Quoted For Truth

It seems a lot of atheists these days are just angsty Gen-Y’ers. I know that as a Gen-Y member, we cop a lot of crap from older generations, but maybe I make this observation because it’s the Gen-Y’ers who are more vocal about religion. In a way, they give a tainted name to athiests. I’m sure there are many athiests who lead very normal lives, just as I know there are plenty of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims who also lead very normal, non-extremist lives, and manage to practice their religion without making the news or starting debates or whatever.

via Meghan Cummins | formspring.me.

Growl, meet Prowl.

Growl is by far the most awesome Mac notification utility there is – it shows me when stuff happens on my computer, like when Firefox has finished downloading files, like when Transmit has finished uploading files, and when stuff finishes zipping, when contacts go online or offline, and so on. It’s pretty awesome.

Enter Prowl.
Prowl is an iPhone app, and it uses pish Notification technology on the iPhone to send me a notification whenever I’m away from my computer – essentially, it’s like having Growl notifications on my Mac, sent to my iPhone.

The really cool thing about this is, I can leave a file downloading at home, and when it’s done, Transmission will show a Growl notification on my laptop to let me know that it’s done – but since I’m not at the computer, Prowl automatically picks up the notification and pushes it to my device – with no interaction required from me.

Now obviously this kind of notification system could be extended to oter systems – already, people have created extensions and plugins so you can get a Prowl notification whenever someone comments on your WordPress blog, for example, or when someone mentions you on IRC, or when you get a message/call on Google Voice, or even when you have a new RSS item to be read. Infinitely extensible, and easy as hell to use – all while being pretty damn cool, to boot.

Twilight may have dampened my hope for humanity, but it’s stuff like this that makes technology so awesome.

Posted via email from Benny’s randomly-updated Posterous

Critics argue Twitter is 99% noise, and they’re right.

This is a complaint that I often come across when discussing Twitter with non-users, they cite media hype and their own experience with Twitter claiming that the majority of tweets on the service are of no interest, or simply “people telling the world about their breakfast” or some variant on the inane comments theory.

They are right.

But they are also missing the point.

For any individual 99% of the internet will always be useless noise. For instance, when was the last time you went to YouTube and watched all the top videos and were interested in them all? I’m guessing never. Does this mean that YouTube is useless because so little of the content is of interest to any particular individual? No.

via Pointless Really » Critics argue Twitter is 99% noise, and they’re right..