Encephalosponge » Soaking Up Life

Learn the principles of chemistry with the Chemical Party video [hat tip Peter Srinu].

Vendors Rally While Windows Sleeps by Mike Elgan (PCWorld) I must say I have to agree with this article. Windows appears to be complacent and vendors are seeing an opportunity to create custom solutions for people by bypassing Windows when it’s not needed.

A comment on Mark Pilgrim’s Hello Darkness My Old Friend:
“No one cares about freedoms for the same reason that no one cares about oxygen. As long as they’re there, why bother? Freedom zero is so abstract to most people that no one even thinks about it, let alone care. It’s like the string theory. It’s [...]

Some people on an airplane videotaped a solar eclipse (via Gizmodo). Sweet!

Good quote by my classmate Peter over at Medical Pastiche:
“You should also know that these “general practice” physicians are very humble, and are not quick to admit that their career as a suburban-adult ambulatory general practice internal medicine physician really is a sub-sub-specialty.” -Stuff Doctors Like: Sub-sub-specialties

I just checked IMDB to see how The Dark Knight fared. I was surprised to see it has quickly overtaken the longstanding The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption as #1 in their Top 250 movies of all-time. I haven’t seen it yet, but Sadie and I are planning to go this weekend.

Ubuntu is now being sold at Best Buy (both in-store and online) for $20, which includes 60 days of installation and setup support from ValuSoft. Someone noticed this a few days ago and posted it on /. but now Ars is giving us the full scoop on this great idea from Canonical and ValuSoft.

I’ve been reading the Free Software Magazine on-and-off for a few weeks now, whenever something looks particularly interesting. Some stuff is not incredibly impressive, but this article “Creating web pages, the right way” by Mitch Meyran offered a lot of incredibly insightful information as to some of the true considerations for designing a page. [...]

According to Cory Doctorow’s latest article in the Guardian, copyright holders (like the RIAA, MPAA, etc.) are lobbying in governments here and abroad to force ISPs to pull the plug on customers who are “caught” transmitting or receiving illegal copyrighted material. That much isn’t necessarily a bad idea. After all, frequent violators may [...]

I found this old post on Dive Into Mark about why he chose WordPress to run his blog. I started reading his blog regularly a few weeks ago, and I really like it. That post gives a concrete example of why the GPL rocks: because it gives you, the user, all the rights.