pb30 — Web developer — News junkie — @pb30 — pb30@pb30.com
Real Racing has up to six cars on the track at any one time. Since the game uses a high fidelity physics engine, adding cars is a good test for pushing the hardware. We started our tech demo with 8 cars on the track, then 10, 12, 16 and 20, and the 3GS still didn’t break a sweat. We finally stopped when we got to 40 cars on the track at the same time, still with no perceptible drop in frame rate. We think the results are mind blowing.
Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached. In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.
You can sign up here. Just signed up for email/SMS alerts.
Windshield Defroster (via There, I Fixed It)
Readable Feeds can filter out ads and other junk from your feeds so that you can concentrate on the content. It can even repair crippled feeds that only show small excerpts instead of the full content, saving you the time and hassle of leaving your feed reader.
Interesting app, although some publishers probably wouldn’t like it.
MacMP3Gain is an AppleScript Studio application which brings an Aqua GUI to the command line version of mp3gain, a utility that performs statistical analysis to determine how loud the MP3 file actually sounds to the human ear and performs lossless volume adjustments. MacMP3Gain is free and open source.
In the last six months, we’ve seen uploads from mobile phones to YouTube jump 1700%; just since last Friday, when the iPhone 3GS came out, uploads increased by 400% a day.
Looks like Apple is on the way to dominate YouTube, just like they do with Flickr
Australian company 22Moo announced today the development of “the world’s first” iPhone OS 3.0 compatible game controller which will feature an 8-way D-pad with 6 buttons, incorporate a 2000mAh battery and support both Bluetooth and 30-pin dock connector connectivity.
In a news release, however, Apple claims … that sales actually exceeded 1 million units. In addition, the company says six million customers have downloaded the new iPhone 3.0 software in the first five days since its release.
Some websites already have the functionality to shorten their URLs. For example on snaplog.com a URL can be accessed 2 ways. Content html pages would programatically describe the shortened URL by embeding a attribute in the page.
<link rel="short_url" href="http://snaplog.com/:E7d" />
Interesting idea. Rather than forcing users to use external shortening services, websites should provide their own short URL’s and provide a way for services like Twitter to find the proper short URL for a page.
We’ve scientifically determined the maximum amount of time that you should need to make a layout work in CSS: it’s 47 minutes. When your time is up, we’ll even give you the table code you need. Take three minutes to build a table. And ten minutes to get a donut. Bill the client for an hour. Done.
I recently found Sandboxie, a Windows app that creates a sandbox where programs can run without touching your actual OS. When the apps try to write data to your harddrive, it is written to a cache and kept seperate from your real data. This prevents any malware from being installed in your Windows directory, or hijacking any other files. When you’re done using the sandbox, you can choose to recover some files (move them back to your real harddrive) or erase them. It has a lot of powerful configuration options that allow you to do things like:
For example, you could create a sandbox that only allowed FireFox.exe to be started, and only allowed FireFox.exe access to the Internet. If you downloaded any malware, it couldn’t even be started. And once you closed Firefox, the malware would be securely erased (along with your history, cookies, and temp files if you desired).
All of this is done with a fairly low performance hit (unlike running a virtual OS in something like VMware). Sandboxie is free to try, and costs around $30.
The idea is to get a new type of device into people’s hands for as cheap as possible (we were aiming for $200, it looks like $299 is more realistic). It fits perfectly on your lap while you are sitting in front of the TV, so you can look up stuff on Wikipedia or IMDB as you channel surf. It plays Flash video flawlessly so you can watch movies and TV shows on Hulu or Joost or wherever. Or listen to music on MySpace Music. Or use TokBox to have a video chat with your parents. Then check email and call it a day
I’d love one of these. I’d probably sell my Aspire One netbook for one.
If you’re using OpenID, there’s an easy way to use your domain as your OpenID without running any extra scripts/software. With a couple of lines of code you can set your personal domain to redirect to your OpenID (known as OpenID delegation). Then instead of logging in with you.myopenid.com you can use yourdomain.com. According to MyOpenID.com add the following in your <head> tags (after changing yourusername).
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://yourusername.myopenid.com/" />
<link rel="openid2.local_id" href="http://yourusername.myopenid.com" />
<link rel="openid2.provider" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://www.myopenid.com/xrds?username=yourusername.myopenid.com" />
If you’re using another provider check their docs for the proper server and XRDS URL’s (which isn’t used by all providers). Here are some popular server URLs:
Another advantage of OpenID delegation is that if your OpenID provider goes out of business, you can just change the tags above and your domain will point to the new OpenID.
TrackThis - Track packages over Twitter
WatchBOL - Watch CNET Podcasts stream live
Sierra Bravo - My job
