Some dude is going to deactivate his spam protection (Akismet) for one day, on December 15th, and the idea is actually starting to spread.

What a pointless idea… I mean, everyone knows how many spam they're getting each day: Akismet as a WordPress plugin comes with a spam counter. I know I get between 100 and 300 spams every single day, how cool would it be that on this particular day I deactivate my comment condom and manually moderate this many comments? You said it, completely uncool.

The interesting part — there is one after all — of this experiment is, if the idea really gains momentum, we'll see how the spam count increases this particular day: just like everyday, or will spammers put an extra effort in their work?

Christmas is approaching and I'm thinking a bit about what Santa could bring to me. One gadget I still miss because I've never found the perfect one is an MP3 player. Every time I read reviews, I just cannot understand why every single product seems to miss an essential feature or comes with a couple of bloated concept I don't want.

The gem I'm looking for would be :

• High capacity (something like 80 GB from the iPod is appealing)
• No touch screen. I want a small robust screen.
• No "large" screen. I want a small robust screen. I'm going to listen to music, not hurt my eyes with a tiny stamp sized crappy video, damnit
• UMS support! I want to be able to upload and download MP3, just with any USB key, whenever and wherever I need to, including on my computer at work on which I cannot install a bloated piece of crap software like iTunes

I just can't believe I still have to find a simple product like this.

In the best case scenario, captchas annoy me. In most cases, I can't even read them properly and they make me fill twice some registration form. In some too frequent cases, when I fail a couple of times I get fed up and don't even register with the site they're supposed to protect (And in every single case, I am positive that there are better ways to keep robots away.)

Today, when registering on lifestrea.ms I stumbled upon the very first near-intelligent, almost unobstrusive, practically painless, captcha. What made it so? Beside being not too unreadable, it was simply validated real time via an Ajax server check, preventing an unwanted and frustrating form submission with incorrect field values. Why on Earth is this the first time I see something like this? I can swear I'm not going to fill any more form with a captcha that doesn't comply to this real time validation principle.

Compare this to Quakenet's captcha: ugly beyond acceptable (note the professional looking unstyled link and the so pretty blue frame) and completely undecipherable. This is pathetic.

From time to time, about once a month or so, I make a small donation to somebody. It's not a principle I try to follow, I just donate when I find something cool and it happens roughly every four weeks:) It's almost like recycling, since recent donations where mostly given to plugin coders and I receive myself a few tips for my plugins.

Today kind of breaks this pattern: I've donated to something I've been knowing and using on a daily basis for years, Wikipedia. Compared to how much I've used this service and how much it's actually worth, this makes probably the most little donation ever, but this is also probably the most useful donation too. Fun fact: 100 people giving $40 equal 100 million pageviews of free information.

The Donation page is convenient and works with Paypal and other stuff. Go give a few pennies too!

This is hilarious, and then beyond hilarity you realize this is quite a performance: your old rock & heavy metal tunes, "hand fart" style! (ok, seems it's also called manualism but that doesn't sound as funny:)

This crazy guy plays The Trooper (Maiden), Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen), Crazy Train (Ozzy) or Sweet Child O' Mine (Guns) with his hands. This. Is. Hilarious.

One of my favorite blog ever, Colour Lovers, has a very interesting entry: The Scariest Colors Imaginable, matching color palettes and phobias.

Man, I didn't even suspected there were so many phobias around! Pick yours, the list is amazingly and unexpectedly creative:

• Chromatophobia: The fear of colors, and more specifically:
  • Phodophobia: Fear of the Color Red
  • Chrysophobia: Fear of the Color Orange
  • Xanthophobia: Fear of the Color Yellow
  • Chlorophobia: Fear of the Color Green
  • Cyanophobia: Fear of the Color Blue
  • Porphyrophobia: Fear of the Color Purple
  • Leukoophobia: Fear of the Color White
  • Melanophobia: Fear of the Color Black
• Coulrophobia: The fear of clowns
• Ablutophobia: The fear of washing or bathing
• Trypanophobia: The fear of needles
• Selachophobia: The fear of sharks
• Caligynephobia: The fear of beautiful women (ahah, what the..???)
• Somniphobia: The fear of sleeping
• Pediophobia: The Fear of dolls (ok, not too annoying)

This article on ColourLovers is, as usual, a stunning mix of creativity and research.

On to the subject of phobias, I found phobialist.com. I'm going to start to classify my friends now:)

I'm extremely pleased and excited to (finally!) release my latest plugin, Absolute Comments, which is probably the most useful plugin I've written to date. I love it.

Absolute Comments adds something that everybody misses: the ability to reply to comments from within your regular "Manage Comments" page, without having to load the post page first. It also adds to each comment email notification a very convenient and fast "Quick Reply" link to instantly reply to comments. I've blogged about a similar plugin a few months ago, but I thought this plugin missed on the integration with WordPress (adds an unneeded extra page) and had a number of bugs I couldn't live with. So I made my own (which might have bugs too, but I seem to be able to live with them:)

Quick roundup of Absolute Comments features:

• Simple integration: no extra page, just more features to your "Manage Comments" page
• Quick Reply: instantly reply straight from the email notification of a new comment
• Comment Reply Prefill: make all your replies automatically start with "@Joe" or "Diana »"
• Threaded Comments Support: if you're already using a plugin that features this
• Translations: plenty of cute funky characters everywhere!

My friends, I tell you : replying to comments has never been this enjoyable with Absolute Comments. Feedback from testers and translators has been very enthusiastic and I believe this plugin has a very great potential for anyone running a blog with more than 10 comments. Give it a try now!