http://github.com/philc/vimium →
Chrome + Vim = Vimium.
Vimium is a Chrome extension that provides keyboard based navigation and control in the spirit of the Vim editor.
Tried it this morning and it works great. If Chrome was my main browser, I’d probably be all over this.
4%
Wikipedia on converting 24p to PAL:
The most popular method [of converting] is to speed up the material by 25/24 (4%). […] As for audio, the ~4% increase in speed raises the pitch by 0.7 of a semitone.
That speed increase doesn’t happen with Blu-ray or DVD, but I get it on television where I live (Australia is a PAL region). I’ve noticed that pitch variance very occasionally.
I can’t help but think that online video distribution will fix these kinds of technical issues. There’s no need to convert to PAL or NTSC or whatever when it’s just 1s and 0s going across a network, right?
I scratched my own itch again. Throttle is a little Mac OS X app I wrote that (surprise!) throttles your Mac’s bandwidth.
It’s a little spartan (not Spartan) at the moment, but it works.
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator →
Converts font files (.ttf, .otf) into EOT and SVG fonts.
Context: the only monospaced programmer-y font on the iPhone is Courier New. How could I let a site involving Mac and iPhone software development be rendered in Courier New?
Point is, SVG font + @font-face = Monaco on the iPhone. Boom.
[[NSPodcast alloc] init];
If I was going to host a podcast about Mac OS X and iPhone software development, y’know what I’d call it?
I explain a little bit more on the site, but I’m considering making a show for and about Mac/iPhone software development. Not a big thing — just some interviews with developers that I think make neat software. I think that’s a reasonable goal to shoot for.
More news on NSPodcast as it happens.
http://wafflesoftware.net/hexpicker/ →
Hex Color Picker from waffle software (the same group that did Google+Growl, a nifty little program I use every day) adds another tab to the Mac OS X Color Picker for dealing with colors in terms of hex values, a system more familiar to programmers and web designers than a box of crayons.
It works really well and it’s free. Try it.
Computer: internet.
From Men in Black II (2002).
Mac OS X v10.1, I think. That QuickTime icon looks about right.
I likes it, I tells ya.
You’d think that Vimeo would have some kind of if/then/else thing there to change the tense of what’s written depending on who’s looking at it and at what time. I know, I know — it’s pronounced “pedant.”
For the record though, I do likes it.
I have a story for this one.
Basically, the high school Stage Band (we played jazz-ish standards) was playing a show and the next song was “Blue Train.” My friend, the drummer at the time, had his sheet music in the wrong order, and so he thought the next song was “Wipeout.” When the bandleader counted the band in, most of the band started playing the head of “Blue Train” — “ba-da-ba-da-baaaaah…” My friend, however, did not. He started playing the drum solo intro to “Wipeout.”
It was awkward.
The State — Sideways House Family
My boy is dead and this house killed him AS IT WILL KILL EVERY LAST ONE OF US!
Too funny. For the record, Thomas Lennon has quite a few funny things to say on Twitter.
15,000? In a row?
So I had an idea. It was tentatively named “Wasn’t She In?” and it was going to be a web app with two text fields and a do-button. In each text field, you’d type the name of a movie or TV show. When you hit Return or clicked the do-button, the web app would tell you what cast members those two films/shows shared.
The idea is that you’re watching a TV show (say, oh, I don’t know, an episode of The Big Bang Theory) and you recognise one of the cast members (Sara Rue, maybe) from somewhere. You wonder, “hey, wasn’t that person in Movie X?” (in this case, Idiocracy, and yes she was).
Normally, you’d go and find out the person’s name from the IMDb page for the TV show that you’re watching and then do a ⌘+F for that name on the cast list for the movie you thought they were in. “Wasn’t She In?” was going to be a way to streamline that process.
I say was because accessing IMDb’s API costs $15,000 a year.
Let me say that again.
Accessing IMDb’s API costs $15,000 a year.
So, yeah. I don’t think I’ll be following through on that idea.
(btw, Boxee pulls in metadata from IMDb for movies and TV shows, but they don’t pay that $15,000 annual fee. They screen-scrape.)
As seen in the dance scene from Sixteen Candles.
From later in the dance: “Wild Sex (In The Working Class),” by Oingo Boingo.
If the number of cannons fired or the number of 50-foot-high inflatable women there are riding a life-size steam train with fireballs shooting out of it are criteria for how good a rock show is, then AC/DC were pretty good last night.
There you are at the airport. You want to read Hacker News, but you’re about to get on a flight. Why not catch up with HN while you’re on the plane?
instahn is a Python script that adds every story on the front page of Hacker News to your Instapaper.
Get it here.
Ideally I’d like to get it to add the stories to an Instapaper folder called “Hacker News” or something, but the Instapaper API doesn’t appear to support adding things to any folder other than “Read Later.”
instahn was written at an airport.
All The Books Are About Old Apple
I own a couple of books about Apple. I have Apple Confidential 2.0 and Steve Wozniak’s autobiography, iWoz. I’ve also read Andy Hertzfeld’s folklore.org series of essays that got turned into Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How The Mac Was Made. I think I have another one floating around somewhere, but the ones I mentioned are the good ones.
As a computer enthusiast and software maker person, I freaking love the stories that are in these books. I know this sounds dorky, but some of those stories have actually inspired me. Literally.
Here’s the thing — all of these books deal with the earlier (pre-Steve-Jobs’-return) Apple. I’m yet to see any books or whatever written about the internal workings of Apple since, I don’t know, the iPod. I would love to see books about the recent Apple stuff. Stories about the design decisions around the iPhone? Pfft, sold. I’d buy that book in a heartbeat.
Now, I get Apple’s whole cloak-and-dagger deal. I get why they stay quiet about product development and why they don’t comment on rumours. I’m fine with that, and I honestly think it helps them to make great products. I just really hope that Apple’s penchant for secrecy in recent years doesn’t prevent those stories from being told.
I get the feeling that one of two things is true — either
- Apple was just as secretive back in 1984 as it is now, and it’s just that enough time has passed now that tell-alls can be written about ca. 1984 Apple. If this is true, then we’ll probably get the Apple 2.0 tell-alls some time in the next decade.
- Apple is more secretive now than it was in 1984, and we’ll never get books about recent events written by Apple insiders.
I can’t be sure which is true since I wasn’t around in 1984 to see how Apple was back then. I hope the former is true though, because I feel like there are some great stories to be told about the development of recent products like the iPhone and the Apple TV.
