Aw man. I got hacked (or something) and an obviously spam message got posted in my twitter feed. Of course, I’ve had my account suspended, pending investigation. I should be back up within a month, according to twitter. I don’t know whether the error is twitter’s or mine, but needless to say every place where I used the same password as for twitter has been changed, just in case. All in all, not as painful as it might have been, I guess!

Having apparently abandoned former principles of simplicity and unintrusiveness, Google now punishes account holders by sticking coloured icons next to every Google search result and, worse, animating them on a mouse-over of the result. Obnoxious! There currently seems to be no setting to remove these that I could find, but I figured a way to use AdBlock to hide them away.

Read more…

Read this old, unsurprising report in New Scientist. From the article:

Automated trading ...has come to account for more than half of trades in many markets around the globe. ...Because of the finite speed of light, trading speed depends on where you are sitting. ...“The basic insight,” says Wissner-Gross, “is that the optimal location lets the trader exploit fluctuations equally on both exchanges.” ...“This shows that the technological arms race to extract every penny from high-frequency mechanical arbitrage will soon reach its ultimate limits,” says physicist and hedge-fund manager Jean-Philippe Bouchaud

If this is how money and the free markets work now, I’m pretty sure we no longer know what words mean.

This has been plaguing me for a while since I updated to Mac OS 10.8. Dragging layers in the layers palette of Photoshop CS4 would cause an immediate crash to desktop. Finally found a solution in this thread which worked.

Solution: turn off the OS power-saving graphics switching.

It’s the checkbox at the top of the Energy Saving preference pane:

You’ll need to ensure that it’s unchecked and probably restart after that.

Now I can drag layers all day long.

I was trying to make a bunch of elements change position as an audio file played, using a snippet something like:

$(audiohtml).bind("timeupdate", onAudioUpdate);
$(audiohtml).bind("play", onAudioUpdate);
$(audiohtml).bind("pause", onAudioUpdate);

function onAudioUpdate() {
  // Move the elements here
}

But the trouble was that the audio element’s timeupdate event only fires once every 200ms or so on my browser (this is set by the HTML5 audio specification and isn’t modifiable as far as I know).

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Just look at this. A cutting edge communications device from an alternative 1950. But designed and fabricated by a person on their workbench, like the raddest cyberpunk street tech.

The creator, Justine Haupt, actually sells them in kit form. But watching her guided build instruction video makes me think it’s a little beyond my skill level with a soldering iron.

Actually, this (hour long!) build video is really worth watching. Not only does it detail the creator’s design philosophy, she’s also really good at explaining the history of her design and the reasons behind many decisions.