January 2010
62 posts
Thousands face colonoscopies after botched cancer... →
Drop your shorts and bend over, Mr. Babar.
And on that (brown?) note, I think it’s time to stop posting to Tumblr until I’ve come back from making my thing. I’ll keep reading, but I’ll post nothing.
See you Monday.
WatchI made an internet video about the way I take photos (specifically close-ups) with my iPhone.
You probably already know this stuff if you’re a nerd, but I still think it’s a pretty neat-o trick.
iPhone is now the iPad Mini
After the keynote this morning, I spent most of the day thinking of my phone as a smaller (lesser?) iPad — an iPad Mini.
I don’t think I can go back.
(btw, the iPhone doesn’t think “iPad” is a word yet — it tries to correct “iPad” to “uPas” the first few times you type it. I can see that changing pretty soon. Of course, the software...
Quick Thoughts
Huh. 1024 x 768. Never thought I’d see that resolution again. It’s not widescreen, and it’s not the iPhone (320 x 480) ratio scaled up.
Anyone else catch the bit in the video where the guy zoomed in on Up? (It’s at about 3:42)
You can double-tap to fill the whole screen.
Pretty sure Woody Allen gets pissed when you do that.
Also, that keyboard dock is brilliant....
Auto-Complete in the Safari Address Bar
http://instapaper.com used to be your saved Instapaper items. Now it’s the latest posts from givemesomethingtoread. To actually look at your saved items, you have to go to http://instapaper.com/u.
After going to http://instapaper.com for so long, Safari now thinks that that’s where I want to go when I type “inst,” so that’s what it auto-fills the address bar with. I...
TV Tropes → Da Chief →
aka the Angry Captain. The TV Tropes page also features a list of characters that fit the Angry Captain archetype.
The Cowboy Cop’s eternally put-upon superior. Always strict and by-the-book. Can be comfortably relied upon to give a good McCloud Speech, say that You Have 48 Hours or demand that you Turn In Your Badge, usually at the top of his formidable voice. Frequently worried that...
kashioboy — The Entertainer
I didn’t...
1 tag
Writing Tics That Piss Me Off, Part 1
Multiple Exclamation Marks
It really shits me when people end their sentences with multiple exclamation marks. Why? Well, name me a punctuation mark that’s meant to be written two or more times in a row — and remember, an ellipsis doesn’t count, because although you type it as three periods (…), it’s actually a symbol of its own (it even has a character reference...
“Interviewer: How long have you been playing? Keith Moon: The drums since I was...”
– Urban legend. Sounds like the kind of thing Moon would say though.
Andrew vs. The Collective - Kickstarter →
Have I mentioned lately how Kickstarter is the future of funding and distributing creative projects?
I haven’t? Well, it totally is. Kickstarter is as revolutionary as Digg — they just haven’t had their Paris Hilton moment yet.
I love how Andrew is funding this project — he writes a short story every week, and you pay to submit any word for him to include in the story....
Disc Drives in Laptops
Here is the list of things I’ve done with the disc drive in my laptop:
Install Snow Leopard
I’ve been carrying this big, heavy SuperDrive in my laptop around for a year. For that one thing.
Screw that.
You shouldn’t have to always carry a component around if you’re barely ever going to use it. The things that disc drives are typically used for (installing applications...
Is there a Tumblr for final moments/episodes of TV shows? There should be. If I was curating it, I’d have the final episodes of shows like Friends, M*A*S*H and Star Trek: The Next Generation. They’re the first ones that came to mind.
Related: wiki’s list of most-watched television series finales.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Stardate →
Biggest. Nerds. Ever.
Their criticism of the stardate system is almost as passionate as their disappointment that they can’t really get into Tasha Yar’s pants.
Locations for Mac OS X →
Locations ($19, by @warwick) lets you change your system’s settings based on which network it’s connected to.
When I take my computer to work, it complains because it (understandably) can’t find the wireless drive I have Time Machine set up on. Every hour, OS X reports that Time Machine failed to back up. I could just turn TM off at work and turn it back on when I get home, but...
2 tags
An Idea
A tumblr about depictions of The Future in film that are now in the past. Examples:
Escape From New York, set in 1997. Escape 2000, set in 2000. Death Race 2000, set in 2000.
This would be a micro-niche blog. To broaden the scope a little bit, you could have a tumblr just about depictions of The Future in film (Blade Runner, Back to the Future Part II, and Soylent Green come to mind as...
“You can always tell a Milford man.”
Spotlight Wins This Round
There are two areas (that I know of) where I think Spotlight beats out Quicksilver: dictionary lookups and calculations. Spotlight does both of these on-the-fly (i.e. as you type), while Quicksilver makes you type your query in full and hit Return before you get something back.
I seem to remember that Spotlight also searches the contents of files while Quicksilver doesn’t (I could be...
Android App Steals Bank Account Details →
Free as in “oh shit, now I’m poor,” amirite?
Maybe Android users should put their wallets on chains.
WatchSNL — Body Fuzion (non-Hulu)
Just because it’s low-impact doesn’t mean you won’t get high results.
http://www.instapaper.com/extras →
Tweetie 2 for iPhone supports a custom Mobilizer setting for browsing links from tweets.
Gives the Instapaper treatment to any page you open up from within Tweetie 2. Saves you bandwidth, makes pages load faster. Win-win-win. (The third win is you winning because you know what Instapaper is.)
“The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was...”
– Douglas Coupland, starting his answer to edge.org’s 2010 question, “how is the Internet changing the way you think?”
Clay Shirky’s answer is pretty nice, too.
New Order — Ceremony, Live in Paris, 1982
...
Descendents — Silly Girl
from I Don’t...
M*A*S*H →
In America the series was shown complete with laugh track. […] However, an exception was made in the American version where scenes in the Operating Room never used the laugh track.
I’d never noticed. That’s surprisingly tasteful.
iPhone Dev Center:
To send customers to a specific application:
http://itunes.com/apps/appname
To send customers to a list of apps you have on the App Store:
http://itunes.com/apps/developername
To send customers to a specific app with your company name included in the URL:
http://itunes.com/apps/developername/appname
http://itunes.com/apps/appname beats the shit out of...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrocopter →
Like a helicopter, but with four rotors instead of one. It’s also four times better since, to paraphrase Worthington’s Law, more rotors equals better than.
Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach →
Balls Out: Gary the Tennis Coach is an American film directed by Danny Leiner and stars Seann William Scott, Randy Quaid and Leonor Varela.
Jesus — that wiki page is derelict. Usually the sign of a great movie.
How Do You Type Air-Quotes?
In the real world, I occasionally use the term “New Media.” When I do, I put air-quotes around it, because I like saying it ironically or whatever. I think it’s a dick term, but that’s a whole other thing that I’m not getting into.
I was just writing a thing, and I wrote “New Media.” On the page, “New Media” looks the same as “New...
Go read the wiki article on paper size.
All ISO 216 sizes (A4, A5, B3, etc) have the rectangular proportion of 1:√2 (or 1:1.414). This ratio is mathematically unique –- no other size allows paper to be cut or folded in half and yet retain the same ratio of width to height.
Only the Germans could have come up with this.
“Carefully look at each book, and decide if it is worth keeping.”
– That’s the one important sentence in this ~1000-word article that gives you 5 Steps To Simplifying Your Book Collection. Everything around that sentence is just frivolous minimalism for minimalism’s sake.
