Grooveshark now offers a mobile webapp that plays music without the help of Flash, works on just about any smartphone, and doesn't require a Grooveshark Premium account to use.

Grooveshark, one of our favorite music streaming services, has long offered apps for Andorid, jailbroken iPhones (after being pulled from the App Store), and other devices, but they require a premium account to use. If you aren't jailbroken and just want to listen to a couple songs, their new HTML5-powered webapp will work wonders. It's in beta right now, and still pretty feature-bare, so don't expect to be able to log in and listen to your playlists. You can, however, search for artists, listen to streaming radio stations, or see what's popular, which is great for those quick one-off listens if you don't have a particular song on your iPod. And, like other HTML5-powered webapps, it can keep playing music even if you close Safari. To check it out, just head to html5.grooveshark.com on your phone.

-LifeHacker

I wonder if this will work on my iPod Touch... 

I love all the fun finds kottke.org provides everyday. Here's a funny Javascript module posted there the other day that classifies if a sentence can be replied with "that's what she said" or not. 

twss.threshold

If you want more obscure jokes to be accepted, you can set the "probability the sentence can be replied with twss" threshold. Be aware that a too low threshold may result in a lot of false-positives, and a too high threshold may result in a lot of false-negatives.

twss.threshold = 0.5; twss.is("You're hardly my first."); // false
twss.threshold = 0.3; twss.is("You're hardly my first."); // true

twss.probability

If you'd just like the probability that a sentence can be replied with "That's what she said" you can use the `twss.probability` function.

twss.probability("Behold, I come quickly."); // 0.956323045469951

Or just use the alias `twss.prob`

twss.prob("The juice keeps coming out of the wrong hole!") // 0.9961630818418142

 

Interesting. 

Found via The Oatmeal - "How the male angler fish gets completely screwed" 

Reminds me of this really interesting book, "Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex." 

"No One's Gonna Love You" - Band of Horses

It's not surprising that MediaFire's Facebook page has nearly 3.2 million Fans. The versatile free file hosting/sharing site touts unlimited storage for registered users, and no-sign up required for others just looking to share files too large to email. On the surface, it's a great service, but I have a few major reservations I'm trying to resolve.

First of all, MediaFire has always marketed itself as a file sharing service. It's meant for the file that's too large to email, or the photo you want to share with a friend quickly and easily. Not necessarily as an extra long-term storage solution. 

I found this out the hard way. About a year ago, I logged back into MediaFire after an extended absence to find all my files had been deleted. Do a quick Google search and you'll find lots of other people with similar stories. 

So when MediaFire posted a Happy New Year blog post about all the great services available, including unlimited storage so users could "free up hard-drive space" by archiving files off their comptuer onto a separate storage location without fear, I was especially confused. I posted the following comment, twice, with about 4 days between attempts under different email addresses. Both times it said it was "awaiting moderation" for awhile, but then just sort of disappeared. 

Hi Tom. Congrats, and Happy New Year! I've been a happy MediaFire user for about a year now. But, as I rely on this site more and more, there's one line in the Terms of Service that makes me nervous:

"MediaFire is not a data warehousing service. Its intended use is for active accounts and active file sharing which may inadvertently result in backups of files being shared. Accounts with large amounts of stagnant data `collecting dust` or accounts with very limited user and sharing activity may, in MediaFire' sole discretion and without notice, be removed from the Services."

This blog post in particular touts Mediafire as a place to archive files. That's great, and what I'd love to use this site for, but it feels fairly contradictory to "MediaFire is not a data warehousing service" from your ToS.

So, which is it? If I use MediaFire to "upload all those old files into folders" can I TRULY "delete the data from your local computer without fear?" I'm getting mixed messages.

Now, I know the owners don't really owe me anything since I'm not paying them, but snubs like this from invested, loyal users bug me. I guess right now they don't need to get into anything like this given there's no one else who offers what they offer for free.

And, even I'm still using their service -- at least until I can find someone better.

Some random things I stumbled across yesterday. 

• Founders at Work

Founders at Work is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company. 

Happy New Year, 'ye faithful reader! I've decided to make some changes with this site, and have some new realizations about domains and hosting to share.

For the last two years, I've been using FatCow to host apgordon.com. I went that route becuase a friend recommended them, they supported WordPress with a 1-click install feature, and had unlimited storage. With no technical or customer service problems, paying about $8/month seemed fine.

I've come to realize I just don't need this service though. I haven't made the most of the the unlimited storage given I embed photos I've uploaded to Flickr, and I'm sort of tired of all the plugins, updates and configuring required to make WordPress work.

So I checked out Tumblr again. But, according to their Help section, it doesn't allow for importing in blog content, and the export/back-up feature is currently Mac Only (Windows version coming soon). And, I feel a little uneasy building on a system that doesn't allow comments unless you buy a premium theme (using Disqus). 

Here's some strategic SEO for you. While searching for a workaround to use native comments in Tumblr, I found this post: Hey Tumblr users: Want comments? Need privacy? Graduate to Posterous. Wow, Posterous, how'd you know? 

In the end, I'm going to give Posterous a shot. I like the updates they've made in the last year since I last checked them out, and the general look is more in line with what I'm after (compared to Tumblr). I like that I can configure a custom domain for free (vs. $10 set-up fee Wordpress.com charges), and import my old blog content easily. I love the option to quickly post to my blog, to Twitter, to Flickr... etc all from my email. And since my domain is registered with GoDaddy, I was able to cancel FatCow altogether without losing anything I need, saving about $100/year. 

Takeaway: I'm looking forward to an easier way to post to this blog, and I've come to believe that for 95% of people and businesses looking to carve out some space for themselves on the web, there's no need to spend more than $20 a year doing so. Posterous will even let you buy a domain through them for $12.99/year and set up all the DNS stuff for you. Good stuff.

For the loyal readers using Google Reader, I've updated the RSS feed slightly. It's now: http://feeds.feedburner.com/apgordon1

When I turned 16, my dad bought me my first digital camera: a Canon PowerShot A40. It featured 2.0 megapixels and could hold almost a dozen large (1600 x 1200) pictures on an 8 MB memory card. I still remember saving up to buy a 16 MB from Ritz Camera in the mall so my friends and I could make home movies with my friends more easily. I took a ton of pictures back then. Looking back, it's crazy to still remember taking certain ones. Or, in the case of these two, capturing something that so completely embodied the feeling of that time in my life. Without many weekend plans, an old friend of mine and I spent a fair amount of 2002 and 2003 riding up and down our quiet suburban street on Friday and Saturday nights. We'd ride for hours, late into the still of the night, talking some, but mostly just taking in the gentle feeling of carving down a single lane road, the cool air in our faces, and maybe the familiarity and comfort of the life we knew was ultimately fleeting. I never thought that after almost 10 years and transfers between 3 laptops, images like these would not only survive, but still mean so much. After all, it was just a normal night when I snatched these shots of my friend while cruising beside him all those years ago. My wife and I didn't do much Black Friday shopping last week, but we did get a great deal on another Canon PowerShot (my how the specs have changed since that first camera). I've realized I haven't taken a lot of pictures since graduating. With this new camera, I'm trying to do it more regularly, remembering that even a picture you didn't think much of might make you pause in ten years time.