antimeria

• For Tony, a Wired article about Internet addiction in China. I’ve read a bit about this phenomenon in Korea, and have wondered if it’s a legitimate concern, or if it’s just the fact that 43% of China’s 1.3 billion citizens are under 29–a cohort which outnumbers the entire United States population.
• For Scott, a blog about clouds. Update: link broken, server problems.
• For just about everyone else, the Voltaggio brothers’ website is definitely drool-worthy. They also have a bunch of Youtube videos.

HT: Andrew Sullivan and Ezra Klein

I share links on Facebook, Twitter, GReader and this blog.

I just downloaded Firefox 3.5, and I already love it. I never made the switch to Chrome or Safari, partly out of inertia, but mostly because of the huge array of available add-ons. Since I haven’t done a list in a while, here’s my list of nerdery:

• Adblock plus. No more of those stupid dancing-woman ads for mortgages or shitty diploma mills.
• Better Gmail 2. This is one of my favorite add-ons. In addition to little things like highlighting the email you’ve moused over, it includes the truly outstanding Folders4Gmail, which allows you to create hierarchical (nested) labels. Doesn’t require a separate Greasemonkey install.
• Forecastfox. Since I’m on a PC at work, I don’t have a handy little weather widget. Or should I say… I didn’t, until I found this. Has options for multiple areas.
• Various PageRank checkers. I used Live PageRank, but they don’t have a version for FF3.5 yet. Currently using SearchStatus, which is more fully-featured.
• Ubiquity. Get this. I’m not even kidding. This is the first thing that gets added to any FF install. It’s a command-line type interface that lets you do just about anything you want, including:
  • Search Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps, Flickr, Yelp, Weather.com, Yahoo (how far you’ve fallen, Yahoo), Amazon, and probably a bunch more.
  • Tweet, Digg, StumbleUpon or create TinyURLs.
  • Send email in Gmail. Yep. You can highlight some text on a page, or the url bar, then type ‘email this to martin’ and, hey presto, I just got some email.
  • Translate selections or pages.

You can just hear the rimshot, can’t you?

Anyway, Dan Deacon’s upcoming album, Bromst, is streaming in its entirety on NPR’s site. I already love it (that might have something to do with not opening with a cut like “Woody Woodpecker”).

I’ve never bought into the “technology makes you stupid” canard, because… it’s really stupid. In short, it goes like this: You have too many things to keep track of (for instance, I’m currently rocking Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 on my iPod, and have my cell phone on my desk, seven tabs open in Firefox, and two Gchats going), and so you can’t just focus on one task. Since multitasking is inefficient, you cause “stress and frustration and lowered creativity … when you’re scattered and diffuse.” That’s Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, in a Wired interview.

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