Interesting Drug

Feature: ‘The History of Activisison’:

“Nowadays, Activision is a massive worldwide publisher, responsible for Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero, but it all started with just four game developers leaving Atari in 1979, and in today’s feature, Gamasutra presents a history of the first ever third-party publisher, with insight from company co-founder David Crane. When Crane joined Atari in 1977, the company was at the crux of its maturation from a feisty Silicon Valley start-up into a mass-market entertainment company, gaining …

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Facebook users open to cyberattacks, ID theft?:

“Facebook Platform creates channel for malicious third-party applications. Users also face identity theft, VeriSign says.”

Technophilia: Get productive with the best Facebook Apps:

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While most people are content with using Facebook to connect with friends and colleagues, Facebook can also help you get things done. With Facebook apps - third-party plugins - you can make Facebook into your own personal Mr. Belvedere. There are thousands of Facebook apps floating around out there, most of them about as useful as a fish on a bicycle. However, there are some diamonds among the coal - and these are the ones you can use to launch your Facebook profile into the efficiency stratosphere. Keep reading to find out how to customize your Facebook into a productivity launchpad.

Writing helps

Zoho: You can add Zoho to your Facebook profile; this gives you the power to write all your office-ish documents.

MyLists allows you to create simple lists and share them with others.

Edit documents with Documents, a collaborative text editor.

Social bookmarking and networking

Update your Twitter status from Facebook with Twitter for Facebook.

View your del.icio.us bookmarks with the del.icio.us Facebook application.

Get your five most recent Diggs with the Digg app; this one needs to have more functionality added to it in order for it to be over the top awesome, though it’s still pretty useful.

Files/Storage

Files gives you up to 1 GB of free online space from which to share any kind of file: text, audio, video, etc. (Requires a Box.net account.)

Swap and share files with Divshare, up to 200 MB in size.

Tracking

Get the calendrial (new word, peeps) power of 30 Boxes in your Facebook with the superbly executed 30 Boxes Facebook app.

View your Google Calendar events within Facebook with the GCal app.

Stay on top of the hip and the happenin’ with the Upcoming.org application; get info about events before they happen.

Media

Create your own personal multimedia channel - podcasts, videos, documents, pretty much anything - with SplashCast for Facebook. For example, I was able to find the last 30 or so NPR programs and tweak them into one long-running show - you can also use this to create presentations from .ppt files on your machine and share them with others.

Who doesn’t love Scrapblog? Now you can tweak with your Scrapblog directly from your Facebook profile with the Scrapblog application.

Keep track of your Netflix queue with the Netflix application - you can view others’ lists as well.

Listen to yours and your friends’ Last.fm stations with the Last.fm app.

Editing

Edit photos from within Facebook with the Picnik application. You can edit photos from your own ‘puter, the Web, Flickr, Picasa, etc.

Use Picasa within Facebook with the Picasa app; you can upload photos, resize them, share images, and more.

Feeds

Read your favorite RSS feeds from within your Facebook profile with MyRSS; offers a few hundred categorized feeds from which to choose from as well as adding your own feeds (doesn’t seem to be a bulk import option though - perhaps you can sneak ‘em in via OPML?).

Share what you’re reading via the Google Reader app; displays only your shared items.

Web search

Search Google, Amazon, and Wikipedia from within Facebook with Search.

Of course, there are many more Facebook apps that are productive, unlike this one, or this one, or maybe even this one; so tell us your favorite Facebook applications in the comments.

Wendy Boswell, Lifehacker’s Weekend Editor, has become a wee bit addicted to finding new Facebook applications (29 and counting). Subscribe to her feature series Technophilia using the Technophilia feed.

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How To: Predict the weather without checking the forecast:

“
How-to web site wikiHow offers a beginner’s crash course to predicting the weather with nothing but your wits and senses. For example:

Take a deep breath. Close your eyes and smell the air.

• Plants release their waste in a low pressure atmosphere, generating a smell like compost and indicating an upcoming rain.
• Swamps will release methane just before a storm because of the lower pressure, which leads to unpleasant smells.
• A proverb says ‘Flowers smell best just before a rain.’ Scents are stronger in moist air, associated with rainy weather.

In all, the post describes 10 different methods for predicting weather by observing smells, animals, the sky, and more using your sharp senses. If you’ve always wanted to pick up some grass, look up at the sky, inhale a full puff of air, and declare in your best down-home country twang: ‘Looks like there’s a storm a-brewin’, mother,’ this guide should give you a good start.

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These Games Are So Bad, It’s Not Funny:

“Why is there no such a thing as ‘B game’ — a game so bad it’s good? Columnist Clive Thompson plays some of the worst recent videogames, and wonders why they don’t produce the same enjoyment as B movies.”

Robot Chicken - Calvin and Hobbes’ Parents (Funny):

“A look at Calvin’s life through his parent’s eyes. He’s not so normal.”

Doctors Stop Puberty For Transgender Kids:

“When Marty was about six, doctors said she was no tomboy. She seemed to fit the diagnosis of gender identity disorder (GID), and though dubbing it a disorder whips up a maelstrom of controversy, the basic sentiment is this: not only feeling an intense discomfort with one’s biological gender, but also feeling profoundly, compellingly, like the other.

Enrolled in a new school last year as a boy where only the staff knew otherwise, the nine-year-old passed without a hitch in his wardrobe of Nike trainers and T-shirts, paired with a crew cut, boyish build, and aggressive basketball moves at recess. (To keep his secret, the names of the boy and his parents have been changed.) But the days when the only outward markers of gender lie in haircuts, clothes, and personality only last so long. Deep inside Marty’s brain, a time bomb known as the hypothalamus waited to stage a hormone-armed mutiny. Breasts would sprout. Hips would widen. The uterus would shed blood on a monthly basis. Marty didn’t want any of it.

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What it takes to bring you Fiji water:

“Xeni Jardin:

Farhad Manjoo of Salon.com’s Machinist blog says,

There have been lots of stories lately about the inefficiency and environmental damages caused by bottled water, but Charles Fishman has the definitive piece in Fast Company. You’ll never want to drink Fiji again.

The label on a bottle of Fiji Water says ‘from the islands of Fiji.’ Journey to the source of that water, and you realize just how extraordinary that promise is. From New York, for instance, it is an 18-hour plane ride west and south (via Los Angeles) almost to Australia, and then a four-hour drive along Fiji’s two-lane King’s Highway.

Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, since the plastic for the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles’ journey is even longer. Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation–which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.

That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of Fiji Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity–something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from ‘one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth,’ as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze (…)

Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles a day, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have reliable drinking water.

Link. Image by Nigel Cox, via Fast Company.

Reader comment: Sam Finnemore in .nz says,

Readers might also want to consider the current government in Fiji - the country
has been run by the military since a coup last year, and members of the armed
forces have intimidated journalists and allegedly beaten people to death in
custody. I’m writing from New Zealand, which has had its high commissioner
forcibly expelled from Fiji, so it’s in the news a lot down here!

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Allofmp3.com finally shut down by Russian authoritues:

“Xeni Jardin:
The existence of this grey-market music site once represented a threat to Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation. Allofmp3.com has been shut down now, after the United States condemned Russia for failing to crack down on illicit filesharing. Link. Apparently an alternative site just popped up, under the same management? (thanks, AKMA)

Reader comment: Anon says,

If you had an account with AllOfMp3.com, you have one with MP3Sparks.com. Same login works, and your balance is carried over.

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State Quarters Quiz:

“How well do you know your dough? A nickel tour of the US via a 25-cent quiz.”

Readin’: A Book Crammed into a Pack of Cigarettes For Some Reason:

“Do you want to combine the cool, devil-may-care image of the cigarette smoker with the intellectual airs of a bookworm? Do you also want to avoid that pesky cancer that seems to catch up with smokers? Well, the Tankbook seems right up your alley: it’s an entire classic novel crammed into a pack of smokes. Sure, the text has got to be really tiny to fit a full-sized novel into a package that size, and $14 is a lot to pay for a gimmick, but think about your image! Ladies love dudes who buy weird things on the internet! • [Gearfuse] via [Coolest Gadgets]

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A fix for USB disks and AirPort Extreme base stations:

“A few days ago, a friend came by with his AirPort Extreme base station (AEBS) and his external USB hard disk. He was having problems getting the hard disk recognized and shared through the AEBS in a seemingly random way. The AEBS would correctly share the disk, until you would directly connect it to a Windows PC to transfer files. After that, reconnecting it to the AEBS’s USB port would lead to an unmountable network share on the Mac, and an empty share on the PC (Windows XP SP2).

We thought of a formatting problem, so we first reformatted the 500GB disk as an HFS+ volume, and tried again connecting it to the AEBS. Transfers would work both ways from the PC and the Mac through the AEBS. But after connecting the disk directly to the PC and transfering files with TransMac, then plugging the disk back on the AEBS, we would get the same problem with an unmountable share (the problem wouldn’t appear after connecting the disk directly to t…

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iCal icon that follows the real date!:

“One of the real downside that came with the latest OS, Tiger, is that the iCal icon doesn’t follow the date anymore. Before Tiger, after you opened iCal, the icon remained with today’s date. Not anymore, so we don’t have the choice but to solve the problem ourselves. I thought it was really cool when I saw iConiCal on MacUpdate. I thought someone finally solved the problem. Well, they did”

Thousands of Rubber Ducks to Finally End Journey:

“Bert de Jong writes ‘The Daily Mail reports that thousands of rubber ducks who have traveled the seas of the world since 1992 are about to end their journey. After escaping out of a container fallen off a Chinese freight ship in a storm, scientists have been followed them on their fifteen year trek. This has turned out to be an invaluable source of information for studying ocean currents. Now it seems inevitable though that they will finally land on the shores of South-West England. ‘[Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer] correctly predicted what many thought was impossible - that thousands of them would end up washed into the Arctic ice near Alaska, and then move at a mile a day, frozen in the pack ice, around their very own North-West Passage to the Atlantic. It proved true years later and in 2003, the first Friendly Floatees were found, frozen and then thawed out, on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada. So precious to science are they that the US firm that made them is offering a £50 bounty for finding one.'’

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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ǝpoɔıun ɥʇıʍ unɟ:

“Sure, you know your ABC’s, but how well do you know Unicode? Its special characters are used in i18n applications, and are commonly seen on college campuses, where the greek alphabet (αβΓΔ) seems to pop up everywhere. Now, thanks to some clever substitution, it can even be used to uʍop ǝpısdn ǝʇıɹʍ!”

When was the last time you cleaned the inside of your computer?:

“For goodness sake, clean your damn computer. I was given this earlier today to fix. I should charge the guy for my lunch as well.”

Keyboard keys jump the shark:

“Lately, it seems like there has been a rash of products elevating ordinary keyboard keys to pop culture status. They’ve become an ironic take on our digital life. They take an ordinary thing we use everyday out of their normal context. They’re jumping the shark.

Take a look at these recent products, all found via Gizmodo.

The first up is the weirdest. These are actual rings that you can wear and push. They have bonafide keyboard action. Would you want to impress your friends with your Ctrl ring?

Marché Noir’s Computer Key Rings are spring mounted to accurately reproduce the action on your favorite key - so you can hit it whenever you need to reboot your cool.

Or, you can buy one of these lovely keyboard wall clocks. Enough said.

But personally, this is my favorite, seriously. The Delete eraser, created by Art.Lebedev Studio, who also makes the Optimus keyboard. This is ironic in a good way. The eraser erases. It really deletes. Ok, it’s funny, but I like it.

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Timewaster Of The Day: Weird Timewaster of the Day: Hotel:

“ Hotel isn’t exactly a game, per se, described as a ‘multiple narrative work’ and ‘e-lit,’ but with more and more people discussing the overlap between interactive fiction and games in a more traditional sense, it’s close enough. At the very least, it’s a surreal way to spend an hour or two.

In the name of science you are about to become a freak accident waiting to happen. His name is Dr. Doglin and you are the new volunteer at Preconstruction, his mysterious private clinic located inside a hotel. In a few seconds he will ask you to swallow a strange tablet and be hit by a very big truck. But first he would kindly like to ask you to practice in a wheelchair. Welcome to the clinically bizarre world of Hotel.

Hotel [via Grand Text Auto]

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