Posts tagged “dailydavid”

  • Biden Administration Proposes a Rule to Make Over-the-Counter Birth Control Free
  • I guess this counts as good news: EPA imposes stricter standards to protect children from exposure to lead paint. (We’ve known that lead is dangerous for close to 2,000 years!)
  • The moon hasn’t changed since the 1960s, while every technology we used to get there has seen staggering advances. But twenty years and $93 billion after the space agency announced our return to the moon, the goal seems as far out of reach as ever. – via hiro.report
  • If your website aggressively pushes me to use your AI support and/or search features, I will not assume you have a bunch of radical, hip, cutting-edge tech bros on your web development team. I will assume your CEO surrounds himself with a bunch of greedy, soulless sycophants who refuse (for the worst possible reasons) to pay humans a living wage to do valuable work. – @gatordavid
  • I feel like every single time I receive an email from LinkedIn, I click the unsubscribe button. Yet every day I seem to receive at least one completely new type of email from LinkedIn. – @gatordavid
  • Penguin Random House is adding a clause to all their copyright pages explicitly stating the contents of their books are not to be used to feed generative AI models. It’s a lovely sentiment, of course, but about as effective as the FBI warnings they used to play at the beginning of VHS tapes. (The tech bros building these resource hogs certainly aren’t going to respect copyright law.) – via @clairecameron123

  • Want 33,000 classic sound effects for free? Check out the BBC Sound Effects Archive.
  • I am very much concerned about the many, many, many possible negative consequences of nefarious, incompetent, and/or misguided generative AI. Ruining wikipedia should have been on my bingo card.
  • A University College London demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans won an Ig Nobel prize. I always thought blue zones sounded fishy.
  • Ugh. Scientists are worried that persisting cognitive issues sparked by COVID-19 may signal a coming surge of dementia and other mental conditions.
  • Philip Moscovitch‘s Halifax Examiner article Beyond the Link Tax: Journalism and the Changing Nature of the Internet contains some interesting ideas about potentially taxing megacorporations to subsidize good reporting. But what grabbed me was the line, “Essentially, what we are seeing is the slow death of the hyperlink […]” Sites like Threads, Instagram, Twitter / X, et.al. have a vested interest in keeping you from leaving. They are, in fact, designed to make it more difficult for you to get to the “rest” of the Internet. I have been occasionally combing through old posts here and it is alarming — for someone who’s been blogging regularly for more than a quarter of a century — how many links simply no longer work. And I’m not talking about links from twenty years ago which should work but don’t (because the site’s gone offline or developers didn’t bother to redirect URLs). I’m talking about links from just a year or two ago. The wayback machine has been a fantastic resource to help me find archived content, but it’s not perfect and it’s grossly underfunded for how important it is to anyone who cares. See also: link rot
  • Speaking of being extremely online, you should read Reclaiming Social Media in a Fragmented World. I love the concept of POSSE and it’s been something I’ve really tried to remember the last few years, especially after what’s happened with Twitter.
  • On Ghost Networks: Ravi Coutinho bought a health insurance plan thinking it would deliver on its promise of access to mental health providers. But even after twenty-one phone calls and multiple hospitalizations, no one could find him a therapist.

  • News & Notes
    • Couple married 72 years dies holding hands — from kottke.org
    • Jason Kottke also published an epic round-up of all the best stories, comments, obituaries, collections, videos, etc. about Steve Jobs.
    • Top Ten Misused English Words — from listverse.com
    • 4 Personal Finance Principles That Would Make Your Grandfather Proud — from The Art of Manliness
    • Stellar.io is just awesome. Seriously. Trust me on this one. (Let me know if you want an invitation.)
  • Apps
    • Amazing Breaker is a fun (free) breakout game.
    • Can anyone explain the difference between the Starbucks app and the Starbucks Card Mobile app?
  • Tech
    • If you have an iPhone running iOS5, open the iTunes app on your phone. Click “More” in the lower right-hand corner. Choose “Tones”. You’ll see that there is now a new section of Star Wars ringtones. (I can’t understand how this wasn’t front page news.)
    • See also: How to make custom tones for your iPhone — from macworld.com
    • If I’m going to get a MacBook Air, then it looks like I’m also going to get a new Thunderbolt display. — via Shawn Blanc
    • Incredible macro photographs taken with iPhone 4S camera — from campl.us
    • Shit Siri Says Is, indeed, quite funny. (On Sunday I was upset when Siri couldn’t connect to the Internet and was unable to tell me the distance from Key West to Cuba. When I said, “Blow me!” in frustration, she said, “David! The language!”)
  • Sports
    • Quote of the day: “…it’s clear that marketing people underestimated [Tim Tebow’s] intangibles and popularity.” — Tebow’s Eye Black
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  • Declaration 1776 sells Revolutionary t-shirts celebrating the origins of our nation. (*These are badass.)
  • I used the free version for about a month and last night finally decided it was time to cough up the $3.00/mo for my Instapaper subscription. “What’s Instapaper, David?” It’s only one of the most brilliant apps EVAH! Basically it lets you save webpages to read later, but it’s so, so much more than that. You really need to try it for yourself. I use this every single day.
  • Color me shocked. A new study finds that all plastics are bad for you.
    2019-11-30 Update: It looks like rodale.com is no longer around, so that link is dead.
  • Everyone knows that you’re born left-handed or right-handed or ambidextrous. But did you know that you have a dominant eye? (And apparently there’s no such thing as ambidextrous sight.) It’s pretty simple to determine which eye is dominant. (Thanks, Shawn!)
  • TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) gave a glowing review of 3D4Medical.com‘s iMuscle, calling it, “a must for exercise aficionados.” Andy Faust wrote a much more in-depth review at AppAdvice, though, and let’s just say that he wasn’t quite as impressed.
  • Honestly I had no idea that at some time in the 1930s some Nazis built an elaborate compound in the hills around the Pacific Palisades.
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Daily David

Random weblinks recently found

Daily David

Daily David

Recently-discovered links

Daily David

An esoteric collection of random web goodness

Daily David

A bunch of links I found lately

Daily David

View the Daily David from August 4th, 2010

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What Is This?

davidgagne.net is the personal weblog of me, David Vincent Gagne. I've been publishing here since 1999, which makes this one of the oldest continuously-updated websites on the Internet.

bartender.live

A few years ago I was trying to determine what cocktails I could make with the alcohol I had at home. I searched the App Store but couldn't find an app that would let me do that, so I built one.

Hemingway

You can read dozens of essays and articles and find hundreds of links to other sites with stories and information about Ernest Hemingway in The Hemingway Collection.