(Source: hatethefuture via whatevs.net)

F Yeah Nyan cat (and Youtube)

Such smiling, sparkling insanity.

And how happy was I yesterday when I noticed what Youtube had added to the video? Take a look at the progress bar. SO IMPRESSED.

(moar info: Know Your Meme)

UPDATE: They took down the progress bar thingy! Awww. Well, here's a screenshot, which can't even capture the full extent of the awesome since it was animated just like full-size Nyan Cat.

Want to know what $8 million in Bitcoins looks like?

Way up.

(credit: Penny Arcade)

At the moment, 432,000 bitcoins are sitting in one account, right here. For perspective, that's about $8.4 million dollars at current market rates, or (perhaps even more impressively) almost 7% of all bitcoins in existence! Current rumors are that they represent the entire holdings of all the accounts at Mt. Gox, the major bitcoin exchange site. They did have some outages this weekend, so maybe they're doing something with all their funds. Of course, who knows what it is they're doing.

Perhaps part of the puzzle: I was led to this account by a link posted by LulzSec on Saturday. The link shows a transaction where dozens of accounts transfer 50 BTC to a single one, totaling 17000 BTC in that single account. Then that account joins dozens more to transfer a total of 432,000 BTC to the account I mentioned above. What are all these movements about? And what about it did LulzSec find so lulzy? Was that just how Mt. Gox was storing its bitcoins, 50 BTC each in thousands of addresses? Are they just changing their organizational scheme? Maybe it's something as mundane as that, but even so, it's an impressive amount of wealth in one place.

side note: Earlier on Saturday LulzSec posted a tweet that seemed to hint at claiming responsibility for Friday's crash in the bitcoin market. Related? Probably not. True? Almost definitely not.

Bitcoin breaks $10

(all graphs are from Mt. Gox)

After stalling around $9.50 for a few days, Bitcoins have finally broken through $10 on Mt. Gox, one of the major Bitcoin exchanges. And only a month and a half ago, they were under $1.

A tenfold jump in six weeks.

For the uninitiated, Bitcoins are a new digital "currency" that everyone has been talking about in recent months. I put "currency" in scare quotes because calling it a currency isn't the best way to describe it, and leads to confusion. It's better to think about it as a digital alternative to gold. Just like gold, bitcoins are scarce and can't just be "printed" whenever you want, like paper currency. Also just like gold, the bitcoin economy is decentralized and doesn't rely on a central bank, like with paper currencies or all previous digital currencies.

You're probably wondering now about how it actually works. Well that's a fifteen minute conversation that involves in-depth topics like cryptography. After plenty of research I'm still not sure I fully grasp it. But I'll take a shot at the 30-second version:

Everyone in the bitcoin network has files on their computer that contain records of transactions, signed and sealed with an official (cryptographic) stamp. Owning a bitcoin means that there are people out there who have records of a transfer of a bitcoin from someone else to you. So a bitcoin isn't just a file on your computer. They exist in records of transactions, held on other people's computers. That's why you can't just make more by making copies of files. And how do you verify that you're the person who received that transfer? Your identity is proved by your possession of a secret that you never tell anyone, called your private key. There's a cryptographic way of proving that you have this private key without divulging it.

If I've got anything wrong, please let me know. But that gives you an idea of the basics. That is how there can be a currency with no central bank. It's maintained by sharing transaction data between everyone on the network. Also, the mechanics mean that you can be anonymous even while exchanging money with people. All you need to identify yourself is your private key (and a corresponding public key). You never have to tie that to your actual identity.

That's probably enough for now. Later I might answer a few more questions like "What can I actually buy with bitcoins?" and "Will they keep going up?" For now, I'll give the short versions: a lot, and no. I'm pretty certain we're in a bubble and they'll probably be illegal within a year.

Ever had this feeling?

P.S. Speaking of CAPTCHA memes, I have to recommend Inglip. It's already got its own complete mythology!

Google Video is shutting down! Help save the videos!

Google Video will stop hosting videos on April 29 (seen at Geekosystem). It will still serve as a video search engine for other sites, but those remaining videos that are only hosted on Google Video itself will disappear. And that's a tragedy, because there's a ton of amazing things there.

The strength of Google Video is mostly the long-play, timeless videos of talks, documentaries, interviews, and esoteric full-length movies you can't find anywhere else. As soon as you start looking you find gems like the original Nosferatu film from 1922, a talk by the creator of object-oriented programming, a long interview with Stephen Colbert out of character, or a documentary of interviews with the repentant Secretary of Defense who fomented the Vietnam War. And then there's hundreds of full-length interviews by Charlie Rose. It looks like they have almost everyone he's ever interviewed.

I'm going to say it. This is worse than Geocities.

So what I'm hoping we could all do is download as many of the good ones as we can. There's a Firefox extension that makes it really easy, and even a no-install web service that can do it for you. Then maybe we can re-upload to another site those videos that copyright will allow, or in some other way continue to keep them available. Whatever the solution is, I know that the first step is to get these videos into as many hands as possible before they disappear.

I welcome suggestions in the comments, including great videos you've come across. There's a lot to go through.

UPDATE: I've found some like-minded people leading a centralized and organized preservation effort. It requires technical know-how, but follow the instructions on this page if you want to help build a collection for the Internet Archive.


I'll leave you with an abridged list of interesting things I've found.
(Sorry they're mostly nerdy. That's why I need you to help find the other stuff!)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Richard Feynman - The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Rare interview with Neil Armstrong on 60 Minutes
Richard Dawkins - Nice Guys Finish Last
GoogleTechTalks - Building a computer from logic gates to operating system
amateur video of "Buildering," a combination of bouldering and parkour
The creator of HyperCard talking in 1986
Neil deGrasse Tyson talk at Beyond Belief 2006
Talk by the creator of Narbacular Drop, which inspired Portal

note: I recommend searching general terms like "talk," "interview," "documentary," or any other interesting genre you can think of. And you can specify Google Video-hosted results by including "site:google.com" as a search term. And don't forget to check it isn't already on Youtube!

Though words in haste be human nature, "orient man" is not preferred nomenclature

Background: If you haven't heard of Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, then you've got some awesome learning to do. It's the entirety of The Big Lebowski, written as a Shakespearean play.

I just ran into this video of one of the scenes:

So awesome.
The funniest thing is it's so similar to actual Shakespearean performances I've seen before. It makes me realize that a Shakespearean play is basically a Kevin Smith movie. Most of it is just a bunch of characters sitting around talking about random stuff only tangentially related to the plot. But watching it is nevertheless an interesting ride.

Anyone else ever feel like this?

Holy crap, 100 posts

Hey, so it turns out that last one was my 100th post on this here blog. Yeah, that's right, turns out I've actually kept at this for one reason or another. Experiment: ..success? It turns out it's interesting and fun to write things and craft a post now and then. At least, enough to maintain my interest in this.

So yes, to anyone who's stumbled upon this blog and is trying to figure out what this thing is, it's not just a forgotten-about project someone flirted with for a few months. I started it about a year and a half ago, and I have continued posting. There's not exactly a readership, though, don't be mistaken. There's about 30-40 unique visitors a day, almost exclusively drop-ins who arrive via Google searches.

Not that I'm against that model of displaying my work. The creator of Stack Overflow mentioned in his Google Tech Talk that they think of Google as their user interface. It's how people are supposed to find and read their site. And I myself have discovered the joys of producing useful things that are supposed to be found via Google to enlighten those seeking information. For example, there's this post on fixing Firefox's url bar and this one on a Google Voice technical issue. Both times someone was looking for that information and said so in the comments. If editing Wikipedia has taught me anything, it's that contributing information to the internet can be as rewarding as finding it there in the first place. It feels so good!

So I guess this concludes the State of the Blog. I usually don't talk about this stuff, so I thought why not take this opportunity to publish the info. Let the interested know what exactly this thing is. Oh, and don't let that graph fool you. I'm still just writing stuff I find interesting, as if no one's reading.

Image source: this better "100th post" post

Perspective, people.

A few years ago there were headlines about research that indicated that most people don't know the difference between a search engine and a browser. There's a good description of the phenomenon at this blog post, along with this video of pedestrians in Times Square describing the "difference", in case you don't believe it.

I loved this bit of news. It really punctured the bubble of the high-flying digerati who are busy talking about whether Kickstarter is making nonprofits obsolete or if people are upset about Flickr using flash instead of HTML5*. Really, the number of people who even know these issues even exist is a vanishingly small portion of the public. The majority of internet users know that there's this internet thing that happens in this box on their computer and they can type things into that space at the top to read the news.

Any time you're talking or thinking about something technology-related, you should keep this in mind. 90% of everyone is not even going to understand the words you're saying, let alone care. They interact with technology on a very pragmatic, basal level. And honestly, that's okay. There's no obligation to spend a big portion of your life learning about this complicated realm. Maybe you don't have the time. Maybe you have to prepare that presentation or get groceries. Even if not, perhaps you'd rather work on your bike or go to a show. Those are legitimate interests, as is technology.

However, I happen to have an interest in technology so I usually enjoy these types of stories**. I just get a little fed up now and then when I remember how little it really, actually matters.

Anyway, now I just heard on This Week In Google (like I said, I do enjoy this stuff) that 90% of the American public doesn't know how to use Ctrl+F in a webpage. Bam! Again, we get our perspective re-adjusted.

It's not that I think everyone is clueless with computers. But I like these little reminders that there are a lot of assumptions we make about computer literacy and they aren't all based in reality.


Footnote: Google employee Dan Russell gave that Ctrl+F figure on TWIG #88, somewhere near mid-way.

*FYI, if you're trying to think of examples of this kind of fluff, a great resource is just browsing the Mashable front page.
**But I still don't like Mashable.