I’ve just got an account on Dreamwidth:
http://avram.dreamwidth.org/

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but I wanted to grab my name.

Zvi has been doing a good job of preaching the Dreamwidth gospel:

• What it is and why it’s better than LJ
• Some info about OpenID
• Introductory guide to Dreamwidth
• How to follow someone who has moved to Dreamwidth
• Crossposting and locked posts

Libertarians like to remind people how every law passed by state authority, no matter how minor, is ultimately backed up by brutal force. I’m not a libertarian, but here’s some evidence backing them up:

An SVSU student who made headlines for being tasered during a struggle at a Saginaw City Council meeting after refusing to remove his hat is telling his side of an unusual series of events that has left him facing criminal charges that could result in several years in prison.

(via BoingBoing)

• The size of the iPhone, compared to some other portable devices.
• Cisco is suing over the name.
• PvP’s Brent Sienna reacts.
• Microsoft responds with the ZunePhone!

For the third time in the past month, I’ve seen one of you talk about having to get links into an LJ post for fear that you’ll never find them again if you close your browser tabs. While I certainly don’t mind seeing the links, I shudder to think that so many of you may be relying on your browsers not crashing for days or weeks at a time, so I’m going to tell y’all about one of the handiest web services around: del.icio.us.

It’s a free social bookmarking service. I’ve been using it for a couple of years; it was down a lot at first, but it’s been reliable recently. You can auto-import your browser’s bookmarks file, but I didn’t bother, because that’s not how I use it. For me, my bookmarks file is for stuff I use a lot (so I get auto-completion in my location bar, and scanning by Quicksilver), while del.icio.us is for long-term storage of links I’ll want to find again later, with tagged-based sorting so I’ll be able to find them.

Here’s how it works: When you find a page you think you’ll want to find later, pop it into your del.icio.us account, along with a brief description and a few tags. Months or years later, when you’re thinking “I knew I bookmarked an article a while back about anti-abortion activists who get abortions anyway”, you just go to your account, click the tag for abortion, and hey, there it is.

More tags: Here's everything I've tagged with history. And here’s everything that I’ve tagged with both mac and freeware.

(Note: Tags on del.icio.us are space delimited. Tags in LiveJournal are comma delimited. The difference will probably annoy you at some point.)

And since it’s a social service, you can see other people’s tags, subscribe to other users or tags, even recommend a link to a particular user. Here’s the Help page. If you use del.icio.us with Firefox, you’ll want to use the official extension — it gives you a button in your menubar that you can click that pops up a window with the URL and title of the current web page already entered, and it does type-ahead completion with your tags.

• “We’re here! We’re American! Get used to it!” (via solarbird)
• Tom Disch vents his spleen at Dick and Delany (via Kip Manley)
• Sketchfighter 4000 is a 2-D spaceship shooter game (for MacOS X, $19) with pen-drawn graphics on a graph paper background — the sort of thing many of us doodled instead of paying attention in class. The pen shown on the website, also used to create the art, is the Pilot Precise, also featured in Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. (via Ceejbot)
• Dan Froomkin: On Calling Bullshit — “Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. The relentless spinning is enough to make anyone dizzy, and some of our most important political battles are about competing views of reality more than they are about policy choices. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.” (via Daring Fireball)

• A George Carlin sketch come to life — it’s Meat Cake!
• Now there’s a grabber of a lede: “A man who was attacked by an alligator this morning was naked and smoking crack at the time, Polk County deputies who rescued him said today.” (via Boing Boing)
• The things you can buy in Utah!
• Researchers at Los Alamos have been training bomb-sniffing bees.
• Asteroid’s Revenge is a free Flash game in which you control an asteroid smashing into fleets of spaceships. (via Daring Fireball)
• Cabel Sasser reviews the Nintendo Wii (I am so gonna get me one), and provides video of what he calls “the greatest, weirdest, most terriblewonderful User Interface Design idea of all time”: the Help Cat.

• Via pnh, the story of the psychologist who wouldn’t do awful things to Iraqis.

• Time-lapse video of an artist drawing a wasp on toned paper. This leaves me totally inspired. If I weren’t fixing to go to sleep in a few minutes, I’d go to town with those Inktense pencils I bought in August.

• How to Save a Wet Cell Phone — First vital step: immediately remove the battery.

• Research Beyond Google: 119 Authoritative, Invisible, and Comprehensive Resources

• But You Can Call Me Il — Harper’s list of titles allegedly used by “prominent leaders from 160 nations across the world” to refer to Kim Jong-Il, as announced by North Korean state television, translated from the Korean.

• That goldurn gummint!

• Distinguishing Bolts from Screws, a 21-page document (in PDF format) by the US Department of Homeland Security, March 2006. Covers important supplementary criteria such as Under-head Fillets, Bearing Surfaces, Head Angularity, Shank Straightness, and Thread Concentricity. Someone should write this up as a d20 supplement.

• Do You Know Oatmeal?, US Dep’t of Agriculture, just a single page photo.

• Index of Blank Forms, Dep’t of the Army Military Publications Pamphlet 310-2. Just a cover shot.

• Psychological Aspects of Equipment Design, US Air Force, 1949. Don’t let Gary Gygax see this!

• Sprocket Man, a PDF comic book about bicycle safety from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. Check your handlebars and put your helmet on....

• A Winning Combination: Wild Horses & Prison Inmates, from the New Mexico Bureau of Land Management. I’m seeing a new line of romance books here.

• And from the Canadian government, we have Who Are the Zombie Masters, and What Do They Want?. Calm down, cadhla, it’s actually about health care politics.

(listed on Free Government Information, discovered via Kevin Huizenga)

Y’know how the writers at The Onion sometimes seem to be just going through the motions? And sometimes the headline is funny, but the article itself isn’t worth reading? Well, the latest issue has one of those pieces that’s great all the way through: “Five Years Later: NYC Unveils 9/11 Memorial Hole”:

“Let this circle of flowers — brief, beautiful, and too soon gone — symbolize the respect we have shown for the memories of those innocents who lost their lives on that sorrowful morning by creating this great hole,” said the Reverend Charles Bourne of Lower Manhattan’s Trinity Chapel as the flowers sank into the brown, debris-strewn runoff at the bottom of the cavity. “I firmly believe, as does every person here, that this deep, empty hole has come to stand not only for the New York City of today, but also for the transformation of the entire United States since Sept. 11, 2001.”

• Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada has a new ad campaign: Yale, Shmale
• PingMag is a great blog for visual inspiration. Check out these articles:
  • Oded Ezer does experimental typographical art in Hebrew.
  • Gez Fry dropped his diplomatic career path and became a pro illustrator in two years of self-training. (The article title, “How Japanese style illustration works”, is sadly deceptive.)
  • Chopstick design! I hadn’t realized that Japanese, Chinese, and Korean chopsticks are all designed slightly differently. (And Kwytza Kraft recycles disposable wooden chopsticks into lamps, jewelry, bowls, tabletops, bags, etc.)
  • MisFormers are sculptures made out of Transformers figures.
• When did the Muslim world start getting good cartoonists? I’m used to Islamic cartoons being crudely-drawn with blunt, boring symbolism, so when I checked out this Iranian collection of political cartoons I wasn’t expecting much. But wow, that’s a lot more sophisticated than I was expecting (though most of the cartoons aren’t from the Middle East). I was especially impressed by this piece from Iranian artist Mohammadreza Doustmohammadi, enough to look up his website. Antisemitic, sure, and somewhat conceptually disordered (What’s the cowboy imagery in there for? Is it because the six-pointed star looks a bit like a sheriff’s badge?), but graphically very good. And this one is just brilliant.

• Male workplace restroom etiquette leads to scientific breakthrough
• Wacky Japanese video Hard Gay Ramen! Because nothing sells noodles like public humiliation. Skip the first 45 seconds or so.
• Is all of Garfield just the hallucinations of a starving cat?
• The Art of the Shiv: Slideshow of improvised weapons confiscated from inmates at a New Jersey prison.
• “Spanish for Dummies”

• I wanna get this t-shirt and send it back through time to myself fifteen years ago.
• That post I wrote back in March about the infinite-bladed razors? It’s still getting comments.
• Hey, remember Macintosh System 1.0? I love that old all-in-one Control Panel, designed by Susan Kare. (Yes, Jordin Kare’s sister.)
• Time breakdown of modern web design, as a pie chart.
• Malcolm Gladwell on food design and the marketing histories of ketchup and mustard.
• George Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte” recreated in photography.
• Here’s why the Internet was invented: The Fat Wonder Woman Blog! (And you thought it was the Cats That Look Like Hitler blog. Man, what were you thinking?)

I’ve got links about all of them in my Del.icio.us account:

• Stephen Kilnisan, jeweler and techie, is also the unofficial historian of New York’s diamond district, the stretch of 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues through which most of the diamonds sold in the US first pass:

  His eye is caught by two gentlemen huddled in conversation outside 11 W. 47th St. “You see that?” he says. “They’re making a deal.” He narrates the transaction as it unfolds. “One of them pulls out a pouch containing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of diamonds. They haggle for a while, then the handshake. Deals are still made on handshakes here.” In fact, according to the Diamond Dealers Club bylaws, “Any oral offer is binding among dealers, when agreement is expressed by the accepted words ‘Mazel and Broche’ [‘good luck and a blessing’] or any other words expressing the words of accord.” Even more remarkably, since the Talmud prohibits resolving conflicts in non-Jewish courts, disputes on 47th Street are not handled by civil courts but upstairs at the Diamond Dealers Club, where a board of arbiters presides over oral hearings (notes are never taken and the hearings are never recorded) and deliver judgments based on common sense, trade customs, and principles of Jewish law. For generations, this is how diamond dealers throughout the world have conducted business, and it continues to be the principal mode of operation on 47th Street.

• The Monkey Chow Diaries — can a human being subsist on nothing but monkey chow? Probably not.

• The Mini-Microsoft blog’s FAQ on Microsoft’s review, promotion, and job-change process.

• The nest architecture of the Florida harvester ant — Walter Tschinkel of Florida State U’s Dep’t of Biological Science made casts of the structure of ant’s nests by pouring orthodontal plaster into them. He also tried using metals, thus learning on all our behalf the valuable lesson: “Pouring red-hot aluminum in the bottom of a 2-meter pit runs the risk of having ones socks catch on fire from the radiant heat.” There are photos! Of the ant’s nest models, not the burning socks.

• C for Cookie: Parody of the V for Vendetta trailer. (via bugsybanana)
• Incredible Machines: 13-minute collection of bumpers for a Japanese TV show, consisting of elaborate Rube Goldberg devices made from household materials. The video wasn’t available just now when I looked, but maybe it’ll come back up. Oh wait, here it is on YouTube!
• Itaccora suicci: 2-minute Italian parody of Incredible Machines video. (via bugsybanana)
• Ryan vs Dorkman: Amazing 5-minute homemade lightsaber fight.
• G4 + BOOOUM = G5: A professional video editor needs a new G5 Mac, so he says he’ll ’splode his old G4 if he gets $5000. He does, and does. (via mister_wolf)
• iTalk concept video: Short fake ad for possible combination cellphone/video iPod from Apple. Very cool, but probably just vaporware right now.