January 2010
64 posts
December 2009
42 posts
Formative Pleasures
In your childhood, you must’ve seen a particular movie (or three) dozens, if not hundreds, of times. It was your favorite VHS/DVD, or maybe you only had a few and you couldn’t be picky. It is probably true that whatever what movie was, today you have a nearly cellular-level familiarity with it. You recognize its sound right away. Lines of its dialogue pop into your head for no reason....
“Even before a Nigerian with Al Qaeda links tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines...”
– Maureen Dowd in her op-ed piece for the New York Times, wondering why our airport security isn’t more technologically advanced. Memo to Maureen: when attempting to use a sci-fi writer’s name as a shorthand for a vision of the future, it’s a good idea to actually be familiar with...
Treme
You may have heard that David Simon, creator of the greatest TV show ever (The Wire) is working on another project for HBO. Looks like there’s a little more info about this now than I thought, namely:
The show is named Treme after the New Orleans’ neighborhood in which it is set (and about which it is).
It stars Wendell Pierce (AKA Bunk), Clarke Peters, and Steve Zahn(!)
It should...
Pizza, Gus' way
(This post uses formatting and features not visible in the Tumblr Dashboard. If anything below doesn’t make sense or looks plain ugly, consider viewing the post on my website. I love the Dashboard, I hate the Dashboard.)
Gus Mueller, software developer and amateur pizzaiolo, had an idea for generating the sort of heat you need to make properly burned pizza at home:
My general theory was as...
The Gullible
(A short story by Neven Mrgan)
When Harold Raymond, a household name among fans of mystery novels, told his friend Lou Davis that he needed to see him about a legal matter, it did not escape Davis’s attention that his author friend was nearing his sixtieth birthday. He thus prepared himself for the making of a will, and this gave him a crack of guilt. Raymond had, after all, said nothing about a...
My favorite music of the 2000s
(This post uses formatting and features not visible in the Tumblr Dashboard. If anything below doesn’t make sense or looks plain ugly, consider viewing the post on my website. I love the Dashboard, I hate the Dashboard.)
“Ask a man what he thinks about music, and he’ll tell you what he thinks about you.”
- Neven Mrgan
I don’t trust my brain. Sure, it keeps me vertical...
The titles of P. K. Dick
Dear friends, I apologize - I think.
I have consistently mislead you, being mislead myself, to believe that P. K. Dick was the world’s greatest book-title writer. This has come up frequently in our conversations, I’m sure. I tend to obsess over the sounds of things, and titles - of books, of songs, news headlines - hold a place of special power. Just look at these words:
The Three...
Avatar 2
seoulbrother:
The trailer for Avatar 2
FADE IN:
Int - Day - Pandora Na’vi village
Village life as usually among different Na’vi and humans.
Read More
Crazy →
In 1956, Alaska did not have any mental health treatment facilities. A bill was drafted to create and fund a state program to address this. Surely no one in their right mind would oppose the creation of such a sorely needed healthcare institution?
Well, no one except religious groups, anti-communist groups, right-wing groups, and Scientologists. They claimed that the bill would strip American...
Whoa.
Ok, stop whatever you’re doing. Yes, I know it’s the last weekend before Christmas; put down the CC. Listen:
If you put your iPhone in a regular ziplock bag, you can still use it. As in, you can tap the screen all you want and it’ll respond just fine.
I honestly had no idea that this worked - my mind is blown. This means I can use my iPhone when I walk in the rain. I can read...
Tonight I Am The Bearded Man →
I am humbled, honored, proud, and tickled pink to have had troubadour Daniel Jalkut set one of my tweets to music for his TwitPOP series.
Seven DVDs a day?
dwineman:
whileyouweresleeping:
What’s pretty shocking is that whatever any of you sees/reads/hears/watches each day (EACH DAY!) on your spare time (SPARE TIME!) could fill 7 DVDs (SEVEN DVDs!).
(…)
A DVD can contain about 3 hours of standard-definition video. I don’t personally spend 21 hours a day watching TV, and I suspect neither do most people.
(…)
It would make just as much sense to...
The Long Tail of Humor
buzzandersen on Tweeteorites, a twitter-favorite tracker, and on recommendation services in general:
As I’ve used it, I’ve found I like Tweeteorites better than the Favrd leaderboard for the same reason I like Foursquare but not Yelp; or the reason I like the Last.fm page that shows what my friends are listening to, but not actual music recommendations; or the reason I like my Delicious network...
Vowl →
Internet’s one and only Steven Frank has a mini app for you:
Give Vowl a list of tags, and it displays an unattended slideshow of random Flickr photos matching those tags. By default it shows you “cat”, “dog”, and “chicken” photos, but this can be changed in the preferences. That’s it. That’s all it does.
It can be surprisingly entertaining...
Some of them want to use you
Let’s say you wanted to find out who among your friends is a MST3K fan. You could ask each one next time you talked to them, or you could email to ask them all, or, this being 2009, you could tweet something like, yo, do you like MST3K?
Or, you could just tweet “Watch out for snakes!” and see who favorites it.
I twat some such quote a few months ago, not fishing for anything in...
Ebert on The Hurt Locker →
Roger Ebert links today to a terrific piece he wrote back in July. This is not the most important bit of it, but it is interesting (in a frustrating way):
…”The Hurt Locker” is arguably the most pro-Army feature to emerge from the war. Pro-Army, not pro-war. But the U.S. military declined to assist in its production or allow the film on a U.S. base, and the Bigelow team shot with its...
A non-exhaustive list of items which contribute to...
Glorious 2D paintings, lively 2D characters, richly choreographed and art-directed animation
New Orleans, all of it - from the French mansions to the Black rowhouses, from colonial bonhommerie to working-class, bootstrapped business
Awesomely out-of-date music, groovy and swampy and warm
Étouffée, jambalaya, gumbo, beignets
Trumpet-playing alligators
Cajun sidekicks
Firefly zydeco bands
...
Immersion blender
I know, I know: I’ve been linking to consumer products a lot lately. I’m not trying to get rich off Amazon Associate links, believe me. It’s just that we’ve bought a house recently and we’re trying to furnish it with “for-keeps” stuff. So there’s been lots of web research, FedEx packages, and product returns at Casa Mrgan (Actually, our place is...
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you...”
– Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt answering CNBS’s question, “People are treating Google like their most trusted friend… should they be?” Why are you people not shitstorming about this.
New social networking rule
dwineman:
No one, under any circumstances, for any reason, is ever obligated to defend his or her “following” list to anybody.*
*Especially people who aren’t on it.
I don’t know what people expect to hear when they ask me why I don’t follow them on whatever website. The answer is simple and obvious: I don’t find what they’re saying interesting.
Tumblr Backup →
marco:
The Tumblr Backup app is ready for its first beta testing.
Unlike other publishing sites’ approach to backups, our goal was to create a useful copy of your blog’s _content_ that can be viewed on any computer, burned to a CD, or hosted as an archive of static HTML files.
This is great news. Now, to look a gift horse in the mouth for a moment, let’s establish a rule that...
Battle Soup recipes
If there exist cooks who like turning delicious meals into step-by-step recipes, I do not know them. I mean, it’s basically data entry, which no one likes; on top of which, entering data made up on the spot, eyeballed and adjusted three times during the course of cooking, isn’t just annoying - it’s damn near impossible.
Buuuut… You asked, so here are what I’m dubbing...
Showtime, the iPhone web app →
Nial Giacomelli has done a bang-up job with Showtime, his web app for keeping track of your favorite TV shows. It’s not fabulous “for a web app”, it’s fabulous period.
John Gruber has two fair and true complaints about it:
Scrolling (it’s slow even at maximum speed.)
The ON/OFF toggle switch has to be tapped (instead of the deeply satisfying native ability to slide...
Panic Blog →
Whoa Nelly.
You know Panic Inc., makers of excellent Mac software and unpredictable goods? Did you know they now have a blog?
On it you can read all about a new non-software product they (I mean we) are rolling out today: Panic Retro Boxes and Posters. It’s a long story, and since Cabel wrote it, you’ll want to read it.
Go go go!
AT&T Mark The Spot app →
Well I’ll be: AT&T has released an iPhone app you can use to let them know you’re experiencing poor cellphone reception (dropped calls, failed calls, no coverage, etc.) The list of complaints also includes “data failure”, in which case, lol - how do you send the report?
I’m going to be not be cynical about this and assume that this data will actually go somewhere...
Editor's Choice
The New York Times has a ridiculous interview with Jeff Bezos about the Kindle:
Barnes & Noble claims on its Web site that the Nook has several advantages over the Kindle — for one thing, a Nook book can be lent to friends. You can forward the text to another user.
The current thing being talked about is extremely limited. You can lend to one friend. One time. You can’t pick two friends,...
XOC plays Super Mario Bros 3 →
It has recently come to my attention that some of you haven’t bought XOC’s awesome SMB3 album, wherein he and bassist Chunkstyle cover the entirety of the ultimate NES classic’s soundtrack. The tracks are true to the 8-bit spirit, but they totally work on their own as well. The nostalgia factor for anyone born between 1975 and 1985 is off the charts.
Gus Mueller cooks pizza at home in 80 seconds →
Gus Mueller experiments with pizza-class heat in a typical home kitchen:
At our house we’ve got an electric oven, which is generally considered to be inferior to gas ovens. However, yesterday I discovered one great advantage. I had a bright idea to cook a pizza in my electric oven with the broiler, which rests on the top underside of the oven. My general theory was as follows: 1) Place pizza...
Google Public DNS
Google has introduced their own DNS resolver called Google Public DNS. Sounds useful/scary - I’m sure Google will do a great job with the tech part of it, but honestly how much more info about my digital life do they need to get from me.
On the other hand… If you’re concerned about privacy, you can read the privacy policy for Google Public DNS. Now how about your current provider or...
Pandy, a 3D CSS demo
(This post uses formatting and features not visible in the Tumblr Dashboard. If anything below doesn’t make sense or looks plain ugly, consider viewing the post on my website. I love the Dashboard, I hate the Dashboard.)
Did you know you can do 3D transformations on objects in Webkit-based browsers? What I mean is, you can take an IMG or a DIV or, well, anything, and translate, rotate, or scale...
A Hint
It was 2005, so the phone’s name was spelled in all capitals, it lacked a vowel, and ok it was a RAZR. I was barely using it - such as you could anyway - at my job, because the job was at a call center. In case you’ve never worked at a call center: hundreds of people rotated daily through fabric cubiclettes belonging to no one, smoke-beige phone handles connected to dead boxes...
