31 July 2009
30 July 2009
Official Gmail Blog: Send mail from another address without "on behalf of"
If you use more than one email account in Gmail, you can now change a setting to have Gmail use the other account’s outgoing mail server instead of Google’s. I’m sort of surprised they weren’t doing this all along, and it’s just another annoying part of how everyone else has to cope with Outlook being a crappy product.
NetNewsWire Syncs with Google Reader
The newest beta version of the best desktop RSS client, NetNewsWire, now syncs with Google Reader. More surprisingly, they are going to discontinue NewsGator Online (which I never liked), and are referring people to Google Reader. What’s so cool about the syncing is that if you, like me, want to be able to use NNW at home on your Mac but use a PC at work, you can keep switch to Google Reader very easily and not miss anything.
(Personally, I’ve been dabbling with Fever lately and may get around to writing up a review of it soon.)
Take Back the Beep Campaign
Following up on his previous article, David Pogue’s Take Back the Beep Campaign urges readers to complain to their cell phone carriers about the annoyingly long recordings you hear every time you try to leave someone a message.
Update: here’s part two.
29 July 2009
Mad Men Yourself
Oozing with style, Mad Men Yourself is a lot of fun. See also these promo pictures for season three.
The Comic-Con 2009 Cosplay Gallery -- 600 Amazing Costumes
Witness a 600 photo gallery from this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Notes:
- Heath Ledger Joker is past played out
- Love the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh
- A good Twi’Lek costume is great, but keeping all the bodypaint intact is tricky
- I’m a huge sucker for the fashion design of the new Star Trek. Way hipper than TNG uniforms, but
- I like that the girl in the Deanna Troi getup is keeping that look alive.
- Maris Brood’s tonfa lightsaber is the worst lightsaber variant conceived thus far, and looks even more impractical in real life
- Bravo for Umbrella Academy costumes
- Robin costumes should be limited to 16-year-olds and younger
- Nightwing’s costume doesn’t work in spandex. Should be leather, or whatever they make the movie X-Men outfits out of. And his mask looks stupid if you exaggerate its shape at all.
- On page six there’s a bizarrely abstract girl Bumblebee Transformer cosutme with working headlights
- Rogue’s ’90s green spandex with tiny brown leather jacket outfit makes no sense
- Do the other Catwomen make fun of the girls in the Halle Berry tights?
28 July 2009
Thoughts on the Apple Tablet That Doesn't Exist Yet
- Its interface will not be just like the desktop Mac OS, but it won’t be just a bigger iPhone. Multi-touch, yes, but the iPhone’s interface is based around one app at a time with no multitasking. With a bigger screen this doesn’t make as much sense, yet the Mac OS’s menubars and such wouldn’t work as well with touch.
- Apple has a marketing hook up its sleeve no one has thought of yet. Like it or not, Apple won’t release a tablet just because journalists right now think it would be cool. It needs a reason to exist, whether that’s enhanced productivity or on-the-go media like never before, but they won’t just put it out there unless it fills some gap, maybe a need you didn’t know you had, between what the iPhone and the MacBook can do.
- They will likely stress the ability to hook up their skinny Bluetooth keyboard to it.
- The iTunes Store will start carrying books. They’ll either be in the Kindle format, a new format that Apple invented but claims is part of a new standard, or they’ll just be PDF. If it has copy protection, Jobs will demure when asked why music doesn’t but it does, like when people ask him the same thing about video. Kindle Digital Ink enthusiasts will point out that a brightly backlit LCD hurts your eyes if you stare at it for too long, and its battery life won’t last two weeks. They’ll be right, but Steve Jobs will make a pithy comment about how good his screen is. Unless it has some magic dual screen that goes into book mode.
- People will start to wonder if maybe the laptop as we know it is on its way out. Maybe all we need is a multi-touch tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard. Computing power in said tablet will still be years away from making this possible. Some will mention the lack of the CD drive as a plus, and some of these will be called out by John Gruber as having said the opposite when the Air came out.
- They might just call it the “MacBook”. Remember last month when they moved all their laptops (except the legacy plastic one) to the “Pro” level? Well, this one will let you read it like a book: MacBook.
27 July 2009
26 July 2009
Marvel To Publish Mick Anglo's Marvelman - And They Own It
Marvel To Publish Mick Anglo’s Marvelman - And They Own It
Rich Johnson:
As I teased yesterday, Marvel are to publish the Marvelman comic book. It’s been an up-to-the-wire deal, but Marvel have signed a contract with Emotiv, who are representing Marvelman creator Mick Anglo and will reprint the silver age comics published during the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties.
Naturally there are questions about the more recent-ish Marvelman/Miracleman run from Warrior Magazine and Eclipse Comic by Alan Moore, Garry Leach, Dez Skinn, Alan Davis, Chuck Austen, Rick Veitch, John Totleben, Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham that has been under extreme legal uncertainties since the series ended, mid-way into the latter creative team’s run.
I understand it is Marvel’s intent to publish that as well, and they are currently trying to contact every party involved to come to an agreement over any outstanding issues.
Here’s Newsarama’s piece on the backstory of Marvelman and the Alan Moore controversy, and Robot 6’s Marvelman 101.
23 July 2009
Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work: Unlimited Edition
Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Always Work: Unlimited Edition
Famous set of basic cartooning advice by Wally Wood, now with high resolution scans by the original’s new owner.
An Apology from Amazon - kindle Discussion Forum
An Apology from Amazon - kindle Discussion Forum
Jeff Bezos:
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.
A nice apology. I think the whole situation is good to remind people about how paying for things online doesn’t always confer ownership. Part of me still wonders if Amazon didn’t do it on purpose to maybe give them some arguing power down the road against copy protection.
September 4 Update: Amazon is giving free downloads of the books to affected customers.
YouTube - Alan Rickman's Answering Machine
YouTube - Alan Rickman’s Answering Machine
From Family Guy, tangentially Harry Potter-related. I kept thinking about it during the movie.
My Deathly Hallows Impressions from July 2007
My Deathly Hallows Impressions from July 2007
Having watched the sixth movie, I immediately started thinking ahead to the last book. Here’s what I wrote about it then, with one addendum about the epilogue.
22 July 2009
YouTube - Amazing Young Organ Player Rocks Out
YouTube - Amazing Young Organ Player Rocks Out
Carry on, little girl.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: I'm really thinking maybe I shouldn't have yelled at that Chinese guy so much
I worked for one summer as a news announcer on WNRN (“New Rock Now”) in Charlottesville, VA. Every twenty minutes in the morning and once an hour in the afternoons I’d read a few headlines and engage in some quick banter with the host. (Aside: the morning shift was “Acoustic Sunrise” which I absolutely could not stand. The host was a very nice guy named, if I recall correctly John, but his music was capital-L lame. Sorry.) One of the stories involved someone who had been killed. I don’t remember what the story was about, but it was a Darwin Awards-esque thing. My uncle, who had been a professional DJ for years in Alaska, gave me a piece of advice: be careful about making fun of dead people.
So when I read Fake Steve Jobs’s piece this morning, I winced. He’s making fun of a guy who killed himself for losing a telephone. But it’s worked its way around the Web, and you may have already seen the following paragraph:
We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused—what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.
And despite I think much of the post being in poor taste, that paragraph is a stunning, sad (and, yes, condescending) piece of editorial. Being a guy from Virginia and not Michigan, labor issues aren’t something I’ve devoted a lot of thought to, but we all are going to have to, soon.
Using Lottery Effect to Make People Save
Using Lottery Effect to Make People Save
Fascinating. Eight banks in Michigan have a savings account with a monthly raffle. Put away $25 and you get a chance to win $400 each month, and a yearly $100,000 drawing. It seems like each person only gets one “ticket” each month they make a minimum deposit, which is a good call since if you got more tickets the more money you invested, rich people would likely win every time.
The longest solar eclipse of the century
The longest solar eclipse of the century
Dozens of photos collected on the ever-stunning The Big Picture. Love the one with the dinosaur. Wish I’d been on the other side of the planet yesterday.
Nobody Watches the Watchmen
I’ll give them credit, they did a great job capturing the right clichés about Alan Moore
21 July 2009
20 July 2009
Holy Shit, Man Walks on Fucking Moon
Holy Shit, Man Walks on Fucking Moon
Classic Onion front page from July 21, 1969.
19 July 2009
Bird Feeder and PHP4/5 // Troubleshooting // Forum // Mint: A Fresh Look at your Site
Bird Feeder and PHP4/5 // Troubleshooting // Forum // Mint: A Fresh Look at your Site
Had some trouble with using Dreamhost and some .htaccess rewrites. This fixed it.
17 July 2009
Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others - Pogue's Posts Blog - NYTimes.com
Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others
Decreases my already low level of desire to get a Kindle. Stick around for the punchline at the end.
16 July 2009
Rainbow Costume Shop
Never noticed this. In Eyes Wide Shut, when Bill goes to the costume shop:
As Mr. Milich steps out of his apartment, we can see some lights reflected on the glass door of the building. These lights are the neon signs in front of Sonata Cafe and Gillespie’s Diner. Upon cutting to a reverse we can see both buildings directly behind Bill. He’s apparently hired a cab to drive him to a destination that was right across the street from where he was. The cabby most likely drove around, then dropped his clueless passenger off.
15 July 2009
New Haven Commuters, 1961
In honor of season two of Mad Men coming out on DVD, look at all the commuters drinking and smoking.
YouTube - New York Nearest Subway Augmented Reality App for iPhone 3GS from acrossair
YouTube - New York Nearest Subway Augmented Reality App for iPhone 3GS from acrossair
It’s like the future. Reminds me of the locative art in Spook Country.
13 July 2009
Notes on a Dual-Mode Airport Extreme Network — Luo.ma
http://luo.ma/52/dual-band-airport-network/
This is exactly what I have set up at home, and it works great. 2 notes: the Nintendo DS needs 802.11b connectivity, if you have one; and this works nicely also if you want to hook one base station up to a printer and another up to an external hard drive.
09 July 2009
Megacorporations
Sometimes the writing in Wikipedia just makes me smile:
“Megacorporation” is a term popularized by William Gibson derived from the combination of the prefix mega- with the word corporation.
Easy to criticize, but I don’t think I could do better.
Stormtroopers 365 - a set on Flickr
A different picture of a Stormtrooper action figure’s adventures each day.
07 July 2009
Kotaku - New Nintendo Release Exacerbates Lefty Gamers' Lament - Art style: base 10
New Nintendo Release Exacerbates Lefty Gamers’ Lament
DS game Base 10 is reportedly unplayable by lefties.
03 July 2009
02 July 2009
Cage III-Free Show
Of all the bizarre things David Foster Wallace sticks into the endnotes of Infinite Jest, I absolutely loved the fictitious filmography of James Incandenza, which includes a film bearing a wonderful resemblance to the scenes of the terrifying Mickey Eye theme park from Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart’s Seaguy:
Cage III—Free Show. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Infernetron Animation Concepts, Canada. Cosgrove Watt, P.A. Heaven, Everard Maynell, Pam Heath; partial animation; 35 mm.; 65 minutes; black and white; sound. The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-65-65
01 July 2009
Follow-Up to Twitter Favorites and Retweets
Discussing my idea that Twitter clients should show one’s friends’ favorites on another blog, I’ve learned that this (like many things) is easier said than done. Twitter doesn’t provide a way for a program to say, “give me all of [username]’s friends’ favorites”. Instead, a program would have to ask, “who are [username]’s friends?”, then make a request for the favorites for each person individually, then stitch them together into the timeline. So, more like an RSS reader polling a number of different feeds. It could work, but it’d be more complicated, barring Twitter standardizing this sort of query.
I stand by the notion that there’s untapped potential in the ability to mark a post as a favorite. My guess is that not many people ever star a tweet, or even know you can, and I think this is because doing so doesn’t do a whole lot right now.
Flickr adds Twitter integration
Flickr adds Twitter integration
You can set up a special email address that you can send a photo to from your phone which will post it to Flickr and send a link to Twitter.