Darth Vader Transformer
Damnit. Another one. I haven't unwrapped the last lot yet!
That's no moon...
(via Smidigt)
« August 19, 2007 - August 25, 2007 | Main
September 1, 2007
Against Interpretation
Susan Sontag: "interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art"
uselessness
As one of the people responsible for Twitter Blocks (really it was Ryan and Tom who made it - on this project, I'm "management"), it's been interesting reading feedback to the project's launch. Tom summarized a particular strain of it as Criticism For Twitter Blocks. Go, read.
...
So we get this a lot: "Beautiful! But useless!". We've heard it in response to most projects we've done over the past few years (one exception has been Oakland Crimespotting, whose stock yokel response is: "no way am I moving to Oakland!").
By now, we're fairly accustomed to it. I've historically stayed mum, in the belief that this particular critique is best met with silence, because what is there to add? This current case rankles a bit, since a lot of those snarks are coming via Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku messages. Twitter is practically the "fun, but useless, but oddly popular" poster child of the moment, so it's ironic to see people who've taken the leap to its particular brand of short-messaged-based playtime suddenly waxing utilitarian (for example, Dave Winer). Tom argues that it's worth focusing on fun once in a while instead of just utility, monetization, and features. I'm arguing that a lot of the people crowing "but useless!" have already taken that plunge, yet lack the self-awareness or humility to see it for what it is. There are plenty of but-useless things in the world that serve as emotional bonding points, amusements, attractions, and macguffins. Practically all of social media falls under this category for me, a form of mediated play that requires a suspension of disbelief in rational purpose to succeed.
There are of course legitimate reasons to find Twitter and Blocks annoying: Blocks likes teh CPU, not everyone enjoys frequent tiny updates from people, there are jerks in any social service, Blocks has a big Motorola ad next on it, and so on. Worries about Obvious Corp.'s business sustainability and freakouts that Blocks was launched (by us) despite the presence of bugs in Twitter are not legitimate reasons.
But, since we're on the topic, I'm going to suggest that Blocks is our hat in the ring for traversing the social graph. Unlike the friends views on the existing site, the only people who show up are guaranteed to be recently active, so there's no deadwood problem. Also unlike the existing friends view, we've introduced two dimensions to show a second degree of separation, leading to regular "I had no idea so-and-so was on Twitter" moments since the first experimental layouts were done and presented one month ago. Also, it doesn't look like some suck-ass sticks-and-rocks graph.
Sufficiently useful?
NBC contradicts Apple, says shows will remain in iTunes Store through December
An NBC spokesman swings and misses in round three of the company's battle with Apple to raise TV show prices and clamp down DRM even further.
Little Snitch 2.0 Beta
David Chartier:
Little Snitch’s UI has received a complete overhaul, offering tools to search and filter rules and a new Network Monitor to watch network traffic in real time. The connection alerts—one of my pet peeves about Little Snitch—are also getting a boost with keyboard shortcuts that should make it easier to allow or deny traffic on a per-connection basis.
Worth noting: This post marks Chartier’s jump from Weblogs Inc.’s TUAW to Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop.
Utility Overrated
Jim Bumgardner: "A question like 'what good is it?' presupposes that all things must serve some common good. They must save lives, or repair toasters, or solve the world's fuel shortages, or above all, make enormous sums of money. In short, everything must have a use, and frivolity should be avoided."
Founder of Peet’s Coffee Dies at 87
Alfred Peet, founder of the world’s best coffee house chain, dead at 87.
The Original Macintosh User Manual
Peter Merholz:
I recently purchased an original Macintosh User Manual (thanks eBay!). I had seen one at a garage sale, and was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers. I figured I could learn something about helping make innovation happen.
Little Snitch: Network monitor gains more control with new beta
Little Snitch is a utility that squeals on apps that try to connect to the internet. A new beta version looks even better, offering more control over your Mac's network chatter.
Sun GPL's Darkstar
Sun has released Darkstar, its serverware for multiplayer gaming, under General Public License v2!
First announced at the Game Developers Conference in March 2007, Project Darkstar source code is now available for download and free use under the GPLv2 license.
Project Darkstar is the video game industry's first enterprise grade, high performance, fault tolerant and highly scalable server technology for online, multiplayer games. Project Darkstar has been designed from the ground up to handle almost any kind of online game imaginable.
From card games to full blown MMOGs, Project Darkstar is the perfect technology to get you up and running quickly, allowing you to focus on building your game, not network technologies.
Nice!
August 31, 2007
Python 3.0a1 Release
If Python 3.0 ships before Perl 6, I’m going to cry.
Greg Storey on Web Site Design Rip-Offs
“First things first, admit it: you suck. You’re a moron and a cheat.”
Webb On Warner Retirement: Let's Hope The President Listens To Him
Here's the key quote from a just-released statement on John Warner's retirement, from fellow Virginia Senator Jim Webb: “While today is a bittersweet announcement for Virginia, the nation and the...
An Open Letter to NBC re: Leaving Apple’s iTunes Store
Jeremy Horwitz to NBC:
In other words, the per-episode price people are accustomed to paying for what you show on television is “zero”, or something very close to it.
Twitter Blocks
Launched, like Q*Bert without the springy snakes.
The Trouble with Tribbles by Edward Gorey
Haven’t you ever wondered what it would have been like if Edward Gorey had illustrated The Trouble with Tribbles from the original Star Trek series? Wonder no longer! (via MetaFilter)
THE MONASTERY: MR. VIG and THE NUN: Q&A with filmmaker Pernille Rose Grønkjær (Recorded August 29, 2007)
THE MONASTERY: MR. VIG and THE NUN: Q&A with filmmaker Pernille Rose Grønkjær (Recorded August 29, 2007)
Happy Labor Day Weekend - MT4.01 Beta 2 now available
A quick note to wish everyone in the Movable Type community a Happy Labor Day Weekend, and to inform everyone that we released Movable Type 4.01 beta 2. This has been an excellent beta period thanks to everyone who has been submitting bug reports and patches to the MT team. We have managed to address a lot of issues affecting people upgrading and migrating blog content to Movable Type 4.0; plus we have made a lot of progress on addressing issues raised by developers as they continue to build some incredibly innovative plugins on top of MT. For a complete list of issues addressed in this latest release, check out the change log on the MT 4.01 Beta homepage.
We expect this to be the last beta before we officially release Movable Type 4.01 to the public. Thanks again to everyone who has been contributing to this process, your feedback has been invaluable.
YAPCEU07: Scaling with memcached
YAPC::Europe in Vienna was totally amazing. I'll post more soon but for now you can enjoy the slides to my talk Scaling with memcached: memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system used by LiveJournal, Facebook, Bloglines and others. Find out how memcached works, how to it set up and how you can scale your website. Enjoy!Read more of this story at use Perl.
Matthew Bloch
Portfolio of interactive web maps.
Warner's Retirement: A Huge Opportunity For Democrats
Now that long-time Senator John Warner (R-VA) has announced his retirement, both parties will have candidates lining up for the seat in 2008. It's the first open-seat Senate contest in Virginia since...
Et Tu, Spock?
Maybe I'm just a pushover, but I felt like there was something very charming and sweet about this video of a school project that I found on YouTube. It's a restaging of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that takes place on the bridge of the Enterprise during the time period of the original Star Trek series. Kirk as Caesar, Spock as Brutus, some Señor Wences-looking thing as the alien bad guy, and "We emptied out the garage" as set design. I love it! Especially since it features Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Round", which was released well before these kids were born. (And yes, Star Trek went off the air decades before they were born.)
I find it oddly reassuring that kids today, with access to iTunes and the ability to make (pretty decent-looking!) green-screen starfield affects at home, are also still clearly having fun making goofy home movies with homemade costumes. I sure hope their English teacher gave them an A.
If you wanna see more, check out the outtakes and bloopers.
New York Post: Apple Set to Sell Ringtones Via iTunes Store
It’s The New York Post, so take it with an appropriate grain of salt. If true, though, it’s great news for Ambrosia — why pay a buck (or whatever) for each ringtone when you can spend $15 and convert any non-DRM-protected song you already own into one? This whole “ringtones are something different than songs and you have to pay for them” thing is a racket, and everyone knows it. (Via Mat Lu.)
Update: Ends up iToner works with DRM-protected songs from iTunes, too. Sweet.
Google Desktop for Mac gains spam support, 9 new languages
The Google team has updated Google Desktop for the Mac with support for nine new languages, but the more exciting news to us is that it can now ignore e-mail that has been identified as spam in Mail or Entourage.
Rooftop
4th of July fireworks-watching on Paúl's roof in Chelsea.
Executions
Electric Chair, Executions series (Figure 0049)Catherine Chalmers' executions series depicts roaches being electrocuted, hung from miniature nooses, and burned at the stake. None of the roaches in the photographs however was actually burned or executed or hung-in fact, the roaches were already dead by the time they were photographed. In the case of the gas chamber photos, the cockroaches were immobilized with carbon dioxide and woke up a few minutes later. (via)
Untitled
Ry’s post reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to post forever: The woman who says, “Your call is being answered by Audix” is named Lorainne Nelson. You can hire her to customize your voicemail shit so it sounds the real Audix. I’m going go to hire her to read transcripts of Bill Hicks routines in a Audix voice. In other news, I think ‘baby’ Jane Holzer is a real estate agent somewhere on Long Island.
Wireless Network Spam
This was a new one for me. It was taking awhile to pick up a wireless networks at MM’s apartment and then when I checked the available networks I was amazed and frustrated to find that spammers and plundered a new domain– wifi hotspots.
NYC Mac and Cheese Porn
There's good, mouthwatering food porn, and then there's Gridskipper's NYC Macaroni and Cheese Porn Gallery. Macaroni and cheese samples from ten New York restaurants are photographed in all their gooey, glistening, residual cheese-trailing glory to illustrate the wide variety of macaroni and cheese that New York has to offer. The gallery is informative, but I have a feeling the photos don't capture the tastiness that each restaurant has to offer. Gridskipper will reveal its choice for the best macaroni and cheese sometime today.
Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crushpad Project
We’ll admit we were both relieved and disappointed at Gary V’s announcement yesterday. We had all sorts of theories that he was going to be franchising his store to LA and converting the few but loyal Domainiacs to Vayniacs. (more…)
Catching up with One Laptop Per Child
Last weekend, the US news show 60 Minutes rebroadcast its segment on Nicholas Negroponte and his One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. As Bruno Giussani has reported on the TED Blog, much news has emerged since that segment first aired in May:
+ OLPC and Intel have agreed to work together, not compete, to put laptops in the hands of every kid on the planet.
+ OLPC's chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, said last month that a retail version of the laptop may be commercially available by this Christmas.You can see more from Nicholas Negroponte here on TED.com -- he gave a rousing talk at TED2006, just days after he took a leave of absence from MIT's Media Lab to devote himself fully to One Laptop Per Child. Watch the TEDTalk and join the conversation >>
To contact Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project, visit the OLPC website's Contacts page >>
Posh Lands a "Major" Role
While her hubby David Beckham is nursing his bum knee, Victoria Beckham will bring home the bacon with a guest spot on super hit, Ugly Betty. After weeks of speculation, ABC confirmed the fashionista will play herself on the adorable show. Rumors has it that Victoria will be a bridesmaid at the wedding of Wilhelmina Slater (Vanessa Williams) and Bradford Meade (Alan Dale).
Access Hollywood caught up with Betty herself, America Ferrera, for her thoughts on having the Posh one on her show. “She definitely belongs in the MODE world. She’d definitely be somebody that Wilhelmina is good buddies with."
If they need any help deciding on Vicki's wardrobe for the episode, I have a one word for them: poncho.
August 30, 2007
Fresh KRS Interview (You Suckas)
Just Blaze has the hookup. Gotta give him his due since we've been hard on KRS in the past, he's on point for most of this session, discussing the death of the industry and the future of the culture. Much...
digg arc history
I just posted a visual diary of Digg Arc development to the Stamen blog. Go check it out, and relive the glory...
Photo of the Day: Charlie's Fashion Beef Hot Dog
Down the block from the Serious Eats office on 7th Avenue and 27th Street is Charlie's Fashion Beef Hot Dogs where for $1.50 you can get a grilled hot dog topped with onion, relish, chili, ketchup and mustard. The life of the above hot dog was about a minute before swimming in my stomach's digestive juices. It was a damn good minute.
"“Frankly, any city person who doesn’t think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn’t..."
““Frankly, any city person who doesn’t think I deserve a white-collar salary as a farmer doesn’t deserve my special food"”
- No Bar Code
Illustrated Guide for Espresso Noobs
For people like me, who know almost nothing about the family of espresso-centric drinks, Lokesh Dhakar's illustrated guide to espresso drink composition may be helpful. The illustrations won't help you much if you want to make the drinks, but they're great for providing a simple overview of the ingredients. [via Boing Boing]
Toy/Story
I asked one of my favourite questions on Facebook: Toys or Stories?
I got some lovely answers, which I’ve rendered anonymous to share/store here.
So far, toys are ahead, by a narrow squeak at 14 ludological fundamentalists, to story-fans’ 12. Three respondents opting for the indivisible wave-particle duality of the Toy/Story.
“Toys beget stories. It’s only the other way around when capitalism comes out to play.”
“Toys that are not attached to a story (i.e. unbranded generic toys). Not Transformer toys (or Toy Story toys, for that matter)”
“The two can never be torn apart.”
“Toys. Will Wright’s TED demonstration of Spore as a ‘montessori toy to help kids think long-term’ blew… my… mind. ‘Tis the next gen’s literacy, and potency. But I do like to submit to a good story at times. Kind of geronto-therapy, these days.”
“stories. through stories comes the invention of toys”
“Toys so long as it is old Lego not new - my own stories are better.”
“Toys! Stories come with them for free!”
“Stories! Let your imagination run wild…”
“Stories. Stories stay with you, toys end up in landfill.”
“Stories, a toy is just a story in Vinyl form :)”
“Toys…cause you can make up your own stories with them ;)”
“it all depends on which kind of toys…”
“If it were J, toys and if it were N, stories. Depending on the time of day.”
“stories!”
“Toys. Most stories are just made up anyway.”
“Why has no-one said both, surely not an either/or question - not for my two boys anyway…”
“Toys. Because you can use them to create your own stories.”
“Narrative first always. Expanding narrative through imaginative play second.”
“Stories! The merchandising deals come after the original IP!”
“Toys!”
“toys then as i like plastic things”
“You can have stories without toys but not toys without stories. Maybe that’s where Pixar started from, there are always stories that go with the toys. Epic, life-defining stories. Now I feel the need to go get more toys.”
“Stories; as they force you to use your imagination more, and that’s richer than any manufactured experience. However, a crappy DVD could be a story and a stick and ball could be a toy, and the stick would involve you using your imagination more.”
“Life is stories. Toys are the friendly characters and landmarks. (My two-year-old says Jemima Puddleduck is scary… but he then admits he’s joking. Jokes — the shortest stories around.)”
“stories are always best - and most in demand - as they require interaction and contact. that said toys enable self produced narrative in the years before writing. mind you toys are cool and provide problem solving & physical fun (blocks/puzzles/autobots)”
“Stories, because they don’t precipitate the opening of out of town warehouses branded ‘Stories R Us’”
“Oral stories because even the worst ones can be mass-produced without causing waste. :)”
“Stories. They feed the imagination and can help you turn anything into a toy.”
“Object is story. Toy is object. Toy is story.”
“story-telling toys (like the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, not Teddy Ruxpin)”
“toys: the reassuring teleology of narrative appeals only to the weak of spirit (in a nice way)”
Energy Harvesting Déerive
Informed by the mathematical random walk and the Situationist dérive, or “drift,” these fantastic roller shoes harvest energy from your motion and direct you via toe-mounted LCD on a random walk.
Fred Thompson To Skip New Hampshire Debate
As we reported yesterday, the influential New Hampshire Union Leader, a major voice of Republicanism in the crucial primary state, published an editorial challenging Fred Thompson in no uncertain...
Breaking: GOP Senator Warner To Announce Whether He'll Retire Tomorrow, Report Says
Jonathan Martin: Sen. John Warner will announce tomorrow at the University of Virginia whether or not he intends to seek a sixth term, according to two top Virginia sources. Warner is planning a 2...
but mom, lawn darts are FUN!
Since Mattel is recalling all those toys with lead, Radar Online does the public a service by recycling their "10 most dangerous playthings of all time" story. Number one on the list? Lawn darts, of course.
Redefining the dictionary: Erin McKean on TED.com
Is the beloved paper dictionary doomed to extinction? When does a made-up word become real? And could you use "synecdochical" in a sentence, please? In this infectiously exuberant talk, leading lexicographer Erin McKean looks at the many ways in which today's print dictionary is poised for transformation in this internet era. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, California. Duration: 15:41.)
Watch Erin McKean's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.
Read more about Erin McKean on TED.com.
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Edwards And Obama Camps Both Pushing "Hillary-Is-Polarizing" Line
One interesting subplot in Campaign 2008 worth noting is that the Edwards and Obama camps are now both pushing a similar line against Hillary -- chiefly, that you shouldn't vote for her because lots...
Transmit 3.6 comes with Amazon S3, remote URL support
Panic has released an update to the popular FTP software, Transmit. Transmit 3.6 comes with a whole host of bug fixes and improvements, but the two main features added in this update are remote URLs and Amazon S3 support, although the latter seems to be a little buggy for some.
happy year of rumi
It’s mostly [Rumi’s] romantic and spiritual poems that have captured English-speaking fans. (He’s quite popular on the wedding circuit these days.)
Washington Post: “Rumi’s Time Has Come (Again).” Previously on rW: Rumi’s “A Community of the Spirit.”