davextreme: January 2007

31 January 2007

Cutbacks Impede Climate Studies: U.S. Earth Programs In Peril, Panel Finds

My uncle was talking about this weekend. A bunch of satellites have been de-funded which are getting great data on global warming. (via Anne)

PvP: The Series

Today is the last day to subscribe to PvP’s animated series for the reduced rate.

30 January 2007

Spanning Sync Announces Public Beta

Keep Google Calendar synced with iCal.

29 January 2007

Books: Mapped

Wild. Google has added maps to some of its books pages, so you can see the locations of places mentioned in a book.

Twosday // ShaunInman.com

New version of Mint out. Not sure if I’ll upgrade for $19, but it looks spiffy.

28 January 2007

How to Disable Snap Previews

Turn off the annoying site thumbnails that pop up on some links. I’d like to be able to turn off the link ads on most game sites, too.

24 January 2007

Thinking some more about Waxy’s Pirating the 2007 Oscars, there are tons of interesting conclusions one could begin to draw. It’s apparent from the findings that these movies make it into the pirate channels (arrgh!) very quickly. This is clearly the worst fear of the movie studios, who are trying and failing to do whatever they can to stop it. Amusingly, this is having the result of making it harder for Academy members to watch the movies, hurting the studio’s chances of getting votes for awards. I wonder if their suits have sat down and weighed the alleged loss of profit from piracy versus the sales bump a movie gets from winning awards. Is their a calculus to determine the worth of piracy versus accolades? Clearer heads conclude that in the end you’d just want people to see your movie, but I don’t have their spreadsheets in front of me.

Linking to the Waxy article, Daring Fireball notes, “Methinks the movie industry is getting closer and closer to their date with a Napster-style reckoning.” The havok that Napster wrought can certainly be exaggerated—the music industry likes to blame all of their declining sales on it without mentioning that it came onto the scene at the same time that people started spending more money on their burgeoning DVD collections and on video games instead of CDs—but certainly Napster made it easier to get music than ever before. If movies are finding their way into illicit channels that quickly (which I know they are), how likely is it that movie downloading is going to become a major problem, considering especially that young people are both the most likely to be able to navigate a BitTorrent client and the most likely to be spending large portions of their money on entertainment? Probably pretty likely.

So what can the movie industry do to avoid what they imagine is going to be a great calamity? Well, for one, they can chill out. Despite whatever harm Napster and not BitTorrent sharing caused, people still enjoy making and listening to music, and the recording industry isn’t exactly destitute. But more importantly, the industry can be pragmatic about it. There’s no question that getting your hands on a movie for free is going to get easier and easier, and once there are better devices to get the picture from your computer onto your TV, there will be even more incentive to get movies onto your computer. At present there are only two movie studios selling their movies on iTunes, and one of those is only selling a small collection of older movies. There are tens of thousands of movies out on DVD, yet you can only legally download a hundred or so.

So what are the movie studios waiting for? Copy protection, and a bigger piece of the pie. They want complete control over how watch your movies, and they want more money than anyone’s been willing to offer them so far. They want to be able to sell you a file for $15 that only lets you watch a movie on your living room TV, then sell you a $2 upgrade to be able to watch it in your bedroom, then a $10 upgrade to watch it on your cell phone, and so on. They want to be able to count the number of people in the room watching and apply an extra eyeball surcharge. And of course in the process, the products they develop are so hard to use that no one bothers, and they turn to piracy for the pure ease of it. Apple sells millions of songs a week with iTunes for two reasons. One, the store has a large (though by no means comprehensive) selection of songs to buy. You can’t buy what isn’t being sold, which was the problem pre-iTunes. If you wanted to download a song but would not buy the whole CD, you had to either go without or download it illegally. The other reason the iTunes Store is so successful is that it’s very easy to use. People are willing to pay for ease of use. The question is, which is going to be easier in five years: pirating a movie or downloading it?

Save the Friendly Locals!

23 January 2007

Toys

Something the internet has never been very good at is selling toys. If you want a specific action figure, it’s kind of hard to find it. The big stores you’d think of, Amazon, Toys ‘R’ Us, Target, etc. don’t provide very comprehensive selections, or they don’t keep toys in stock very reliably. Usually you have to turn to collector’s sites which charge twice the list price for the toy just so that it can have a guaranteed mint on card status. But what if you don’t care about the alleged collectors’ quality? What if you want to actually open up the toy and play with it?

Anyway, I’m having trouble finding Marvel Legends’ new Ultimate Iron Man toy (review/pics). I already have an Ultimate Captain America who sits on my desk at work, and I’d like an Iron Man to match. I can keep checking at Target and other toy stores, but it’s annoying that I can’t just buy one from an online store for the price I’d pay in person.

TypePad and OpenID

I don’t imagine it’s high on their priority list, but it’d be nice if Six Apart would add OpenID pointers to the default TypePad headers. Every TypePad user automatically gets (I think), a TypeKey identity at http://profile.typekey.com/username, and TypeKey profiles all include OpenID identities. If TypePad pages all had a delegation to TypeKey, they’d join LiveJournal and Vox (also Six Apart products, LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick having invented OpenID in the first place) in offering OpenIDs for all their users.

At present, if you’re already logged into TypeKey and want to comment on a TypeKey-enabled blog, all you have to do to sign in is click the sign in link. Then, if you want to enter your URL to be displayed with your name in the comment, you type that in when you type in your comment. Switching to OpenID would be exactly the same process, except that you type in your URL before clicking “sign in” instead of after.

What I’m getting at here is that, since I’d wager a large amount of TypeKey’s and TypePad’s users overlap, and since TypeKey profiles are OpenID profiles, OpenID could replace TypeKey without anyone missing anything. Anyone with a TypePad page would log in using their TypePad URL, and any other TypeKey users could just log in using their TypeKey profile as their OpenID, if they don’t have another one. My present comment form allows OpenID or TypeKey authentication, but it seems somewhat redundant. I’d like to remove the TypeKey thunk, but I don’t want to scare off all the TypePad users who are used to it (not that I get many comments).

Pirating the 2007 Oscars

Studios are trying, and failing, to stop piracy of the screeners they send out to Academy members, and often the anti-piracy efforts make it so hard to watch the movie that people don’t bother.

22 January 2007

Silent Star Wars

Fun 1.25 minute silent movie.

Silent Star Wars

Those Storm Troopers are adorable.

Wikipedia Nofollows Links

Certainly it’s important to stop spam links, but if a site is genuinely the authoritative source on a matter it seems like it has earned and deserves its Google juice.

21 January 2007

How to Spot Arial

Good piece I read a long time ago about why Arial is a bad copy of Helvetica.

20 January 2007

Frank Miller's Complete Sin City Library

Frank Miller’s Complete Sin City Library

Really great deal from Amazon. $70 for all seven books.

19 January 2007

Comparison of Cell Phone Internet Speeds

The short bar is EDGE, which is what the iPhone will use. Cellular internet is very expensive, so it'd be nice if it were actually fast.

English Sentences without Overt Grammatical Subjects

What is meant by the sentence, "Fuck you"?

18 January 2007

You Could Call iPhone Perfect

Interesting: "iPhone's virtual keyboard is a huge improvement over the mechanical thumbpads found on […] any other smart phones".

Michael Tsai - Blog - Buy Base Station to Get Software Update

Bizzare aspect of accounting law says that Apple can’t give away its 802.11n upgrades for free.

17 January 2007

The iPhone User Eperience: A First Look

From AskTog.

16 January 2007

Before and After Darwin

Brian Eno to write music program for Spore that will create background music that is generated by the game and doesn’t repeat.

A Quick Observation Comparing Two Versions of the Office

True, but I’ve never seen the American version as an actual documentary like the BBC one was supposed to be. Gervais said himself that they ended it after 2 seasons b/c no documentary would go on longer than that.

iPhone and the Dog Ears User Experience Model

The weight of all the little touches really adds up.

MacRumors.com's Webcast Stats during the Macworld San Francisco 2007 Keynote

MacRumors.com’s Webcast Stats during the Macworld San Francisco 2007 Keynote

14 January 2007

'Lost' producers in talks about end date

‘Lost’ producers in talks about end date

Funny that, it seems, the studio had to force this.

12 January 2007

Spider-Man 3's Venom revealed ... again

Spider-Man 3’s Venom revealed … again

I miss the white on the costume, but I’m sure it’ll look great in motion on the big screen.

11 January 2007

Banksy : Shop

Free art. “Serving suggestion: Prints look best when done on gloss paper using the company printer ink when everyone else is at lunch.”

A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope

Neat reading of the original films in light of the new ones. I don’t buy all the collaboration between R2 and Chewie—much of the movies are based around fate—but it’s a fun concept.

10 January 2007

List of inventors killed by their own inventions

I’m generally not a fan of the Darwin Awards on the ground that you’re making fun of people’s deaths, but here’s a crazy list.

Apple's New Calling: The iPhone

Apple’s New Calling: The iPhone

Good article on how the iPhone came to be.

09 January 2007

New AirPort

In addition to the iPhone announced today (which looks peachy), there’s also a new AirPort station, which has a very cool feature:

New to AirPort Extreme, AirPort Disk turns almost any external USB hard drive into a shared drive. Simply connect the drive to the USB port on the back of your AirPort Extreme and—voila—all the documents, videos, photos, and other files on the drive instantly become available to anyone on the secure network, Mac and PC alike. It’s perfect for backups, collaborative projects, and more.

Were you wondering how useful Time Machine was going to be for laptops? There you go.