Free Public WiFi

David Pogue writes about where those stupid “Free Public WiFi” networks that don’t work come from.

Fictitious Sports Team Jerseys

BuzzFeed has neat links up to jerseys from fictional sports teams (San Dimas high school football rules!) and t-shirts for fictional bands (Wyld Stallyns!)

New iTunes Syncing Option

The newest version of iTunes has finally added the video syncing option it should have had all along: “Sync x least recent unwatched”. Previously if you downloaded an entire season of a show, it would only sync the newest episodes, meaning you’d end up watching the whole show backwards.

Books That Make You Dumb

Books that Make You Dumb is a research project that compares the book choices and colleges of users on Facebook with that school’s average SAT score to determine which books are most beloved by dumb people. Other results: Harry Potter is the most popular book, followed by The Bible mean, among college students, Harry Potter is, like the Beatles, indeed bigger than Jesus.

Millar/Hitch Fantastic Four

Preview of Mark Millar & Bryan Hitch’s first issue of Fantastic Four, due out next month.

Mock WGA Debate

The Daily Show and The Colbert Report writers held a mock debate in DC, hosted by Representatives Nadler, Weiner, Schakowsky, and Watson.

Comixology

comiXology, a website that lets you build lists of comics that you read, has launched. It’s functionally identical to a site I’ve wanted to build for years, so I’m glad to see someone saved me the trouble of learning to program. It looks like it’ll track what books you read and will let you search around for other recommendations. They also have a neat iPhone version, and a Dashboard widget.

Last.fm Offering Free Streaming

Neat. Last.fm will now let you play songs for free and pay a portion of the ad revenue from the site directly to the artists, whether signed or unsigned.

Vertigo Book Design

Vertigo Should Move Away From “Slickness”

The Picoult book that DC did is especially guilty of trying too hard to look like a novel.

Library of Congress on Flickr

The Library of Congress has published a great deal of photos on Flickr, with the hope that the community will help identify and tag them. Here’s a post about it from the Library of Congress, and here is Flickr’s piece about it.

Spore on Mac and PCs

Kotaku reports that Spore will be released for the Mac this year as well as for the PC. I think it’d make a fine Wii game, too.

Sarah Connor Chronicles

Fox made an uncharacteristic good call when they held onto The Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles for airing during the strike in January. It’s not a great show, but it has the kind of excitement you look for in a 24. I don’t think it’ll be as good as Alias, but it’s already better than Bionic Woman ever was. But what is up with the name? Try saying “Sarah Connor Chronicles_ five times fast. The sportscaster doing the throw before Sunday’s episode couldn’t even say it once. Terminator: The Series isn’t catchy, but at least it would have been pronounceable.

Directors' Guild and Writers' Guild

Mark Evanier on how the Directors’ Guild talks could affect the writers’ strike.

We the Robots

Today’s We the Robots has a case of the Mondays. And I’m right there with ‘em.

CNN Political Market

CNN has launched a political market website that’s pretty fun to use. Find a market (like “Who will win the Democratic nomination”), and you can buy shares using fake money. They ask a few simple questions that help you narrow down how many shares to buy, and then you can buy or sell based on how the market is doing. Prediction markets like these can be amazingly accurate.

Bonus, the site lets you use an OpenID instead of a password when you create your account, so you can just use your LiveJournal, Vox, AIM, etc. URL and use that password instead of having to create and remember a new one.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Annotations

Thanks to Santa Claus, I’ve now finally read the first two volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and will be starting The Black Dossier tonight. I’ll spare a proper review, which isn’t something of which the internet needs another, and instead link to Jess Nevins’s great annotations. What strikes me most about the series is that they’re entirely enjoyable without an encyclopedic knowledge of Victorian fiction. I’ve read Dracula, The Invisible Man, King Solomon’s Mines, The War of the World, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and a number of Sherlock Holmes stories, but none of it is required to follow the story or understand the characters, and one would need to read thousands more pages to pick up on all of the references that Alan Moore has snuck in there. He could have easily made the books very dense given their premise, so I was surprised to find them entirely enjoyable without needing to read panel-by-panel annotations as I went along.

NetNewsWire Now Free

NetNewsWire, the best RSS reader client for the Mac, is now free. I use Google Reader myself, but only because I don’t have the option of using Macs all the time.

Pikmin in Smash Bros. Wii

I’m not too interested in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but I love that Olimar and the Pikmin are going to be in it. Gives me hope that Nintendo hasn’t forgotten about the characters and that a Wii Pikmin 3 will eventually be made.

A Mind Interrupted

Touching story about the most recent issue of Buffy. A cameo spot was given to an essay contest winner whose husband wrote in to say how much the show had helped his wife when she was starting to suffer from schizophrenia.

Naming twins in Python & Perl

Naming twins in Python & Perl

Brand New Day

I’m loathe to admit that the new Spider-Man Brand New Day actually looks kinda good. Economically, though, if it’s shipping three times a month, that means it has to be three times as good to justify the purchase, which I don’t think it will be.