firehose

When Adron Chambers was left off the Cardinals’ World Series roster Wednesday to create a spot for the team’s RBI leader, Allen Craig, Red Sox utility outfielder Quintin Berry realized that he was the sole African-American representation on baseball’s grandest stage.

What's the difference btw the Tea Party and Silicon Valley? One is a cabal of secessionist sociopaths, & the other is a political movement.

If you're a fan of the 15-perf/70mm film-based format exhibited on giant IMAX theater screens, you'd best enjoy it while you can. Imax told investors that the digital transition is continuing at its big-screen theaters, with AMC's massive Lincoln Square … more »

1920s Popular Mechanics and the golden age of illustration. Def stealing that car front-end for Symbiosis.

What does it mean to be romantic? It’s a question that comes up multiple times over the course of “The Romance Resonance,” an episode that looks at how the characters in The Big Bang Theory show affection toward their significant others. For Howard, romance is writing a cute song to celebrate the anniversary of his first date with Bernadette. For Leonard, romance is seeing the box full of memorabilia Penny has kept over the course of their relationship. And for Sheldon, romance is hearing someone tell him that he’s right when everyone else is saying he’s wrong. The episode doesn’t take the most original path to reaching these conclusions, but the payoffs of the three plots make up for any stumbles at the start.

The three stories all begin in predictable places: Howard wants to find the perfect way to celebrate his anniversary, Penny wants to ...

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why

Washington Post

Former spy chief gets eavesdropping lesson Danbury News Times WASHINGTON (AP) — Former National Security Agency chief Michael V. Hayden learned a lesson about eavesdropping aboard an Amtrak train to Newark: Don't talk on the phone where people can hear you. Hayden, who also once headed the CIA, began ... Inside former NSA chief Michael Hayden's 'interview' with an Amtrak live-tweeterWashington Post (blog) Former NSA chief's private talk gets tweetedFond du Lac Reporter Man Live-Tweets as Ex-NSA Boss Bashes ObamaNewser Slate Magazine (blog) all 106 news articles »

Something felt a bit off about this week’s Apple event.

Part of it was the lack of surprises, which isn’t Apple’s fault. All of the product upgrades, while nice, were incremental and predictable. None of the pricing was a surprise. In fact, the only unexpected product announcement is the zombie iPad 2 sticking around for another year, shamelessly at the same price as last year.

The presenting executives seemed a bit off, too. Their energy was flat, as if Apple wasn’t particularly excited about these announcements either (with the notable exception of Craig Federighi, who was properly energized and most polished). Most of the jokes and digs at competitors were awkward. The lines were so tightly scripted that the presenters often stumbled off-script slightly, and rather than rolling with it naturally, they’d just jump back and awkwardly retry the line. Nothing about the speeches seemed natural — at best, the presentation felt uptight.

The product messaging was almost entirely just rehashing old talking points. We’ve seen the Dots video for months.¹ We know Microsoft’s tablets suck, and the market leader doesn’t need to kick them while they’re this down. We know that effectively nobody browses the web on their Android tablets full of stretched-out phone apps. We know the iPad is number one in customer satisfaction. Hardware, software, services, technology, and liberal arts, right?

We know that people are using iPads in all sorts of different ways. Look, firefighters are launching space shuttles with an iPad! Farmers are building wind turbines and composing songs! And Apple can’t wait to see what we do with our iPads.

But they already know. Everyone knows what people do with iPads, because iPads have been heavily used in public for over three years. It looks like most people use iPads for basic web tasks (email, browsing, Facebook), reading, and, importantly, casual gaming. Going into the holiday season, in which tons of iOS devices are usually sold that will primarily be casual-gaming devices, Apple hardly even mentioned games.² Is that because they don’t need to, since games are already a popular iPad use, or because they’re not in touch with one of the biggest reasons people buy iPads?

Suppose the event worked, and we’re all jazzed up to buy the new iPads. Well, too bad — you can’t even preorder either of them yet. The iPad Air will be released 10 days after the event with no preorders, and the one likely to be in much higher demand — the Retina Mini — doesn’t even have a release date yet, except “later in November”.³

Mavericks, iLife, iWork, and the incrementally updated Retina MacBook Pros look good, but I can’t help but feel like the event wasn’t up to Apple’s standards.

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

@jhw (and @monstermash) (but mostly @jhw)

Zoom Info

Camera LGE Nexus 4
ISO 1500	Aperture f/2.65
Exposure 1/16th	Focal Length 4mm

Zoom Info

Camera LGE Nexus 4
ISO 1700	Aperture f/2.65
Exposure 1/16th	Focal Length 4mm

Original Source

Elizabeth E. Coker may forever be known as the “texting judge,” but her notoriety will soon be all that is left of her days on the bench of the 258th District Court of Polk, Trinity, and San Jacinto Counties. Coker signed an “AGREEMENT TO RESIGN FROM JUDICIAL OFFICE IN LIEU OF DISCIPLINARY ACTION” with the State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

According to the terms of the agreement, Coker was to send a formal letter of resignation to Governor Rick Perry on Monday, stating her resignation will be official December 6. Until then, she has agreed to take a leave of absence, and will cease to perform any duties connected with her position. As of December 6, the third-generation Texas judge is officially and permanently stripped of all judicial power, and is even prohibited from performing a wedding.

Original Source

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”

- Kurt Vonnegut (via howstuffworks)

[twitter]

fromsqualortoballer:

Earlier this week I had the good fortune of attending a small private event at the Gustin HQ in San Francisco. I expected to see the normal crowd there -  namely, bloggers and clothing enthusiasts talking about recent acquisitions, new collections, and how the weather was affecting their clothing choices. I was surprised to find that this was not the case at all. Instead, the event was full of movers and shakers from a huge variety of industries, all with some link to the early days of this company. I met venture capitalists, vintners, furniture designers, restaurateurs, brewers, techies, and even a gentleman who created a charming app called “Bang with Friends.” Needless to say, the conversation was quite fascinating. I met a diverse and interesting group of people that night, and it was great fun. As usual, I forgot to take many pictures because I was too immersed in deep conversation and spending time at the bar.

If you’d like to check out Gustin’s wares in person and partake in a fun evening of socializing, RSVP in this styleforum thread for our next meetup on Nov. 7th. It will be located at their HQ in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco (right down the street from my apartment!). I’d love to see you all there.

A Korean restaurateur, trying to make his menu more accessible for foreign customers, came up with bewildering English translations of some dishes.

엉터리 한식 메뉴판/MBC 방송캡쳐

1. 동태 찌게 [dong’tae jjigae: dynamic stew]
dongtae 동태(凍太) or "frozen pollack" (a kind of fish) was misinterpreted as the homonym 動態 and translated as "dynamic"; “jjigae” means a hot pot.

2. yuk'hoe 육회(肉膾) or "minced raw beef" was treated as the homonym 六回 and translated as "six times"

3. gom 곰 ("a thick broth made of cooked meat") + tang 탕 (汤) or "soup" (i.e., "broth-soup", a beef soup that has been boiled for a long time [usually more than 3-4 hours] and served with rice) became "bear thang", because gom is homophonous (okay, homographic) with the Korean word for "bear" (there is no Chinese character for this morpheme)

Summary notes on gom 곰:

a. a Korean verb that means "to boil for a long time"

b. a Korean noun meaning "bear"; if they used the Sinitic morpheme xióng 熊, it would be pronounced "ung" in Korean, but the Korean word 곰 gom is preferred

In chart form:

Korean dishes	meaning	Romanization *	Homonym	Google Translate  10/24/2013	Mistranslation (menu)
동태  (凍太)	Frozen pollack	dong-tae  (RR) tongt’ae (MR)	動態: (the enemy’s) movement	Dynamics	Dynamics
동태(凍太) 찌개	Frozen pollack stew	dong-tae-jji-gae (RR) tongt’ae tchigae (MR)		Dynamic stew	Dynamic stew
육회 (肉膾)	Korean-style raw beef	yu-koe (RR) yukhoe (MR)	六 (six) 回 (times)	sashimi	Six times
곰탕	Beef-bone soup	gom-tang (RR) komt’ang (MR)	곰 gom = bear 탕 tang = soup	Oxtail soup	Bear thang (typo of tang)

*Romanization: Revised Romanization of Korean (RR), McCune-Reischauer (MR)

The above are examples of faulty English translations of Korean dishes. It seems that restaurant owners favor Google Translate to create English versions of menu items, resulting in weird translations such as 동태찌개 as "dynamic stew". Although Google Translate often offers grouped synonyms and prioritization by frequency, it does not reliably do this to every word in Korean. "동태," for example, yields only one translation, "dynamics", in Google Translate. The South Korean government wants to clarify errors in English-language descriptions of Korean dishes and is currently working on a uniform standard for the wording of Korean dishes to facilitate the globalization of Korean food.

[Hat tip Hiroshi Kumamoto; thanks to Haewon Cho, Bill Hannas, Daniel Sou, and Minju Choi]

staceythinx:

Crack open this skull cookie jar from my Thinx Gifts store for some tasty Halloween treats. 

I'm a proponent of services like FastMail. They charge a modest price for a service I use a hundred times a day.¹ Because FastMail does one thing, it's far superior to using the generic email services provided by most hosting companies.² FastMail web access is better than any other web client I have used and the little options like file upload and mail alias' are terrific.

But maybe you're held back by the effort required to move your email to a new host. If that's the case, here's a walkthrough of migration and configuration for a new FastMail account.³

Working with Archives

I have about 10 years of email archives on my server. That's excessive but it's useful at times and it's never been a problem keeping it around. As the archive grew, storage costs shrank and search got better.

I've stored this archive in iCloud for several years without an issue. But I wanted the powerful query options available on FastMail and the webmail access is better than iCloud.

Login to the FastMail web interface and switch to the Account page.

On the right side of the page, visit the Migrate IMAP link.

Once you supply all of your login credentials for the mail server containing your archive (iCloud in my case), just click the Migrate button.

Sure, you could drag and drop using the Apple Mail app, but by using the FastMail tool, you can go right back to using your Mac and email. They will read in your entire email archive and rebuild the folder structure too. When it's done you will get an email with the status. Migrating almost 7GB of email took about 2 hours for me.

I migrated my folder structure to a new FastMail subfolder called "Cabinet". This lets me collapse the entire archive list with one click in the web app.

You can perform this process with multiple servers and merge folders together. One warning: if you migrate the same server more than once then you will generate duplicates of every message.

Under the Settings you'll find the folder controls. This will allow you to keep old archives around but hide them from the folder list view. Folders can also be moved, renamed and deleted from this screen.

For even greater control, switch to the Advanced settings by clicking the link in the upper right corner of the standard Settings screen.

In the Advanced settings there are additional options such as Sort order and easier folder organization.

Click "Edit" next to a folder to get a bonanza of nerdy options.

You might be asking what's the use of all of these options on each individual folder. If you have several mail rules that move messages around before they ever hit your inbox, then it's pretty handy to enable auto-purge, Spam-learning and a move-to-trash link. These options mean that you are not limited to a single inbox, and it all happens server-side.

Aliases

FastMail allows you to setup an email domain for your primary address. You can also create email aliases that funnel into your primary account. Mail sent to an alias like junkaccount@fastmail.fm still make it to you at your primary account at dogbuns@mailcan.com. Think of them as mail forwarding accounts using the FastMail domain names. By default, they forward to your primary account but they can also forward to an external account. Or, use a comma separated list of aliases to forward to multiple accounts automatically.

Plus and Subdomain Addresses

In addition to aliases, you can also use "plus" addressing to create new incoming email addresses with privileges. Sending messages to the address username+folder@fastmail.fm automatically routes them to a specific folder.⁴

You can route to nested folders too, but it's a bit awkward: username+folder1.folder2@fastmail.fm. However, FastMail does use a bit of fuzzy logic to find a folder. You can exclude underscores, hyphens and spaces and it will still find the folder.

Subdomain addresses take the format folder@username.fastmail.fm and also deliver the messages right to a specific folder.

When combined with server side rules, these options create a lot of opportunity for keeping the junk out of your face.

Personalities

Personalities are the other side of Aliases. This is the address that recipients see when you send email from FastMail. By default it's your basic account address. You can create as many aliases as you need through the web interface. If you intend to respond to messages sent to an alias, it's a good idea to create a matching personality. Otherwise, you'll receive messages at one address and reply from a different address.

FastMail has a lot of options for Personalities, but it's relatively simple to create a new one.

Here's a nice use, when every store clerk asks for your email address in order to give them money for a can of coke, give them one like this: suckit@username.fastmail.com. Then set the "suckit" folder to mark everything as spam. You just improved your spam filter.

Connecting the Clients

The FastMail web client is top-notch and includes features that native mail apps don't compete with, like complex search operators. But native apps still deliver a better overall experience through access to notifications, offline viewing and inter-app data sharing.

It's fairly simple to connect both Apple Mail.app on the Mac and iOS to FastMail but there are a few options to be aware of.

On the Mac

Create a new Apple Mail account for your chosen FastMail server. It's straight forward. My incoming host is mail.messagingengine.com and the outgoing SMTP host is just the FastMail domain you chose.

If you want to be able to send mail using the "Personalities" you created in FastMail, just add them to the "Email Address" field as a comma separated list.

The only other tweak is to adjust the IMAP Path Prefix setting to "INBOX". If you fail to do this, you'll receive error messages when moving mail between folders.

On iOS

The setup is similar to Mail for the Mac. Add a new account and enter all of your server details. Take special note of two areas in iOS. The MAILBOX BEHAVIORS setting should be configured to point to the appropriate folders on FastMail. Map the deleted items to the Trash and so on.

Adjust the IMAP Path Prefix setting to "INBOX" as before.

The last tip I'll add is that FastMail provides an option for "Alternative Logins." This provides an option to create credentials that do not have access to the settings or to permanently delete mail items. If you're going to access FastMail from a browser on a machine that you share or don't own, this might be a good option.

There are some interesting ideas here, for example, a password that only allows the acccount to be used for 1 hr at a time. It's not something I need but I like the thinking.

Conclusion

I rather like FastMail. This intro just scratches the surface. Server side rules add far more power to what I've described here.