Recently I’ve been playing with linking to specific parts of a video and incorporating YouTube subtitles. Then I realized that you could do a neat trick. YouTube allows you to create closed captioning with a simple text file that looks like this: 00:00:07.000 Hi everybody. Welcome back to anot...

Last week Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced support for a new link element to clean up duplicate urls on sites. The syntax is pretty simple: An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following: <link rel=”can...

My wife and I decided to head to Washington D.C. for the inauguration, and I’m already glad that I did. On the way out of a party, I spotted Minnesota Senator-elect Al Franken. Someone asked him to do a short “Hi kids, stay in school” video message for a classroom in Florida. A lad...

It’s the end of 2008, which means that it’s time for one of my favorite posts of the year: what charities would you recommend donating to? As I said a couple years ago: If you’re not aware of them, GuideStar and Charity Navigator are two good places to start. … Does anyone wa...

I really want to run Ubuntu, but it shouldn’t be this hard. Plugging in an SD card reader that I picked up from Best Buy shouldn’t cause a hard freeze of my system (on both Gutsy Gibbon and Intrepid Ibex): The card reader works fine in Windows. At this point, I’m honestly thinking ...

In case you’re looking for the “udevmonitor” program on the Intrepid Ibex version of Ubuntu, it’s changed; use “udevadm monitor” now: $ udevadm help Usage: udevadm COMMAND [OPTIONS] info query sysfs or the udev database trigger request events from the kernel settl...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/9_Tips_for_Google_s_New_Voice_Recognition_App_for_iPhone'; Here are some tips to help you get the most out of Google’s new Mobile Application for the iPhone. To get Google Mobile App on your iPhone, go to the App Store and search for “Google Mobile App,&...

I’m not sure what Google Docs market share is, but I thought it would be interesting to mention a couple data points and add a new data point. Data point #1: Compete. Compete just estimated that 4.4M visitors stopped by Google Docs in September, which is just a hair below 2.4% of the U.S. onli...

I know what you’re thinking: “Matt, I hacked my original iPhone. Now I want to share in the iPhone 3G fun, but I’m worried that something horrible will happen if I upgrade to the iPhone 3G.” Buck up, fellow iPhone hacker. I’ll tell you how to upgrade from your hacked Ap...

This sucks. On some very rare occasions, when I connect an SD card reader to my Ubuntu machine, it freezes. Normally I just reboot and everything is fine. But this time my Ubuntu machine won’t boot, and it shows a message like Starting up … Loading, please wait… kinit: name_to_dev_...