Todd's Old Blog

Category: Technology

  • Facebook Is My F-word

    “Facebook has devolved from a social networking platform to an operating system for third-party applications.” I cringe at the mention of it. It’s more contemptible than “free”, with all that’s been done to make that word utterly meaningless—if not borderline fraudulent—mostly from the lips and keyboards of marketers. It’s more despicable than “f*ck”, which despite…

  • RTFM: The Next Generation

    Back in the day—and probably still, in certain dark corners of the Internet—curious n00bs spouting often-asked-and-answered “obvious questions” (at least to those being asked) were quickly booted in the posterior and sent reeling from Usenet newsgroups, IRC,  and (later) discussion forums with the phrase “RTFM!” left ringing in their ears for good measure. Nowadays it’s a much…

  • Product #FAIL: Koodo Phone Case

    Here’s a few questions it might be useful to ask before designing a mobile phone case, or alternately, before buying a warehouse full of some other manufacturer’s mobile phone cases: (1.)  Should we use rivets to attach the belt clip to the main body of the case? (2.) How many should we use? (3.) How large…

  • Happy April Fool’s Day, Tweeps!

    April Fool’s Day and Twitter were made for each other, don’t you think?  Sharing-oriented messages with a shortened URL courtesy of bit.ly or some other tool?  It’s the perfect combination of trust, expectation of useful content, and an obscured link.  The perfect storm. That was my thinking at least.  For the last couple of weeks…

  • IMD 4005 Open Source Presentation

    This is a presentation on Open Source I created for Interactive Multimedia & Design (IMD) students enrolled in the Bachelor of Information Technology (BIT) Degree program (a joint collaboration between Carleton University and Algonquin College). Audio: Presentation audio (MP3 format) [37.4 MiB] Presentation audio (Ogg Vorbis format) [36.4 MiB] Slides: Download now or preview on…

  • Quit Following Me

    Yesterday afternoon on the bus ride home, I watched from the window as a flock of birds circled and dived around the roof of a high-rise apartment complex. One bird had a slight lead, several others were a length behind, while another three dozen or so were clustered in pursuit. I turned in my seat…

  • New year, new OS?

    So far it’s shaping up to be a year of changes.  Some milestone birthdays, the family website on a content management system (at long last), and now, a change of operating system. After about 3 years of running Kubuntu on the family desktop, I’ve switched to openSUSE.  Not a huge change I guess, switching from…

  • The site, reborn

    It was a ten years ago today… Well no, not really. More like nine years actually. And not today. (Start again.) It was November 9, 2000, when I originally reserved this domain, long before MTV’s Total Request Live… Okay, fine… it was sometime after MTV’s TRL, not that I’d actually heard of it at the…

  • On Free Culture

    I love free.  I blog about it; I tweet about it; I consume it; I produce it. Free Culture is a difficult concept for some to understand, primarily because we have been born and raised in a capitalist society where few things in life are truly free, both in terms of their monetary cost and…