I took a quick look at the Wordle Beautiful Word Cloud generator, and sure enough, it generates beautiful word clouds, from text, or from a del.icio.us account. Here's mine:

There are lots of controls: the font type, range of colours, orientation mix of the fonts, etc... I like it!

At long last we've decided to cancel our cable TV and go 100% DVD and media purchased online (although we don't have as many options here in Canada). I assumed we'd get an Apple TV one day, but the Bell Video Store was announced a few weeks ago, so I signed up to see what I could learn.

I still haven't rent or bought a movie, but I did learn a lot about corporations and their privacy statements. I'm hoping this will be a cautionary tale for consumers, but more so for companies.

Seemingly obvious, but easy to break rule #1: Don't make your customers have to fight just to protect their own privacy, and by extension your employee and business-partner's privacy.

I was wandering about Twitter tonight, looking for more people to follow, when I started to wonder just who has the most followers on Twitter. Some of more famous names came to mind, but in most cases they've made thousands of updates, too. Lots of work, quite frankly, so I decided to try and find the most efficient person on Twitter:

Who has the highest People per Update (PpU) ratio on Twitter?

Like many bloggers out there, I've just started using the Disqus comment system here. Seems like it is a popular subject on Twitter and FriendFeed, so I thought I'd give it a try. It didn't take long before I wanted to start searching through the comments to find other bloggers commenting on similar topics (Apple iPhone vs the latest from Noikia, or the latest Canon digital SLR, for instance), but they don't have a real comment search up and running yet, so I created a form here that use Google to do the search.

I don't know about you, but my desk is a mess. I embrace the mess as the sign of an active mind, but today I realized it is more than that --- I'm ahead of my time. I'm not sitting here taking a break for lunch amongst garbage, but amongst the UI input devices of the future! Never mind multi-touch displays, iPhones, or even Wii video game controllers. It looks like garbage will form the basis for the new UI!

I consider myself a 'power' FireFox user, but I had no idea you could run an OpenSearch search of text you highlight. It even opens the search results in a new tab! Here's a quick video of the functionality in use, followed by the really easy steps to follow.

Summary: In about 5 minutes I got Apture set up and running in this Drupal blog -- it was quick, easy, and best of all, it works!

Steps:

1. Get a user ID and password from the Apture website
2. Embed one JavaScript call just before the </body> tag in every page
3. Reload the main page in Firefox or IE and the Apture links were working!

It really was that easy (and no, I'm not in any way associated with Apture).

Summary: A quick tutorial on how I put together a PHP script to serve a Google Earth KML file updated live with all the geo-tagged photos from my photo-blog, stored in MySQL. Rather than having people store the whole, static data file on their local machine, I've created a small, second XML file that uses the <NetworkLink> element to have Google Earth re-load the data file every hour, so that newly geotagged photos are included as well.

If you have Google Earth installed you should just be able to load the KML data file on this page to see a live version of the links.

We went for a hike in the Glendon Forest today, north of Sunnybrook, south of the York University Glendon College campus. Some nice red and yellow fall colours, but more interestingly, they are improving parts of the trail (that, plus we saw a huge dead Salmon in the Don River).

More wonderful fiction (I hope) from Cory Doctrow. He describes this one as:

"a long, weird adventure story about the failure of futurism and the difference between 'progress' and 'change,'
all about immortal children stalking the bones of ruined cities in lethal mechas.
Disney fans will recognize the title as coming from the amazing, weird,
awful and wonderful Carousel of Progress ride that Disney built for GE at the 1964 World’s Fair in NYC,
and subsequently moved to Disneyland, then Walt Disney World."