Adding Bookmarklets on iPad and iPhone

Most of the bookmarklets you really want in one handy place. (Thanks, Josh!)

According to the RIAA, the Pirate Bay has stolen about 46 times more dollars than actually exist on Earth

—Cracked on how the Pirate Bay is sort of like a lamer Robin Hood.

Every other state on the border should emulate what Arizona has done

—Sarah Palin, heaping praise on Arizona’s awful immigration law. Now, does that border just mean Mexico or does it include Canada, which shares a long, unsecured border with Palin’s beloved Alaska? How are we supposed to profile Canadians in that case – ask ‘em to say “about”?

Portland pig cook-off followed by brawl over the provenance of pork

Complete with egoistic chefs, headbutts, broken legs, a tasing (tasering?), pepper spray and a strip club! Oh, Portland.

This blew my mind when I saw it. That’s a photo I took for Salt & Fat, the food blog that Neven and I do, in a post about quinoa. Not just a photo, though, a photo featured in a screenshot, in the app store, for what is hands down one of the greatest apps I’ve used in a long while, Instapaper.

I can’t I imagine anyone reading this doesn’t know Instapaper, but it has quite literally transformed how I use the web. On any given day, I’m bombarded with more text than I could possibly consume and Instapaper makes all of that manageable. If someone IMs me a link or if any of the two dozen tabs I’ve got going are more than a few grafs long, I send them straight to Instapaper and digest them when I can, usually on the bus home or while battling demons in the wee small hours. It’s one of the most useful, well thought out applications I’ve used and Marco deserves every bit of praise that he’s received.

Thank you for including us, it’s truly an honor to hold such esteemed company.

The WebM project hopes to solve the open video problem

A lot of the focus on HTML5 video has been on the codec, which has meant either H.264 or Ogg Theora. Each has problems – Ogg Theora doesn’t have broad support and serious performance problems, particularly on mobile devices, while H.264 is an industry standard but patented, making it philosophically untenable for Firefox.

WebM is a set of tools based on the VP8 codec, now open sourced under a BSD license, and already open source Ogg Vorbis audio encoder. Mozilla, Opera, Google and Adobe have announced their support as have a whole bunch of hardware vendors.

Two big names missing from that list are Apple and Microsoft, who already or will soon support H.264 in their browsers and mobile devices. I suspect that their absence on that isn’t because they weren’t asked but because they’re playing wait-and-see.

New video codecs aren’t trivial to build and they’re even harder to build a coalition around. Part of why H.264 enjoys the support that it does is because it works really well on mobile devices, which have dedicated hardware to support decoding H.264 streams. WebM isn’t the sort of thing your iPhone can start supporting with just a patch to the OS.

The next version of Flash will come with built in P2P streaming

Now this is interesting, particularly for big publishers. Bandwidth is hugely expensive, particularly for video, and offloading those costs to the people consuming that video has to be very attractive.

Potato/Potato, Tomato/Tomato, Slave Trade/Atlantic Triangular Trade

My girl’s wicked smart

A while ago, a screenshot was making the rounds showing what happens when you try to quit your Facebook account, how they bring up pictures of your girlfriend or grandmother to try to coerce you into staying. It’s the kind of manipulative scam you’d expect from Zuck and crew, but it’s honestly no worse than any other promotion that’s easy to sign up for but hard to leave. Just try canceling your subscription to the New York Times, where you have to actually call a number and talk to a live human being who will all but beg you to stay.

As luck would have it, someone passed along a sneak peak of the new “are you sure?” screen. It seems a touch more aggressive. (Embiggen.)

Alex Payne is leaving Twitter to help found a new startup called BankSimple

A bank that doesn’t suck sounds fascinating and Alex is a brilliant guy. I love the ambition of the idea and can’t wait to see what they build.