New ‘Iron Man’ Trailer via Geeks of Doom. Holy crap I can't wait for this movie!
Via Scoble is the WorldWide Telescope intro talk from the TED conference. I'm not entirely convinced, this looks fairly close to a combination of google sky (or whatever it's called) and Cellestia. However, I'll have to wait till it's available to the world before I can make any judgement. Anything that increases learning and awareness of the world and the universe is a good thing though, right?
Just a few bits for the morning that have been in my queue....
Heheheheh, pic of what you need in case of Headcrab Infestation. Half Life understanding required :)
BankWest Singing Kittens. Just watch it....
Jimmy Kimmels F@cking Ben Affleck Response to Matt and Sarah. Not as funny or catchy (IMHO) as the original, though still pretty funny! Wish it was uncensored :)
Great video pointed to by Veronica Belmont of Jonathan Coulton performs "Still Alive" in Rock Band with a couple of special guests.
‘X-Files 2’ Teaser Trailer at WonderCon. Best part for me was the screaming of the people in the audience as they (I presume) realized what they were seeing and were enveloped by the absolute coolness of it all! As an old-time X-Files buff, I can definitely relate :)
I found my next must-have knitting project (as I got a Dalek)... the R2D2 Beanie!!
OMG, this is the best idea ever!!! You have to of course have watched a bit of Fawlty Towers to really understand it.
Two nice little portal bits:
The Escapist : Zero Punctuation: Yahtzee Goes to GDC. Not much more need said.... absolutely hilarious, anyone who doesn't watch Zero Punctuation, really needs to subscribe IMMEDIATELY! :)
Here's the first "awwwwwhhhh" for the morning... check this video of a Lion reunited with his rescuer. Super-cute. Here's the reddit thread where I found it. I love the first comment.... where do you "find" a lion? :)
The Bender Brewer Project is a must for all true futurama fans. Someone want to get me a christmas present? :)
Darren threw me a link to a Leaked RIAA Training Video: Find Pirates, Find Crack-Dealing Terrorist Murderers Too!. Apparently people who are music pirates are also generally buying crack with their downloads, while burning the flag with flamethrowers aimed at YOUR UNBORN CHILDREN.
God bless the USA!
Stephen Fry's Podgram is up and available via RSS and on iTunes.
What appears to be the latest in a really lame attempt from Microsoft at marketing, or connecting with the cool kids is Source Fource.
Can someone please explain this to me? Is this just a "buzz" creator? A legitimate product of some sort (obviously aimed at confusing "open source")? A cross-promotion with Lego?
The only thing I can gather from the site is maybe this is a new qualification system of some sort.... though I'm unsure the reaction of a fortune 500 company to hiring a "ISV Super Gal".
Dear Microsoft friends of mine, you know who you are, please explain this stuff to me.... :)
Coding Horror points that Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book is now available online for free from Byte (they're still around?). This is a tome of a book which I picked up many years ago at one of those super-cheap computer book sales and have only glanced through, as it's fairly intimidating. Jeff makes it sound like a must-read for any programmer though.
Twelve Important Rules for Photography has the sunny 16 rule and 11 others. Good to have all nicely condensed! (Hhehehe, moony 11 rule..... )
Now You Too Can Frag Frakkin Toasters, with your own viper pilots license. Way cool!
WWTDD has a good scoop on Lindsay Lohan's re-creation of Marilyn Monroe's last nude photoshoot, with gazongas fully engaged where needed. It's honestly fairly "meh", but hey, naked pics of celebs? Bring it on! Link is mostly SFW (photoshopped out boobages, with links to non-edited versions).
Looks like I wasn't the only one disappointed with the Knight Rider movie last night..... IO9 declares that Knight Rider Smashes Our Childhood Memories Without Turbo Boost.
Way too much driving, not enough KITT, way too many commercials, not every car on the road is a ford and Hasslehoff wasn't wearing a "Don't Hassle the Hoff" shirt were among my complaints. I can only pray that the upcoming series is better.... (assuming it appears at some point of course).
Inspired by a post from Scoble, someone put up an Obsolete Skils wiki.
Star Trek Phaser With Blu-Ray Laser... I would love one of these! Wonder how the transit cops would react to me "stunning" loud talking commuters though... ?
Interesting writeup called Things I Learned At The Apple Store (here's part 2).
* For God sakes, people were lining up -- waiting time, 22 minutes -- to get a seat in the Apple "lounge" at the back of the store. What was special there? Nothing. A chance to sit, read some magazines, drink coffee and sample some computer stuff.
Interesting read and follow up... especially to see how vile the reaction is to saying nice things about an apple store.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull trailer... including high def links. W00t!
Lifehacker has a good post of Top 10 Free Wallpaper, Fonts and Icon Sources. All the goodness needed to pimp out your desktop.
Ars reviews the just-released Firefox 3.0 beta 3 and determines that Firefox 3 beta 3 polishes rough edges. Re-done interface (nice on the Mac), integrated download statusbar, way better memory use than Firefox 2.0, plus lots more. Hit the article up for some screenshots. I'm not too sure about the windows look to be honest, I'm just booting up VMWare to check out how it looks and feels.
Some Pentax K20D porn for you photogs in the audience who shoot pentax (probably only me I figure). Someone posted the Pop Photo K20D review - March 2008 over in the DPReview forums.
I really wish I could understand the complaints about the high ISO performance. I shoot at max 1600 and in that I know that the pictures will not be useful for much more than the web, and people are bitching that the performance at 3200 is "irritating". Maybe I'm just used to "bad" performing old cameras and figure photography should be done in good light. Improved AF in low light performance would be great, I was bitching about slow autofocus last night with my *ist-D. I presume that the K10D, and of course the K20D is much better though.
Here's another article with some more news.
Wired article that Darren sent over where Will Wright Walks Us Through 'Spore' with some good gallery shots.
Aperture 2 was released earlier today, and Fraser Speirs has his Aperture 2 First Impressions. I downloaded and played with it a bit, and wasn't all that impressed... course, Aperture is pretty foreign to me as I've been a lightroom guy for a while (due to the cross platformness and my lack of a Mac till recently). The list of improvements is impressive though. Check the article for more details.
Bit of gaming news today....
Laughing Squid points to a Time Lapse Video of San Francisco Fog. Best part for me is the planes zipping overhead...
Darren Barefoot posts a link to Five Gorgeous Minutes of Dance, Set to the Lyrics of Lou Reed. I normally would have passed it by, being the uncultured slob that I am, but it features a version of "Waiting for the Man" by the Velvet Underground, one of my favorite heroin songs (about, not to do it to!)
Geeks of Doom has ‘Quantum of Solace’ Teaser Poster and a video with some behind the scenes info... have to wait till November though :(
IO9 has a bunch of new Knight Rider info including videos and clips.
Oh man do I so hope that this doesn't completely suck...
From Fozbaca's daily link roundup comes 15 Exercises for Learning a new Programming Language... something I'm going through right now in my learning of Ruby. Very cool stuff.
Interesting and amusing presentation by Zed Shaw called Mongrel, 2500 Lines, and Economics in which he talks about how the tiny little program called Mongrel (the server used in Rails) became sucessful. You may remember Zed from his rant a bit ago :)
How a BitTorrent Tracker Owner Hides from the MPAA/RIAA is a fascinating article over at torrentfreak about how to fly under the radar online.
TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X and Linux just released version 5.0, including an OS/X version, a Linux graphical version, and lots of other goodies. Great work guys!
Found out about the Rarindra style workflow from these comments over at reddit.com which pointed to this photoset at photo.net. Very cool look, though overdone (IMHO) if done all the time. Still, an impressive use of photoshop for sure!
M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening Teaser Trailer make it look really creepy and I hope it's good.... watch the trailer and and tell me the part where it goes black and there's just 'crunch, crunch' isn't super creepy. Set to open June 13, 2008.
XXCLONE, A New Way of Cloning the Windows System Disk is a bit old (2007-02 was the last update) but it promises a fast and easy disk clone (with lots of extras) for windows.
Opera Mobile 9.5 was announced over at Opera Watch... lots of funky new stuff, speed improvements, widgets, etc, etc. A preview will be available Feb 11.
7 Viral Videos You Didn't Know Were Staged (and How They Did It) from cracked.com via Digg.
Humanized has a good article on one particular aspect of usability in the Mac Vs. Windows dispute.... Luxury Computing talks about some of the challenges in doing some simple things in both Mac and Windows.
After going through the same three dialog boxes, the wizard appears yet again; this time it’s found a “HID-compliant device”, and I have to go through the same song and dance, after which I get yet another wizard for a “HID-compliant device”.
Another "what tool for what toolbox?" debate, though some usability issues are more like using a hammer that randomly smacks you in the thumb by itself (Ok, so I'm not all that good at analogies :)
The Ukulele Orchestra of GB - Smells Like Teen Spirit... coolest version of Smells Like Teen Spirit you'll see all evening :)
Ed Bott says that Windows Vista SP1 is done and will be arriving mid-March. It looks like SP1 will not be automatically installed if there are known driver conflicts, which is an interesting (and good) way to do it. I hope that SP1 will deliver the improvements for Vista that people have been talking about and asking for.
I'm not sure if I would have paid $2500 for a 20 year old computer.... but the unboxing pics and story about it certainly is interesting.
Any adventurous mac users out there might be interested that they released a native Mac theme for 3.0 in the nightly build. The theme is a little "more" brushed metal than the actual native apps (to my eyes anyway) it seems, however it still integrates a bit more nicely into the rest of the mac look and feel than the default 3.0b2 theme (not sure I like how they did the tab look though). There's a screenshot linked from the linked post if you're interested.
The nightly build is stable (so far) for me as well... (my first nightly build experiment).
Interesting looking set of articles on Rails 2.0 and Scaffolding Step by Step. So far there are 2 parts of fairly in depth and well written information about Ruby on Rails 2.0.
Iron Man new TV spot from the SuperBowl (I presume). Some awesome scenes in there... I'm really looking forward to this one now!
I resisted watching the video She's F-n Matt Damon, a hilarious video from Sara Silverman to her boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel... very funny (though not as good a song IMHO as Matt Damon's other great song "Scotty Doesn't Know" from Eurotrip). Not bad, not bad at all.
I keep on meaning to get into Ruby on Rails, and still am struggling.... however looking at tools like Active Merchant makes me think "OMG how did I deal with doing CC validation before!?!" as my previous CC validation systems have been a lot less, shall we say, "clean" :) Looks nice, looking forward to getting into it more.
BBC reports that Microsoft wants to purchase Yahoo. So is this the start of a major power move, where one family absorbs the other in an attempt to hit the big boss? (Sorry, just finished watching a bunch of Sopranos last night). Or is this just political posturing? If the merger goes through will it really mean anything to anyone? In my online world google is my search engine, and my online mail goes to gmail (though that's not a primary address). I have a yahoo account, and a hotmail account, but they were only really for getting access to downloads, or flickr, or something or other.
Microsoft has been putting lots of work into both hotmail and their Live.com search lately, so are they looking to replace them with the yahoo search and mail (both also (from what I've heard) updated and improved lately), or are they just looking to kill off Yahoo from the search engine market. Yahoo doesn't have online advertising (that I know of, feel free to correct me), but they do have things like Flickr.
Anyone out there have any thoughts? Or should I just keep an eye on the geek podcasts and news to see what the industry experts think?
