PurplePaste

This limited edition bowling ball packaging that commemorates the Big Lebowski's 10th Anniversary is a beautiful thing. It would really tie the room together.

I had completely forgotten that this video existed. Thank you Pandora, for reminding me.

People speak about how applications have been moving from the desktop to the web. Web-based email and calendaring have seen huge improvements over the past couple of years, Google Docs and Microsoft Office Live are bringing very capable office suites to the web, and even image editors are appearing online. Flickr recently added an image editor to their arsenal, powered by Picnik.

I like this progression. Data portability is important, and application portability is going to become equally important as handheld devices provide more and more functionality. I like being able to check my Gmail account from my Mac at work, my Macbook, my phone, and my girlfriend's Windows machine, without dealing with installing and configuring applications or syncing data.

But there is one problem with running so many of my applications in the web browser - when web browsers crash (and they do, especially when you have 80 tabs open), everything grinds to a halt, and data and information is lost (at least temporarily).

Fluid is a free, Leopard application that provides an interesting solution - stick your important web apps into a desktop app. As a separate application (using WebKit, so it works just as well as Safari), the application is siloed off from your other apps, so when Firefox or Safari crashes, your Fluid apps are still there, unaffected. You can even launch the web app from the dock, and the ability to use the favicon as the icon is a nice touch.

It's similar to the Mozilla Prism project, which the developer of fluid credits for his inspiration. You can download Fluid from fluidapp.com.

This is why you buy the snowshoes with the lifetime warranty...

Via GoBlog

This just arrived in my inbox, via the local Freecycle list...

From: XXXXXXX@yahoo.com
To: freecycleLowellMA@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:38:33 -0000
Subject: [Freecycle Lowell] OFFER: 10.2 GB Hard Drive (Lowell)

Model:IBM DPTA-371020. Part #07N3339. ATA-IDE. No Idea whats on it.

"No idea what's on it." I've got a bunch of hard drives kicking around my apartment that fit that description too. I sure wouldn't hand off them to a stranger, though. I like my credit score just the way it is, thanks.

Sounds like an identity thief's wet dream. No dumpster diving necessary, just an old hard drive, probably long since forgotten (it's a 10GB drive, after all). Could be full of personal information about somebody, maybe even some old tax returns or bank statements?

Freecycle should adopt some guidelines, or at least some recommendations, about this sort of thing. Maybe they already have, but it's not on their FAQ.