An anonymous reader sends the story of the rediscovery of an original painting of Ada Byron at about age 4, the girl who was to become Countess Lovelace and the world’s first computer programmer. A US Army sergeant in Tajikistan caught wind of an eBay auction of a 180-year-old painting of Ada Byron, with provenance; he notified a programmer buddy in Texas, who won the auction.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share This

Share This

kamikasee writes “I recently found out that I’m going to be moved from an office to a cubicle. The cubicle area is not very secure, and I’m worried about things wandering off. My boss has offered to purchase some equipment to help me secure things, but so far I haven’t found anything that fits my stipulations. Google and Amazon searches are overwhelmed by lockable key cabinets and bigger pieces of furniture. Here are some of the requirements: The main issue with traditional solutions (e.g. locking things in a drawer) is convenience. I use a laptop with a second LCD monitor. There’s also an external keyboard and mouse and a USB hard drive. I leave my laptop on at night so I have the ability to remote-desktop into it, so I’m not really happy about putting it in a drawer (no ventilation), plus I don’t like the idea of having to ‘unharness’ everything each time I want to put it away. I don’t trust cable locks. Besides, cable locks won’t help me secure my the USB drive and other electronics that might wander off. The solution I imagine is a lockable, ventilated metal box that would sit under the monitor and home most of the electronics. If it was large enough, I could stick my laptop into it at night (while leaving it running) and feel confident that it would still be there in the morning. I’d be open to other types of solutions. Surely someone else must have dealt with this problem.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Design, World wide web, Features, Blogging, Web services, Google, web 2.0

So you want to start your own blog. One of the first things you’ll have to do is decide which blogging application you want to use. There are a ton of options, ranging from the incredibly simple (LiveJournal), to the infinitely customizable (WordPress). But one of the easiest blogging clients around is Google’s Blogger.

Blogger isn’t as simple to customize as WordPress, but Blogger’s simplicity also makes the process of setting up a blog a lot less daunting. You can literally start blogging within minutes of signing up for a Blogger account. Google will also host your blog for free, which means you don’t need to pay for domain registration or web hosting. WordPress does also offer free hosting, but WordPress doesn’t allow free account holders to include advertising. Blogger does. So if you’ve dreams of quitting your day job, but don’t want to pay a few bucks a month for web hosting, Blogger provides a good way to test the waters.

But while Google offers a handful of widgets for customizing your blog, if you really want to make your web site your own, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty editing your blog template and adding some HTML and JavaScript code. Fortunately, you don’t have to know much about HTML or CSS to implement the tweaks in this guide. As long as you’re handy with the copy and paste keys, you should be all set. So let’s get started.

Continue reading 8 steps to a more professional Blogspot blog

Permalink

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Fun, World wide web, Features, Web services, Social Software

If you can’t get enough of the English-language Weblogs, Inc. blogs, you can always check out some of the ones we serve up in other languages — Autoblog Chinese or Engadget Spanish, for example. What? You don’t know any other languages? Well, it’s time you learned.

Babbel is a well-designed Web site designed to instruct you a foreign language. It’s part instruction, part wiki, and part social (isn’t everything these days? What’s next? A social network for wood stork enthusiasts? But we digress). Babbel incorporates a few different methods to facilitate learning one of the five languages they offer: Spanish, French, Italian, English, and German.

Continue reading Learn a new language at Babbel, por favor

Read

Share This

Share This