Joseph Miller's Blog

Everyone loves a top ten list, right?  And what’s better than a top ten list but a top one hundred list.  What could be better than that?  Oh yeah, how about one hundred freakin’ top 100 lists.  So here you go, in relatively no particular order, the absolutely officially unofficial top one hundred top 100 lists on the ol’ interwebs.   Ok, one of the lists is a top 101.  Please don’t tell anyone.

Websites

Top 100 Science Sites
100 Most Important Online Publishers
100 Websites You Should Use
100 Best Websites for Women
Top 100 British Parent Blogs
Top 100 Food Websites
100 Best Blogs for Healthy Recipes
Top 100 Software Testing Blogs
100 Awesome Business Blogs
Top 100 Gadget Blogs
Top 100 Interior Design Blogs
BBC’s Top 100 Websites
100 Best Blogs for the Literati
The Ultimate List of Cyberpunk Sites (from 1995???)
Top 100 Language Blogs
Top 100 Classic Websites
Top 100 SEO Blogs
Top 100 Link Building Resources
100 Most Iconic Internet Videos

Software
100 Free & Useful Mac Apps
100 Essential Mac Applications
100 of the Best Open Source Applications
100 Free Windows Software
Top 100 Network Security Tools
Top 100 Free Apps For Your Phone
100 Amazing Free WordPress Themes
100 Most Popular Twitter Applications

Film
Top 100 films of the “Noughty’s”
Top 100 Films from Times Online
Arts & Faith’s Top 100 Films
Yahoo’s 100 Movies to See Before You Die
100 Greatest Films of World Cinema (starting at 100)
100 Most Significant German Films
100 Movies to See Before You Die (again)
Top 100 Foreign Films

Music
100 Greatest Jazz Albums
Top 100 Jazz CDs
100 Best Jazz Recordings
100 Greatest Rock Songs
Flux-Rad’s 100 Favorite Albums
100 Greatest Funk Songs
100 Greatest Reggae Songs
Top 100 Classical Songs from Kickass Classical
NME’s Greatest Albums of the ’00s
100 Greatest Drum Beats
100 Greatest Surf Rock Songs
100 Greatest Psychedelic Albums
100 Rockabilly Hits (actually a CD set for sale)
100 Greatest Protest Songs
100 Most Important Records Ever Made (as of 1992)
Top 100 Indie Songs of All Time
Top 100 Albums of the 90s
Top 100 (Techno) Tracks of the 00s
100 Best Indie Rock Albums Ever
Top 100 Hip-Hop Albums of All Time (circa 1998)

Books
100 Best Novels #1
100 Best Novels #2
100 Best Novels from the Modern Library Editorial Board
and 100 Best Nonfiction
and Radcliffe’s Rival 100 List
100 Best Children’s Novels
100 Greatest Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels
ISFDB’s Top 100 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels
Top 100 Social Media Books
100 Most Influential Books Ever Written
100 Best Business Books

Business
100 Best Digital Agencies
100 Best Global Brands
Top 100 Food and Beverage Companies
Top Social Brands of 2009
Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands
100 Most Innovative Companies
Top 100 Restaurants Using Twitter

People
Forbes 100 Most Powerful Celebrities
MediaGuardian 100 2010 (Most powerful people in media.  Scary!)
Top 100 Artists (Living or Dead)
Maxim’s Hot 100 (Girls) for 2010
100 Most Creative People in Business
100 Most Influential People in Finance
Top 100 Entrepreneurs Without College Degrees
100 Best Science Twitterers
Top 100 Digg Users

Places

100 Best Places to Live in America
100 Most Beautiful Places in the World
Top 100 Clubs
100 Geeky Places to Take Your Kids This Summer
Top 101 City Lists

Education
100 Great Tech Talks for Educators
Top 100 Learning Tools for 2010

Design
100 Awesome Retro Wallpapers
100 Beautifull (sp) Logos

Humor
100 Funniest One-Liners
100 Quotes Every Geek Should Know
Top 100 April Fools Hoaxes

Games
Top 100 NES Games
100 Super NES Games in 10 Minutes (Youtube link)

Various
100 Best Times to Do Everything
CNET’s Top 100 Products (updated monthly)
100 Best Sewing Tutorials
Top 100 Comic Book Villians

Whew, that’s about 10,000 things to count down.  Got any more?

I spotted a van today with the signage ‘Absolute Destruction’ .  What an awesome company name.

So you’ve bought an MSI Wind u100 from Newegg and you want to get up and running, but now you’re having a hard time figuring out what the most updated information is and how to get started. You keep reading that you’ll need an external DVD drive, a USB keyboard and mouse or at least two USB key drives.

Fear not! As of May 10th, 2009, you can be up and running in about two hours. Here’s what you need:

(1) MSI Wind u100
(1) Another Mac. I used my white MacBook.
(1) USB Key Drive. I used the 16GB OCZ Diesel drive that’s crazy cheap

Step 0 – Download MSIWindosx86.iso and everything else you’ll need

This file is a special version of OSX 10.5 that enterprising hackers have built just for the Wind and other variants. Obviously, it’s not kosher with Apple so you are going to have to find it by less proper channels. Google should lead you in the right direction.

The download is going to take a while, at least a few hours and probably more like 12, so do it ahead of time for your own sake.

While you are at it, download the following:

10.5.6 combo update from Apple
OSx86Tools
MSi Driver Pack v1.1
RealTek WiFi Drivers
WindTrackpadBundle_v6.0.2

Step 1 – Update the BIOS

Follow the instructions borrowed from Bay-Wolf.com for making bootable USB key in Windows.  Next, download the updated BIOS files from MSI and copy them to the root of the USB key. I used version 1.0B, but many people recommend 1.09.  I couldn’t find 1.09 on MSI’s website and using a hacked BIOS is just too hardcore and risky for me.   Before you get going you need to shut down the Wind, remove the battery, and plug in the power and USB drive.

Now start it up, press F11,  select the USB drive, and you should get the DOS prompt. Then type ‘runflash.bat’ and wait.  After that’s finished you can shutdown and hook up the battery again.

Start up and press Delete to enter the BIOS. Restore the optimized defaults, save, and restart. You can shut it down again after it restarts and BIOS posts without beeping or anything scary like that.

Step 2 – Get OSX on the USB Key

Plug your USB into your other Mac and open up Disk Utility. Click the partition tab and format the USB key with Disk Utlity, selecting the format Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and the option ‘Master Boot Record’.  When that’s done, click the Restore tab and drag MSIWindosx86.iso to the source field (browsing won’t work), the USB key to the destination field, and click restore.  This process may take 5 – 10 minutes depending on how clunky your USB key is.  After that’s done you should also copy all the other files you downloaded over to the USB key.

Next, fire up OSx86Tools and click the Install EFI / Run FDisk button.  Select your USB key in the Disk to Use menu and select No EFI (Darwin Uploader) in the EFI to Install menu.  Then click Run FDisk and, once complete, Install EFI.  If both complete without any errors, you should be good to go.

Step 3 – Format and Install

Plug your USB key back into the Wind and start it up again.  Press F11 and boot from the USB key.  You should get the Mac installer within a minute or two.  Once the first screen is up, click the Installer menu at the top and choose Disk Utility.  Format your drive in the exact same manner as the USB drive, apply the changes, and proceed with installing OSX.

Step 4 – Installing Drivers

Assuming you have no problems with the installation, unzip the driver pack, install MSiWindBaseDriverPack_v1.0 and restart.

Once you’re back, mount the 10.5.6 combo update and run the Installer, but DO NOT restart once it finishes.  You need to install ‘MSi10.5.6UpgradeDriverPack_v1.0′ or else you are screwed if you don’t have a USB keyboard or mouse.  After both are installed, restart again.  Next, install Trackpad drivers from WindTrackpadBundle_v6.0.2 to get a preference pane in System Preferences that will enable two finger scolling.

If you don’t yet have WiFi working, install the RealTek WiFi driver and restart yet again.  I haven’t tested Bluetooth yet.

Now you should have everything working, up to date, and be done!  So simple, right ?

Credits and Sources

There is an incredible amount of knowledge about this on the MSIWind.net Forums.  I relied on information from threads including these to get up and running: MSi Wind OSX86 Install [Driver Pack], Triple Boot setup [GPT+MBR] [Retail Mac OS X, XP & Ubuntu], Sentelic/Synaptics 10.5.6 Driver Bundle. Cybergreg is a genius.

Let me know if this works for you.  I think you’ll be happy with the end result, an amazingly snappy and competent little OS X netbook that’s gotta be a precursor for something Apple is working on.

Ever since The Sheep Market, I’ve been curious about exploring the potential of Mechanical Turk for fun little tasks, rather than it’s main purpose as a brutally cheap and efficient marketplace for repetitive tasks.

My own silly idea was to pay people a relatively fair wage of 25 cents to record themselves singing short improvised songs.  I posted a request for 50 HITs with the minimal requirements that songs must be between 30 and 60 seconds and uploaded directly through Amazon’s interface as wave files.  After posting the HIT around 11 at night, I received one cute song almost instantly and went to sleep excited that the assignment would be completed by the morning.

By the way, if you’d like to skip my Turk tips then click here to go straight to the songs.

I checked the progress before leaving for work the next morning and was bummed to find that I hadn’t received any more songs at all. I thought that I might have been too stingy at 25 cents, so I closed the order and submitted a new one for 20 songs at 50 cents. Once again, I got a song almost straight away. Maybe price wasn’t the major factor?

Then I started browsing MT from the worker’s perspective and realized that my little task was likely not very discoverable within the pool of thousands on tasks (51,405 as I write this).  With such little monetary reward at stake, I pictured workers gravitating towards the first reasonable tasks presented to them, much like how searchers generally click the top handful of Google results.

Besides search and tags, MT provides the following ways of sorting tasks (“HITs”):

-Creation Date (Old to New)
-Creation Date (New to Old)
-HITs available (Fewest)
-HITs available (Most)
-Reward Amount (Least)
-Reward Amount (Most)
-Expiration Date (Soonest to Latest)
-Expiration Date (Latest to Soonest)
-Time Allotted (Shortest to Longest)
-Time Allotted (Longest to Shortest)
-Title (A to Z)
-Title (Z to A)

I put the options you can reasonably try to optimize for in bold.  The Creation Date sorts pass quickly and you can’t stop and start your projects at will without paying a 10% penalty, so unless you are comfortable losing some brutal efficiency it’s not an option.  I ended up was a couple bucks figuring this out.  You can’t post a massive order to get to the top of HITs available since Amazon requires that you pre-pay for your tasks, and you can’t get to the top to the top Reward Amount page without paying 5$-10$ per task.  Before you get too excited about making some folding cash, go check a few out. The amount of work required for some is absurd. Think ‘write a 5000 word essay’ or ‘transcribe 30 minutes of audio’. The hourly rate for the top paying projects is probably worse than most of the cheapies.  As you might expect, there’s a perpetual tie for the Least Rewarding task at 1 cent although there’s actually a couple totally free tasks on top right now for some reason.

Finally, we get to the easy wins. Time allotted can be cranked up to a few weeks if you aren’t in a hurry.  Most turkers are reliable and want fast cash, so an overly long deadline is not really a deterrent.  The current leader has allotted 20 days for workers.  On the short side, the minimum time you can allot is 60 seconds.  If your task is doable in that amount of time, it will likely get you on the top page.  Title is another east one.  Just browse the current top A to Z task and tweak their format $+number format.  To get top page on Z to A, start your task with the letter Z (duh).

All that said, it’s probably not a coincidence that Amazon put the easily gamed sort options toward the bottom, but there’s no downside in trying my suggestions to increase your exposure.

Here’s some other fun Turk ideas that may not exist:

-tag your flickr photos
-tag and organize your music and media collections
-create a frame by frame animation, each based on a previous turker’s drawing
-photoshop contest, like a low, low budget layer tennis

Don’t forget to check out the songs the Turkers made for me!