This is good advice for keeping any kind of notebook. Lab notebooks have to be robust, since science often requires fire, freezing, or dangerous chemicals.
From the same article, this handy chart compares kinds of pens and how their ink stands up to erasure, water, methanol, ethanol, acetone, and baking.
Sweatshop, the live art show I produce with the artist E.G. Gauger, returns this Sunday, February 27th with live art commissions, answer to questions about doing art, and the 1973 classic HORROR EXPRESS starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Telly Savalas. We start early (around 12pm PST), run late (midnight?!), and want you to come. Yeah, you.
Show up, chat with our filthy regulars, buy some art if you’ve got cash and the will to support the arts.
If the government does it, it can’t be a crime:
Legislation introduced in the Senate this week would broadly criminalize leaks of classified information. The bill (S. 355) sponsored by Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) would make it a felony for a government employee or contractor who has authorized access to classified information to disclose such information to an unauthorized person in violation of his or her nondisclosure agreement.
Nixon would’ve been happy about this. Just declare your illegal activities classified and you’re safe. Who wants to get thrown in Federal prison for doing the right thing and snitching? Even if you’re right and you literally save the world from an illegal war you’ll be legally culpable.
and
Instead they think it could be used in next-generation supercomputers which will be built with components that use light rather than electrons.
are enough for me today. The bad news is that this only absorbs light. It will not stop you from being melted into a puddle by the heat.
I’ve been wondering how long it would take before the pixelart fetish left the game space and moved into proper applications. This will not be the last.
A jQuery plugin that makes reordering rows, sorting, and show/hide look absolutely great. The plugin’s page is itself a perfect demo for the tech. At something like 2kb minified I’m wondering how I lived without it.
Rogue Amoeba has been a big name in consumer audio software for Mac OS X since their inception. One of their biggest apps is an application for streaming audio to the web from your Mac called Nicecast. I sometimes use Nicecast to stream audio to friends and relatives, and it’s very good software.
There’s one thing that annoys me, though: Nicecast doesn’t automatically update the stream you send with the artist and track title, so your listeners don’t know what they’re hearing unless they’ve either heard it before or ask you. Luckily for us, this is OS X, and that means we have access to Applescript.
Cutting to the chase: copy and paste the code below into Applescript Editor (Located in the Applications → Utilities folder on your hard drive) and save it somewhere. Line-wraps are marked ¬, which should be removed from your copy/pasted code.
Phil Nelson 
property sleepTime : 10
repeat
tell application "iTunes"
try
if not (exists current track) then return
set this_artist to (get artist of current track)
set this_track to (get name of current track)
end try
end tell
tell application "Finder"
try
set current_user to do shell script "whoami"
set the_file to "/Users/" & current_user & ¬
"Library/Application Support/Nicecast/NowPlaying.txt"
set eof of the_file to 0
write ("Artist: " & this_artist & return & "Title: " & ¬
this_track) to the_file
end try
end tell
do shell script "/bin/sleep " & sleepTime
end repeat
The script updates your NowPlaying.txt file every 10 seconds (you can change that setting by modifying the sleepTime property), until you tell it to stop by hitting the “Stop” button in Applescript Editor.
If you found this script useful, a donation would make me feel pretty good about this use of my time.
Kyle Tezak is making mini icon sets for famous films, with the constraint of only using 4 icons for each. I’m fond of the Life Aquatic challenge, myself.
A 1958 short story by one of my favorite sci-fi authors, which contains much of what we’d eventually call Reality TV. See also: Nigel Kneal’s 1968 BBC production “The Year of the Sex Olympics”.