Linked List: November 30, 2007

Friday, 30 November 2007

Evel Knievel, Daredevil, Dies at 69 

The Associated Press:

Immortalized in the Washington’s Smithsonian Institution as “America’s Legendary Daredevil”, Knievel was best known for a failed 1974 attempt to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered cycle and a spectacular crash at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. He suffered nearly 40 broken bones before he retired in 1980.

One of my first boyhood heroes.

Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6 

Clever bit of web nerdery from Drew McLellan.

Zune’s Spot in Amazon’s Best-Seller List 

Gina Hughes:

Something tells me the Zune will be a popular Christmas gift this holiday season. The player is currently Amazon’s top-selling music player, beating out the new iPod Nano and the 80GB iPod on the “Bestsellers in Electronics” list.

Amazon’s best-seller lists are updated frequently, so it’s possible this was true when she wrote this, but as I type this, the best-selling Zune is behind seven iPod models.

Update: Apparently last year’s brown 30 GB Zune held the top spot at Amazon a few weeks ago after they dropped the price on them to $90. Perhaps Hughes will be buying more of them for all her friends and family this holiday season.

Eye-Fi Wireless Memory Card 

Kottke pretty much nails it with his short write up of the Eye-Fi — an SD memory card with built-in Wi-Fi networking. I tested one from Photojojo for a week, too, and came to a similar conclusion. It’s sort of amazing, technically, but ultimately it’s really only useful if you want to use an online photo site like Flickr as your primary photo library. If you prefer to use something like iPhoto or Lightroom, Eye-Fi is needless.

Layer Tennis: Hutchinson vs. Van Meter 

Crackling good Layer Tennis today — this time in Flash, with animation.

BetterZip Quick Look Generator 

Fantastic — freeware Quick Look preview generator by Robert Rezabek that works with a slew of archive formats, including zip, gzip, and bzip. Works great.

The Key to Reserva 

Scorsese does Hitchcock. Pitch perfect. (Via Coudal.)

E-Junkie 

Brad Miller on E-Junkie, a simple, hosted shopping cart that offers easy integration with PayPal and Google Checkout. (Via Michael Tsai, who’s now using it at his store, too.)

The Making of FF Meta Serif 

“It feels like Meta to me”, indeed. Brilliant work.

‘Futurama’ — The Geekiest Show on TV 

Wired story on the return of Futurama, and producer David X. Cohen:

In a 1995 Simpsons episode, Cohen devised an equation that appears briefly behind Homer Simpson:

178212 + 184112 = 192212

The equation appears to be a counterexample to a famous mathematical statement, Fermat’s Last Theorem. Pierre de Fermat had proposed the theorem in 1637, and a proof had only recently been discovered when the episode aired. Cohen wrote a computer program to find near-misses for Fermat’s Last Theorem, equations that were close enough to being true that a person who tapped it into a calculator would be fooled.

The story includes a link to the source code.