Particle systems in OpenGL - GL_POINTS

GL_POINTS with a size pastes a texture at that size centered on the point. Faster than texturing two triangles. OpenGL ES doesn't support glBegin / glEnd, so use glDrawElements instead

Grug - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Resembling a small, striped haystack with a face, he is fascinated by the world around him and solves everyday problems creatively and without fuss."

Don’t get me started on that subject « DadHacker

I've seen software you wouldn't believe. Installer Vise sessions nested five deep...

LRB · Jenny Diski: Diary

Jenny Diski writes a very thought-provoking essay on rape and Roman Polanski. "I was more disgusted by him than I was shamed or diminished. A different zeitgeist, luckily for me." (Warning: quite graphic)

Greens choose moralising crypto-communist for Higgins – Pollytics

Clive Hamilton is terrible. The Greens seem increasingly to be about polarisation and making headlines over good politics. (via liedra)

Energy, Entropy, Enthalpy

Entropy is a measure of the uniformity of energy distribution. Enthalpy equals internal energy plus pressure times volume and not, as I first suspected, entropy with a lisp.

Visible Earth: Solar System Portrait - Earth as 'Pale Blue Dot

Earth is the bright pixel just over half-way down and three-quarters of the way across.

HELLO SEXY WORLD

The best Pokey cartoon ever (liedra is malfunctioning)

GitHub Flavored Markdown - Introduction

Yep, these things bugged me about standard Markdown too. (via daringfireball)

Teensy USB Development Board

Awww, it's really cute!

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you [dive into mark]

Publisher releases book under license that lets other people republish it. Someone does. Publisher freaks. Author gets all sanctimonious about it. My favourite parts: a) "My Zen teacher", b) people here and on Reddit claiming that the second publisher is dishonest and unethical. c) Mark hypocritically writing "Part of choosing a Free license for your own work is accepting that people may use it in ways you disapprove of" but using the GFDL rather than a license that does not impose legally-enforced constraints.

YouTube - Let's Play Super Mario Galaxy - Part 38 - Dusty Dune Galaxy

1) Brit accent, 2) slight lisp, 3) he's a pretty bad player, 4) Cursing and trash talk throughout the playthrough. Hilarious. :) "That was unnecessawily long!"

Kevin Rudd eats biscuit, Twitters about it | The Courier-Mail

"He is wearing an expression of concentration on his face as he breaks the bakery item in two."

It's a gateway drug to a lifetime of depravity! : Pharyngula

Young people are often exposed to temptations and pressures to experiment with things that seem popular. Like PhDs. (Via fark)

Apache CouchDB: The CouchDB Project

Another non-SQL storage option. This one looks really fun! It's document-based, where updating documents is an atomic operation. The guy who started it used to work on Lotus Notes, and was laconic and entertaining on the Stack Overflow podcast.

Using the I2C Bus

They Fight Crime - Television Tropes & Idioms

Found this after trying to explain to a non-native-English speaker why my T-shirt says "Babbage & Lovelace: They fight crime!"

Truth or Consequences, New Mexico - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There is a city in New Mexico named Truth or Consequences.

25 Cent I2C Adapter

Use the Display Data Channel lines of a monitor output for I2C. Clever! I love the brick wall / rainbows and candy graphics.

motz diary: Debug a Native Application for Android

Using gdbserver and gdb for native apps on Android. Found the bug! :)

Is it nerve-wrecking or nerve-racking? - Yahoo! Answers

Schneier on Security: Robert Sawyer's Alibis

"Whenever I visit a tourist attraction that has a guest register, I always sign it. After all, you never know when you'll need an alibi." - Robert J. Sawyer; "whenever I see a tourist attraction with a guest register, I do the same thing. I sign "Robert J. Sawyer, Toronto, ON" -- because you never know when he'll need an alibi." - Bruce Schneier

todbot blog » Blog Archive » Spooky Arduino Projects #4 – Musical Arduino

I'm about to do this, in exactly the same way. :) I'm not really disappointed that I've been beaten though, because I can borrow his MIDI interface code.

Free Online Course Materials | Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey | Highlights for High School

Could be good? (via Catie)

Christopher Smart

Lots of interesting material here, particularly his "paper war".

Amazon.com: How to Avoid Huge Ships (9780870334337): John W. Trimmer: Books

'This book was "written by an old captain who was tired of running over fools in their pleasure boats, and wanted to educate those same fools in a futile effort to save their lives".' (amazon.com review) (fark)

Why I’m Done Making Desktop Applications: MicroISV on a Shoestring

Very thorough article arguing that Web apps are easier to sell because they have fewer potential failure points than desktop software. But a lot of the points he makes against "desktop software" are really points against *Windows shareware*. There is no "looking for download" or "navigating a shopping cart" for downloadable iPhone applications, for example.

Parliament of Australia: Senate: Platypus and Parliament - The Australian Senate in Theory and Practice

Asked the Greens why they continually call for divisions in the Senate, got referred to this book as part of the answer. Not a bad response.

Snow Leopard Automatic Text Correction

Auto text correction on a qwerty keyboard is annoying. I usually know when I make a mistake (because the keyboard gives a lot of tactile feedback), so I start to correct it, only to find that it's been fixed, so I have to resync from however much I've already deleted. This breaks mental flow much more dramatically than just fixing the error. Anyway, the point of this bookmark is that TextEdit does its own corrections in addition to the system wide ones. Turn them off in TextEdit's preferences.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review - Ars Technica

Linking to the middle of the Snow Leopard overview, but this is the best part. Grand Central Dispatch uses "queues" to allocate tasks to system-wide threads, where each task is a closure defined using LLVM's new C closure syntax. Don't need to worry about explicit multiprocessing. Really cool OS-wide solution to concurrency problems.

60ish literary euphemisms for masturbation

"9. Deconstructing The Fountainhead" (via meghano)

Dinosaur Comics - August 28th, 2009 - awesome fun times!

Dinosaur Comics vs the Sorites paradox. Bookmarked because I reckon you can apply the sorites paradox to "is X conscious?" type questions, so I am interested in it. (Via language log)

apophenia: Twitter: "pointless babble" or peripheral awareness + social grooming?

This pov (Twitter as social grooming) makes a lot of sense to me. But I would also dispute the term "pointless babble" itself: the two examples of "phatic" (non-information-conveying) expressions given here, "hi", and "thank you", actually can convey quite a lot of information, depending on context.

LKML: Dianne Hackborn: Re: [PATCH 1/6] staging: android: binder: Remove some funny && usage

Android's Binder is a real tangle: capabilities, process lifecycle, namespaces, unforgeable object references, file descriptor passing over IPC, weak references. Its original implementation was "simplified" for Android, and even in Android it is sometimes bypassed (for example, the window manager implements its own security model based on uid checking instead of relying on Binder capabilities) (Via Michael Hills)

Stephen Fry — Happy birthday to GNU — The GNU Operating System

This is quite depressing, like watching your favourite sports star advertising Coke. The plumbing analogy is particularly inane.

nature-fight.gif 700×609 pixels

NATURE FIGHT! RIGHT NOW! (via Mimi Smartypants)

National Vulnerability Database (NVD) National Vulnerability Database (CVE-2009-2692)

I wrote earlier that Android's use of a Linux kernel made debugging and testing a lot easier -- this is the other side of that. (via Benno)

Pecunia non olet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Money does not smell. Now, urine -- that smells.

Bug 193917 – valgrind fails to run on Mac OS 10.5.7, gets a SIGTRAP

Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think « Socialnomics – Social Media Blog

Terrible! "Biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution" -- er, shift of what? "Social media has more users than the population of Ireland, Norway, and Denmark" -- great, very helpful! "96% of Gen Y have joined a social network" -- okay, and how many still use it regularly? Seems appropriate that they picked a 10-year-old Gen X song to accompany their useless stats. Ptooey.

iPhone Sudoku Grab: How does it all work?

Developer explains how his automatic sudoku solver for the iPhone works. Simple techniques well applied. (daring fireball)

USBtiny

Interfacing to the USB in software from ATTiny / ATMega microcontrollers. Means you don't have to use a separate USB interface controller. Clever.

TOKYOMANGO: Super Mario chess set

It's a Super Mario chess set.

Netgear DG834G v3 Firmware

My new router firmware

Classic point and click adventure Simon the Sorcerer magically appears on iPhone | Simon the Sorcerer news | Pocket Gamer

Looks like this one actually has an iPhone-friendly UI. Wish Monkey Island was like this!

Red letter days of my life

Fascinating bio piece on Babbage. "No one could have turned the cat out of the most comfortable chair, as Chaucer's monk did, for no such chair was ever there." (via 2dgoggles)

The Correspondence of Michael Faraday - Google Books

Babbage on Ada: "that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it." (via 2dgoggles.com)

Stanislaw Lem: FAQ

Philip K. Dick became schizophrenic and petitioned the FBI regarding precious bodily fluids etc. "[Sci-fi writer Stanislaw] Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas."

Vibram Five Fingers: Discover the Barefooting Alternative

These look fun.

Issue 2454 - android - Cannot view html on sdcard because no file url - Project Hosting on Google Code

Android insanity -- how to load Webpages from the SD card, and how to trick the browser into not prepending "http://" to bookmarks (the latter trick is definitely a bug. The former trick is probably a bug)