Koplowicz.com

I'm in love with this blog called Shady Characters by Keith Houston.  It delves into the history of punctuation marks, and the result is drama, political intruige, and passion.  Think The Da Vinci Code for the ampersand.

So, a lot of websites, including Wikipedia, are blacking themselves out today to protest SOPA.  Apparently someone has decided to take the protest one step further: instead of just imagining life without Wikipedia (because it's blacked out because of SOPA), some people are acting it out.  I'm seeing a bunch of Twitter hashtags for #factswithoutwikipedia.  Here's the best of the lot:

There's been more and more talk recently about using your cell phone to pay for things.  I'm all for it.

"But, what if I lose my cell phone?"  Well, what if you lose your wallet?  If you take something valuable out of the house, there's always a chance that something can go wrong.  But that's always true.  Besides, if you're smart, you've already protected your phone so you can get it back or deactivate it if it gets stolen.

I've blogged before about how I hate it when an operating system takes away features that I like.  Two years ago, I left KDE for this reason.  Two years later, I'm leaving Gnome.  Their sin?  Removing support for Compiz.  I want my spinny cube.  To be sure, Gnome 3 has some very nice features, and it's beautiful.  But the Gnome developers made a conscious decision to remove support for a popular feature, a feature I lean on heavily.

I previously complained about Google's poor integration between their own products.  For example, I've previously blogged about how Google Voice is a fantastic service (multiple times), but it has remained separate from Google Talk, their instant messenger.  "Aren't those separate technologies?"  Not when Google Chat lets you do voice chat and send/receive messages from cell phones.  So you're left with two products that offer almost identical VOIP services that don't talk to each other.

You might have already heard the news.  This may sound like jumping on a bandwagon, but I was sad to hear it.

Over Rosh Hashanah, I saw a girl get her cellphone stolen.  It was a fancy new iPhone and I asked the police if they could track its GPS, like in the movies, and they said no - unless it had one of those anti-theft apps.  That made me realize I need one of those apps.  And so do you.