Well, not only is there going to be an Apple Event in September, looks like Leica is set to unveil new products on 9.9.09. The video says "a collection of ground breaking products", and there's a webcast. Personally I'm excited in so much that I greatly admire the craftsmanship, quality and history, but I'm pretty sure I won't be able to afford it whatever it is. Maybe a new M9? A full frame version of the digital rangefinder? Who knows....
Who'da thunk it, the ADF built a Linux-Based Flight Simulator costing $1.7 million and running on a cluster of SUSE systems. Wonder what sort of system I'd have to have to get that running at home?
Digital Photography School has a nice set of 10 Astounding Astrophotos by Phil Hart, and Australian photographer. These aren't easy to get, if you check the details for this impressive image you'll see that a total of 13 hours was required to capture the image, along with a host of impressive sounding equipment.
Blogscoped reports that PingDom, a performance and uptime monitoring system is now free for one site (after the initial trial).
First of all, if you don't know who James May is, sequester yourself inside for a week and watch all of Top Gear. When you're done, check out the Lego House he's building. Why? No clue. It's pretty awesome though :)
Screenhead has a nice wrapup of their Top 10 forgotten and underrated Sci-fi movies.
Noticed that the unstable version of GIMP had updated and there were 2.7 development snapshots up and about. Improvements to UI and the text editing are at the head of what's changing. Linux and windows downloads are available.
Some truly drool-worthy Modern Warfare 2 Leaked Single-Player Gameplay Footage. Blah blah hope it's not a console port blah blah PC FPS FTW blah blah ;)
OMG Funny as hell... Dana passed on me "Puke In My Mouth" a response to Jizz In My Pants. That's just awesome.
Bonus: My Box in a Box, a response to "Dick in a Box".
The note taking software that I love, Evernote has posted Evernote (Alpha) Version 3.5 for Windows, which is the start of the much needed upgrade for their windows version, which (IIRC) will start to be tied into the same codebase as their Mac version.
Note: The software is very alpha and fairly crashy :) So be warned.
I don't really know WTF to think of Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter Supermercial Video, but it seems to indicate that something from Crotech is coming....
Yup, August 28th is here, which means that Snow Leopard is available to the general public today. Here is Snow Leopard reviews roundup over at TUAW, and I'm sure there will be many more today.
My favorite summary from that page is from Macworld's Jason Snell:
"Failing a massive makeover, then, we've got to take joy in the little gifts that Snow Leopard gives us. And there are a lot of them. I'd like to pick my favorite, but the fact is, they're all small enough that I can't really choose one. But if I could gather up the whole lot of them in my arms, I'd give them a hug."
I'm heading down to the local London Drugs computer department in about an hour when they open to see if they have it in as "Jay" said they would when I was there yesterday, and this weekend will be a weekend-o-OS-upgrades for me.
Anyone upgraded yet? Thoughts?
OMFG I have just wasted the last 20 minutes looking through the latest twitter meme #songsincode. Epically awesome. Don't think of it as wasting time, think of it as increasing your coding skills by learning to parse other people's code.
Also I hear that the new facebook 3.0 iPhone app is available, but it's not showing up for me yet.
In a thrilling video, @sockington celebrates his one millionth follower. A cat. Who posts things like "A MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR WHAT OF YOURS I JUST BROKE ACCIDENTALLY what oh nothing". Has (as of 4pm thursday the 27th of August in the year of our lord 2009) 1,082,191 people and spam bots watching his posts. Holy crap.
That said, I'm intruiged by this cat and his tweets and videos, and pissed off (still) that I didn't think of it first.
Cool little video of 100 Years Of Movie Special Effects In 5:00. Neat to see how some things are done in the far ago days.
I agree with the guys from work who pointed me to Mario Kart: The Movie - I'd totally watch that!
forgetfoo picks out a test of some great plot summaries. IE:
STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE: Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands.
The BF2 1.50 patch was given a release date, that being Sept 1, 2009. Funny thing is I thought it was released already, I didn't know it was only in beta (and was all pissed off as I couldn't find anyone online when I did go and try to find a game).
Windows 7 Sins is the latest FSF fight against Microsoft. Personally I'm tiring of the whole thing a bit. Either MS has retreated from their big bully tactics in the last couple of years, or their marketing campaign to make themselves look like the little guy fighting the uphill battle against the big bully Apple and Google (which do kick their ass in the smartphone and search markets respectively).
Either that or the internet and computer world has just changed in the last while, and things like DRM and lock-in are starting to pass out of the consciousness. Do people really chose WMV over AVI? Or care since you can play WMV on any other platform with ease (I presume the protected WMVs aren't as easy, but when was the last time you saw one of those???)? Security and stability seem to have been getting way better lately (I haven't seen a BSOD on my vista box I don't think, and if I have it wasn't nearly as often as with XP, and the monopoly issues just seem ridiculous now the EU has been answered by making a Windows 7 edition without a browser.
It could be also that I've matured, and use the right tool for the right job. Coding is all done on my Linux box, gaming and photography/photoshop stuff is done on my windows box, and everything else is done on my mac laptop while watching TV on the couch. And I don't care anymore :)
AfterDawn.com reports that Mininova is dead, must filter torrents. A judge has ordered the site to either pay 5m Euro or delete copyrighted torrents:
Mininova notably removed links if copyright holders flagged them, but as with all trackers, when one went down, five would take its place, making the whole situation redundant.
It's not dead just yet, and lets be honest, once it is, one of the other sites on the net will rise up to take it's place, just as it once did to replace suprnova.org.
Former Ku Klux Klan leader Johnny Lee Clary tells some stories about his days in the KKK. Pretty damn funny actually. The black preacher they're talking about also sounds like an amazing example of tolerance, and defeated the entire clan.
I recently discovered the 'not always right' blog, and it's posts like this that makes it a completely awesome repository of stupid customer quotes :)
Awesome song from a sci-fi songs blog all about Cylon #6, the gorgeous Tricia Helfer.
Very interesting and very geeky article on Licensed Memory in Windows Vista and basically how you can get access to more than 3G of RAM under 32bit Vista (and presumably Windows 7 as well).
Wow, this was about, well, 18 years in the making.... Aug. 25, 1991 is when Linus first posted about Linux, so happy birthday Linux!!
1991: Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old university student from Finland, writes a post to a user group asking for feedback on a little project he's working on. He's built a simple kernel for a Unix-like operating system that runs on an Intel 386 processor, and he wants to develop it further. The kernel eventually becomes Linux, which is released in 1994 and distributed over the internet for free.
Not trying to make it Snow Leopard week here, but this is something I want to know for myself, thanks Darren for the Snow Leopard Compatibility List.
I don't personally believe that the poo trap is an actual product.
Pretty fascinating look at the design evolution of the Convertbot Tap Tap Tap Convert iPhone app.
Codexon gives 6 Simple Tips to Get Stackoverflow Reputation Fast, and shows why Stackoverflow.com has some social-engineering errors in the way they present the information and some of their rules. Of course, reputation and karma on the site aside, it's a great site with good information, and hopefully this will show them a bit of information on how to avoid the social engineering bugs.
Well, looks like reddit is making fun of more reliable disk eject in Snow Leopard (pic, and context (bottom of the page)). While I don't think that disk eject improvements necessarily needs it's own icon, it is a feature that's nice to have, and makes the OS experience better. Ever had one of those times when you try to eject a CD or removable drive and it just says "can't eject" and you can't figure out why, and end up having to reboot? It happens on Mac, Windows, and Linux... this is just a little feature that will tell you what process is preventing the ejection. Simple, but a nice bit of polish (IMHO) that adds a bit more user friendliness to the OS. Pretty sure that Ubuntu has this as well come to think of it.
As another side note, looks like Windows 7 does this too, which is more good news.
No, not by some sort of space doubling compression utility, just by creating a machine with dual Internal SATA Hard Drives!
If you have been keeping up with the GPS market for the iPhone, you know that there are two or three main contenders. Gizmodo has a good wrapup of TeleNav vs. Navigon vs. TomTom to figure out "the best" (or at least, the best for right now.
No matter which app you're using, the GPS runs constantly and the screen generally stays on, which means utter battery drainage: You will need to keep your iPhone plugged into the car's lighter jack. You will also need a dashboard mount, which range from $10 to $30.
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is going to be available on Friday August 28th, and is available for pre-order now. If you're a mac-head and unfamiliar with Snow Leopard and what it'll bring, you can check out this page for more details. Short story is it's evolutionary, new/better tech, nicer quicktime, Exchange support out of the box, and lots of nice little tweaks.
Pretty amazing video from SIGGRAPH on 3D modelling using real video, in which you basically trace over an object in the video and it's now a fully usable 3D object. Easies to watch the video though :)
The Wolfman Trailer is up and over at Yahoo. This is the one with Benico Del Toro that had some pretty awesome screenshots of the makeup last year or so.
TUAW has a great wrapup of Friday fakes, the best of the fake tablet photoshops from around the net. I know that Apple folks love their gear, but I'm not sure how that translates into making fake images (unless it means they get lots of attention from the fanboys). Nonsense, but fun to look at some peoples ideas.
The first image also has some interesting application possibilities of an actual iTablet (instead of it being a ridiculous thing to have where it's a super-expensive netbook with half the functionality). Of course, knowing Apple, if they do do something like this, it'll be something that comes out of left field and will blow everyone away and not glom onto what is (IMHO) a dead market that is only really useful for a very narrow market.
Anyone heard of Plex Media Center for OS X before? Looks pretty sexy... the only thing that these are all missing are support for decoder cards (a la MythTV) or something to auto-torrent download to give the impression of recording TV. MythTV is kinda old and busted looking and in terms of some of the features (especially compared to the new sexiness that these media center apps have), but it will record TV which none of the other systems do (for the most part).
I want it all dammit! In the form factor of a mac mini. And a pony!
Sent over by S is this Sweet Bumblebee Transformer Costume. Guarantee it's the best one you see today :)
Normally I wouldn't post something as simple as the Flickr Blog's post on Research in Antarctica if not for the last few images :) Those wacky researchers know how to have fun :)
James Cameron's Avatar finally has a trailer. Looks pretty awesome, though no idea what it's about, or what's going on in the trailer :)
An awesome article / confessional on Dirty Coding Tricks used for PC and console gaming.
Zed Shaw (famous for his anti-Rails rant a while back) has some great thoughts on The Impermanence, Karma, and Bad Behavior of Why The Lucky Stiff. "Why" or "_why" as you may or may not have heard basically suddenly and unexpectedly removed all his online "stuff" which in this day and age is fairly unusual. Zed has a good wrap up of what he did and some thoughts on why.
Star Wars West Coast Defense on Flickr via Laughing Squid.
Via BoingBoing is a list of John Scalzi's Guide to the Most Epic FAILs in Star Wars Design.
Torrent Freak points out that the copy of The Pirate Bay that was posted has been brought to life, and is up and running over at btarena.org. Or at least I think it is. Hard to tell. Anyway, the 21G of torrents are up and going and alive and well out in the wild.
How The Pirate Bay Will Be Legalized from TorrentFreak.
To please the entertainment industry GGF will install a system that will allow the copyright holders to either authorize the 'illegal' torrent or have it removed from the site. If the copyright holder opts to choose the first option they will be compensated every time the file is downloaded. In addition, the board says that it will pay penalties if it has to.
[...]
One of the pitfalls of this new reactive system is of course that copyright holders might start to remove content en masse instead of authorizing it, so that there is nothing available for the (paying) users to download and share. Without content the users will walk away and The Pirate Bay will slowly die.
And by "slowly die" I think you mean "quickly die".
Somehow this doesn't seem like it'll be "business as usual" as TPB promised when they first announced the buyout.
Referenced in this week's MacBreak Weekly is a 1975 live performance of "Thunder Road" by Bruce Springsteen. Awesome and chilling, I gotta get me an MP3 of that.
The Facebook blog has some info on Why You'll Love Facebook's New iPhone App. Still waiting for it to come out though :)
The Windows Experience Blog posted that there's a New Windows Live Movie Maker today.
Anyone use movie maker? I have a few random movies (and by movies I mean 10 second to 3 minute clips) that I'd like to have organized similarly to how I have my images in Lightroom (ie: always there and available, editable, exportable). I've played with iMovie on my Mac, but that seems more project oriented, not library + project. Since I do my photography stuff on a windows system, I have no problem doing the minor movie stuff on there too, if only to have it there and in one place so those incredibly interesting 10 second clips of SCA fighting from 5 years ago don't go missing forever :)
I had not heard of Sockington, @sockington, the Sockington Army, the most popular cat on flickr, or anything related to a blog "by" a cat.
However I am impressed that someone managed to acquire over 1 million twitter followers and at the same time basically be a guy posting cat pictures to flickr. Guess you need a story to go with those cat pictures. Sadly this means it's too late for me to start the Corny and Rex blog (or the Corny and Rex and Zoon and Munchkin and Bump and Bear blog).
Pidgin 2.6.0 is out the door for all platforms, and addition of video and voice support.
DPReview has the press release and images of the Canon PowerShot G11. This comes of course, right after my dad got himself the G10. Same lens, a downgrade from the 15mp sensor in the G10 to a "high sensitivity" 10mp sensor (maybe they listened to people talking about the insanity of huge megapixels on a tiny sensor), better anti-noise (they claim 2 stops) and various other things. No HD video yet either...
Interesting to see what the people screaming in the forums about how Canon was right and DPReview and their unjustified crusade against high megapixels in P&S cameras have to say...
Update: Engadget has a hands on with the G11.
A few bits from Shacknews that I've come across this morning:
Anyone thinking IE is a better browser who ever reads YouTube comments is simply wrong. Check out the YouTube Comment Snob extension and have your experience be that much better. Or just don't go to YouTube....
News on the PlayStation Blog Europe. $299 is fairly cheap.....
Not really official, found via @navigon_ on twitter, but the navigon photostream over on flickr has some interesting looking updates for version 1.2. From the looks of it you'll get proper iPod control from within the app (yay!) with a very cool 'peel away' interface for it, location sharing (great for stalkers), text to speech for street names (yay), automatic night mode (yay), and lane information in a small display.
Gotta say that these are some pretty nice things, and while they should have been in there from the start, they weren't absolutely critical, and make a nice point release update. Course, I'll have to nuke a bunch of music from my iPhone, then update, and then re-load it as I keep it pretty chock full....
No ETA on the update though. Also they only said these updates were on the European version, but I'd assume the changes will be the same across all versions. There are some more stuff on the navigon site about this too.
Update: A little birdie told me that the 1.2 update for North America and friends are already submitted to the app store.
Trailer for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 from Gamescom 2009.
The Palm Developer Blog has details of the just-opened Palm app store. Maybe they're going to be the ones to take advantage of the PR fails that the Apple app store has had recently. Hopefully Palm will learn from Apple's mistakes, and have as much success as they've had. They have a long way to go to get the 50,000 (or however many they have) apps that Apple has (though I'd say 80% of those are crap anyway).
Awesome tip tip at shell-fu for Linux/UNIX users using BASH... putting a "\" in front of a command runs the un-aliased version of the command.
Len passed on this bit from the Register, and a Zombie plague was analysed by Canadian maths prof and they determined that violence was indeed, the only option. Now where's my shovel?
Highs and lows. Ha! It's funny cause it's true.
John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has a nice editorial on The Android Opportunity, and what Google can do to bring the Android brand up and over the top.
Start by copying what Apple has done right. Release one new phone per year, every year. Split that one phone into separate models by storage size, keeping all other specs the same. Apple has shown you can make a lot of money by charging an extra $100 for less than $100 worth of flash memory.
It's interesting if you think that 2 years ago the iPhone didn't even exist, hell, the market hardly existed before that. Yes, I know there were smart phones, but they didn't have the mindshare (IMHO) that Apple has created in that time. And then in that time it's become a juggernaut, had a falter from some of the bureaucracy / BS at Apple, and other phones are making a play for it's market share, all in that short time.
I don't know if this was the fault, but my home-brew Time Capsule setup has been failing lately, and this weekend I probably put in 5+ hours of mucking around to try to get it working, and then it'd work, go for a few (1-20) Gb, and then fail. Looks like this might have been caused by the Mozy backup, which has been fixed. Fingers crossed that I can get this set up and working tonight with the updated Mozy software!
Good news read today that the Siberian Tiger is no longer in as much trouble as it was a few decades ago. According to vertex (a blog) and their source (MoscowTopNews), there are more animals alive than 100 years ago. Good news, if you believe it. I say let the hunting begin! I'm going to make cat beds and throw rugs out of tiger hides!
(I kid of course)
Well, it only took a few months, and now the TomTom for iPhone app us out. It'll cost you $99 and it's a 1.2G download. No word on the accompanying car kit yet.
Update: Looks like the holder will do some hooking-in-GPS magic and will work with 3rd party apps, so you'll be able to buy the Navigon, iGo, etc and have it get the enhanced GPS from the TomTom car kit. Of course, to me this also means that the car kit will probably cost big $$, and when you can get a brand new TomTom GPS for $149CND..... Looks like they're either pricing themselves out of the market or relying on the fact that people will pay for the convenience of having everything on the iPhone :)
Also this means that iPod Touch users will be able to use it, which brings in a whole new level of interesting....
YouTube video of Global New's YRandene Neill Accosted by a Dog. I'm sure you've already seen this, but I link to it for a few reasons, partly for the transition from "this is a well mannered dog" to the utter sarcasm of "oh we've sold these two haven't we?". I haven't seen as much dog on woman action since... well, I can't really say least I incriminate myself :) Thanks to Sarah for sending this over to me!
TomTom for iPhone has appeared in the New Zealand iTunes app store. Probably because NZ is in the future and it's Monday there already. In theory (theeeeeooooory) the TomTom app is having a Monday release and will appear in local app stores as Monday appears for the region.
That said, the app looks good. It's about $83 USD, so about the same as the Navigon, and a 1.2G download, so about the same there too. A quick look at the features shows it's pretty much the same as well, with a slightly different look and so on.
The big issue here is that a) this price is only for the app, not the magic holder system that was demoed and b) you can (apparently) get a TomTom standalone unit for that price. So unless the TomTom holding arm is cheap, I think they might have priced themselves out of the market a bit. Course, to do the same with the Navigon (or any other GPS unit for that matter) you still need to pay $40-150 on a holding system.
Guess we'll see what happens on Monday!
Quake Live Updated to Support Linux and Mac Users. Whohooooo!
On OSNews: Editorial: X Could Learn a Lot from Vista, Windows 7. Basically what we all know, X sucks and while it's mostly rock solid, having all the good bits built on top of something that can fairly easily bring you back to a console, or dump you back to a GDM login screen is kinda a sucky thing.
Top 10 Tricks for Making Your Playlists Rock from lifehacker.
Models.com has a Keep It Real post with a bunch of supermodels without makeup. Look good too, and as they say, more human than the normal plastic people you see in the supermarket rags. That said, they were also still done in an "artsy" way, with good lighting and using a vintage 70's black and white look to minimize and hide some of the imperfects (instead of airbrushing the smeg out of them on the "well lit" covers). Still, good to see some of these (unrecognizable) people looking more human.
Lightsaber Chopsticks, something you didn't know you needed until you saw them :)
Available in three colors, the $10 sticks are the perfect utensils for devouring tauntaun and Ewok dishes.
Shacknews has some Rage Screenshots Fresh From QuakeCon. Looks good! Also somehow I missed the Rage trailer posted yesterday.
Via Reddit is a neat flash animation of the International Space Station coming together. First of all, I'm amazed that it's been around since 1998, and secondly, I didn't know it had gotten so damn big. Sometimes us humans amaze me....
Girls In Bikini Reading Star Wars. Not much more to say really. It's sexist, and probably best to listen to with the sound off.
Merry Friday.
Shacknews has a trailer for the new Wolfenstein trailer from iD Software.
If you're a digsby user, you may want to re-consider after reading this where lifehacker details some of what Digsby has done lately in terms of bundled crapware. Bummer.
Update: Digsby has posted a response.
Flickr Blog has some good stuff from the Perseid meteor showers.
Daring Fireball points over to engadget's story about how the Zune HD is available on September 15. I have to say that the hardware does look pretty sexy. It's not going to replace my iPhone or iPod Touch, but I'd love to get my paws on one to see how it feels and acts. Anyone at Microsoft want a chance to convert me by sending me a review unit? :)
Torrent Freak has news on some of the Pirate Bay site changes coming in the next few weeks.
Two weeks from now The Pirate Bay as we know it will cease to exist. To gain access to the site users of the new Pirate Bay will be charged a monthly fee, and even then it remains to be seen what files they will have access to.
It'll be interesting to see what the changes are and for my own morbid curiosity, how soon TPB will die and be eclipsed by MiniNova, BTJunkie and friends, same as SuprNova before it.
The Google Reader blog has news of their latest flurry of features for feed readers. This has some neat "send to" features, and more options for marking as read. Very cool stuff, good job guys!
Peejay send this over. From the World Science Festival is a video of Bobby McFerrin hacking your brain with the pentatonic scale. Looks a bit like the TED videos. Cool stuff.
I have had no exposure to this movie, but the Legion red bad (so it has bad words and grossness) looks epically awesome.
Holy Crap, They're Making a Lego Movie! - Lego Movie - Gizmodo
The author expressed my feelings perfectly ;) "Let's hope it doesn't put a buzz kill on my childhood memories the way GI Joe and Transformers have."
Gizmodo has some proported insider information on the Apple Tablet from someone at Apple. They say:
"The device, which I've held mock ups of, is going to have a 10 inch screen, and when I saw it looked just like a giant iPhone, with a black back-- although that design could change at any time" they said, "with the same black resin back, and the familiar home button." That's obvious.
Who knows, might see this this holiday season (if it exists of course).
Another link from Aryk is a DIY project of a recycled wine bottle torch. Looks like something neat to have on your deck to set the mood on a night of relaxing outside.
Conan had this slightly amusing comment on the Microsoft Word injunction thing. Thanks Aryk.
@Tecknology posted a link about Microsoft and them explaining why they can't discontinue IE 6 from the IEBlog. Best quote from the article, IMHO, is this one:
Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments.
*cough* I call bullshit. Plays For Sure anyone? The argument seems to be that people (and organizations) should have the choice to upgrade or not, and if you, or some large corporation or organization decides that they don't want to deal with upgrading 100s or 1000s of computer's browsers, Microsoft is going to keep on supporting them. While I applaud them and their dedication and agree that if you're in a huge corporation you shouldn't be left out of security upgrades and whatnot that's needed by IE6, I think that the web as a whole should not support IE6. If you're forced to use IE6 at work that sucks to be you, if 10,000 users start complaining that digg.com isn't rendering properly, they'll either be told to install another browser to do their personal surfing, or it'll put pressure on IT to actually upgrade.
Besides, IE7 and IE8 is available on XP, and neither of them is the hole-ridden pile of fail that IE6 is. The only reason someone with XP has for keeping IE6 is that they aren't online to get the update, and if that's the case, they won't be surfing. I wonder if anyone has figured out the developer cost of IE6 and keeping websites compatible with it as well as modern standards-compliant browsers.
Really interesting article over on Slashdot on SEncryption? What Encryption? and discussing how having an encryption program that you can be forced to give up the keys to (or arrested for refusing to) automatically puts you under suspicion, because if you do have some sort of program like TrueCrypt then you must have something to hide. The author goes through the pros and cons of a few different ways, and proposes some interesting ideas of ways for plausibly deniable encryption to become a little bit more mainstream and "normal", and therefor not as much of a red flag that you have evil anti-government subversive videos hidden on your hard drive.
The Onion News Network has a great piece on how thew New Google Opt Out Feature Protects Users' Privacy By Moving Them To A Remote Village. For all you security concerned out there, this is something I recommend you do immediately....
For the lack of humor impaired, this is humor. Though I'm wondering if Google got any calls or emails about this.
Inorganic flora is a very cool collection of computer generated images of plants and flowers. Looks potentially perfect for a iPhone or phone wallpaper.
Star Wars trash compactor bookends over at Boing Boing. Seriously, how cool is that!
Macenstein has a cool Time-lapse video of a Macworld cover creation. As a photography it's particularly interesting in their lighting setup and the amount of post processing that's involved to get the shiny gadgets to look so shiny. Also I didn't realize what was all involved in setting up and tweaking all the stuff on the cover, fonts, and text and layout and whatnot.
Team Fortress 2 has a "Classless Update", which involves hats. Who knew.
TomTom has called a Media Event for September 22nd for some journalists (apparently yours truly wasn't on the invite list). They aren't sure if this is for the iPhone app and holster (which had UK pricing of £113 leaked a few days ago or something else), but the message is about how "TomTom will reveal the future of navigation to you".
Also, this is from a .nl site via google translate, blogged by a rumors site, picked up from an iphone subsite of the "topnewsdigest" site, and then by me, so take it as worth the paper it's written on :)
Mr. Skin's knowledge of nude scenes and slips in movies is amazing and legendary (I'm listening to his appearance on Howard Stern right now), and he has his Top 100 Nude Scenes with some classic, uhm... watching material.
XBox 360 owners rejoice, the promised Xbox 360 Dashboard Update is now up and live according to PC world.
Cracked.com proves once again how (some) people are absolutely insane with their expose of a set of 5 Incredibly Impractical Sexual Fetishes. The most revealing thing is the "typical quote" section from the associated fan sites. Makes me scared to leave the house....
MacRumors has some details of the recently rumored iTunes 9's Social Media Integration features. I'm not sure if I want more cruft in my iTunes though. Version 8's big new feature, Genius, seemed more about selling you new music than anything, but I do enjoy being able to create a playlist of similar music when I'm listening to something I'm really in the mood for with one click. I'm thinking that while it seems like a small thing, it'll start being a given for future media player systems.
I'm looking forward to see what apple pulls out. I'm wondering if version 9 will also tie into new hardware somehow.
I love it when a good idea comes to life. In this case, the Dilbert cartoon where Wally programs his IM to randomly send messages to his boss.... well, someone built it using python and dbus. That is super-awesome.
Looks like Apple reinstated the matte display option on the 15-inch MacBook Pro, for the lovely charge of $50. WTF?
So let me get this straight.... first they change the perfectly fine matte display on the new model of the MBP to a sexy glossy screen that causes glare/reflection problems that people bitch about. Then they change the whole lineup of laptops to use the new glossy screen. People whine, and Apple Fanboys say how you just need to move your head a bit and stop whining The Steve Knows Best for us. Now they bring back the original for half a c-note. This rings back to the "black macbook" model option, where a black paint-job cost $250 (or something crazy like that).
We've never had a matte display, we've always had the glossy display.
[bad attempt at a 1984 reference].
It's people rolling tires down a ski hill... what could be more fun. You probably want to skip towards the 7:00 mark to see the big tire going down :)
The very cool mono-based image management tool F-Spot has released version 0.6.0. Link has all the changelog goodness.
Ha! N00b Boyfriend video from the folks at College Humor.
From the AllFacebook blog: Facebook Announces FriendFeed Acquisition
Facebook has announced this afternoon the acquisition of FriendFeed. For those unaware of the FriendFeed service, it enables users to publish stories just as Facebook does with feeds imported from around the web and open APIs for all information passing through the system. One interesting note about FriendFeed is the team's remarkable ability to scale their application effectively without error.
Interesting, I'm wondering how this is going to affect either company. Personally I don't use or grok friendfeed all that much, but I do like the idea that it's a separate entity that others can glom onto. I hope being absorbed into the 800lb gorilla that is Facebook doesn't affect it's (perceived) independent 3rd party standing.
Great question over at StackOverflow.... How did you get your first programming job? The top story includes this gem:
Luckily I didn't have any quizzes or tests the next day, so I hopped into my P.O.S. Nissan Sentra and drove 3 1/2 hours home. When I got there, I realized that the only suit I had was a tan corduroy leisure suit I last wore in 9th grade. The mall was closed, so I had to make due. Fortunately I was the same height as I was in 9th grade, but the trousers were a tight squeeze.
Remember how one of the promises of HTML5 is to allow video to play without having to use flash? Looks like YouTube, who you could say uses Flash video "a lot" is flirting with it. They have an HTML5 Demo page showing off their interface playing a video with no flash involved. Looks good, it's basically YouTube and the only reason you'd know it's not Flash is if you don't have the flash plugin installed or look at the source code.
Once again this is something you'll need a modern browser to see (IE users are left out again :( Hopefully an update sometime soon will include HTML5 in IE).
Tom's Hardware scored an interview with the author of the iPhone SMS hack, where he explains what the issue was and how he exploited it.
Someone set up a nice little video comparing the Navigon MobileNavigator for iPhone and the Tomtom GO 720T.
Of course there's still now actual news regarding the TomTom iPhone app, but if you assume that the iPhone version will have similar mapping, routing, and display features as their hardware devices, it's a decent look.
Just a random collection from someone of Beautiful and Attractive HDR Pictures that (for the most part) don't suck with that "hey look at me I'm an HDR picture!!!!" look.
Another bunch of the 30 Best Free iPhone 3G Photo & Video Applications shared over by Fozbaca.
Another list of The 100 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies. Not sure if I agree 100% with the order, but they did hit the high points....
PingWire defines itself as:
PingWire is an (almost) live feed of images being posted to twitter with Twitpic, yfrog, and Twitgoo. Clicking on a thumbnail will take you to the full sized photo.
Cool and mesmerizing at the same time.
Now here's a near project, the ability to export Spore creatures to Maya.
I really am not sure what this is, but IO9 collected some Star Wars standup videos. Some painful, some funny in their painfulness ;)
What more needs to be said? Iron Man 2 Comic-Con Trailer has Leaked! Looks awesome, can't wait! looking forward to the official trailer though.
TorrentFreak pointed out that the much-used uTorrent has hit 2.0 Beta with some interesting changes for resource use on public trackers.
IO9 posted some video clips of vintage G.I. Joe. Wow, brings back some random memories from way back in the day...
Mozilla has Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 ready for testing. Wonder how good it looks?
This is possibly the most awesome bedroom I've ever seen.
iD has released the
QuakeCon 2009 Schedule for August 16th. Of note is the Carmack Keynote and the first public demo of RAGE, which I'd love to see.
If you're a mac lover, you definitely don't want to watch IceT and his Mac Repair.
I know, I know, all these Downfall Hitler mashups get tiring. I do like this new tirade against iTunes though.
Now this is interesting... Waze basically employs crowd sourcing to get traffic updates and navigation tips.
I actually envisioned something like this, letting users submit traffic information from their GPS coordinates, when I was thinking about doing some iPhone programming. We'll see if Waze has completed my vision!
Two things can be learned from The Art of Retouching site. First is nothing you see in print is real. Second is that some photoshop retouchers have no sense of restraint, and sometimes what you see in print has almost no resemblance to the original photo (as if you didn't know that already). Case in point, where's the other half of her chest!?!?!?
Hat tip to Photoshop Disasters for the first link (which is a pretty awesome case of no restraint).
Some leaked photos of Facebook For Android have surfaced. The client looks not too bad, though I'm interested in a refresh of the iPhone client.
My buddy Len pointed out that there was a new alpha refresh of Flash Player 10 for 64bit linux. He also noted that (on ubuntu) running:
sudo apt-get remove swfdec-mozilla libswfdec-0.8-0
The ever-vigilant Macenstein blog nicely lists out what we know so far about the oft-rumored Apple tablet system. Great conclusion with:
Excited? Us too. Seeing the specs laid out like this really cuts through all the rumors and really solidifies the iTablet in the mind... I can almost feel it in my hand! (By the way, it weighs between 8 ounces and 13 lbs).
A picture of a man with a cat on his head. This is how I go to sleep at night actually, except I'm lying down, and the cat is horizontal on my head, not vertical.
If you haven't heard about the NinjaWords kafuffle, here's the readers digest notes. It's a dictionary app that Apple rejected from the iPhone app store because it contained dirty words (the 7 dirty words apparently are in the standard english dictionary). Daring Fireball got a letter from Phil Schiller and has put up his response. An excerpt that seems to be part of the root of the rejection:
The issue that the App Store reviewers did find with the Ninjawords application is that it provided access to other more vulgar terms than those found in traditional and common dictionaries, words that many reasonable people might find upsetting or objectionable.
[...]
It is certainly arguable whether Wiktionary's English dictionary content should be rated 17+. I personally disagree with that. But what I -- and, judging from reaction around the web yesterday, many others -- found outrageous was the idea that Apple insisted that Ninjawords both filter its dictionary and still carry the 17+ rating.That is not the case, and that is good.
Google has closed their Recreating the Google Chrome icon videos contest and has the submissions for you to peruse.
Found a Glenn Beck video on the government cars system over at ForgetFoo. Basically there's a 'I agree' page when you go into some US government car site that these guys interpret to mean that Uncle Sam has legal ownership of your computer while it's connected to the site, and has access to all your files on the computer and they can continue to monitor and track you and you after. First of all, not really technologically possible unless you're running some sort of app on the system and secondly, I'm pretty sure clicking an 'I agree' icon wouldn't hold up in court :)
Ok, it's a bit of a cheap shot, but check out the comparison of upgrade methods between Microsoft Windows 7 and Apple Snow Leopard. In the Microsoft world, upgrading is hard. Of course, I think it's pretty obvious that if you have only one version of your software (take this as a good thing or a bad thing I guess), the upgrade path will be light-years easier compared to having 3 or 5 different versions to dance from/to).
Starcraft nerds of the world cry out simultaniously in anquish at the news that StarCraft 2 is delayed! They are blaming Battle.net in part. Thanks Aryk for the news.
An oldie but a goodie: True Porn Clerk Stories. Other links to this sort of thing (classic internet lore) over at the reddit article.
For those wanting some more options in the iPhone GPS department, a new player has come in with the iGO My way™ 2009 app, priced at $79 and coming in a North America and two European version (west and east). The app looks really good actually, with 3D buildings showing up on the 3rd person view map. This may or may not be another contender in the Navigon (here for real), TomTom (I want the stand but there's no official word on release dates) and AT&T (ugh, monthly fees) and G-Map (sketchy reviews). YouTube video of the app in operation is here.
Competition is good however!
Found this one at Image Of The Day.... a story from the Sarvey Wildlife Center about a guy and an eagle.
OK, if this tease is true, I will be a happy puppy. Seems that some vague and suggestive emails from LucasArts went back and forth, and the indication is that the classic and awesome X-Wing and Tie Fighter space sim games may be coming back. It'd be awesome to see a re-boot of the games with modern graphics and modern features (and not some lame console port please), but hell, even a re-release would be great, those were fantastic games that sucked many hours of my youth away.
Information Is Beautiful does very cool information visualization. Kinda like a serious version of Graph Jam.
Speaking of IE..... I think even the most apologist of Microsoft lovers (you know who you are!) who haven't already stopped reading this post will agree that IE6 was a horrible browser and anyone using it should upgrade to at least IE7 and optimally IE8, if for no reason other than the safety of their browsing and the overall experience you get on the web with a modern browser. The IE6 No More campaign is a set of code to insert on your pages that will display a nice message telling them that their browser is outdated and giving them a list of alternatives to download.
The issue with this is twofold though. On one hand, I hate pages that dictate what I can see or not see based on my browser (IE only sites that look just fine on Firefox anyone?) or IP/location (hello hulu). I surf some sites in elinks from a terminal session and if all I got was a "hey, you need a real browser" when I went there I'd go ballistic.
Secondly the longer IE6 is around, the longer web designers need to support it using up their valuable time, putting in hacks, or writing sites to the lowest common denominator. The idea of standards are there so that you can write something once and know that it'll look and work the same on all the browsers that users visit your site with.
Since this is just a strip of code inserted, nothing prevents the user from seeing the rest of the site, so it might not be that bad to pepper it to a few of your sites.
So anyone running the developer (and possibly beta) channel of the Google Chrome browser might have seen the "themes" support in the options, and up until today, the "get themes" just went to a 404 page. Now it goes to the Google Chrome Themes Gallery which gives you a fairly nice set of themes to use.
The one fail for this is there isn't a way to "apply" a theme, you save it, and Chrome picks it up right away, but you end up with a bunch of '.crx' files sitting in your download folder.... Still, I'm sure this'll change/get better as the feature matures.
Via Daring Fireball I found this very cool HTML5 Canvas and Audio Experiment which mashes up moving bubbles, audio, and twitter as the data stream. Works awesome in Firefox 3.5, Chrome, Safari 4,and any other modern browser that supports HTML5 and the <audio> element... IE users need not apply sadly.
Sometimes it takes something like this to truly show one of the major faults in the Linux world. I'm as big a fan as the next guy (well, unless the next guy isn't a Linux fan), but sometimes the.... "focus" of the community isn't quite where I think it should be :) I want my John Stewart smooth too!
The most awesome XKCD is going to be released in book form, so sayeth Slashdot.
Good article called Yeah, There's an App for That which goes over a bunch of iPhone photography apps ranging from adding effects to editing. Posting here so I don't have to keep clicking the 'keep unread' checkbox in my RSS Reader,
Someone at work posted this awesome gamer shirt design.
According to Yahoo Paramount won't show critics `G.I. Joe' which people seem to be reading in to mean that it sucks.
"G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" opens Friday, but Paramount Pictures isn't screening the blockbuster for critics beforehand. Only a select few writers from blogs and movie Web sites have seen it for review -- such as Harry Knowles, the self-professed "Head Geek" from Ain't It Cool News -- and their opinions have been mostly positive.
That said, I'm still going to see it Friday or Saturday :)
Quick note that Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5.2, so if you don't see a "firefox has updated, restart now?" when you get into the office this morning, go to help -> check for updates to get yourself up to date and protected against a couple of security vulnerabilities.
I'm not sure if this is real or not, but I did find some info on the much touted, and then ignored/clamped up, TomTom iPhone car kit. The article puts it at about $200 USD. A bit pricey, maybe, we'll see if this is even real.
Ok, so I did do a quick upgrade to Movable Type 4.3, and for the most part, it was pretty painless. Most of the pain associated was that the templates for the site are not quite of the same ilk that the modern software is setup for, so I need to figure out how to go and slice and dice this lovely late 90's era design into the more modern header/footer/CSS style.
A couple of new things you might notice:
Just a note to say the lack of updates today is two-fold, one, it's a public holiday here in British Columbia, in particular, BC Day, which I spent with my loverly wife at the Fort Langley festivities. I'll post some pics somewhere if anyone cares.
The second reason is I'm really wanting to upgrade this server to the latest version of Movable Type. Currently it's 3.2 which is ancient compared to the most recent 4.3 release. Not sure if I'll get around to it tonight or not, we'll see. I did a test upgrade and it all seemed to go quite well. Still looking for someone to bring the site design out of the dark ages though. Email me if you're wanting to help out.
Normal posting will return tomorrow as myself and the rest of the lower mainland drags themselves up and to work as normality resumes.
Aryk pointed me to FreeAppAlert, which gives you Free iPhone apps that were paid iPhone apps yesterday.
GI Joe Movie Battles, Destruction And Torture Reenacted In Toy Form. That about says it all :)
As this is a Userfriendly fan site as well as a link-blog, it's good to announced that Illiad is back and the 'toons will be back to brand fresh and new (other than Sundays) right away.
