Been Taught is Wrong?
- Video of Joseph Smarr’s talk on High-Performance JavaScript.
- 30+ Firefox Add-ons for Web Developers & Designers
- Nice collection of Firefox extensions useful for web developers and/or designers.
- Redirection – Manage 301 redirections without modifying Apache
- Wordrpess 2.1+ plugin to handle redirects. Looks very full featured.
- eTextbook seller fails logic test
- Evo points out what I assume is a hilarious misuse of survey data. CafeScribe is supplying a “book” scented scratch and sniff sticker to customers because people like the way books smell.
Links of Interest (July 21st 2007 through August 3rd 2007)
- Official iPhone Tool
- This looks somehow familiar.
- Math Book Helps Girls Embrace Their Inner Mathematician
- Interview with Danica McKellar (Winnie Cooper from “The Wonder Years”) about her new book: Math Doesn’t Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math and not Break a Nail
- Sandbox Designs Competition » The Designs
- Gallery of entries for the Sandbox Designs Competition. All entries are the same XHTML styled with CSS.
- Fisher-Price recalls 1M toys
- If you have any Dora or Sesame Street toys in your home you want to be aware of this. We do. A lot of them. Oddly the online recall only lets you return six items. Not sure exactly what they expect us to do with the rest.
- AjaxRain – Ajax/Javascript/Dhtml examples and demos to download
- Interesting site. Lacks search. I recommend using the “Tag Cloud” to navigate, but be sure to scroll down after clicking a tag because it looks like nothing happened.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events ::: NOW IN PAPERBACK!
- Are you made fainthearted by the work of Lemony Snicket? Does the thought of strange new siblings unnerve you? Your answers likely reveal the following brief video to be ill-suited for your personal use.
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