This article about networks retooling TV shows reminded me of a great sequence in a recent How I Met Your Mother. Robin, one of the main characters, is a TV news anchor. She also happens to be Canadian. The entire episode centered around a secret tape that she wanted no one to ever see, which the other characters assume to be something dirty. At the end of the episode the secret gets revealed: she was a Canadian pop star in high school. Her one hit: “Let’s Go to the Mall.”
28 February 2007
Official Google Blog: Stuck in traffic?
Official Google Blog: Stuck in traffic?
Google Maps now shows traffic data for some major cities (DC included).
Advertising and Propaganda in Children of Men
Advertising and propaganda in Children of Men
Montage of all the ads that appear throughout the film.
Rhymes with Raining
Interview with Matt Groening about The Simpsons, The Simpsons Movie, and Futurama.
The Black Donnellys: Television Doesn't Get More Irish Than This
The Black Donnellys: Television doesn’t get more Irish than this.
I agree mostly with this review. Could be a good show. Takes a lot from The Godfather, but knows as much.
27 February 2007
Early Man 'Couldn't Stomach Milk'
Early man ‘couldn’t stomach milk’
Europeans tend to be able to digest milk better because they’ve had the gene longer.
Steve Jobs v. Underwear Gnomes
Steve Jobs v. Underwear Gnomes
“Look, the computer industry is not holding out on you […] We’ve been fighting piracy of our wares for thirty-five years, now, and we’ve lost every round. […] Why do you think we can do better for the recording industry?”
Mark Millar's Civil War Post-Game Show
Mark Millar’s Civil War Post-Game Show
This could possibly be the last link to a story about Marvel’s Civil War comic.
Oscar-nominated short films in iTunes Store
$1.99 each. Link goes to story about them, with link to iTunes.
26 February 2007
Japan's Top Thirty Emoticons
It’s funny how involved some of these are compared to English emoticons.
Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll
Neat article arguing that the thing with kids these days is not that they know how to use technology, it’s their willingness to let everything be public.
Joss' Input Into the End of Marvel's Civil War
Joss’ Input Into the End of Marvel’s Civil War
Joss Whedon, unanimously credited with writing the ending of Civil War, explains just what he contributed.
25 February 2007
Apple Says "Hello"
During the Academy Awards telecast tonight, after Wes Anderson’s wonderfully quirky American Express ad, Apple showed a commercial for the iPhone:
The ad revolves around the word “hello,” which, in addition to obviously having a lot to do with telephones, has a history at Apple. Here’s an image of the very first Macintosh:
The unveiling of that Mac is a sight to see and, naturally, its first word was, “hello.” Here’s the story all about it, which gives some great context, and here’s the demo itself:
The demo, of course, came right after the famous Superbowl commercial directed by Ridley Scott:
Great story about that commercial, also on Folklore.org.
Cheat
I took the plunge today and picked up a strategy guide for Twilight Princess. I’m not categorically opposed to using cheats, but I generally prefer, and find it more fun, to play a game without them and figure things out for myself. For Zelda games, though, that just isn’t possible. You can get through the story and the dungeons on your own, but if you want to come anywhere near completing them, especially as regards heart pieces, you have to cheat.
I did debate, though, the necessity these days of buying a book when gamefaqs is often adequate. In the end the pretty pictures did me in and I have a nice thick book sitting on my coffee table full of maps and secrets. Anyone who wants is welcome to borrow it once I’m done with the game, but I don’t think that’ll be for a while. FWIW I’m in the third dungeon now, the water temple.
24 February 2007
23 February 2007
Wii Bowling Knocks Over Retirement Home
Wii Bowling Knocks Over Retirement Home
“They come in after dinner and play. Sometimes, on Saturday afternoons, their grandkids come play with them.”
Never Did No Wandering
An article I read today got me thinking about something. There are lots of very good web services that are free. Enough, in fact, that they can often adequately replace similar paid products, depending on how many features you need of course. Gmail would be the prime example here. I used to pay for an email address, but now Gmail’s free and offers most everything I could want out of an email service, and indeed more than the prior paid service did. Vox and Blogger are other examples. Other blogging utilities offer more flexibility, but the free ones offer enough that you can do quite well with them. I’m not one who wants stuff for free because I’m cheap—I gladly pay for services that I deem worth the money—but at the moment the web is built around the notion that the consumer often doesn’t have to pay anything and the providers get their money from advertising. This isn’t much different than TV or radio.
The thing is, some of us are currently paying for web hosting. I like being able to tinker around with Movable Type, and I like being able to use all the plug-ins and such. I like having that control. But sometimes I also like the simplicity of a hosted service, and well, we all like saving money. The problem is, I have lots of data sitting on my own server and, more importantly, lots of people have links to that data. Neither Vox nor Blogger offer import features (though I think they will in time) but, even if I were to move all of my posts and images over to a free provider, I’d still have to give up all the links that have been going to my current domain. Google juice is currency on the web.
There may be a service out there already that does this, but here’s what I think would be useful: a tiny, cheap web hosting service. Imagine I have one blog I’d like to move over to a hosted service. I’m happy with having the data on another service, and even happy with existing at myname.service.com instead of myname.com, but I don’t want people who’ve linked to me over the years to lose track once I switch over to the new host. What I need is simply a host that provides just enough space for an .htaccess file to redirect stuff to new locations, one index with a profile page that I can customize, and the ability to edit cnames so that I can use services like Google Apps. What I picture is that if you went to myname.com you’d see my profile, maybe my hcard and a photo, and a few links pointing to my blog, my photos, and so on. The .htaccess redirecting could probably even be auto-generated (the ability to edit later on) given a dump of Movable Type post titles and the URL parameters and knowing how Blogger and Vox name their files. Naturally a lot of this requires some technical know-how, but given that the target audience would be people who are currently running websites and want to move to other services, they probably know a little about the stuff already.
I don’t imagine there’s a huge market for a service such as this, but as time goes on and new services come out, people are going to want to be able to move around more.
22 February 2007
Official Google Blog: Google Apps grows up
Official Google Blog: Google Apps grows up
Google Docs rolled into Google Apps, which gets a paid version for businesses.
Some Wild Reading for You
- Teens kill homeless guy for fun. One of them remarks that it was like a violent video game, which the media has lots of fun with.
- Penny Arcade publishes a little editorial saying that, as any reasonable person knows, violent video games didn’t lead the kids to murder, and blames it on bad parenting.
- The step-mother of one of the kids writes into Penny Arcade and explains that the kid was basically a psycopath.
21 February 2007
The Old Black: Looking Back at Spider-Man's Black Costume
The Old Black: Looking Back at Spider-Man’s Black Costume
History of Spidey’s black costume.
iTunes Tip: Sort by Album Is Smarter Than You Think
iTunes Tip: sort by Album is smarter than you think
I did not know this. Sort by album year would be neat, except that so many of the release dates from CDDB and iTunes are the release of that edition of the album, not its original release.
How Statistics and Surveys Can Be Misleading without Further Research
How statistics and surveys can be misleading without further research
Recent study finds British women have biggest breasts in Europe. Look further, and you’ll also find that Britain has lots of fatties.
The Noises of Nature
Article about Bernie Krause, a scientist working on how animals’ vocalizations change depending on their habitats.
20 February 2007
Google Maps Now Showing Metro Stations
Google Maps Now Showing Metro Stations
Doesn’t show alternate exits at the moment, but this is a nice little change.
Australia to Ban Incandescent Light Bulbs
Australia to Ban Incandescent Light Bulbs
CFLs use way less energy, but I wonder if rather than a ban it would be better to just get the major stores to stop selling them but still have them available for certain uses.
Eight Women Who Look Better Bald Than Britney
Eight Women Who Look Better Bald Than Britney
Winona Ryder should also be on this list.
19 February 2007
Slaying Alive: Whedon talks "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
Slaying Alive: Whedon talks “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”
About the new comic series starting in two weeks.
18 February 2007
15 February 2007
Customer Service Gone Shockingly Right
Customer Service Gone Shockingly Right
Great story about Nintendo fixing a Wii for free.
George Washington Graces First in New Series of $1 Coins
George Washington Graces First in New Series of $1 Coins
New dollar coins hit the streets today.
14 February 2007
13 February 2007
Wii Sports DVD Cover Art
Wii Sports comes in a little envelope. If you have a spare DVD case and a color printer, here’s the art you can use as the cover insert.
11 February 2007
Things I've Learned Playing with My Wii
Though the whole interface is very well designed, there are a few things that took me a while to figure out.
- The address book is hard to find. You have to go to the “new message” page in the message center to get to it. Assuming this is going to be the main way that you sign up friends, which needs to be done in order to play online with people (once there are online games), the address book should be made more visible.
- You don’t get any notification when someone adds you as their friend. It’d be nice to get a little mail from the system once you register someone and they register you back.
- The first instinct you get when you see that you someone has befriended you is you send them a letter and attach a Mii. This Mii does nothing except show who sent it—you can’t pull it off the message like an attachment and add it to your Mii collection.
- To send a Mii to someone, you have to do it from the Mii Channel. Once in there it’s pretty obvious as there’s a little mail icon, but the fact that you can’t do this from the message center seems odd.
- Your Miis seem to be able to populate other people’s Mii Parades on their own without you explicitly sending them, but only if you first go into Mii Parade and enable the travel setting and set each individual Mii to mingle in the editor.
- My camera’s too old to use SD cards, so I can’t use the cool picture editor.
- You can register your email address as a friend. When you do, it sends you an email, and you can then send stuff to that address and it’ll show up in your system, which could be useful for sending yourself reminders of things to do when you get home.
- When you get a new message, the glowing blue light is very tantalizing.
- The Forecast Channel seems to check the weather two or three times a day. This should be increased to at least every other hour. Otherwise I like the presentation a lot.
- glynnenstein is tricky to capture in Mii form. “Tall with short light hair” is the best we could do.
09 February 2007
The Complete Guide to Marvel Legends
The Complete Guide to Marvel Legends
Pics of all the toys in this line.
07 February 2007
"Favorites" on del.icio.us
If you go to anyone’s page on del.icio.us, the page title is now called “username’s favorites on del.icio.us” (here’s mine). Didn’t they used to call them “bookmarks?”
Update Feb. 9: it looks like it’s browser-related. If I load my page on IE it’s called “favorites,” in Firefox it’s “bookmarks.” I guess they scripted that in there so that you’d get a term you’re more familiar with.
Wii Sports Boxing Gloves - Kotaku
Wii Sports Boxing Gloves - Kotaku
“Another candidate for the useless peripheral hall of fame, the Wii Boxing Gloves actually transcend my usual criteria of being only useful in one game by being useful in only one fraction of one game.”
Reading Between the Lines of Steve Jobs's ‘Thoughts on Music'
Reading Between the Lines of Steve Jobs’s ‘Thoughts on Music’
“The music industry wants a magical DRM format that gives them—not Apple, not Microsoft—complete control over all digital music. And a unicorn and a rainbow.”
06 February 2007
Vox Adds Full Post Cross-Posting to LiveJournal and TypePad
Vox Adds Full Post Cross-Posting to LiveJournal and TypePad
Nice one, but the real thing that keeps this back is that comments still stay independent on each page. That’s technically difficult, I’m sure.
Apple - Thoughts on Music
Essay by Steve Jobs about the current era of music, DRM, etc. Summary: DRM is a pain to manage and the record labels should get let them get rid of it.
05 February 2007
02 February 2007
Playlist: Convert audiobooks to Audiobooks
Playlist: Convert audiobooks to Audiobooks
How to get iTunes to recognize programs you’ve loaded in as audiobooks that you didn’t buy from the iTunes Store.
01 February 2007
Amazon.com: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling
Amazon.com: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling
Pre-order the new book, save 46%, and, if you use this link, I’ll get a small commission.
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