Acts of Volition

For those who participate in this discussion following a post here on aov about the death of the free web, you may find this comic interesting as it deals with the topic of file-sharing and micropayments.  •  The comic, by Scott McCloud is interesting for what it says and for how it says it. Check …

Did you know:  •  Google gives more weights to links that are bold or have a larger relative font size?  •  Google uses the text in links to a page to help rank that page? As they "often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves."  •  This all comes from an academic …

Prince Edward Island's Department of Agriculture and Forestry has photographed every inch of the Island from about 9000 feet. The provincial government website has combined these photos with their powerful mapping plugin to make for an amazing way to view the Island.  •  You'll need to download …

aov has been host to some interesting discussion of television and some less interesting rants by myself on the topic. I was pointed to a great Northern Exposure website where a fellow fan spoke nicely on my behalf.  •  The whole site is great. They have 1-megabyte windows help file with …

Home sick yesterday, the big boss man passed on a call from CBC Radio. The good Mitch Courmier, keeper of charlottetown.cbc.ca was doing a story on Human Portals (blogs) for the local morning show.  •  Mitch and I had a great chat about the state of web logs. He was inspired by Human Portals, the …

“  •  There once was a man from Chicoutimi  •  Who was kind enough to lend his canoe to me  •  But when I fell in  •  I couldn't swim  •  Because canoeing was new to me  •  ”

While summer doesn't officially start for seven days, it may as well have. It is beautiful where I live. While Matt from MetaFilter plays in the sun, I'll toil in a stuffy basement (I love it here).  •  Nothing marks a beautiful pre-summer day like a set of random links. Enjoy:  •  Kirby Ferguson …

Fun with Babelfish. Robots translating aov to Spanish. Rob Fletcher becomes Robo Fletcher, I apparently work for "el silverorange", and thegeniuses@actsofvolition.com are losgenios@actsofvolition.com.  •  Keep up the good work, robots.

A friend of mine recently cast off his American birthright to become a Canadian citizen (actually, he just became a dual citizen, but casting off birthright sounds very cool). He was given the choice of either swearing or affirming the oath of citizenship. He was told that "you are encouraged to …

A reminder that we are not marching towards a blissful and peaceful future: The U.S. executed Timothy McVeigh today.  •  What do you think of that?

Behold a visual history of Hard Drive icons in the parallel worlds of Windows and Mac. Notice how they get more and more realistic without becoming more meaningful. Personally I prefer the balance between abstraction and a tactile feel found in the Win9x/W2k and MacOS 9 versions.  •  The old Mac …

Speaking of behemoths, Microsoft introduces a keyboard with the long overdue Copy, Cut, and Paste keys. A Microsoft Word key is lame, but anyone who has done the Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V a hundred times knows that the pinky and index finder were not meant to be that far from each other for any length of …

A few low quality videos from last summers evening stress release activities at work.  •  Keyboard, Buick, meet North River Road  •  (1.3Mb MPEG)  •  Keyboard, meet Buick  •  (1.3Mb MPEG)

There is a special place in hell for a browser that reloads a page every time the user resizes their window (try building a web-based application on this rickety platform). Netscape will soon take it's place in that special place. Netscape 4 has less than 10% of the user base and the number is …

For those who find the grocery store (and stores in general) claustrophobic and frightening like myself, I recommend waferbaby's how to survive the grocery store.

News.com tends to consist of little more than a collection of press releases and product announcements. However, their new feature, The Death of the Free Web is a fine collection of articles measuring the effects of the crash of dot-com-tomfoolery.  •  The bottom line of the articles is that we …

Old school computer columnist John C. Dvorak's The Myth of Broadband looks at the idea that broadband doesn't matter until most users have it. Right now, they don't.  •  On the bright side, a dialup connection is much better now than it was two years ago. I don't know if it's hardware, software …