31 July 2007
30 July 2007
25 July 2007
Car Talk - A Great New Way to Set Your Car's Side-View Mirrors
Car Talk - A Great New Way to Set Your Car’s Side-View Mirrors
Align your mirrors to eliminate blind spots. (via Whitehead)24 July 2007
How to Take Halfway Decent Photos with an iPhone
23 July 2007
Deathly Hallows Impressions
I’ve written up some of my Deathly Hallows thoughts here. I’ll probably add to them as I think of more stuff about the book.
Seven
I never understood people’s claims that they read entire Harry Potter books in one day. They must have skimmed, right? Yet here I am, 25 hours after I started, and I’ve just finished the epilogue.
22 July 2007
Love Advice for Wizards
“Wands are only as powerful as the wizards who use them. Some wizards just like to boast that theirs are bigger and better than other people’s.”
—Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, page 415
20 July 2007
Twitter Blog: Friends, Followers, and Notifications
18 July 2007
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
We saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix last night, and it totally lived up to the hype. I had just a few minor gripes (why did they establish that Ron, Hermione, et al couldn’t see the thestrals and then not play that up for humor when they were flying on them?), but I think it’s my favorite of the movies to date. They mostly cut out the right things to cut to let the story move forward, though I’d maybe have liked a few scenes to be a bit longer. Another minute with Sirius wouldn’t have hurt, nor would have explaining a little more clearly why they all get mad at Cho. Rowling’s strength is not in writing action, and I found the ending battle to be more exciting on film than in the book. Like the cemetery scene at the end of Goblet of Fire, the end could have been scarier and sadder, but it worked. I especially liked the way the Order of the Phoenix and the Death Eaters flew around and flicked spells at each other, and then how the Voldemort vs. Dumbledore battle looked like they were conducting an orchestra with their wands. It was no Yoda vs. Darth Tyranus fight, but the following internal conflict between Harry and Voldemort was great. They’re lucky Daniel Radcliffe grew up to be a good actor.
A Recipe for OpenID-Enabling Your Site
17 July 2007
Playlist: Sync different
16 July 2007
SCI FI Announces More Battlestar Galactica "Mini-sodes"
Leaflets: iPhone apps that grow on you.
12 July 2007
Bags and Boards: Lindelof: Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk scripts almost done
Bags and Boards: Lindelof: Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk scripts almost done
"They have scripts all the way through issue four and I’m about to turn in issue five in about a week."A Cold Inclusive Primer « The Cold Inclusive
Daring Fireball: On Top
Apple Releases QuickTime 7.2 and iTunes 7.3.1
11 July 2007
Daring Fireball: Non-Top-Posting Reply Scripts for Apple Mail
Daring Fireball: Non-Top-Posting Reply Scripts for Apple Mail
"My first must-fix annoyance is that Mail’s Reply feature is hard-wired to encourage top-posting, an uncouth and illiterate practice."WiiFit gonna make you sweat - Joystiq
10 July 2007
09 July 2007
Transformers
Transformers is a straight action movie, and in being an action movie it succeeds wonderfully. Certainly the script could have benefited from some more work. Hot computer hacker girl and her wise-cracking black friend eat up too much screen time while not advancing the story whatsoever. John Turturro’s government agent character is simply lame. There are too many cheesy lines. They say “more than meets the eye” twice. But robots blow each other up. The action is just perfect. Big, loud, exciting.
It isn’t the cartoon you watched as a kid. It’s just not, and don’t expect it to be. A few of the robots have enough of a resemblance to the original that it’s still Transformers, but it is an action movie version of that cartoon, not an adaptation of it. In this regard I think Michael Bay was right in making the robots look more alien and less like the original characters. It removes them a bit from needing to be what they were in the cartoon.
There’s a cliché in monster movies where Godzilla shows up, the army comes in and fires its useless weapons, and then the scientists find a way to stop him. Transformers, not terribly subtly, turns this around. The film opens in Iraq with a Decepticon blowing away an army base. Josh Duhamel and his squad escape and, by the climax, get to blow up their own Decepticon. It’s like Michael Bay is saying, “Hey America, I know it’s depressing that we can’t win in Iraq, but our military still kicks ass! They can blow up Transformers!” In fact, one of the key climactic Transformer-on-Transformer battles happens off-screen while Josh Duhamel and his squad get to do the ass-kicking.
In the hands of a better director the movie could have been a deconstruction of monster movies and 80s nostalgia. Instead Bay blows shit up, and does it spectacularly. I’d have loved it to have been smarter, but wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice any of the wall-to-wall carnage for it.
08 July 2007
Kotaku Design
Pardon me for a moment of design criticism. Kotaku, along with the rest of the Gawker webring, redesigned its website recently, and it’s pretty messy. Footer information now sits to the right of the main article, but it’s not lined up in any way with the other column. Headlines extend past the main content article, hanging off to the right awkwardly over the new column. If a post has a picture to go with it, the picture floats to the left of the headline, pushing it even further to the side. There are also some new mini-posts that are appear to be just links, but they’re de-emphasized so much in the design that my eyes skipped over them for the first few days. I didn’t let that kind of sloppy layout go to print in my high school newspaper. Gawker’s sites get millions of views a month.
Charlie's Diary: Unpacking the Zeitgeist
07 July 2007
06 July 2007
Cable companies blame CableCARD for coming rate hike
05 July 2007
Kitchen Confidential
Part of the great tradition of great shows that Fox canceled, Kitchen Confidential is now out on DVD. Here’s a link to its page in Netflix for easy queueing. I’ve watched disc one over the last few days, and it really was a funny show that just didn’t get a shot. It got hit with the Arrested Development reverse halo effect. Both were broadcast on the same night, in an hour-long block of under-appreciated shows that no one watched and Fox inexplicably hated.
04 July 2007
02 July 2007
A Few iPhone Observations
Some cheers and jeers:
- First and foremost, the reason that the thing is so cool is because it doesn’t feel like technology that should exist quite yet. It’s like holding a sci-fi movie prop that actually works.
- Rich text fields (like the compose fields in Vox and Gmail) don’t work in iPhone’s Safari. Vox lets you email in posts, and of course there’s the Mail app instead of Gmail, but it’s a bug that needs fixing.
- I feel like the “iPod” functions should be called “iTunes” instead.
- If you don’t have headphones plugged in, play songs or movies over the speaker. Great for demos or for sharing YouTube videos.
- EDGE isn’t as slow as everyone says it is. It’s great for email, and in limited tests the maps application works fine.
- Connecting to recognized wireless networks is seemless.
- iTunes gives you the option to sync the “most recent x episodes” of a show. That’s great if you’ve watched all but 3 episodes, but, for example, I’d imported the entire series of Firefly from DVD to my computer and I haven’t watched any yet, but it’ll only sync the last few b/c they were added most recently. There should be an option for “oldest unwatched.”
- The screen is very nice for watching video, but the blacks aren’t quite black. Darker scenes in Firefly are a bit muddy. This is a general problem with all LCD and plasma TVs, too. Bright videos, like Pixar’s short films, are beautiful.
- Google Reader defaults to its mobile version. The standard interface with its multiple AJAX frames would be difficult to use in the tiny Safari, but the mobile Google Reader is more primitive than it needs to be for the iPhone.
- Safari is a bit crash-y. Presumably this will get ironed out with software updates. Fortunately crashes are low impact. You just wind up back at the home menu, slightly confused but unharmed.
- Having a physical switch to turn off the ringer is very nice, rather than having to go all the way into Settings when you’re in a movie theater.
- It won’t sync my email properly, because I use Google Apps and it can’t understand that I don’t use @gmail.com even though I’m on Google’s server.
Taste Visualization FX Designs and Animation for Pixar's Ratatouille
Taste Visualization FX Designs and Animation for Pixar’s Ratatouille
"In the Fall of 2006, I was contacted by Brad Bird to create a series of animated vignettes for his movie Ratatouille. The concept was to design and animate abstract representations of what the character was tasting."iPhone Not Quite the Cash Cow eBay Sellers Were Hoping
Kwik-E-Mart - a photoset on Flickr
01 July 2007
Pachelbel Rant
Ratatouille
Ratatouille’s up to 95/100 on Metacritic now, which is exactly right. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s damn close. I’d rank it below Finding Nemo, my favorite Pixar movie, and about even with The Incredibles.
It’s a bit of a shame, really, that Pixar isn’t putting more weight behind this one. I’ve seen some advertising, but not much. It’s coming out right before Transformers, which will probably hurt its box office earnings. Cars got a lot more press, but I guess the subject matter speaks to lots more people than a movie about fine food, despite that Cars had a terribly flat, predictable story. I guess it’s hard to compete with Shrek, with its stars and its franchise power, but the effort that Pixar put into the storytelling of Ratatouille is as palatable as the food its characters produce.
Anyway, I recommend this one. One small thing: for some reason I can suspend disbelief that all these French characters are speaking English (and of course that rats are speaking in the first place), but it bothers me that onscreen, diagetic written material isn’t in French. What’s wrong with me?
AppleInsider | How to port 'ineligible' mobile numbers to AT&T and iPhone
AppleInsider | How to port ‘ineligible’ mobile numbers to AT&T and iPhone
Interesting. Problem comes if your current area code doesn't match your billing zip.