The Betacantrips Travelogue

On Tor.com, an interview with Whisper Merlot, who "doesn’t just dress up, or create steampunk accessories, or attend cons. Whisper actually lives in an RV, travelling from place to place bringing steampunk into other people’s lives." (Emphasis mine.)

For me, the steampunk mindset is about following the adventure whatever it may be. I am more true to myself and my goals, weirdly. Going to cons, doing panels, making a comic, dressing up, dressing down, making an alter-ego, throwing parties, watching movies, reading books, organizing photoshoots, ditching the creature comforts, jumping into a van, and bringing steampunk wherever I can go. Over time, my steampunk has become less about what props and costumes I’m showing off, and more about helping other people find this subculture so that they can start enjoying it too.

A neat review of the Pleco iPhone App on Sinosplice.

This is a big one. Pleco for iPhone has very impressive handwriting recognition. You really need to watch the video to see how it works, but the two-finger swipe is genius. Pleco has definitely improved upon Apple’s handwriting input, and it’s at least as good as nciku’s, as well.

There are also images of "having fun with it":

Tor.com has an interview with James Ng, who explains some of the inspiration for his steampunk art.

Night Patrol: Assassins and thieves that dare to enter the forbidden palace would be wise to avoid the night patrol. Stepping into the circle of light generated by the patrol robot will not only cause the guard dog to attack, but will also set off the gong and baton alarm that summons more guards to deal with any intruders swiftly.

Seen on the FTP-master New feed: Gnaughty, Fast and Easy Porn Downloader.

Gnaughty is a program to automatically download adult sex content, i.e. porn movies and pictures, from a known internet porn directory.

Providing a friendly interface, users who feel like having some porn can have it served fastly and directly to their desktop.

This is deeply fascinating for a lot of reasons. Central to all of them is the fact that pornography, being taboo, is nevertheless a fairly important part of the computing experience for many users. As a result, the market is underserved by companies who can’t address the topic without breaking the taboo — a constraint that "the open source community" can address because there is no company.

Other interesting, related topics include bug 283578, about the hot-babe package and how gnaughty contributes/discontributes to the ongoing discussion about sexism in open source; the role of Sourceforge in this whole process; how the name "gnaughty" relates to the taboo nature of its own function; and the charming perspective-altered screenshot that shows on the Sourceforge page.

Seen on Planet Debian, this post.

Even at the most physical level. This is a cup that won’t topple over when you accidentally kick the desk! Gunnar’s Viking of Approval certifies it.

OK, no joke: LUST. I want an N900 so bad I can almost taste it. Um, anyhow, seen on LWN.

KDE.News has a report from the Maemo Summit, where Nokia handed out 300 N900 phones to developers. "However, it is not the hardware which is most interesting to us – it is the software. The N900 runs Maemo, a Debian Linux based operating system for high-end smart phones. Compared to pretty much all competition, the N900 offers a very open software platform and provides a terminal application by default."

An interesting article on Slashdot about the predictive power of early reviews.

‘We now know that a remarkable percentage of consumers and businesses decided to spurn Windows Vista and stay with XP. But did the reviews of Vista serve as an early warning that it had major problems? I looked back at the evaluations in nine major publications and found that they expressed some caution–but on the whole, they were far from scathing. Some were downright enthusiastic.’

As futurists, we have to re-evaluate what we thought would happen if we are to get better at predicting. My feeling is that by and large, the things we expect to happen do not happen, and the things that take us by storm are the things we never saw coming. But that’s just a gut intuition.

This leaves aside the larger question of whether Vista sucks as bad as people feel it does (as is discussed in the Slashdot comments). What’s interesting is that nobody could have predicted the user outcry based on the press — maybe even based on the quality of the software itself!

Three Panel Soul has a strip titled "On Loneliness".

Seen on pixelstyle.

As a data collection/data analysis fanboy, I have no choice but to love the OK Cupid data-mining blog, seen via this post on JWZ.

Here are the grouped match percentages for a random pool of 500,000 users. Astrological sign has no effect whatsoever on how compatible two people are.

As one of the commenters points out, the stuff about race and response rates is super-interesting.