davextreme: March 2006

31 March 2006

Over Three Hundred Proofs of God's Existence

Over Three Hundred Proofs of God’s Existence

Good stuff.

30 March 2006

Grandfather paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Articles like this are why Douglas Adams said in that we’d eventually have to invent a new tense to talk about time travel.

Everyone's Dumping UMD Movies - Kotaku

Everyone’s Dumping UMD Movies - Kotaku

Oh joy. I’m so glad this is a failure. Seriously, we need standard software to copy DVDs to iPods, PSPs, etc. easily. To hell with Hollywood’s “piracy” concerns.

29 March 2006

IGN: Nintendo: Rev Games Under $50

I really hope they announce a release date at E3. Also, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t put a small hard drive in.

Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations

Great stuff. (Thanks Vaishali!)

28 March 2006

After Abramoff, Nats Fear It's Out With the Hill Crowd

After Abramoff, Nats Fear It’s Out With the Hill Crowd

RFK Stadium is having trouble filling some seats because politicians are wary of taking tickets from lobbyists.

Thank You For Smoking main titles

I’m not sure I’ll even go see this movie, but this title sequence is great.

Seed: Prime Numbers Get Hitched

42.

27 March 2006

Next Generation - In Defense of Final Fantasy XII

Interesting article on the foibles of FFXII. Admittedly I probably won’t ever play this game, unless they release it for XBOX.

The Movie Timeline

I love reading how many times mankind has already been destroyed!

Magnum Photos - Cherry Blossoms

In honor of the Cherry Blossom Festival, starting today.

26 March 2006

Inking Jim Lee's Infinite Crisis #6 Cover

Inking Jim Lee’s Infinite Crisis #6 Cover

Neat look into the inking process.

25 March 2006

SimpleBits | The Raisin Has Ruined the Oatmeal Cookie

Totally.

24 March 2006

Penny Arcade is Six Times Funnier Than I Thought

I’ve been vocal when asked about my opinion of Penny Arcade. PvP boiled it down pretty well a few years ago. I certainly don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with knowing your audience and skipping the background introduction, but really, it’s like a leader paragraph would kill them somtimes. Regardless, I had the theory that I thought they were brilliant occasionally, and either unfunny or inaccessible the rest of the time, so I decided to put it to the test. I read every single comic they’ve published, and picked out the ones I thought there were funny. Anything rating above a three on the chuckle-meter made the cut. Here you go:

I think my initial goal in the project was the prove they only had like five funny comic strips, and their vast popularity was all a fluke born out of getting into the game when the world needed a webcomic about video games, but thirty strips is a lot, even if they’ve beeing doing it for years. Much like my slow progress through The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, it’s neat to see how their art and writing changed over the years.

My gripe about webcomics in general is that they exist on the web, but they don’t take much advantage of it. You can’t search for old comics easily. They’re not usually arranged by category. Finding an old strip, unless you get lucky and a blogger wrote a post about it, is just as hard as flipping through old newspapers is — you go day-by-day until you find the right one or get sick of the project. They could solve this pretty easily by using a content management system (Movable Type could easily be rigged to do webcomics) and putting the text of the strip in a field that you hide with CSS so that search engines could still have an idea of what a given strip is about.

Edit: a few others that did not quite make the cut: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Edit: okay, I’ve grown to like this one: Liar’s Day.

Dillon Works!

Crazy Star Wars style home theater.

Quark Inc. - Transforming the Business of Creative Communications

Quark has a new logo, and it’s unspectacular.

Five years of Mac OS X : Page 1

It would be overdramatic to say I remember exactly where I was five years ago, right?

CNN.com - An hour of '99 Red Balloons'? - Mar 24, 2006

CNN.com - An hour of ‘99 Red Balloons’? - Mar 24, 2006

Alarm zu geben, wenn’s so waer

CNN.com - WB sex-ed drama changed; FCC blamed - Mar 24, 2006

Ah censorship. Won’t somebody please think of the children!

23 March 2006

The Seventh Leaguer

The screenshot accompanying this article about Justice League Heroes amuses me. Ignoring everything about the game itself, the choice of leaguers is always tricky.

By tradition you always have seven members. Slots 1-3 have to go to Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. For four and five you pick the best second-tier heroes in the DC arsenal, Flash and Green Lantern. Flash’s speed makes him able to do almost anything, unless you slow him down in purpose, and GL’s power ring can by definition do almost anything. So that leaves you with two slots. One always goes to Martian Manhunter, because he’s been in every version of the League and because his powers are just ill-defined enough that you can use him as the easy-out for any story you’re not sure how to end.

And that leaves the seventh slot. DC just doesn’t have anyone on the same tier as the rest of them. Hawkman’s a great choice, but Hawkman’s really out of place with the rest of the cast. He belongs in the Green Arrow, Black Canary, and The Atom’s league, which also rules out all those characters. Aquaman has the name recognition, and unlike most I think he’s a great character, but only when you keep him in his element, the sea. Aquaman in the sea is great, but what’s the rest of the League doing there? Grant Morrison threw in Plasticman, but he’s not on the same tier as the rest, either. The game apparently likes Zatanna, but she’s solidly a tier 3 character, though she has the advantage of being another woman to round out your diversity to 2 women, 1 alien, and a black guy, assuming you’re using John Stewart as your Green Lantern.

Countdown to Crisis Chronology (Part 1 of 3)

A great series explaining all the events of DC’s Infinite Crisis events.

JimHillMedia.com-"Cars" officially rolled out at Tuesday ... (3/16/2006)

JimHillMedia.com-“Cars” officially rolled out at Tuesday … (3/16/2006)

Review of Pixar’s Cars, from the first preview screening.

Official Google Blog: Mac Gmail Notifier update

New version, universal binary.

Don't Shoot the Puppy

Don’t Shoot the Puppy

Harder than it would seem.

22 March 2006

del.icio.us Dish

I like what del.icio.us has done with their permalinks, if you can call them that. The pages you’d probably view most frequently on the site are the pages that belong to different people with their links on them. But if you click on the part of a link that says “saved by x other people,” you’ll get a page about the item everyone’s linking to. Here’s a good example, using Will Wright’s Spore demo on Google Video. On that page is a collection of everything those people said about that link, a list of who they are, and what tags they’ve given that link. I’m not sure how useful it is to see lots of “this is awesome!”, but I think somehow it provides some value if you’re trying to find something out about a page. If nothing else it demostrates the web-ness of the web. If there’s a value to being able to find out the metadata about pages, these sorts of things are where that value will start to emerge.

IGN: GDC 2006: Region-free PS3

Very good. Hopefully HD DVD will follow suit.

YouTube - Spiderman 3 - Teaser

TeleFragged -The Many Adventures of Link: Part 1

Neat writeup on what all the Zelda games brought to the table.

21 March 2006

Random encounters with Final Fantasy parody videos - Joystiq

Slashdot | No New Series of Futurama

Correction: they will be making four movies for DVD, not new 30-minute episodes.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Star Wars series to run and run

Oh the humanity.

Google Finance

Very nice stock quotes with news integration, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Wired 14.04: Dream Machines

Will Wright article about games.

19 March 2006

Ezprezzo.com - Aircraft carrier entirely made of Lego

Futurama Returns

According to Billy West, the voice of many characters, 26 new episodes will soon go into production.

17 March 2006

NetNewsWire 2.1: Post to del.icio.us command

Wonderful!

DaVinci's Other Code

DaVinci’s Other Code

Fun logic puzzle from Coudal Partners.

Veer: Products: Merchandise: Kern Zip-up

Hilarious.

16 March 2006

A FOR ALAN Pt. 2: the further adventures of Alan Moore

Part two of the Alan Moore interview I linked to yesterday.

15 March 2006

Robot News

The Ides of March bring two disturbing pieces of robot news.

First, Aging Japan builds robot to look after elderly, a story with a must-see photo. I think Old Glory Robot Insurance is going to have to open a branch in Japan.

Second, via Slashdot comes a story about the US Army’s SWORDS robots that are equipped with either the M249, machine gun which fires 5.56-millimeter rounds at 750 rounds per minute or the M240, which fires 7.62-millimeter rounds at up to 1,000 per minute. In other words, robots that are not only capable of, but are designed to break the First Law of Robotics! The Army couldn’t at least start with the Third Law and work down? I sincerely hope they’re at least equipped with red LEDs.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Inboxer Rebellion (Credit Call)

The Opt-Out number is legit, according to Snopes.

How to Prevent the Credit Bureaus From Selling Your Name to Mailing Lists

How to prevent the credit bureaus from selling your name to mailing lists

LILEKS (James) :: Institute :: Compu-Promo

Promos of 60s-era computers.

Freecell for Mac OS X

Mac version of the card game.

Propellerhead: UNWINNABLE FREECELL?

Via Kottke, only one game of Freecell can’t be beat.

A FOR ALAN, Pt. 1: The Alan Moore interview

Alan Moore talks about why he took his name off V for Vendetta.

Inventory: 14 Exceptionally Memorable Movie Robots | The A.V. Club

Everyone loves lists of robots!

D.C.'s Diamond In the Rough

D.C.’s Diamond In the Rough

How the Nationals’ stadium could end up being a beauty or a beast, depending on how much the team decides to skimp on the details.

Virtual Stadium Tour

Rendering of the Nationals’ stadium (man, what a clumsy name! Who else can’t wait until it has a corporate sponsor?).

14 March 2006

Sony Delays PlayStation 3

Funny that this forces me to revel in Microsoft’s sucess over Sony’s failure. Why must I be torn between these two evils! Hopefully this will let Nintendo get the Revolution out first and actually do well with it.

Proposed Washington Nationals Stadium Design (washingtonpost.com)

13 March 2006

Sixth Annual Weblog Awards

And the Bloggie goes to…

Front Row

Over the weekend I had a chance to play with Apple’s Front Row interface for iTunes to DJ Katherine’s birthday party. Overall I think it’s a pretty neat way to run music. I set her MacBook Pro on a bookshelf and turned off the screensaver so that you’d always been able to see the Front Row display, which meant people could look over and see a song name whenever they wanted, along with album art for most songs¹.

Some observations:

The “Now Playing” screen looks really nice. It’s a very good combination of an iPod screen and Keynote slides.
It’s basically useless without the remote, if you can even activate it without one. Using the keyboard to navigate everything is cumbersome, so we need to not lose it.
There needs to be a way to toggle right into iTunes from Front Row, and vice versa. As it is, you have to back all the way out to the desktop, and then click open iTunes to change your playlists. Fortunately the music does keep playing if you do that.
On-the-fly DJ’ing isn’t really possible. You can’t move through songs quickly enough without a scroll wheel, and I’m not sure if it’ll create on-the-go playlists like an iPod will. This came up when the playlist I had made ran out of music. It would be nice to be able to click-and-hold on a song to append it to the current playlist, though that might be possible and I just didn’t try it.
Playing music from other computers on the network is easy, but playlists don’t seem to sync as often as they maybe should. I started playing a playlist that was on my iMac, and a few times I wanted to pick a track to play right after the one playing right at that moment, so I’d drag the song up on the playlist, but Front Row would play a song from an earlier version of the list. It seems to cache one or two songs ahead before checking the source for more.
At least for slideshows without music already assigned, you can start a song in music mode, then start a slideshow and have the music play overtop of the pictures. It works very nicely, but I’m not sure what it would do if you picked a slideshow that already has music attached.

I think using a computer as a jukebox or a slide projector in this way is basically exactly what Front Row was built for (though it’s funny that both are technologies we’ve had for decades). I don’t think I’ll use it for really anything else, and we don’t host parties that often at all. Down the road, though, there’s the idea that you could just use a Mac mini that would stay plugged into your TV and stereo all the time, and you’d play all your music, DVDs, and TV shows on it. That would depend on Apple expanding the list of shows available on the iTunes store to include basically everything, even daily shows like Oprah, soaps, game shows, and probably also have a portal to watch news streams as well.

For songs that I haven’t downloaded from the iTunes Music Store, I’ve been using Amazon Album Art, a Dashboard Widget. Once installed and on your Dashboard, you just click on a song in iTunes, bring up your Dashboard, and click a button. It’ll search Amazon for the album art and bring it up, and then you can click a button to add it to iTunes. The approach works, but it feels odd to have to use another program to find artwork. Sure, the point of Dashboard is to be something you can bring up and dismiss as needed, but I tend to think of it as an extra layer used for quick reference, and not something interactive. That’s what the Services menu is for, but of course most people don’t know about it. Even better, Apple could add an option right in iTunes to search Amazon (or even iTunes) for art for any song without artwork. ↩

Will Wright and Spore - Google Video

Man, I’d give up WoW for this game…

YouTube - Depeche Mode - Suffer Well

Depeche Mode covering a gibberish song from The Sims 2.

the cool hunter - STRIP CLUB POLE POSITION

Really clever ads for strip clubs. (pretty safe for work)

The Matrix Online - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My understanding is that the events of The Matrix Online are canonical, but it seems like there’s not much going on aside from civil war.

Google Mars

Google Map of Mars geography.

10 March 2006

Town's Secret Star Wars History

Town’s secret Star Wars history

“A relatively long time ago, in a west Wales town not too far away… arguably the most famous spaceship in the universe was created.”

Boing Boing: SmartFilter, BoingBoing, and Adult Baby - Diaper Lovers.

The story of Boing Boing being censored in other countries takes a turn for the bizzare.

Veerle's blog 2.0 - Webdesign - XHTML CSS | Graphic Design

Veerle’s blog 2.0 - Webdesign - XHTML CSS | Graphic Design

Such a compelling design.

09 March 2006

Chip

I chipped a tooth today. Actually I chipped it a few years ago and a piece of popcorn this morning took out the plaster. Now I get to spend the day focusing on not making the problem any worse until my appointment tomorrow morning.

FORTUNE: Trapped in cubicles - March 20, 2006

The history of the cubicle.

08 March 2006

TV on the Web and the Horse's Mouth

It’s funny that the first place I go for clips of funny stuff from TV are sites like YouTube. I don’t even bother checking a network’s website because I don’t expect they’ll be smart enough to put it online.

NBC has apparently figured out that some of the SNL sketches are making their way YouTube, and have started sending out cease-and-desist letters regularly to get them to remove clips that show up. Incredibly, in addition to doing this they’ve started to post these videos on their own site. There’s a lesson to be learned here: while the internet may not care about copyright, it does care about quality stuff. If networks were smarter, they’d work out how to walk that line between so-called piracy and free advertising.

Exclusive Screenshots: Google Calendar

As I’ve said before, I have little use for a Calendar program, but I’ve been liking 30 Boxes lately. I’m sure I’ll give Google’s a try.

Newsvine - iTunes Music Store - Multi-Pass

Seems like iTunes will let you pay for a block of episodes and automatically download them.

isnoop.net universal package tracking

See a map of where your package is.

The ampersand

All about &

07 March 2006

X-Men 3 Trailer

I’m not as excited about this as I am for Superman Returns, but I’m pretty damn excited.

how to fold a shirt in japan - Google Video

Video Demonstration: Peel a potato in one step - Lifehacker

How much cheaper is the iPod going to get?

I can’t see the price point changing much, and really though the price per gigabyte is going down, I doubt the drives will get too much larger.

Two Decades of Zelda from 1UP.com

Link is twenty years old.

Boing Boing: Fourth Amendment luggage tape

“Shipping tape that has the U.S. 4th amendment printed on it in an endless loop. […] Now, if they want to search your stuff, they have to literally slice the 4th amendment in half in order to do it.”

06 March 2006

78th Oscars

Watching The Academy Awards is always an odd experience for me. As a movie-lover, you’d think it’d be a great experience for me, but as an entertainment-lover, it’s three hours of boring, thirty minutes of good TV, and twenty minutes of great TV, and usually ten minutes of awkward moments and contrived speeches.

Jon Stewart did a good job. Probably the best job he could have, considering how out of his element he was. And really, I think that’s a big part of his appeal at that gig. He’s the New York guy, here to make fun of Hollywood and throw in a few political jabs for color. Except that, while on every other night I’m sure all those actors love The Daily Show, on Oscar night they’re all so self-obsessed, so full of themselves, that they’re too cautious and/or defensive to be able to laugh at themselves. This is why Billy Crystal and Steve Martin make great Oscar hosts: they’re showbiz, and Stewart is not. They know the Hollywood jokes and they know who to make fun of and how far to go. Stewart’s not a performer. His jokes are based around delivering a dose of the truth with an ample helping of ridicule, and most actor’s aren’t that good at taking it, no matter how spot-on the joke was.

The evening did, to me, come out a bit understated, in a large part because none of the movies up for the big awards were mega studio productions. It’s not like the same people aren’t there every year, but somehow not having powerhouse films on the docket seemed to diminish the usual pomp of the event. There weren’t any memorable standing ovation moments. No tear-filled emotional speeches from underdogs to make the Oscar highlight reels. Crash’s win is being called an “upset”, but no one was all that shocked.

As for why this year was different, I don’t really have any guesses. I’m pretty sure that the movies and the people who were up for the awards had something to do with it, but I’m not sure how or why that came to be.

My favorite moments of the night: Three 6 Mafia’s performance and win, Steve Carrell and Will Farrell’s presentation of the make-up award, the attack ad on the sound mixer, and Ben Stiller’s presentation of the special effects awards. I’m sure there were others, but that’s what sticks in my head right now. Edit: forgot the fake attack ads for actress and sound editing. Brilliant.

YouTube - SNL WEEKEND UPDATE! MARCH 4, 2006.

The Sasha Cohen “long joke” is great.

Natalie Portman's Rap from SNL This Week

Natalie Portman’s Rap from SNL This Week

Clever: NBC’s offering the hit videos on their own site instead of waiting for other sites to offer them, then suing them. SNL’s in danger of going overboard with these non-live shorts, but so far they’re still funny.

Complexity causes 50% of product returns - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

I love that the executives couldn’t use their own products.

Will Ferrell and Steve Carrell Presenting the Makeup Award

So funny.

04 March 2006

YouTube - Real Life Simpsons Intro

Neat, and really strange.

03 March 2006

Apple Order Status - Dashboard

Dashboard widget to track the status of an Apple Store order. This would have been handy a week ago.

Fast-Track Olympics Graphics

Apple fluff piece on how the on-screen graphics for the Olympics were done.

Waxy.org: Daily Log: Litigation Cosby Threatens Waxy, You See!

Andy Baio refuses to take down Cosby parody under legal threat.

02 March 2006

Movies

The tone of this article by Think Secret interests me, in that I like to hear how villains describe their motivations and how they delude themselves into thinking they’re not Bad People. Not that I think Steve Jobs is an angelic hero, but standing next to a movie executive most everyone has a halo.

What’s interesting to me is how Apple and the movie industry have positioned themselves. Apple wants to be the champion of the people’s right to own the things they buy, not rent them. Clearly they have a business interest in this. In my view an ownership system is far superior to a rental system, and their hope is that this is true of most people and it will win out in the long run, even in the face of competitors. (Apple has a huge advantage here in that whatever they do will probably be Done Right, while other companies like it Done Fast.) So Apple, having somehow managed to get the record companies to play ball a few years ago (who now of course want to change the deal because they don’t think their piles of money are big enough), goes to the movie people and says that they want to offer movie downloads on iTunes, but only if they’re one-time purchases and not rentals. The movie industry says “no way, there’s money in it for us if people have to keep renting them over and over.” Apple says, “that’s not what people want.” The movie industry says, “well it’s our way or no one gets what they want, and other companies are willing to do it our way.” And also, “hey, aren’t you now the single biggest Disney shareholder?”

I’m pretty sure Jobs is right that people want to own stuff, and not rent it, in the long run. Sure, people like to rent movies they only plan to watch once, but people want to own their favorite movies, and watch them dozens of times. I also agree with the idea that in thirty years the notion of storing media on removable discs will be as antiquated as going to the movies to watch newsreels. At some point, someone has to figure out how we can get movies over the internet. Apple’s by far the best company to do that, if for little other reason than they’re one of the few companies with the bandwidth necessary to do it.

So Apple wants to be seen as this wonderful company willing to sell you every movie ever made, ready to watch just a few minutes after clicking “buy”, but the big, bad, evil lawyers in the movie industry won’t sign the deal. And the movie industry wants to be seen as a wonderful group of companies ready and waiting to open their vaults, but big, bad, evil Apple isn’t willing to sign the only deal they’ll give them. And of course neither company wants to admit that either plan would make them lots of money.

There’s little question that offering movies over iTunes would make both Apple and the movie industry a lot of money. In fact, there are numbers floating around showing that, in the post-Napster world, people really were just downloading music because they didn’t have an easy way to buy it, and iTunes did, in fact, solve that problem like they said they would. I read at one point that one-fourth of all internet activity was BitTorrent downloading, a large portion of which was the pirated movie trade. Add that the the one-third of internet activity that’s supposed to be MySpace browsing, and that leaves little room for pornography, email, and eBay. Regardless, there’s no way that all the high school and college students in the world, who will never pay for things they can get for free, are a bigger market segment than the rest of the world that doesn’t know how to use BitTorrent to download pirated movies. Right now the movie industry’s just giving up on money they could be earning.

Something I’ve read a few times lately is that, now that Steve Jobs has a huge stake in Disney, he’ll change his tune. But is that necessary? Isn’t it possible he’ll come in and show the industry why it’s got its head up its ass, and that there’s money to be made in a way that won’t piss off the custmers? Maybe even that you can make more money by not treating your customers like idiots and criminals than you can by suing them?

Interestingness Game

A game you can play:

Open Flickr’s Interestingness, last 7 days page.
Look at the nine photos.
Click “Reload!”
Count how many times you have to hit “Reload!” before getting a cam whore’s photo of his-/herself.

My high score is six. I posit that it’s impossible to reload the page more than seven times without getting someone’s pretentious and/or come-hither self-portrait.

Old Lady Pwnz Mercedes Guy - Google Video

Thanks Din!

YouTube - Yoyo man!

Video of the winner of the 2005 Yo-Yo World Championship.

Newsvine - 'The Office' Makes Home in Scranton, Pa.

Newsvine - ‘The Office’ Makes Home in Scranton, Pa.

Newsvine - Oscars Red Carpet Gets Royal Treatment

The practice of rolling out a red carpet for royal processions dates back thousands of years. Historians trace one of the earliest mentions to Greek playwright Aeschylus in 485 B.C. In one of his works, Agamemnon walks a red carpet fit only for “the feet

Slashdot FAQ - Tags

Interesting approach to the tagging that’s totally different from the “they’re the people’s tags” approach most everyone else uses.

Newsvine Launches

I’ve been using Newsvine for a few weeks. It’s a good wire service with lots of features I don’t really use.

01 March 2006

woospace: Haunted Mansion get UPDATED!

Interesting look at changes Disney’s making to their ride. I’m not against this if it’s done well, but I worry they’ll ruin a wonderful, classic ride.

ESPN.com: Page 2 : Welcome to Arch Madness

Who knew how much a difference typography could make on sports jerseys!