That monkeys, gorillas, and chimps are smart is not really headline news, but researchers have finally observed wild gorillas in the Republic of Congo using tools to do things like building simple bridges, support themselves while foraging, and testing the depth of rivers and streams before crossing.
Pretty neat, but not as neat as a freaking crow making a hook out of a wire to get some food out of a jar. Now that’s crazy.
How how I love me some iTunes Smart Playlists. It’s such a wonderful feature that allows you to enjoy your music more efficiently by setting up automatically generated playlists based on whatever criteria you’d like.
For instance, I have a “Top 100 Songs” (the most listened to of the collection), a “Forgotten Gems” playlist (for those good songs I haven’t heard in a while), where Rating is greater than 4 stars, and Last Played is not in the last 10 days, and a “Virgin Ears” playlist where Playcount is 0 (for songs I haven’t heard yet).
It’s fantastic. The trouble is though, while these work wonderfully in iTunes, for some reason they wouldn’t update automatically on the iPod. I’d listen to “Forgotten Gems”, but the list would never change. The “New Music” playlist (where Date Added is within the last month or so) would never change. It was very frustrating to be so defeated by such a little device… until now.
With the most recent Software Update comes the iPod updater with fixes for all iPods in the family, and much to my great joy, it seems they’ve finally fixed the Smart Playlist issue so they update on the fly. Thanks Steve!
For more ideas on what you can do with Smart Playlists, check out smartplaylists.com
I always like to read the police blotters in newspapers, and in a way, this is a police blotter for drugs. I remember finding this by complete accident a very long time ago, and I was absolutely fascinated. Micrograms is the intelligence report of the DEA and chronicles the “best of” in intercepted smuggling operations. Cocaine in book lining, heroin in tote bag handles, opium disguised as chocolates. I’m not very big on drugs, but it’s a very interesting read, and a testament to ingenuity, however unfortunately directed. After looking at all the different ways here people have tried to smuggle drugs, I imagine the agents of the DEA have very challenging and rewarding jobs.
Read more on Micrograms: The Newsletter of the Drug Enforcement Agency…
In San Francisco, it’s not uncommon to find wonderful things on the street. Many people’s entire furnishings come from gems left on the corner or leaning up against a wall outside an apartment building. I think it’s more common here for people to put old things to curb with the understanding that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure that to take it to Goodwill.
That being said, a few artists decided to do a little social experiment and hide a GPS tracker inside a painting, which they then released into the wild by leaving it at Dolores Park. They were able to track it’s movements pretty much all over the entire city before it finally came to rest a a lumber yard. The embedded GPS device is still sending out a signal, and they’ll be tracking it until the batteries die, but you can check out a brief project documentation here:
If you’re in San Francisco, the show the piece is in should be running through the end of the month. More info here:
Ok, I’m not really a huge fan of The Family Guy. Maybe it was because the show before it, the show made from the hopes and dreams of producers who hope no one remembers Married With Children, sucked so bad, but any show that has the family think the dad for dead when he’s really stuck on a desert island with his friends, has the wife remarry the dog in his absence, and then has him return days before the wife finally has sex with the dog all in the same 30 minute episode is OK with me.
Ok my first gaming system was my brother’s Intellivision, but my SECOND was a Nintendo… I haven’t really been so much into video games in recent times (aside from Katamari Damacy and GTA: San Andreas), but this… this is really just out of control:
One of the greatest features in Firefox (you ARE using Firefox by now, right?) that I just love to pieces are live bookmarks. I don’t really like Safari’s RSS support… I prefer to have a simple tab I can click and be able to browse all the headlines of a feed without leaving whatever page I happen to be on. That’s pretty much how I get all my information, from a row of categorized live bookmarks across the top of my Firefox browser window.
However, Google News has always held a place in my heart. Having studied propaganda and persuasion, having easy access to well over 3,000 news sources from all over the world was a goldmine, and now, I can add Google News live bookmarks to my collection of information sources!
On top of that, another great feature is that you can create your own sections in Google News… say you want to keep on top of EVERYTHING that goes on in the exciting world of Animal Husbandry, right? Just enter “Animal Husbandry” (currently there are about 521 story matches for animal husbandry) in the search bar, click the “Live Bookmark” icon at the bottom, and there you have it! Awesome. Thank you Google!