Day: November 8, 2006

emailed news alerts — WSJ.com does it best

For years I have relied on the Wall Street Journal’s emailed new alerts. Who ever owns the “send” trigger knows exactly when to push it. They never irritate me and are always on the money.

Just crossed the inbox. Rumsfield is saying sayonara:

“__________________________________
NEWS ALERT
from The Wall Street Journal

Nov. 8, 2006
Republican officials say Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is stepping down. The move comes amid growing dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq and Republican loss of the House and possible loss of the Senate.”

I ripped Firefox 2.0 out by the roots, reinstalled ….

…and no lockups in the last hour. Fingers are crossed. I was actually reverting to IE 7 for most of the morning and not happy about it. I do have to say Firefox’s crash recovery capabilities are pretty robust, and I’m an expert having go through nearly a hundred in the last two weeks.

Update: The reinstall didn’t work. So I’ve disabled all extensions and will bring them back slowly.

Update 2: stable so far with only the del.ici.ous, FTP, and colored tab plug in enabled. No crashes in 12 hours.

Riya becomes Like — image search

Techmeme was leading with TechCrunch’s take on the Riya relaunch as Like.com — true image search. This permits a user to search for images that “look like” other images.
Arrington writes:

“The Like.com engine takes both text and images as queries, something no one else does. To return results based on an image query, Like.com compares a “visual signature” for the query image to possible results. The visual signature is simply a mathematical representatioin of the image using 10,000 variables. If enough variables are identical, Like.com decides the images are similar.

What this means – If you see an image on the web, like a watch that Paris Hilton is wearing in the picture to the left, and use it as an image query, Like.com will return results showing watches that look very similar.

If you enter a text query, like “brown boots pointed toe,” Like.com will convert that query into variables in the visual signature and look for related image results. See screen shot below for the results from this query.”

This is insanely cool stuff. Check it out

Favorite Things — Flashlights that work

E1E Executive Elite® flashlight – E1E-HA available from SureFire

Cousin Pete handed me one of these a couple weeks ago after I admired his while surfcasting for striped bass one night in early October. He had his clipped to the brim of his baseball hat and I had to express my lust for one.

The engineering on this is superb. It is very heavy, uses a 3v Lithium battery (camera size), and the best part is the “pocket” clip — or hat clip. Snap this onto the brim of a hat, hit the on-off button, and where you look there is light. This came in handy last weekend during the ski-house work weekend. A couple years ago my buddy Charlie and I were on the roof as the sun set, trying to screw down some metal panels by the light of my Treo 650. That was not fun. This year, Charlie and I were able to inspect our paint job by the light of the Surefire.

“Ultra compact (finger length) incandescent flashlight for everyday carry and general use. Puts out a smooth, brilliant beam as bright as a big two D-cell flashlight. Light enough to clip to hat brim for hands-free operation. Small size, light weight, and long runtime also make it perfect for travel.”

I am a total sucker for mini gadgets. This one rules.

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