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Riding my bicycle for over an hour a day as I make my way to work and back and around the city, I've often felt the need for a GPS. At other times, I would want a speedometer, so I'd have some idea at what speed I'm taking that slope.
In this post, I'll show you how to safely attach your cell phone to your handlebar for less than $5.
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There have been a lot of changes and additions to services offered by Google in the past couple of weeks, and the way I see it, we’re no more than 6 months away from having a Google phone, that allows you to talk in English, and have your partner across the globe hear you in Chinese – and vise-versa.
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The media is all abuzz over NASA’s discovery of ice-water on the moon. This is great news, because it means the moon can potentially sustain more life than was earlier thought.
However, upon further ispection of NASA’s data, I have come to learn that there’s a woman on the moon (in addition to the man in the moon)
Have a look:

woman's face in moon

בעקבות הצעה של מספר חברי כנסת לעגן בחוק את האפשרות לגזור עונש מוות על אדם המורשע ברצח של קטין עד גיל 13, התפתח דיון ביני לחברתי. עלתה השאלה האם אין זה מנוגד לרוח היהדות.
מתוך ידיעה שעונש מוות מופיע תדיר בתורה, הסתקרנתי לראות בדיוק באילו מצבים התורה מצווה על עונש מוות.
חיפשתי באתר של מכון ממרא מופעים של המחרוזת הפופולרית “מות יומת”. הנה התוצאות לפניכם: continue reading »

לאחר שקראתי באנשים ומחשבים על שינוים המוצעים בחוק המחשבים, חיפשתי את לשון החוק הנוכחי.
פרק ב’ של החוק מגדיר מהם עבירות מחשב, לרבות:
“משבש את פעולתו התקינה של מחשב או מפריע לשימוש בו;
מוחק חומר מחשב, גורם לשינוי בו, משבשו בכל דרך אחרת או מפריע לשימוש בו.”
דינו של העובר עבירות אלה, אגב, הינו מאסר של שלוש שנים.

עכשיו נשאלת השאלה, מה נכלל תחת ההגדרה של שיבוש פעילות תקינה של מחשב או הפרעה לשימוש בו. האם חלונית ה-WGA של חלונות, המזכירה לך ש(אולי) הגרסה המותקנת אצלך של מוצר מיקרוסופט זה או אחר אינו מקורי לא מהווה שיבוש לפעילות של המחשב? מה לגבי מקרים שבהם יכולות מסויימות של מערכת ההפעלה מנוטרלות בשל אבחנה (נכונה או לא) של WGA?

ולגבי מחיקת חומר מחשב, רק לפני שבוע אמאזון מחקה מרחוק ספרים ממחשביהם של לקוחות שרכשו את 1984 וחוות החיות.

אני לא יודע אם חוק זה עמד במבחן בית המשפט למעט במקרה הסוס הטרויאני, אבל אני חושב שבניסוח הנוכחי שלו, החוק הזה אוסר על הרבה מההגבלות המובנות במנגנוני DRM (או נז”ק, בעברית). לדעתי שווה שמישהו שמבין קצת יותר בתחומים האלה יבחן את העניין.

XKCD, for those of you who don’t know, is a webcomic about (as it testifies of itself) romance, sarcasm, math, and language. In my opinion, it’s the best webcomic out there. I wanted to download the complete comics archive, for the sake of a local backup, and as an idea for a printed, coffee-table style book. However, I didn’t want just the comic’s image file – the best part of XKCD is often the alt-text that shows up as a tooltip when you mouse-over the comic. And of course there’s the comic’s title, as well.

There are several scripts out there that others have written before me that download the comic, and some even do a pretty good job of getting some of the extra data. However, I wanted more. I wanted a downloader that would get ALL the data available about the comics, and store it in an easily-retrievable, transformative manner. continue reading »

This post will only be relevant to readers of right-to-left languages, and to developers who develop for such languages. As such, my next post will be a translation of this one into Hebrew.
A bit over a year ago, a friend of mine wrote about embedded unicode right-to-left and left-to-right characters in a flow of text. In a nutshell, when writing text that contains both LTR characters (like English) and RTL characters (like Hebrew), the flow of the text can wind up messed up. Here’s an example:

The (proper) solution to this conundrum is this: wrap your text, which you want flowing in the opposite direction from it’s encapsulating element, in the unicode characters for left-to-right embedding (or right-to-left embedding), and the Pop Directional Formatting character. For further reading, go here.

Back when Liron wrote that post of his, I thought it would be a nice little project to tackle – write a Firefox plugin or Greasemonkey user-script that allows you to encapsulate your text in these characters, for the sake of all those who will follow and read it. I have since then become familiar – and very fond of – bookmarklets. I think a bookmarklet is the best way to distribute the solution to this problem, because it’s lightweight, easy to install and modify, and (at least in theory) cross browser. continue reading »

Reading a post on Boingboing pointing out that God is a registered trademark, I was reminded of one of those little bits of information I assimilated along the way, but that was usually of little significance. Namely, that “Let There Be Light” is a registered trademark of Business Objects, which is owned by SAP. continue reading »

As anyone who’s interested in a free culture knows, copyright law has been getting more and more restrictive over the past 100 years or so. When an author published a book one hundred years ago, she enjoyed the exclusive right to reproduce her work and distribute it for a maximum of 42 years. Less, if she did not jump through all the red-tape hoops of renewing copyright after the initial 14 years, and again after 28. The copyright acts of 1831 and 1909 amended copyright law, extending it – including for works already published and still under copyright – from 28 years prior to 1831 to a maximum of 42 and then 56 years. This trend of extending the protection of copyright has been going on ever since, with the latest being the copyright act of 1998, which extended the duration of copyright to 95 years.

So copyright has been getting increasingly extended, and while 200 years ago you would have had monopoly on your work for a maximum of 28 years, today it’s four times that, and encompassing more types of intellectual property. But I would like to argue that over the past 100 years alone, copyright has become over eight times as restrictive. How? Because I don’t think measuring the length of copyright in years is of as much meaning as measuring it in man-years, and the population is growing constantly. continue reading »