http://encephalosponge.com Soaking Up Life Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:27:55 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Learn the principles of chemistry with the Chemical Party video [hat tip Peter Srinu]. http://encephalosponge.com/2008/08/22/chemical-party/ I was inspired by the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell to show off my new desktop look. In traditional Lifehacker style, I'll mention the pictured applications. The operating system is obviously Ubuntu. Avant Window Navigator is my dock. The IM application is Pidgin, which includes the Facebook Chat ... http://encephalosponge.com/2008/08/22/desktop-refresher/ 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. http://encephalosponge.com/2008/08/19/is-windows-sleeping/ A recent post on Ars Technica explains how researchers are converting adult stem cells from patients with certain diseases into embryonic stem cells. This will hopefully make studying the cellular basis of diseases like Parkinson's easier by providing a virtually unlimited supply of tissue, which was previously difficult to ... http://encephalosponge.com/2008/08/14/disease-specific-stem-cells/ 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 ... http://encephalosponge.com/2008/08/13/comment-of-the-day/ So I went to check out the replay of last night's phenomenal 4x100 Men's relay only to find an annoyingly disturbing message: the NBC Olympics vidoes don't "support" Linux. First of all, what kind of ludicrous claim is that? They're freakin' videos. If I've got the ... http://encephalosponge.com/2008/08/12/olympic-browser-blockage/ Harvard made a great video called The Inner Life of a Cell a couple of years ago using some great computer graphics [hat tip Sadie]. It tells a brief story of the mechanism of inflammation being activated in a leukocyte. It was put to some great music by ... http://encephalosponge.com/2008/08/11/the-inner-life-of-a-cell/ Surprise, Surprise. Vista gets seriously pwned at Blackhat 2008 [via Gizmodo]. The exploit is actually based in a bunch of Java and .NET exploit that takes advantage of Internet Explorer's ActiveX controls. Giz claims that this has potential to infect many other systems (theoretically because they're not ... http://encephalosponge.com/2008/08/08/vista-gets-pwned/ Some people on an airplane videotaped a solar eclipse (via Gizmodo). Sweet! http://encephalosponge.com/2008/08/04/solar-eclipse/ I remembered reading an article on ifacethoughts a few months ago about keyboard shortcuts in web browsers. One or two of them stuck, and I keep wishing that more had. I really like using scroll click (press down on the scroll button of your mouse to click) to ... http://encephalosponge.com/2008/07/29/browser-shortcuts/