Apple's Hypocritical Move to Block Competitors From Accessing iTunes

Farhad Monjoo, writing for Slate, argues that Apple should allow any mp3 player to sync with iTunes, and I agree. Palm’s decision to make its Pre pretend to be an iPod was interesting but strange. iTunes should sync with any player that plugs into it, but since all the music Apple sells (and any music you load in from a CD) is copy-protection-free, Palm could have written its own sync software that reads anything in the iTunes Media folder. People could keep using iTunes to play music and use another utility to sync their Pre.

What's in (Or Out) of a Name

In case you ever wondered why you’re cheering for a group of young bears, Northern statesmen, or tiny birds, here’s a Venn diagram of baseball team names and their etymology.

[I really can’t summarize this link better than Ainsley Drew has at kottke.org, so I’m just quoting her and taking the opportunity to mention that I’ve added a custom field to Movable Type for link attribution. It’s not visible in the RSS feed but you can see a “via” link in the footer of relevant posts.

Update: after some quick research, I’ve added a link item to my Atom feed with rel="via". I don’t know how newsreader clients will respond, but it’s in there.]

The Simpsons Shoots Down Gunsmoke for TV Record

The Simpsons’s 21st season marks its “surpassing of the legendary Western series Gunsmoke for the longest running scripted network primetime series in American television history.”—Newsarama

Automatically Converting AVI and MKV Videos Into an AppleTV-Compatible Format Using Breakfast

Imagine you have an RSS feed that occasionally delivers BitTorrents of video files in avi or mkv format, and you want to play them on an AppleTV. You can convert the video, but it requires using a few different applications and multiple steps. Here’s how to automate the process so that it takes zero clicks.

You’ll need these free downloads:

1. NetNewsWire, an RSS reader
2. Transmission, a BitTorrent client
3. Breakfast, a folder action script GUI
4. Handbrake CLI, a video converter

First, make NetNewsWire automatically download any files that feed sends you:

Subscribe to a feed in NetNewsWire (maybe from ShowRSS). Click on it in the source list, and choose Info from the Window menu (⌘-I). Under Enclosures, check Use custom setting and Automatically download: Other Enclosures.

Second, set Transmission to download any torrent that comes from NetNewsWire:

In Transmission’s Preferences, in the Transfer panel, check the box for Keep incomplete files in: and set a folder, and check the box for Start transfers when added. Uncheck the Display “adding transfer” options window. Check the Auto add: Watch for torrent files in box and choose wherever you have NetNewsWire saving the enclosures.

Third, use Breakfast to add a folder action script to your Transmission downloads folder:

Open Breakfast. Set the Folder to Watch to wherever Transmission is saving its files, and choose an Encoding Option.

Breakfast will create a folder action script that launches whenever a file of the right type shows up in whatever folder you tell it to. So when Transmission finishes its download, it’ll put the movie in that folder, and then Breakfast’s script will launch. It converts the video into a format AppleTV can understand, then goes online and tags the show appropriately and adds it to iTunes. All you have to do is delete the original files.

Sunnydale Tweets

Sunnydale Tweets is an acting troupe that’s performing Buffy the Vampire Slayer over Twitter in real time. They’re about to start season four. The Twitter account @sunnydaletweets is friends with all of the players if you want to follow along.

The Inherent Ambiguity of “WTF”

The Inherent Ambiguity of “WTF”

Joss Whedon on Dollhouse and Buffy Comics

In an interview on Complex.com, Joss Whedon talks about Dollhouse and a few other things, including confirming that there will be a “season nine” of Buffy in comics once season eight finishes, and that comic book artist John Cassaday will direct a Dollhouse episode.

Laptop Battery Myths

Nice piece on Marco.org on how laptop batteries work.

NetNewsWire 2 for iPhone

A new version of NetNewsWire for the iPhone is out, free (with ads) or $2 “premium edition” (no ads). It syncs with Google Reader. Recommended.

iTunes: How to Share Music Between Different Accounts on a Single Computer

For future reference: iTunes: How to Share Music Between Different Accounts on a Single Computer.

First Cut of the TV Season

Not unexpectedly, Vampire Diaries only lasted two weeks on our TiVo. It was already up against The Office & 30 Rock, CSI, and Fringe, so it wasn’t going to get recorded once the season started in full, but the first two episodes showed me nothing interesting, so off it goes. The teen drama offered nothing at all new that Gossip Girl wouldn’t provide, if I wanted it, but I feel I have to stick up for vampires. They used to be cool monsters, now they don’t even have to go to bed during the day.

My interest in Fringe waned pretty early last year, but I stuck with it out of deference to J.J. Abrams. I’m ranking it third behind NBC’s comedies and CSI, long in the tooth it may be. The new season has some buzz, but I smell another Heroes.

Glee is looking promising but close to going on probation. After Pushing Daisies’s perfect quirk, I have a hard time falling in love again.

Community’s premiere showed a little bit of promise. Really The Office, 30 Rock, and How I Met Your Mother are all the sitcom I need. I’m not bothering with The Cleveland Show.

New shows left to try: Mercy, Eastwick, The Good Wife, V, and FlashForward.

Magical Mono Tour

Scenario: recent media coverage has gotten you, for the third or fourth time, to try to develop a better appreciation of The Beatles, but the stereo mix of Magical Mystery Tour practically makes you dizzy, with its way of putting all the vocals in one ear and all the instruments in the other. You might want to create a mono mix which, some argue, is the proper way to listen to the band, anyway.

Solution: use iTunes’s built-in encoders to turn the stereo copy you already have ripped into a mono mix.

First, open iTunes’s Preferences and click on “Import Settings…”

Pick either mp3 or AAC and select “Custom…” from the “Settings” menu.

Change “Channels” to “Mono”.

Click “Okay”, select the songs in iTunes, and choose “Create AAC Version” (or MP3) from the “Advanced” menu.

Make sure you change the settings back to Auto or Stereo afterward.

Exporting del.icio.us Bookmarks to Movable Type Entries

For years I’ve used del.icio.us to store interesting links. A few weeks ago I started looking for a way to move my large library of links into my Movable Type-powered weblog. You can export links from del.icio.us, but it comes as in the Netscape bookmark, which Movable Type can’t read. This Ask Metafilter post gave me the solution: save del.icio.us’s RSS feed, import it into Wordpress, and then import the Wordpress blog into Movable Type. The method I used is the one user Memo describes here. He’s since written a Wordpress tool that should do it more easily.

Since Wordpress is free and Dreamhost will install it with one click, I set up a temporary blog as a middle man between del.icio.us and Movable Type. A few notes on what I did:

• Using the RSS Feed method, you only get 100 entries at a time. del.icio.us has a batch edit feature, so if you set your view to see 100 entries per page, you can export the RSS feed and then use batch edit to select all the entries on the page, delete them, and then download a new RSS feed with the next 100 entries. Make a backup of your links first if you do that so that you can restore your backups when you’re done.
• Wordpress will import del.icio.us’s tags as categories. It has a converter you can use to make them tags.

Roger Federer Between the Legs Shot vs. Djokovic

Roger Federer made an unbelievable between-the-legs shot in today’s US Open semifinal match. It took me a few watches to be able to see that it doesn’t bounce. He just hits it backwards, between his legs. He won the match on the next point.

Animals with Lightsabers

Just so you know, Animals with Lightsabers.

Ben Caldwell's Wonder Woman

Ben Caldwell’s “Wonder Woman” strip in Wednesday Comics has been the hardest for me to follow. He fills each page with dozens of panels and, even at broadsheet size, it’s all too small. The first issue I found to just be an incomprehensible mess, but one that I knew had some smarts to it, so likely its incomprehensibility was my failing, not his. As the strip has progressed over the summer, I’ve started to understand it more, and I think going back to read it when it’s done, I’ll be able to appreciate it, though I think reading it all at once is likely to be an overwhelming experience.

Anyway, for future reference, Caldwell’s own annotations to each installment.

The Mysterious Equilibrium of Zombies

Article looking at the math and game theory behind The Dark Night, zombie movies, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and more.

DragonCon "Thriller" Dance

905 attendees of Dragon-Con attempted to break William & Mary’s record for the most people doing “Thriller” at once this week.

Birds on the Wires

“Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song.”—Birds on the Wires

This is the sort of beautiful thing you’d like to think the internet makes possible, sharing a short work of art.

Jon Hamm's John Ham

For the Mad Men fans out there, “Jon Hamm’s John Ham”.

Might as well check out “Don Draper’s Guide to Picking Up Women” and “A-Holes: Pitch Meeting” while you’re there.

YouTube and Copyright Claims

I’ve been going through the Internet Archive restoring lost posts to my archives, and I’ve run across a number of posts with embedded YouTube videos that no longer work. Typically they’re a funny clip from a TV show that the network has requested YouTube take down. Fine. They own the copyright and don’t want their stuff on sites they don’t own that aren’t paying them, so they have them taken down, and my links go dead. It’s not good for the Web, but I get where they’re coming from. With its acquisition by Google, maybe it’s time that YouTube become less of a site for posting videos and more of a video search engine. NBC doesn’t want SNL clips on YouTube, but why can’t I search YouTube and find the video on Hulu or NBC.com?

Think of the workflow for finding and posting a video:

1. Load YouTube, search for video using the search box right at the top of the page.
2. Copy embed code, paste into your site.

Then, a few hours, days, or weeks later, the corporation that holds the copyright demands YouTube remove the video, and your site’s link dies.

The way the TV network would want it to work:

1. Think of video you want to post, remember what network the show aired on (if you can remember what network it’s on, as the concept of TV networks gets less and less relevant as DVRs become commonplace and with Web video on the rise).
2. Go to that network’s website (find the place where it stores videos, which looks different for every site).
3. Copy embed code, paste into your site.

And that’s for TV shows. For an ad, good luck. Maybe it’s on the website for that product (and often you remember the ad but not what the product even was). Movie trailers, Apple might have it, or Yahoo might. Or you have to find what movie studio made it and find their website.

Instead, I think YouTube, with Google as its parent, should work to index every video it can find, and provide a way to link to and embed videos no matter where they originated.

Ian Bogost - A Television Simulator

Neat look at building an Atari game simulator looking at not just recreating the games but also at how they looked on 1970s TVs.

Batgirl PSA from 1974

Here’s Yvonne Craig as Batgirl doing a PSA for equal pay for women in 1974. The story behind the spot, and who’s playing Bruce Wayne, courtesy Mark Evanier. Makes me really miss that show.

Night of the Living Dead and the Public Domain

I happened to notice that The Night of the Living Dead is available on iTunes for $5. This is notable because one, it’s a great flick, two, $5 is cheap, yet three, it’s actually a work in the public domain, and thus obtainable for free from the Internet Archive. Wikipedia explains:

Copyright status

Night of the Living Dead lapsed into the public domain because the original theatrical distributor, the Walter Reade Organization, neglected to place a copyright indication on the prints. In 1968, United States copyright law required a proper notice for a work to maintain a copyright. Image Ten displayed such a notice on the title frames of the film beneath the original title, Night of the Flesh Eaters. The distributor removed the statement when it changed the title. According to George Romero, Walter Reade “ripped us off”. (Wikipedia)

Still, $5 for a copy that’s pre-formatted for an iPod or AppleTV isn’t so much.

Turning to Hollywood Tie-Ins, Lego Thinks Beyond the Brick

New York Times piece on Lego, which has been doing very well compared to other toy companies in the past few years.

Posterous

Posterous is a hosted blogging service that looks like a neat alternative to Tumblr. I like the emphasis on using email to create posts. Everyone already had an email address and knows how to use it, so there’s no wasted effort learning a new interface.

Nerd Venn Diagram [PIC]

Trying to decide if I agree with this Venn Diagram delineating nerds, geeks, dweebs, and dorks.

Alan Moore Reflects on Marvelman

In an interview with Kurt Amacker at Mania, Alan Moore states that he is okay with Marvel reprinting his Marvelman:

After being initially informed by Neil [Gaiman]’s lawyer, I had to think about it for a couple of days. I decided that while I’m very happy for this book to get published—because that means money will finally go to Marvelman’s creator, Mick Anglo, and to his wife. […] I would probably rather that the work was published without my name on it, and that all of the money went to Mick.

This following up on the news that Marvel had acquired the rights to the book. Robot 6 has background on the whole affair, and Tim Callahan did a three-part series on it in “When Words Collide”: one, two, three.

In praise of the sci-fi corridor

In praise of the sci-fi corridor

Rumored Apple Tablet May Be Digital Comics' Future

Andy Ihnatko, in an interview with Newsarama:

I really believe the tablet is absolutely necessary to move comics into the digital realm. […] Publishers trying to go digital, in most cases, have missed the point up until now. They just don’t know how to deal with taking a story designed to fill up an entire page and trying to make it work on a smaller iPhone screen or smaller handheld screen. What they do is they tend to force the path that the reader takes throughout the comic book.

“We’re going to need to see the full page,” said Ihnatko, a comic book reader himself. “We’ll need to look wherever we want to look. Artists will have to have the freedom to design the page however they want it to go for it to really work. That’s why we want a nice, big color screen that can at least give you the top half or bottom half of the page and scroll very neatly and very cleanly.

The article is titled “Rumored Apple Tablet May Be Digital Comics’ Future”. But why is the world sitting around waiting for Apple to do it? “What do you do when no manufacturer seems capable of building the gadget of your dreams? Why not engage in a little wish fulfillment about the most secretive company in the tech business?” asks The Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro. Sure, if Apple releases a tablet, it will probably be a great device, but why is the tech world just waiting around, screaming “help us Apple! You’re our only hope!”, as if only Apple can create such a wünderkindle?

Chill Pill - Feeling Feverish?

Chill Pill is a custom web browser for using the Fever RSS reader. I’m playing with it now.

Has 3-D already failed?

Kristin Thompson, who literally wrote the textbook on film art, on 3D films.