I love beatboxing. I’m not too good at it myself, but I dabbled in linguistics as an undergrad, and I like programming languages (as well as using them). Somewhere, along with these concepts, beatboxing seems to fit in. Mostly, my enjoyment of beatboxing involves the ability of people (who fundamentally have the same mouths and muscles) to find new ways to make their “hardware” sound like something new.

Programming is a lot like beatboxing, insofar as we’re all using fairly standard hardware, but you know it when new software transforms the impossible into the possible, like with Google Maps. Yes, I am going to relate this back to beatboxing, because Google Maps was the first major demonstration of the power of the XMLHttpRequest object, which is the mechanism AJAX is built upon. That object had shipped with Internet Explorer and Firefox for years, but it wasn’t until Google Maps that people realized how immensely powerful it was.

This also happened to the PC demo scene during the 1990s, when Future Crew released Second Reality, which pretty much established the model for all demos thereafter.

This happened when id Software released DOOM, but this has been happening for decades, like when Ritchie released C, as a new way of programming computers, or when Turing … invented the paradigm of modern computation.

Beatboxing seems oddly reminiscent of the spirit of computer hacking, and I like having my mind blown when beatboxers show me something new that I could do too. Check out this completely sick example. Jean jean uses a jaw harp to beatbox some insane techno.

RTFA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GQ_jOPfhzE&feature…

AMAZING freestyle of jean jean ! French beatboxer

YousableTubeFix changes YouTube from a world of pain to a much nicer experience. The biggest improvements (IMO) are:

* the video window is a reasonable size (not fullscreen, but not too small either)
* any video is trivial to download
* switching to high quality is easy

It’s such a pain to track down the Flash or Firefox cache directory, for those cases when you want to download a video from YouTube… and it’s irritating to use third-party plugins or websites, when it’s clear that the browser is already capable of doing everything it needs to.

So you know, you must install Greasemonkey first, but you should already have done so since Greasemonkey is so damn cool.

RTFA: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13333

Removes ads and unwanted sections (configurable), allows downloading and resizing videos, displays all comments on video page, expands the description, can prevent autoplay and autodownload, adds a HD (High Definition) select, etc…

RTFA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (commonly abbreviated to IE6), is a graphical web browser developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 lines of operating systems. It was the most widely used web browser during its tenure (surpassing Internet Explorer 5.x), attaining a peak in usage share during 2002 and 2003 in the high 80s, and together with other versions up to 95% in 2003. It only slowly declined up to 2007, when it lost about half its market share to Windows Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox between late 2006 to 2008.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 was released on August 27, 2001, shortly after Windows XP was finished.

Oh no. Oh GOD no! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! The carnage!

I checked the site stats, and fully 25% of RTFA visitors are using IE 6. I am on the verge of tears. RTFA doesn’t render properly on IE6, but more importantly:

IE 6 IS MORE THAN 7 YEARS OLD. THERE ARE 18 UNPATCHED VULNERABILITIES. THAT MEANS THE RUSSIANS OWN YOUR COMPUTER.

As usual, I need to plug Firefox. If your experience with “browser plugins” is that you get extra bars on the top of your browser, and you suddenly see all these new ads, then you should switch to Firefox; it has a useful plugin ecosystem that actually IMPROVE the browsing experience.

Some of you will want another Microsoft browser when you upgrade, and that is fine. Here is a link to IE 8. Without resorting to shouting capital letters again, let me reiterate: you must upgrade your browser. The Internet forgot about you almost a decade ago, and you are living in a world of pain. Please, for the love of God, please upgrade!

RTFA: http://www.236.com/search.php?x=32&y=12&=go&q=Get+…

23/6 Video: Get Your War On: Jump Off the Roof
October 24, 2008 -
Filed under: Get Your War On, Get Your War On jump off the roof, shoot yourself, Get Your War On, David Rhees, Jon Glaser, GYWO, Get Your War On Episode 13, Sarah Palin, John McCain, Palin/McCain, McCain/Palin…

Get Your War On is absolutely NSWF-hilarious! David Rhees execute these ideas perfectly in a new medium. Rhees is known for My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable, as well as the non-animated version of Get Your War On. Both of these are great comic strips, but the video is amazing…

For your viewing pleasure, I have collected every single episode into a single post. …but for your own safety, the rest of them are located after the jump. You might bust a vein from laughter, thereby crashing your cortex, but if you don’t follow these instructions, you will DEFINITELY crash your web browser and/or saturate your Tubes* with way too much information.

* As a brief aside, speaking of that series of Tubes we like to call the “Internets”, felonious Senator Ted Stevens was finally found guilty of seven – yes, seven – felonies.

Anyway, here’s how you watch it.

1) Download Firefox
2) Install NoScript. If you don’t already use this, then the Russian mafia has already pwned your machine.
3) View the whole post by clicking on “more”, and you can start the videos one at a time thanks to NoScript.

If you’re brave, ignore these instructions, and blow your tubes!

If you’re ready, watch the rest of Get Your War on.

(more…)

RTFA: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiqui…

we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

* Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
* Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone-not just Web developers-to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
* Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
* Extend the browser functionality easily.

The Ubiquity Firefox extension has changed the way I blog. I LOVE Quicksilver, which has completely transformed the way I interact with OS X… and I see Ubiquity as having the same effect on the way I browse the web, and on my access to keyword-indexed information.

There’s something special about using key entry to control movement through an interface. While I like assigning “keywords” to a bookmark in Firefox, and then mapping placeholders to a search query, this doesn’t scale up quickly enough. I’m happy with Sogudi and its Quicksilver integration, but I dislike the way in which the configuration interface is tied to Safari (since I use Firefox).

Enter Ubiquity. Okay – it’s not the end-all, be-all at the moment. However, it’s a significant step in the right direction. And yes: it has the potential.

Check out my screenshot. I just used the hotkey (I am using alt-space) and typed in “ubiquity”. This brings up a quick list of search results, wikipedia results, and a keyboard-controlled interface for “drilling down” into a specific search service. You can do some more interesting stuff too – just check out the site.

I am eagerly anticipating the next release!