Flour Power

It’s part of the Coraline movie promotion, debuting on the 6th of February, which is inspired in a book by Neil Gaiman himself. Ever wondered what koumpounophobia is? Neil answers.

(Via Neil Gaiman’s Journal)

We didn’t really have a clue back then, did we?

Well it takes over two hours to receive the entire text of the newspaper over the phone, and with an hourly use charge of $5 the new “telepaper” won’t be much competition for the 20c street edition.

(Via Techcrunch)

One of Ireland’s biggest ISP’s, Eircom, signed an agreement with the four major record labels in which it agreed to disconnect customers if they illegally download music. This came as a result of a lawsuit initiated by EMI Ltd., Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music and Warner Music Group Inc. (via the Irish Recorded Music Association – IRMA) in which the labels wanted Eircom to install network monitoring equipment. The offenders will be given two warnings before being shut down.

So now, instead of having to go to court to get an order asking the ISP to shut off a subscriber’s connection, the music labels will directly to the ISP, making the whole process much faster. And the record companies have agreed that they will take all necessary steps to put similar agreements with other ISPs in Ireland, although there are no signs of that for now.

Now let’s be realistic. Illegal downloads will not stop. Ever! So why do they even bother? I think it’s quite easy to understand that music sales will not rise because of this. People who download illegal music wouldn’t buy it anyway, and there’s the even the chance that music downloads increase record sales. That’s what far smarter people than me have been saying for a while.

Anyway, the existence of quite a large number of alternatives might eventually make Eircom change their mind, or at least place some effort in trying to avoid shutdowns by being especially strict about the evidence presented by the labels. I guess they don’t want their customers running away to their competitors.

So much hype about this being a big thing, but I don’t think it will really make any difference.

Faux Cyrillic is the use of Cyrillic letters in Latin text to evoke the Soviet Union or Russia. This is sometimes used in book covers, film titles, comic book lettering, artwork for computer games, or product packaging by switching Latin letters with their Cyrillic look-alikes. One such example is the film “Borat”, that had the title in the posters written as ”BORДT”.

The Fake Cyrillic Generator makes it easy for anyone to convert text into faux Cyrillic. For instance, converting “Flour Power” results in “FLФЦЯ PФШЗЯ” and my name is “ДИTФЙIФ FДЯIИHД” in Fake Cyrillic.

Now it would be even cooler if there was a tool to render a whole website this way. It would look something like this, but readable by English-speaking people.

(Via Labnol)

It took some time, but the Google folks finally did it. It is now possible to use Gmail while offline:

Today we’re starting to roll out an experimental feature in Gmail Labs that should help fill in those gaps: offline Gmail. So even if you’re offline, you can open your web browser, go to gmail.com, and get to your mail just like you’re used to.

Offline Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of the mail and as long as there’s an active Internet connection, that cache is synchronized with Gmail’s servers. When the connection is lost, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored locally instead of sending/fetching it across the network. It’s possible to access almost all of Gmail’s features while offline, and those will be automatically synchronized with Gmail’s servers when there’s an Internet connection available. There are some features missing, though: it’s not possible to add attachments, the contact manager is not available offline, and it’s not possible to customize which messages to download. Gmail uses some algorithms to determine which messages to cache locally: in my case it downloaded 3 months of email (some labels were downloaded completely, while Spam and Trash were ignored), including attachments, which amounted to about 280MB.

This should come in handy for those that rely a lot on email but can’t be connected all the time. It’s now possible to get some inbox cleaning done while commuting, or on an airplane. And as the Gmail team point out, it’s a good solution for those with crappy connections:

And if you’re on an unreliable or slow connection (like when you’re “borrowing” your neighbor’s wireless), you can choose to use “flaky connection mode,” which is somewhere in between: it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background.

The setup couldn’t be easier. Just go to Settings > Labs, enable it (you’ll have to install Gears if you don’t have it yet.) and after the browser is reloaded press the “Offline” link on the top right menu. It will take some time downloading everything, though.