This is a guest article by D. Salmons on behalf of DIY Guides.
House cleaning can be a very time consuming and laborious chore that seems to never end. And just when you think you have it all under control, it’s time to do it again. Even worse, things can be missed that suddenly complicate your plan of attack. Is there any hope?
Yes, there is hope! You just need to think like a geek. And what would a geek do? Why, create a spreadsheet that makes house cleaning a manageable job without any surprises, of course.
The next time you’re on that oh-so-important WOW raid and emptying your bladder isn’t really an option, consider using one of those revolutionary geek leak portable urinal systems. Unfortunately, geek leaks aren’t sold on the market for now, so you’ll have to resort to peeing in something like a modified gas tank… or something.
This amazing stop motion re-creation of a Super Mario Bros. Game was created by Japenese Youtube user takotuboooo with a total budget of only $55. Check it out:
The new expansion pack for The Sims 3, Ambitions, was recently released. I’ve had a chance to play with it a bit, and here are my impressions, a breakdown of what it adds to the game, and some nifty screenshots.
In the following video, Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson debunks the 2012 myth, explaining exactly why the various end of the world scenarios that can be found on the net don’t hold up science-wise.
The New York Times—or more specifically their standards editor Phil Corbett—has decreed that the use of the word “tweet” is no longer welcome in the pages of the famed newspaper. His reasoning?
Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles.
Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” — as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter — is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections.
As The Awl points out, Corbett makes some good arguments here. I’m a bit of a grammar nut myself, and I cringe every time someone uses the verb “tweet”—especially during a news cast. It sounds rather insipid, and completely out of context, even to me (someone who uses Twitter every single day). But at the same time, the technology is changing the lingo and try as we die-hard wordwrights might try, in the end we’re not the ones who make the decisions about phrases. To balk the majority means creating a likely rift between the audience and writer.
So: alternatives, perhaps? “Chirp” sounds lame. And, honestly it’s a little difficult for me to think of anything else other than “tweet” at this point. I think that Corbett—however well intended and dead-on about the lingo he is—is fighting a losing battle. That is, assuming that Twitter stays around for another decade. As much as I love Twitter, I’m just not sure it’ll have the staying power of something as game-changing as email (as Corbett discusses in his guidelines). So maybe this entire argument is just, well, for the birds.
How about you? Do you cringe at the word “tweet” like I do in journalism? Can you offer any better suggestions? Or is this just a fruitless argument?
I’m not exactly sure why someone would want to build something like that, but Justin Shull went and did it anyways. But why Justin, WHY? Unless your real name is Wile E. Coyote and you’re looking to sneak up on your all time nemesis, Road Runner, I don’t really see a practical use to that thing. In any case, it sure will bring everyone’s attention on you the next time you go grocery shopping, that’s for sure.
We use the Internet for a lot of things…paying the bills, reading the news, keeping in touch with old friends, but a growing trend if finding your mate online. More people than ever are utilizing dating services and many are finding success. You have seen the commercials, now it’s time to read the stats on this booming trend.
Google has launched a major overhaul of the way it produces its search results. If it works as designed it could mean new content appears in results much more quickly.
The key to Google, like any search engine, is that queries don’t literally search the Internet but rather Google’s index which is repeatedly updated by scanning web pages to make the index more current.
Until now, the index has been built into several “layers” which are refreshed at varying intervals. The main “layer” updated roughly once every fortnight meaning that on average the data Google used for an individual web page would be a week old. (There are exceptions for sites known to be updated more frequently, for example those scanned for Google News.) Here’s an explanation from Google of how the old system works:
That system has been replaced by “Caffeine”, a system which throws out the layers and breaks the web down into much smaller chunks. Rather than running on a cycle, the index is continuously updated. This means new content goes “live” on the index as soon as Google finds it, rather than at the next scheduled update.
According to the company, this makes its index “50 percent fresher”, whatever that means. It also notes that the entire Caffeine database is almost 100 million gigabytes and the daily refresh rate is in the hundreds of thousands of gigabytes range.
What’s not yet clear is if this will have any impact on search engine optimization and the factors which determine where pages appear in the Google rankings. It appears that the frequency at which individual pages are scanned won’t change; instead it’s the speed at which the data collected in that scan is built into the live index. Still, that change may have affect the number of pages which wind up benefiting from whatever element of Google’s algorithm favors recently-written content.
