The Nietz

I just got ThinkGeek’s latest email.  Apparently, they read TheNietz…

Oh frabjous day!

In a missive that made designerds and code monkeys everywhere swoon with Valentiney love, our sweetheart Google announced they would stop supporting IE6. Or as our codeslingers call it, IE666. Google pulled out their vorpal blades and with a snicker-snack, they left IE6 dead. Hearing the news was just like being in high school and getting a pass out of P.E. We are chortling with joy. Callooh! Callay! We love you, Google. Muah! Now, if you could only do something about Comic Sans and Papyrus fonts…

Though seriously, 1) ThinkGeek is awesome and 2) The world needs to take a stand against IE6 and kudos to ThinkGeek for participating.  This is not a cut on Microsoft, or even Internet Explorer.  This is targeted specifically against IE6.  The sooner IE6 is gone, the happier the planet will be.

[Thinkgeek]

Google announced on Friday they will be phasing out support for IE6, and quick.  Starting March 1 IE6 users will lose key functionality in Docs and Sites.  From their blog,

Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.

Unfortunately, it looks like the ancient browser will still work on Google itself; this appear to impact Google Apps and I have read other reports indicating it will also apply to gmail later in 2010. Not a huge surprise.  Digg, Mint, YouTube and many others have already phased out IE functionality.  It was simply taking up too much coding time to get features to work properly. The fact that IE6 was the source of Google’s breach probably didn’t help its case.

Read More »

Oh Noes!

Look familiar? Hopefully not. But if your site now looks like this, it’s bad, but there is hope.  I had my first foray into this world last week when my brother in law’s site was hacked.  It took some digging, but here are the steps to getting your site back again. Part one will cover getting yourself unblocked.  Part two will cover getting your posts and other data back, and part three will get you up and running and take steps to prevent it from happening again.

So the steps:

• Get rid of the offending code,
• verify you are the owner,
• request a review,
• make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Read More »

Armchair astronomer?  Stargazer? Space geek? Want to impress people by just looking up?  Then check out Stellarium.

Stellarium is an open-source planetarium on your desktop.  More than just a starchart, Stellarium can take a point in time and space and see the heavens.  Curious what the sky over Bethlehem was like in 32 BC? Just enter the coordinates, the date and time.  Not just stars, but the planets comets, nebulas, you can even incorporate weather conditions.

Stellarium can even output to a fish-eye projector for actual use in a planetarium (or you can buy your own pre-loaded with Stellarium).

When I traveled to Tibet last year I installed Stellarium on my Macbook.  The night before traveling to Base Camp, I was able to pull up my exact location and map out the stars over the Himalayas.  Something very cool.

[Stellarium]

A few months ago my brother-in-law wanted his own website. Being the resident techie, I set him up with his own domain, a WordPress blog, and picked out a nice template that looked a little non-WordPress-y.

Unfortunately, like most blogs, it sat untouched (something I’m guilty of too). Last week, he got an email from a friend who tried to go to his site. Instead of his site he was greeted with rather ominous looking red screen:

Not good. Read More »

I still remember my old Estes kits.  Apparently they’re still making them, and they are even re-releasing their old kits.

Scratch build vintage rockets via [Make]

Via Neatorama,

Google’s helpful. Even if you’re not sure what you’re searching for, Google wants you to search, and it will do it’s best to help you search as quickly as possible.  Fortunately, they don’t always get it right.  When that happens, autocompleteme is there.

thanks to smashing for reminding me about the wayback machine.  How sites looked in the late 90′s…

[smashing apps]

If this thing opens up it’s going to get real ugly real fast.  Sadly, it won’t.  Each side has is dying to win, has a ton to lose, yet at the same time doesn’t want the other sides to be held legally accountable, since they’d then be held to the same standards. At the end of the day the respective legal teams are going to sit down and decide what’s more valuable to them, hurting the other guy or protecting themselves.  This’ll be  a defensive battle.  Self protection wins.

But until that happens, it’s fun to watch the finger pointing

Apple:  “Technically, we didn’t reject the app.  We’re still studying it.  Kinda like the Ark of the Covenant.”

AT&T: “Wasn’t us.”  “Sure it might have ruined us, but it isn’t our app store.  Please don’t look at all those phone calls to Apple.  We were just setting up a tea time.  honest.”

Google: “[redacted]”

In their own words. First, Apple:

Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it. The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail.

Want to know more?

Wired has a quick summary.  Read Google’s response (the part that isn’t redacted) Read AT&T’s response.

For more details there’s a pretty good analysis by Techcrunch.  (and more in depth information about it and the approval process too. ) Along with some good comments on lifehacker.  Grampa /. talks about it too. And Giz.  And Engadget. Pretty much everyone

Why is this important?  because if any of the three parties win, we win big.  Look at the class action suit over MMS. Right now there’s just finger pointing and speculation.  If we can put the blame squarely on a single company (<cough> AT&T) They will be forced to start making some changes.  But it gets tricky, by the same token, Google, who may or may not have blocked a VOIP application in it’s own app store will also have some ‘splainin to do.

These are pretty cool.  I’ve always loved when trees are ‘trained’ to become chairs, or even houses, but this takes it to a new level of function, the tree roots are woven together to create a living bridge

The root bridges, some of which are over a hundred feet long, take ten to fifteen years to become fully functional, but they’re extraordinarily strong – strong enough that some of them can support the weight of fifty or more people at a time.

Some may be over 500 years old.

Source: [Living root bridges]

via: [Make], [neatorama]