The Google Chrome Team wrote a small book about browsers and the web. It’s a basic introduction to browsers and the modern web, well written and easily readable.

It’s also designed and published using HTML5, no Flash needed. Thus, you should grab a modern browser like Chrome or Firefox and then enjoy the book in fullscreen. Really quite delightful.

Oh, nothing much, only that it can take out hidden targets. Hidden, out of sight ones. Like, now you don’t see it, now you do. In flames. This baby is being placed in the hands of our soldiers in Afghanistan, says AFP, with a quote that I actually will use. “It looks and acts like something best left in the hands of Sylvester Stallone’s “Rambo,” but this latest dream weapon is real — and the US Army sees it becoming the Taliban’s worst nightmare.” That’s so cool. He mentioned Rambo, in quotes! This thing is better than most sci-fi guns I see on TV. The Star Wars blasters still needed manual aim. That’s so last year.

Now, if we can only get droids to shoot for us, then we can really be cooking with nanotech. Who knows? Maybe the wars of the future will look more like video game bots shooting each other. The country with the remaining droids wins the war. Big jump, I know, but hey, if we can make this work of beauty. I’m just saying.

“Spyderco is a company, founded in 1978 by Sal Glesser and based in Golden, Colorado, U.S.A., that produces knives and knife sharpeners.” Thus says Wikipedia (and, incidentally, they’re right). They also have only 38 employees, which I think is pretty cool; it gives that small business feel and attention to detail. Anyways, Sal Glesser was the first, back in 1981, to think of and implement the pocket clip. He also introduced one-hand opening, with the signature Spyderco thumb hole. And serrations. In other words, he shaped the knife industry and made the “tactical knife” possible.

The Endura and it’s smaller counterpart, the Delica, were launched in 1990 as lightweight, affordable pocket knives. Since then, they’ve undergone improvements with each generation, this being the 4th (hence Endura 4). Pricing on the Endura runs from $60 to $115 (I got mine for $61). The knife measures 8 3/16 inches when open and 5 inches closed (the handle length). That leaves 3 13/16 inches for the blade, 3 7/16 of which are cutting edge. For its dimensions, the weight is a fairly light 3.6 oz, partly due to the skeletonized steel liners. Granted, the previous generation was lighter at 3.0 oz, but it lacked the additional strength of steel liners, which I think justify the weight. Opinions differ, however.¹

I just like the fact that it is a more rugged knife, regardless of whether the reinforcement is necessary or not. There is always the potential situation wherein you are sliding down the conical roof of a grain silo towards a 200-foot fall and certain death; dragging your fingernails has availed naught. Wha-chawww! You draw your Endura Wave and open it in one fluid motion, driving it desperately into the thin aluminum sheeting. It bites deep and torques under your weight, but holds, thanks to the tensile strength of the steel liners! Besides, that steel gives the pocket clip screws something more to tie into, and I hate wiggly pocket clips.

Build quality is excellent on the Endura I reviewed, the fit and finish near perfect. The handles are made of FRN (Fiberglass Reinforced Nylon), tough and resilient. I’ve dropped mine on asphalt and concrete with minimal scuffing to the blade and handles, and most of that has buffed itself out, excepting one shallow but visible nick.

Note the scuffed Endura clip vs. the unpainted Persistence clip.

The pocket clip, as I’ve already mentioned, holds up well. (And well it should—Mr. Glesser invented it!) The black paint looks good, but, like all painted or un-painted pocket clips, it scratches when you scrape it against rocks and concrete and so forth.² As you can see in the picture, it’s held in place by three screws positioned in a semi-arc. Not quite so solid as the setup on the Drifter, but adequate. And even the best clip can fail: I caught the Drifter clip on a vinyl chair the other day and bent it (CRKT sent two replacement clips free of charge). But with the longer clip and smaller screw base, leverage is greater on the Endura, and the screws did loosen. And I hate wiggly pocket clips.

However, the screws are fairly long and do tighten up nicely into the steel liners. I just had difficulty finding the necessary Torx set, but, after searching all our local hardware stores, I bought one online. I used some LocTite on the screws and set them tightly, and it hasn’t budged since (an impressive feat, considering the five weeks of active construction and trail-clearing work I’ve carried it through). To summarize, I really like Spyderco’s clip design: the shape, tension and flared tip lend superior ergonomics. I think the size ratio is right on, and despite a questionable screw array, remains secured extraordinarily well. (Incidentally, the Torx size was TX9 for the pivot screw and the rest are TX6, for those interested.) Finally, the clip may be moved to any corner of the knife to accommodate tip-up, tip-down, left- or right-handed carry.

The blade is 3 13/16 inches long, and made of the excellent VG-10 steel.³ I have noticed some side-to-side blade play, but I read somewhere that this has to do with the way it’s engineered for maximum strength. Besides, you can tighten it simply by adjusting the pivot screw; I just like it loose enough where it opens easily.

The Emerson or “Wave” opener is the wave-shaped hook on the top of the blade that works by catching the seam of your pants as you pull it out of your pocket. Here is a good video review that shows how the opener works (frame-by-frame pictures here), and another more humorous use. It is the result of a collaboration with Emerson knives; owner, knife-maker and martial arts expert Ernest Emerson designed the “Wave” opener for his distinctive tactical knives. Combined with the Endura 4, the result is a fast and affordable tactical knife. The deployment—gliding on phosphor bronze bushings—is wicked smooth and scary fast, as this guy demonstrates. The Spyder-hole, the regular opening method, is funky but attractive and works well, especially with cold fingers, gloves or big hands where a thumb stud would fall short. It was also, as mentioned above, the first one-handed blade-opening device.

The lock system is a lockback—more solid than most, if not all, linerlocks (although the LAWKS system feels comparable). The lockback mechanism also features the Boye indent in the release lever, which is “a half-moon of steel removed from the locking lever,” designed to “[make] the knife impossible to accidentally close when gripped very tightly.”⁴ The lockback is also a bit more awkward to close with one hand than linerlocks. It can be managed, however, and I will hopefully be posting a video soon to demonstrate a few methods.

I would call the intended application for this knife EDC (Every Day Carry) and light tactical. The length of the blade takes away much of your precision control, making food prep (like peeling an apple) and other tasks requiring fine-grained control difficult. You can, however, choke way up on the handle and brace your thumb against the opening hole, and gain some manipulability that way. On the positive side, the long blade (almost 4 inches) gives you lots of reach in defensive situations, and the long handle ensures you won’t lose your grip: you can hold the knife farther back on the handle and gain an extra inch of reach, or you can choke up to the thumb ramp for a solid thrust. It’s got a good stabbing point and a rock-solid reverse grip, but unfortunately not a whole lot of slashing belly (compared, for instance, to the Persistence). Finally, the Endura has really nice, functional jimping, both on the thumb ramp and on the plastic behind it, giving your thumb plenty of purchase.

My first impression of the Endura was that, like a ThinkPad, the knife is sturdy and rugged, and even attractive after a fashion. I fell in love with the snick of the lockback. I should note in closing that, while many online pictures and descriptions give the color as dark grey, almost black, the true color is more of a slate blue. (You can see the discrepancy between the two pictures I’ve posted.) The Endura came ”shaving” sharp, as it should. I’m quite pleased with my Endura, and most exceedingly so with the excellent Persistence, with the result that I plan on buying more from Spyderco—possibly a Tenacious or FFG (Full Flat Ground) Delica.

Kind of distracting way to start reading

Take this screencap of an article on The Weekly Standard. All those flashy colors on the sidebar make it hard to concentrate, especially since your eyes hit them every time they get to the end of a line. And that’s just one thing in a pile of stuff that can make it hard to read. Ugly fonts, small fonts, crazy colors, flashing banners, and on it goes.

Fortunately, there’s a little tool that makes web reading a billion times² easier. It’s called Readability.

The same page viewed with Readability in a smaller browser window

Readability is a bookmarklet that strips away the extraneous elements of a page leaving you with nicely formatted content. Often, it will kill off the comments section, too (not a great loss on most public sites).

It’s also amazingly robust, extracting the content from almost any page I’ve wanted to throw at it (home pages and the like excepted, because it’s not designed for that).

Fret not, customization is easy. If, for some reason, you don’t enjoy reading medium size Athelas typeface with wide margins, change it: margins, typeface, size. Whatever you prefer. There’s even an option to convert links to footnotes, which is excellent for pages that look like a Wikipedia entry.

That’s it. No extra bells and whistles. In fact, it’s more like no bells and whistles. Which is awesome.

© Lisa Kimberly

OpenCongress published a blog post yesterday reporting that the two most viewed bills right now are “outlandish, non-viable proposals that have no support and no chance of being taken seriously by congressional leaders, ever.” A lot of traffic is arriving at these bills via searches.

These bills top the list because of chain emails. The sort that posit, in eye bleeding colors and typefaces, conservative conspiracy theories about clandestine government operations or ridiculous proposals. What is the problem with these viral messages? Citation needed. The people passing on the emails might feel they’ve fulfilled their duty to expose these heinous schemes, but the truth is nothing of the sort.

In reality, they merely muck up the issue and possess a lack of trustworthiness and verifiability. Some person or group of persons crafts a scare message, passes it on, and the recipients pass it on, and on, and on, and who knows who sent it in the first place or if it’s even the same message anymore.

Contrast this to the model of open information, say a blog post on OpenCongress. The writers present the subject clearly and cite sources. The post has a URL. Anybody can link to it. It doesn’t change. It’s open, trustworthy and verifiable information.

Peer-to-peer messages do not work for getting accurate and helpful information out. Citation needed.

For most sites, you can just leave out the www and it will redirect to www.example.com or just example.com. Twitter, for example, redirects to no www.

Some sites will just accept either (which is a bad idea, actually). A number of really dumb sites will not work without www. Shameful.

And there’s no need to tack on www in front of a subdomain. www.badthing.blogspot.com. www.uncoolbeans.deviantart.com². Those are bad. The www there adds extra length, looks ugly and is quite certainly unneeded.

Thanks for reading. Tell your friends.

This is the third (second here) in a series of tech posts directed at laymen, non-geeks, etc. Basically a lot of my friends and family.

Tony Hall / CC NC-SA

With the name fresh in your ears, you may now be scoffing at what you think to be one of the new internet fads of the last years. Twitter tends to get a rap as just another social network, maybe even without much of a point.

However, Twitter is probably a bit different than what you’ve used before. Here are a few reasons, then, not to give Twitter not only a chance, but a try.

Simplicity

Twitter is explicitly simple. 140 characters, plain links, no extra crap. It doesn’t try to be everything, but does a few things very well.  New features have grown from organic usage; for example, retweets and @name replies. But that’s user inspired. No Farmville then, no people sending you virtual hearts, cows, or ice cream cones, nothing. You follow someone or you don’t. Tweet, retweet, direct message. No more, no less.

Speed and ubiquity

Twitter is fast. Facebook and FriendFeed may have auto-updating feeds, but Twitter smashes them. The hundreds of apps, as well as just the web interface, get you new tweets very quickly (and it’s going to get faster). One person can post a message and hundreds or thousands of people will read it within seconds. On their mobile phones, web browsers, and iPads. Twitter is platform neutral—meaning it’s everywhere.

Content

Certainly there are ways to make Twitter useless, like converting it into an unceremonious link dump to a blog or news site. But otherwise, it can be gold, because it has to be concise.

Connections are also much more free-form than previous platforms. Follow who you want. Unfollow people if they get noisy. Turn it off if you want for solitude.

And the other side is real time. Whether it’s knowing if Wikipedia is down or getting a restaurant recommendation, real time information flows through the public stream very quickly.

~

It may take a little time to get used to, but once I think the reward is great if it clicks for you. Try out some different ways to interface with Twitter, see what you like. You may be pleasantly surprised. If not, we¹ bear you no ill will.

This is the second (first here) in a series of tech posts directed at laymen, non-geeks, etc. Basically a lot of my friends and family. Subscribe and enjoy.

Since I care somewhat about SEO (not an SEOhead, though… I mean, how many SEO blogs can there be?), I looked for a WordPress plugin to handle that sort of stuff for a broken mold. All in One SEO Pack is pretty much the package for WordPress, I guess, but I couldn’t even get it to run. I have no idea why.

I tried another SEO plugin, too, as I remember. HeadSpace, I think. I also tried Platinum SEO Pack and that’s what I ended up using. The author asks that you either review, link, or donate. I was happy to oblige since the plugin worked fine but being lazy I haven’t done it yet. Until now.

This isn’t really like reviewing a piece of art or anything, so I have simply this to say: it works and it works well. I suppose I’m not an expert and it’s probably missing some, but I’ll go ahead and say ‘name a SEO feature and it’s got it’. All sorts of meta stuff. A big long list of check boxes for you to decide on.

One thing I’d like to highlight, even though I don’t use it, is custom meta elements for individual posts. Check it out.

I guess some people would find this handy.

It could really refer to one of three things:

Mobile broadband – broadband service delivered over a cellular network

Service from a WISP (wireless internet service provider) – the ISP delivers internet usually via some line of sight wireless technology. Somewhat more common in rural, elsewise underserved areas.

A wireless router providing an internet connection to devices – probably all types of broadband can be used via a wireless router. (Well, except gigabit service. There’s no wireless router with enough bandwidth for that.) The router allows devices (laptops, desktops, an iPod Touch, etc.) to connection wirelessly to the LAN and also provides internet if the router is connected. Wireless routers also usually have several wired Ethernet ports.

Some confusion may be had getting service from a WISP and running a wireless router. You have wireless (from the WISP) and wireless (a router running). But remember, you can also run a wireless router with other types of service: DSL, cable, FTTH, etc. In fact, you don’t even need an internet connection to run a wireless router. Once again, it forms a LAN (Local Area Network: a network of local devices, local being ones connected to this router) and provides an internet connection to these devices if there is one.

There are also wired (only) routers that perform much the same function, but may only be connected to with an Ethernet cable. Wireless is probably more common, at least in homes, because of it’s convenience (wiring a house is often much more difficult).

So that’s pretty much what wireless means.

This is the first in a planned series of tech posts directed at laymen, non-geeks, etc. Basically a lot of my friends and family. Subscribe and enjoy.

Illustration built with images from OpenClipArt.

Having weighed the earlier Nite Ize LED modules in the durability balance and found them wanting, I had heretofore purchased an official Mini Maglite LED AA, which also uses a Luxeon. But it flickers, and is longer than my regular Mini Mags, and generally sucks horribly. And flickers. Their LED module must be poorly wired or something. Maybe (hopefully) mine was just defective. One thing I do like about it—due to the longer reflector cone (I think), it is more focusable, as you’ll see in the picture below. This produces a more concentrated beam at greater distances.

But because that was such a fail, I picked up a Streamlight 3N. Pretty rugged piece of gear, it seemed. Used by firefighters and such. Molded polymer case, scratch-resistant lens, up to 30-lumen output, and it even has an “Intrinsic Safety for Hazardous Locations” rating. All this notwithstanding, the contact point on the bottom of the LED module is worthless. Although I’ve bolstered it with solder a few times, it always wears down, makes infrequent contact with the battery, and flickers. It gets worse in cold weather.

Enter the Nite Ize 1 Watt LED Upgrade II. It fit snugly into my old beater Mini Mag, already survived a shoulder-height fall onto tiles without even flickering, and summarily rocks. Here’s a picture I took with all three shining side-by-side at a dark wall. They all had fresh batteries.

Why is the Streamlight so blue?

*Note the Maglite is more focused than the others, since it is actually capable of being focused. That’s why the beam is smaller.