Refenestration Daily.
Does it make me totally lame if I've got NPR’s Morning Edition theme song stuck in my head?
(I have a daily scheduled task which rips it to mp3 for me and I listen to it while I'm at the gym and while I walk from the parking garage to the office.)
Update, 2005-09-29: Just as a warning, don’t even think about reading that linked BBC News article if you’re especially susceptible to getting songs stuck in your head. Damn you, Henry Mancini!
DealNews is reporting a sale on Brondell’s advanced toilet seat for only $474 shipped.
Replacing your old toilet set, the Swash 600 includes a built-in bidet, gentle closing seat, warm air dryer, heated seat, and more, all managed via a remote control. The Swash 400 has most of the 600’s features (no warm air dryer) with push-button controls for $379 after coupon. […]
I don’t know what’s weirder, that someone’s selling a remote-control toilet seat or that it’s made its way up to #2 on DealNews’ Top Reader Picks page :-/.
This MSNBC article on LED light bulbs starts off with charming snarkiness:
Next time you screw in a cheap incandescent light bulb, ask yourself this: Do you ride a horse to work? Still churning your own butter? […]
I’m well aware of LEDs as a light source and I still enjoy my Inova X5 LED Flashlight, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they could be put to use in home fixtures. (As you might have guessed, it’s not a single LED that screws into a light socket, but rather a cluster of them which form a single unit.)
The article writes about LEDs’ long life, saying that they’d last 10 times longer than compact-fluorescent bulbs and 100 times longer than an incandescent bulb. The downside, though, is cost — even the low-end ones are about $25 per bulb. Ouch. I mean, the energy savings would be nice, but I would think it could take a while to recoup that kind of initial investment :-/.
Opera has always been a good browser with excellent standards support — and now it’s free!
Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera's growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made today's milestone an achievable goal. […]
For a moment there, I was wondering how they’d make their money, but it looks like they have a Premium Support plan in place. All the same, I’m pretty stoked about this. And, if Firefox didn’t have so many scrumptious extensions, I’d consider trying Opera as my day-to-day browser.
Update 2005-09-23: According to Om Malik, it was Google that made Opera free, through a compensation deal. Well, yay Google :).
As the government began its recovery operations in New Orleans and other Katrina-stricken areas, it prohibited the media from covering this; as Col. Terry Ebbert put it, “You can imagine sitting in Houston and watching somebody removed from your parents’ property. We don’t think that’s proper” And, in this instance, CNN took a reasonable course of action — they sued FEMA. In a memo to their staff, CNN explained their reasoning:
[…]As seen most recently from war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, from tsunami-ravaged South Asia and from Hurricane Katrina’s landfall along the Gulf, CNN has shown that it is capable of balancing vigorous reporting with respect for private concerns. Government officials cannot be allowed to hinder the free flow of information to the public, and CNN will not let such a decision stand without challenge.
Some people might give FEMA the benefit of the doubt, that maybe this decision was a gut reaction that they didn’t quite think through. However, considering the amount of red tape that even the local DMV has, I can’t fathom that this was a spur-of-the-moment decision. Fortunately, a judge has granted a temporary restraining order “to prevent emergency officials in the Hurricane Katrina disaster zone from preventing the media from covering the recovery […]”.