Romance Novels Via Cell Phones

Harlequin Books now has a series just for busy women — Harlequin On The Go. They send their electronic books to cell phones in small, daily installments — 5-10 minutes each. Each installment takes up about 8 screens of text.

This service is currently available only to Verizon customers, but all national cellular carriers have agreed to offer the service. For Verizon, the cost is $2.49 per month.

[from New York Times]

Classical Ring Tones!

Ring tones have been around for a while.  You can purchase your own, make your own, or use the ones that come with the phone.  However, it hasn’t been easy, until now, to find good, classical ring tones.  The couple that come with the phones are not the best quality.  I currently have an aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, but it’s getting old.

But Boosey & Hawkes, a well-known music publisher, has now come to the rescue.  Booseytones provides not just ringtones, but also wallpaper and full music downloads of classical music.  Even better for musicians, there are polyphones (synthesized sounds recordings) as well as truetones (real sound recordings).  (Check the phone listing to see which type of ring tone your phone can use.)  The difference between the two is truly astounding!

At this point, these ring tones are only available to subscribers of AT&T Mobility, Cingular, Dobson, Sprint, and T-Mobile.

[from New York Times]

Proposals Over Twitter

Twitter, a service that allows you to send very short messages to one another, now has at been part of at least two marriage proposals.

March 2

@stefsull - “ok. for the rest of the twitter-universe (and this is a first, folks) - WILL YOU MARRY ME?”
@garazi - OMG - Ummmmm… I guess in front of the whole twitter-verse I’ll say — I’d be happy to spend the rest of my geek life with you.”

March 20

“To @emilychang - After fifteen years of blissful happiness I would like to ask for your hand in marriage?”
“@maxkiesler - yes, i do.”

How romantic!

[from Wired]

Readers’ Advisory Using BookLamp

BookLamp is a service that analyzes different aspects of books and then compares those traits with traits in books you say you like.  Kind of confusing, but if you’ve used Pandora, it works on the same principle.  It looks at traits like pacing, density, action, dialog, description, perspective, and genre.

Be aware that BookLamp is still in beta, and doesn’t have a lot of books in its database yet, but they’re working on it!

[from LISNews]

Recycle Electronics Through the Mail

The US Postal Service is starting a new recycling program for small electronics. The “Mail Back” pilot program will include ten areas, but if positive, may be available across the country this fall.

Customers use free envelopes found in 1,500 Post Offices to mail back inkjet cartridges, PDAs, Blackberries, digital cameras, iPods and MP3 players – without having to pay for postage.

Clover Technologies Group will receive the recyclables and will refurbish and resell the items, use the component parts in other electronics, or recycle them. They have a “zero waste to landfill” policy.

[from beSpacific]

Is the Website Really Down — Or Is It You?

LISNews posted about a really helpful service — one that will tell you if the website you want is really down or if the problem is on your end.  Down for everyone or just me will tell you just that — if the site is down or not.

Just type the URL in the textbox and click the link.  It will either say that it is or isn’t up, like this:

Study of Public and Academic Library Blogs

Walt Crawford has analyzed hundreds of public and academic library blogs. He then provides metrics in two separate reports based on the active blogs he’s found. Both reports are quite interesting. See where you fit in!

Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples — $20 for download; $29.50 for paperback

Academic Library Blogs: 231 Examples — $20 for download; $29.50 for paperback

At this blog, Crawford provides some of the basic data he found during his research:

• How he chose the blogs used
• How often libraries posted to their blogs
• The total number of words in the 3-month study
• Number of words per post
• How many comments appeared in the 3-month study
• Number of comments per post
• How many illustrations appeared in the 3-month study
• Number of illustrations per post

Each point above is discussed in a separate blog post, so you’ll need to click through his posts to see all the discussion.

[from LISNews]

Gaming May Not Release Violent Emotions

An interesting study published in the journal Emotion goes against most research dealing with gaming.  According to this paper, if you kill your opponents in a game, you are likely to feel badly — not exultant.  If you are killed yourself, you are likely to feel a sense of pleasure.

The scientist has a couple of possible explanations.  If you kill someone, even within a game, your sense of morality may kick in, leading you to believe that it was wrong and you may feel distressed.  By being killed yourself, you remove yourself from the very intense game for a few seconds, allowing your system to relax.

There were only 36 gamers in the study.  Although the results are provocative, further study will be needed to verify these results.

[from Wired]

Acid3 Test

Update 4/13/08:

Apparently, there is more to the Acid3 Test than just displaying the graphic below correctly.  There are actually three parts to this test.  Both WebKit and Opera have passed two of the three tests at this point.  Thanks for the clarification, Lars!

******************************

The Web Standards Project is always trying to focus those developing and manufacturing for the web to be aware and to implement web standards. The Acid2 Test was for browsers. If your browser could display the smiley face correctly, then you had implemented those standards correctly.

In March, they released the Acid3 Test, which of course, raises the bar even further. Acid3 includes 100 tests that include primarily testing the DOM, ECMAScript, and CSS properties and selectors.

Here is what the result of the test should look like:

Here is what Firefox 2.0.0.13 did to it:

Here is what Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.11 did to it:

As you can see, these two major browsers have a ways to go. So far, two browsers have passed the test — WebKit , an open source web browser, and Opera.

[from Slashdot]

Help with Newly Found Documents on Kennedy Assassination

The Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watson found some previously unknown documents related to the Kennedy assassination in his office.  They were originally compiled by Henry Wade, the district attorney at the time of the assassination, but were not made public.

Watson has scanned these documents and the Dallas Morning News has made them public.  In addition, he’s asking for help in going through them.  Feel free to read them and, if you find something that might be historically valuable, there is a forum for discussion.

Here’s your chance to be among the first to look through these documents.  See if there is anything important.

[from ResearchBuzz]