In an effort to shed time-sucking side projects in the past couple years I’ve let a number of sites go dark and domain names lapse. Some of these were ideas that never got off the ground, but one or two were sites with real traffic and Google pagerank (PR 5 in one case, not stellar but not achievable overnight either).

Sadly, some of these domains have now been taken over by those useless squatter pages that manufacture lists of “related links” and “popular searches” and so on to trick people into clicking on ads. This only makes sense – if you were a domain squatter, you’d certainly prioritize grabbing expired domains with high pagerank and many existing inbound links. If you set up your server never to return a 404, some of those linking sites might never even notice the change.

A little-used new feature in the Displays preference pane in OS X 10.4 is rotation in 90-degree increments. I tried this feature out with the 20-inch Cinema Display on my desk. Novel – it took me back to the old grayscale Pivot I wrote so many columns on in the ’90s. A base that handled rotation would make it nicer. Also, the type and other elements onscreen just don’t look as good at 90 degrees – I don’t know if it’s the disparity in vertical and horizontal viewing angles, or maybe a change in anti-aliasing behavior. (Onscreen is top running in Exterminal.)

I was wondering today what ever happened to the town of Half.com when I discovered a recent post at designobserver.com that answers this very question.

The backstory, in case you missed it, is that during the first dot-com boom the company Half.com (since absorbed by eBay) got the town of Halfway, Oregon to rename itself as a publicity stunt.

I gather there are mixed feelings about the way it worked out, and the town seems to have reverted to its former name for the most part.

Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, but when is Talk Like a Pilot Day? “This is chrome-plated stove-pipe triple-nickel eight ball, angels eight, five in the slot, boots on and laced, I wanna bounce and blow…”

This is a lazyweb request – I’m looking for something but I don’t even know if it exists. I have about 200 photos (headshots) and I’d like to make an animation that runs through them in order of, for lack of a better term, visual similarity. I’m not talking about morphing or just fading between the images in arbitrary order. Is there software out there that, given a reference image and a set of images to select from, can choose the most similar image? Open source would be best, as there’s no budget for this, and command-line-only is fine, but I am on a Mac.