net.culture Archives - The Silicon Underground

How accurate Stranger Things is to the 80s

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 12:00:42 +0000

Stranger Things is a pop culture phenomenon, partly due to its portrayal of life in small-town America in the 1980s. But how accurate is Stranger Things to the 80s? Here’s my perspective as a kid who grew up in a

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Phil Kerpen, net neutrality, and socialism: A post-mortem

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 11:00:45 +0000

I learned the hard way a few weeks ago how net neutrality can be equated with socialism, an argument that puzzles people who work on computer networks for a living and see networking as a big flow of electrons. I

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Exploiting Twitter

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:31:59 +0000

It’s interesting that I read two things about buying Twitter publicity today: John C Dvorak’s experiment for PC Magazine and an interview with my classmate and friend Ken. The idea is that people buy Twitter followers to make themselves look

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There’s room for several to gloat over the Britannica

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 12:22:03 +0000

The Encyclopædia Britannica is, after 244 years, calling it quits on its print edition, and I’m sure Wikipedia is gloating, because as I recall, that was one of its goals around a decade ago. Wired argues that Encarta did more

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Are comments worth the trouble or not?

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:33:36 +0000

Gawker founder Nick Denton (home of Mac Hacker, er, Lifehacker; Gizmodo; io9; Jalopnik; and formerly Consumerist) says online comments aren’t worth the trouble. I agree and disagree. The comments on a daily newspaper are a terrible place to search for

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Reflections on 10+ years of blogging

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 11:36:35 +0000

Om Malik shared yesterday what he’s learned in 10 years of blogging. 1. Blogging is communal. 2. Be authentic. 3. When wrong, admit it and listen to those who were right. 4. Be regular. 5. Treat others as you expect

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Wikipedia’s losing contributors? Dip me in axle grease and call me slick!

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:45:28 +0000

So, Wikipedia is losing contributors. Cnet says so. People like me already knew it. I left the place years ago. Last summer I went back. I chose a subject I had a moderate interest in, but that wasn’t likely to

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Integrating WordPress 3.2 with Twitter

Dave Farquhar — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:22:52 +0000

Rich P. tells me all the cool kids use Twitter now. And that some people, instead of using RSS feeds, want to get blog updates from a Twitter feed. I’m about four years late to that party, but I’m not

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Meet Chrysalis, the future of Bit Torrent

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:59:19 +0000

What do you think of when you think of Bit Torrent? I think of the place to quickly download ISOs of Linux distributions. My coworker one cube over calls it “that pirate thing.” Most people probably agree more with him

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Quoting famous people accurately

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 05 May 2011 01:45:26 +0000

If you’re going to quote people on the Internet, you might as well quote them accurately. Here are some tips for quoting famous people accurately, based on my own detective work on one of my favorite quotes. “The problem with

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