The Quest For Every Beard Type

I’ve been growing a beard every winter for some years now, and every spring, I try to see how many facial hair variations as I can check off from the chart of facial hair types. Listed below are descriptions of the 34 facial hair types from the chart, including examples of the 24 variations that I’ve been able to attain so far.

My idol? He takes the Octobeard to a new level of awesomeness.

Turn your point and shoot into a super camera:

If you’re using a consumer grade point-and-shoot Canon digital camera, you’ve got hardware in hand that can support advanced features way beyond what shipped in the box. With the help of a free, open source project called CHDK, you can get features like RAW shooting mode, live RGB histograms, motion-detection, time-lapse, and even games on your existing camera.

Other enhancements include “longer exposure times (up to 65 seconds), faster shutter speeds (1/25,000 sec or faster), automatic bracketing of your photos, and more.”

How cool is that?

File under: the best things in life are free.

The summer is almost upon us, and you know what that means: free concerts! Anyone in the New York area can look forward to Celebrate Brooklyn, River to River, Siren Music Festival, and Pool Parties. Only the Celebrate Brooklyn calendar is up so far, but the others should be available shortly.

Slydial is a new service that lets you bypass those pesky “conversations” and call straight to voicemail. Want to thank a distant relative for a recent birthday present, but hardly feel like actually talking to them? Slydial is for you.

The service is free (but ad supported), and no sign-up is required. Just call 267-SLY-DIAL (759-3425) and dial the number you want to call. Everything is in alpha still, but AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon should work without problem.

(Yes, the title of this post is a ska reference. Deal with it.)

There has been a surprising influx of websites offering you ways to create mixtapes to share with friends (or just horde for yourself). From Muxtape to Mixaloo to Mixwit, each offers a different twist on the mixtape craze.

Mixaloo and Mixwit fall into their own category, as they scour the internet for MP3s (a la SeeqPod or Songza) rather than letting users upload their own songs. They also offer a much more graphical experience, and Mixaloo even offers a way for users to earn money by selling mixtapes.

Still, Muxtape is by far the most popular of the three, most likely for its very straightforward interface and ability for users to upload their own songs (unlike the other two which rely on MP3s already available online). Community love can further be seen in the creation of Muxtape Recommendation, a Yahoo! Pipes creation that takes your Last.fm username and returns featured mixes with at least one track by a favorite artist of yours.

It is no question that Muxtape is a fun little service, but where to go from here? The site’s legality is tenuous at best, and the owners seem pretty steadfast on not earning any income from the site. Of course, once the money angle is figured out, the legal angle will be thrust into the spotlight. The RIAA may be holding back for the moment, but any sign of profiting or really widespread popularity will be sure to bring Officer Buzz Killington around.

(Mixaloo and Mixwit are not safe either, but they can at least plead innocence on the basis of not actually hosting any files. Though even they need to be careful, because the music industry is not one to walk softly.)

Well, best of luck to all of these web frontiersman. And while the party’s still going:

http://isnotchicago.muxtape.com/
http://fallingofftheedgeofthearth.muxtape.com/
http://nakedsandbox.muxtape.com/

Dave Eggers took home a piece of this year’s TED Prize, winning $100,000 and a wish. In his acceptance speech, he speaks about 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing workshop and tutoring center in San Francisco started by Eggers and run by various writers, educators, and do-gooders. He frequently mentions the transformative effect the organization has had not only on the children, but the community as well.

There’s something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one on one, getting all this attention. They finish their homework, they go home — they’re finished. They don’t stall. They don’t do their homework in front of the TV. They’re allowed to go home 5:30, enjoy their family, enjoy other hobbies, get outside, play and that makes a happy family. A bunch of happy families in a neighborhood is a happy community. A bunch of happy communities tied together is a happy city and a happy world, right? So, the key to it all is homework.

His wish? Once Upon a School:

I wish that you–you personally and every creative individual and organization you know–will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you’ll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within one year we have 1,000 examples of innovative public-private partnerships.

The other two TED Prize winners were Neil Turok (Finding the next Einstein in Africa) and Karen Armstrong (Help bring compassion back to religion).

As of midnight on September 18, The New York Times forever destroyed the shitty inconvenient paywall it hid its archives behind:

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

Like the rest of the internet, which is some unruly tangle of webs only able to be surveyed by Google robots, the Times gets most of its visitors from search engines and referral links on other websites. Meaning: even if TimesSelect made $10 million in revenue from subscribers (somewhere between 200,00 and 1.25 million, depending on how many monthly and yearly subscribers there were), much more could be made off ad revenues. 13 million unique visitors a month visit nytimes.com, which is going to translate into enormous revenue now that the number of pages (and thus ads) they can see has increased exponentially.

I don’t know if the Times is going to increase the number of ads per page as well, but hopefully not. There is already a good amount of ads, and every increase would just encroach upon the readability of the content.