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Coming at ya straight from LifeHacker is the Top 10 Amazon Power Shopper Tools:

You already love the one-stop convenience of shopping online at Amazon.com, but chances are you’re not getting everything you can out of this feature-packed shopping engine. Did you know Amazon can email you suggestions from Mom’s wish list two weeks before her birthday? Automatically ship you a new case of toilet paper every two months? Refund the difference on the price of an item you purchased that went on sale? Several advanced Amazon features and third party apps and add-ons can help you get the best deals and the stuff you want delivered to your door right on time. After the jump, add our favorite 10 Amazon power-shopper tools to your cart.

Read the rest of this entry �

Mitchell Howe has a short article called “What are the Odds?” which discusses the bet between Ray Kurzweil and Mitchell Kapor. I love Kurzweil’s books so this caught my attention.

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a topic that always seems to drop on and off the radar of public interest in synch with Hollywood portrayals and celebrity prognostications. Indeed, the most recent spat of attention has followed a much-publicized $10,000 wager made by futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil against corporate trailblazer Mitchell Kapor. The bet, solemnized at www.longbets.org (where all winnings go to charity), is that a computer, or “machine intelligence,” will pass the so-called Turing test by 2029. The Turing test, a challenge to see if a computer can fool a human judge into thinking it is human, is a traditional benchmark for the point when true Artificial Intelligence can be said to have been achieved - a historic moment, by any measure.

But with recent discussion of AI taking place in the context of a wager, debates have tended to focus on the difficulty of the problem rather than the implications - as though the arrival of true Artificial Intelligence would only mean the difference between a robot making your coffee and brewing it yourself.

What are the stakes, really? Why should this wager matter to you personally? And what, exactly, are the odds?”

Mitchell then delves in at a high level explaining the two sides of the bet. This is a great little read if you’re at all interested in AI. For further reading you should check out The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. This book is so fascinating that I read it from front to back in just a few days.

Click on over and check out Mitchell’s article “What are the Odds?”

Raging neo-cons all over the country don’t care for Ron Paul and his assertion that American interventionism in the Middle East is one important factor contributing to the radicalization of an ever-growing number of Muslims into suicidal, anti-American terrorists. But what does the leading expert on Osama bin Laden say?

Michael Scheuer is a 22 year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). From 1996 to 1999, he was the Chief of the Bin Laden Issue Station (aka Alec Station), the Osama bin Laden tracking unit at the Counterterrorist Center. From September 2001 to November 2004, he served again as Special Advisor to the Chief of the bin Laden unit. His insider perspective and expertise led him to write a book, anonymously, titled Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America, Revised Edition. We now know that he is also the anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.

So, if anyone would seem a natural to line up with Giuliani - who has gained his “conservative” following through his tough guy reputation - following his now-famous exchange with Dr. Paul at the South Carolina debate, it would be this guy. But that is precisely the opposite of what has happened.

This day found Scheuer standing beside the castigated Ron Paul, rather than next to the would-be defender of American Empire around the world, Rudy Giuliani. And this is what Scheuer had to say at Dr. Paul’s press conference in the nation’s capital on Thursday: “Foreign policy is about protecting America. Our foreign policy is doing the opposite.”

“Our foreign policy is doing the opposite,” he said. This is exactly what Dr. Paul has been contending - but being ridiculed as being naïve over. But if that quote isn’t clear enough, here is what Scheuer wrote in the book, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes:
“[T]he crux of my argument is simply that America is in a war with militant Islamists that it cannot avoid; one that it cannot talk or appease its way out of; one in which our irreconcilable Islamist foes will have to be killed, an act which unavoidably will lead to innocent deaths; and one that is motivated in large measure by the impact of U.S. foreign policies in the Islamic world…”

The neo-cons need to start reading some books starting with Scheuer’s own works and The 9/11 Commission Report, they also recommend other expert analyses of terrorism and interventionism, such as Chalmer Johnson’s Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.

Perhaps Dr. Paul’s “conservative” critics could do some reading, as well. If these contemporary works don’t suit them, maybe a few from the conservative canon will suffice - you know, works with authors like Edmund Burke, George Washington, and Russell Kirk, for example. Of course the neo-cons probably consider books as part of the left wing media bias as well. �

So I hop on Technorati today and the Top Searches is burning up with Noelia…. I had no idea who or what Noelia is but but a quick scan shows she’s a Puerta Rican pop star and a model. Suprisingly, I didn’t even find anything about her on Wikipedia! Ok so that tells me pretty much nobody in the States knows who she is but hey maybe she’s popular in Puerta Rico?

The scandal video link is below… keep reading.

If you’re unfamiliar with her music you can check out several of her songs online right here.

So most have never heard of her, then why all the fuss? Well, as many celebs are doing nowadays she’s got a sex tape that just hit the net. (No, I haven’t seen it! My wife would kill me!) This whole sex tape for success thing is getting kinda old. Haven’t we learned anything from Paris?!?!? I suppose sex sells. What’s REALLY bizarre about this one tho… the only reason I even mention it… is that it wasn’t an angry ex-boyfriend who released it, or even a housekeeper looking to score a buck by selling it online, it was HER STEPDAD. Ewwwww….. creepy.

Ok so like I said I haven’t seen it but a quick search shows that its definetly out there. If that’s your thing then head over to BTJunkie (BTJunkie is a bittorrent aggregator site, it doesn’t host the files but points you to the places that do) and you can find it. If you don’t know what Bittorrent is head to Wikipedia’s bittorrent page. Don’t ask me for help, don’t ask me to send you the file… I haven’t seen it and I haven’t downloaded it.

Click here for Noelia scandal video download link

 If you don’t know what GTD is… well, you’ve been living in a box. GTD is the shorthand for “Getting Things Done”, which is a work-life management system and book by David Allen. It’s intention is to “transforms personal overwhelm and overload into an integrated system of stress-free productivity”.

There are many people who are REALLY into GTD, but you don’t have to be a die hard to take advantage of the methodology as it’s a very common sense approach to dealing with work/life. GTD is based on the “notion that with a complete and current inventory of all your commitments, organized and reviewed in a systematic way, you can focus clearly, view your world from optimal angles and make trusted choices about what to do (and not do) at any moment”.

So here’s my list of top 5 GTD websites that help you to work faster and get more done while stressing less. These sites are regularly updated with interesting, thought provoking content.

• Lifehacker - Probably my favorite of the bunch, Lifehacker makes getting things done easy and fun. It’s stuffed full with the latest in personal productivity technology and reveals the million ways hardware and software can improve our busy lives. This is one of the few sites on my iGoogle front page RSS feed.
• Lifehack.org - Similar in both name and concept to Lifehacker, Lifehack.org brings hacks, tips and tricks that get things done quickly by automating your daily life, increase productivity and getting organized.
• DigIGetThingsDone - A cool blog covering GTD in general as well as deeper into the specifics. It covers software, using Wordpress and more.
• ZenHabits - A personal blog about setting and achieving goals through the building of good habits that must be cultivated through daily practice.
• RirianProject - Extremely easy to digest site covering GTD. Most of the site is done in “lists” format. For instance:
  • 9 Little Known Ways To Sleep So It Counts
  • 5 Back-to-Basics Strategies For Renewing Your Energy
  • 5 Powerful Hacks to Immediately Improve Your Presentations

David Allen’s website

This article has gotten a lot of traffic from Stumbleupon. If you’re coming here from Stumbleupon, the URL to this article has changed (used to be paulspoerry.com/index.php/…. and now the index.php has been removed. If you could, please hit your “I like it!” button and give me a thumbs up.Thanx!

This is not my list… I snagged the list from tutorialblog.org, I’ve just compiled it all into a single resource. Below are 125 handy HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX snippets for your site or blog.

Part 1

Bubble Tool Tips - Bubble Tooltips are an easy way to add (via a bit of CSS and javascript) fancy tooltips with a balloon shape to any web page.

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Box Over - BoxOver uses javascript / DHTML to show tooltips on a website.

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Ajax Star rating Bar - This is a rating bar script done with PHP and mySQL that allows users to rate things like can be done on Netflix or Amazon, all web 2.0-like with no page refresh.

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CSS Star Rating Redux - Star rating with css tutorial

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Ajax Contact Form - An unobtrusive AJAX contact form (works even with JavaScript disabled)

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Wufoo - Build online forms easily with this web app

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Pretty Accessible Forms - It can be time consuming to make web forms both pretty and accessible. In particular, laying out forms where the form label and input are horizontally adjacent, as in the image below, can be a real problem.

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Adam’s Radio & Checkbox Customisation Method - Customised check boxes using images

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sIFR 3b1: The Mo’ Betta Beta - sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems.

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Revised Image Replacement - Plenty of new and interesting revisions to the original Fahrner Image Replacement technique sprouted up in late 2003. This was an attempt to consolidate them.

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CSS Rounded Corners - Spiffy Corners is a simple way to generate the CSS and HTML you need to create anti-aliased corners without using images or javascript.

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CSS Speech Bubbles

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Even More Rounded Corners - Another article detailing a method of doing rounded corners with CSS. In this case, single-image, PNG-based, fluid rounded corner dialogs with support for borders, alpha transparency throughout, gradients, patterns and whatever else you (or your designer) could want.

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Vertical Bar Graphs - Who wants to use Excel to make a new graph each week? Using CSS and PHP you can create attractive bar graphs (yes, even the stacked kind) that are always up to date.

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CSS Vertical Bar Graphs - Here’s a fairly typical vertical bar graph showing a hypothetical set of quarterly data for, say, invoice and collection totals. The difference here is that the whole thing is a simple set of nested lists and CSS. Really.

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Suckerfish HoverLightbox - A really creative way to show a collection of images in a gallery.

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Lightbox JS - Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

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CSS Image Maps - Image map that’s built entirely using CSS and XHTML.

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CSS Image Pop-up - This is an Pop-UP image effect that is similar to the ones you see using JavaScript on mouseover or on click but THIS ONE uses ONLY CSS!

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Sliding Doors CSS Navigation - A rarely discussed advantage of CSS is the ability to layer background images, allowing them to slide over each other to create certain effects.

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Taming Lists - I’ll demonstrate how to use CSS to bring unwieldy lists under control. It’s time for you to tell lists how to behave, instead of letting them run wild on your web page.

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The Art of Navigation - The main purpose of this design experiment is to see how far we can push CSS. Is it possible to create the most complex navigation (in terms of graphic design) and have it marked-up as an unordered list?

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Navigation Matrix Reloaded - This new experiment is, as the first one, based exclusively on graphics — therefore the same usability and accessiblity cautions apply.

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Light Weight Low Tech CSS Tabs - An example of light weight tabs by combining the Sliding Doors method with the Mountaintop corners idea.

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Accessible Image-Tab Rollovers - I wanted to continue to use a simple unordered list for the navigation in the markup. Much has already been said about using lists for navigation, here and elsewhere. They’re compact, lightweight and accessible to text browsers, screenreaders, PDAs, phones, etc.

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Part 2

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Tables with style - It might not seem like it but styling tabular data can be a lot of fun. From a semantic point of view, there are plenty of elements to tie some style into. You have cells, rows, row groups and, of course, the table element itself. Adding CSS to a paragraph just isn’t as exciting.

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CSS Shadows - So for a couple of years now, folks have been trying to find ways to work around the fact that the box-shadow property from CSS3 seems to perpetually be just a few months away from actually appearing in Web browsers everywhere. Box shadows are a very common design element, and not being able to use them on the Web is a real pain in the ass.

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Airtight Corners - Here’s a quick number on how to produce a box with rounded corners using only one image, and off-setting that image for each corner.

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Collapsing Tables With DOM and CSS - Each of the tables below has a class called “footcollapse” which makes the script add the arrow images in the footer allowing the table to be collapsed and expanded.

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3D Box Model Diagram - Here’s a thing. I’ve seen umpteen diagrams showing CSS beginners how padding, border and margin work together, but not the order in which elements such as background colour and image are stacked. To try and fill this hole, I’ve drawn a diagram.

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Docking Boxes - Docking boxes (dbx) adds animated drag ‘n’ drop, snap-to-grid, and show/hide-contents functionality to any group of elements.

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CSS Submit Button - For some time now we have all known about how you can treat a submit button as you would any tag when it comes to styling it with CSS, we can change its background colour, border and font styles using our trusty CSS.

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PHP Style Switcher - For your style-sheet-switching pleasure, A List Apart offers the Switcher, a piece of JavaScript that dynamically changes page styles. Functional as it is, it quite unfortunately relies on the user to have both JavaScript and cookies enabled. There’s not much we can do about the cookies, but we can sidestep client-side processing with a little help from PHP.

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Two Color sIFR - How to implement two color sIFR

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Styled images with caption - The problem is a simple one. A client wants to add an image to their site via the content management system. They want it to look attractive, not appear too boxy (let us say they want a nice rounded corner, as this is all the rage) and have a nice caption underneath it. However, they do not know how to use an image editor (beyond basic resizing) or how to edit HTML.

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Simple CSS Image Switcher - This is a pure CSS image switcher that is lightweight and standards-compliant. It could be used for a gallery or any similar function.

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Dynamic Pie Chart with CSS - This is an example of creating a semi-dynamic pie chart without the use of server-side imaging libraries

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Replicating a Tree Table - The aim is to replicate a graphic table tree using HTML

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Listamatic - Can you take a simple list and use CSS to create radically different list options? The Listamatic shows the power of CSS when applied to a simple list.

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Simple accessible external links - How to identify external links

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CSS Element Hover Effect - Using css and html only

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CSS Going to Print - You’ve seen them before: links that say “click here for printer-friendly version” or words to that effect. Every time you follow one of those links, you load a separate document that presents exactly the same information with a different layout, and probably different markup.

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Drop Caps with CSS - The code for the dropcap is simple, but we can fancy it up a bit. We use the inline CSS for fiddling with the look.

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CSS: Unordered List Calendar - This is a list boxes calendar. It isn’t the most semantic method, but it does seem to be faily stable and it resizes perfectly. A monospace font like Courier New must be used to ensure proper proportions and two characters must be used. Prepared with dynamic generation in mind.

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Visited Links - Everyone does visited links differently. Jakob Neilson flunkies use the old school blue-and-purple combo to help show visitors where they’ve been. People with actual design taste use more palatable colors, or perhaps a font-weight variation instead.

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Smart Back to top link - Back to top link’s purpose is to quickly position the viewport back to a beginning of a web page. Sometimes you have a variable height of the content and this link is unnecessary if a particular page is shorter than viewport height

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Displaying percentages with CSS - In turning this part of the design into something flexible on the website I saw two options; clever CSS, or ‘Lots of Images’. I decided that ‘Lots of Images’ was a bad idea

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Unobtrusive Sidenotes - Unobtrusive Sidenotes is a simple mix of Javascript and CSS that makes it ridiculously easy to incorporate sidenotes into your web pages or blogs.

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CSS Cheatsheet - The CSS cheat sheet is designed to act as a reminder and reference sheet, listing all selectors (as of CSS 2.1) and properties. It includes a visual example of the box model, unit reference for CSS units and the various media types CSS makes allowance for.

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CSS Navigation Techniques - A roundup of 37 different nav bars

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Part 353 CSS Techniques - Great roundup from our friends at Smashing Magazine

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Accessible Map Rollovers - Create points on a map with roll-over boxes

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Styling Horizontal Rules - Even though it’s sometimes recommended to replace the <hr> element with cascading stylesheets only using horizontal borders of other elements, I prefer <hr> as a section divider

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Cross Browser Multi-Page Photograph Gallery - Hover over the tabs to display a page of images. Hover over each image to see a 2x image and finally, on the Portraits and Landscapes, click the image to open a new window showing the 640 x 480 pixel version

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CSS Button - Create a button using only css

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CSS + Javascript Fancy Menu - In this article I’ll go through the creation of a custom navigation bar with some cute Javascript effects that will certainly impress your friends

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CSS Image Wrap - Image text wrap with sandbag divs

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CSS Cross Fader - In this particular demo, I am going to show how to build a browser-agnostic crossfading effect using Script.aculo.us, a Javascript effects library

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CSS Bar Graphs - Create complex Bar graphs using css only

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Attach icons to anything using CSS - Thanks to CSS selectors it’s possible to attach icons to anything you want just by adding an attribute of your choosing to your HTML

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HTML Visual Sitemap Tool - If you’ve ever had to produce a sitemap for a client using tools like Visio or OmniGraffle, you know that it can be tedious to visually organize a complex hierarchy of pages. Having experienced this myself, I developed a simple and efficient way to make a sitemap through the benefits of standards-based HTML and CSS

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Digg comment style sliding divs - How to make sliding DIVs using Javascript and CSS from scratch without having the overhead of Effects libraries such as script.aculo.us

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Ajax Auto Completion Demo

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Thumbnail Images - Suppose you have a series of images in thumbnail and you would like the user to easily browse through them. In this script we will create three thumbnail images and a larger copy of the selected image will be displayed on the right of the screen. We will also highlight the currently selected thumbnail. 

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Sliding Photograph Galleries - This gallery is my simplest yet. It is just an unordered list of images that are normally compressed vertically (reduction 8:1). When you hover over one of these compressed images it expands to full size

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Free CSS Menus - Downloadable examples of css-based navigation menus

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Image Fade - Fade an image in using only CSS

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Time Sensitive Style Switcher - You Can Change Styles Based on Time of Day

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Free Web 2.0 Templates - Download free xhtml / CSS templates

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Turn lists into Trees - In this article, I will present a technique to display a multi-level unordered list in the form of a tree with lines connecting nodes

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Custom Bullets - Use css to style list items with custom bullet points

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HTML Text Drop Shadows - The drop shadow may not be a designer’s most important tool, but on occasion the need arises to add some punch to a headline. One example could be for branding text that is positioned on top of an image; Depending on the colors of the image, your text might get lost without a shadow to pop it out

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CSS Dashboard effect - Ever want to alert your users to a really important message?

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Create flickr-like Editing Fields Using AJAX & CSS - On one of my web projects I’ve been working on, we needed to allow the user to edit some information on their profile page. I could have written an HTML form page and then written the php database updater, but why use such outdated interfaces?

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Form field hints with CSS and JavaScript - As you tab through each input field, some helper text appears in box out to the right

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Part 4

 

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Simple Accessible ‘More’ Links - “There is this information that we are hiding. But why not show that hidden information when the user is hovering the link?”

 

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10 Tips for an easier CSS Life - As with most things, a logical and structured approach is the best way to go. Therefore I have put together 10 quick tips (in no special order) to help make your CSS coding as pain-free as possible

 

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CSS Gallery Layout - Setting up a gallery layout is not exactly one of the jobs I am looking forward to doing. I assume you all are using lists by now to lay out thumbnail galleries, right?

 

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CSS Alert Box - In various places around the net you may have seen alert boxes which, as far as I can tell, owe their origins to the K2 template for WordPress

 

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CSS Tab Designer - CSS Tab Designer is a unique and easy to use software to help you design css-based lists and tabs visually and without any programming knowledge required Mini Slide Navigation - Sliding nav bar using javascript for the slide effect

 

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Centered Tabs with CSS - What if we need a bit more flexibility? What if we need to place our navigation in the center?

 

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Multi Column Layout - We all know the problems that arise when we try to build multi-column layouts in which the columns are of equal height

 

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CSS Shorthand Properties - One of the many great possibilities in CSS is the use of shorthand properties. It lets you specify several properties by using only one

 

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10 CSS tricks you may not know - 10 Handy tips

 

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Snook’s Resizable Underlines - The aim is to apply underlines to paragraph text that stretch the whole width of the column (without using justified text), regardless of the lengths of the paragraph text itself

 

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Layout-O-Matic - Create layouts of your choosing with this online tool

 

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List-O-Matic - Create navigation bars from lists using this online tool

 

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CSS Vista - Edit CSS and see the results live in Firefox and Internet Explorer simultaneously