Gruber gives us some end-of-the-year tidbits about the (still mythical and rumored) Apple Tablet.
Fantastic video / song / parody / tribute called Battlestar Rhapsody. Just watch and enjoy.
The People of Public Transit blog posted a video of a guy who is very Horny For Pole. Very odd. Probably from Japan based on the bystanders. NSFW if you're offended by intense man on (literal) pole snuggling action.
Seems that Demi Moore's dogs are being set on Boing-Boing over several posts of photo analysis of the infamous "missing hip flesh" cover shot.
Speaking as a photographer, every single cover image on every single fashion magazine cover has been photoshopped and manipulated. Hell, every magazine cover has been photoshopped in some way or another. Seriously, anyone with half a brain can clearly see that fashion mags take liberties (sometimes more than others) with skin smoothing, enhancements, de-hancements, etc. Demi needs to just chill the f out and bring back the dogs, and say to the world "yea, my image was manipulated to make me look my best, same as every other cover girl out there, deal with it". I think this has gone down a road that will be hard to gracefully back out of though.
Great article though with lots of pics, info and links.
Related: Analysis of a photshopped image.
This There, I Fixed It is the best kludge I've seen in a while.
Hilarious old Kids in the Hall with Dave Foley talking about the USA and Canada. Probably not as funny to non-Canadians though.
Basically Every ISP Is Trying to Scare You Into Paying for Internet You Don't Need. A shocking example of advertising at its worst from your favorite Internet service providers.
Remember the Electric Sheep screensaver? Well, now there's a 1080p HD Version for your enjoyment. Cost of entry is a 2.2G download :)
Slashdot has a link to the list of great dumb tech moments from this decade.
Glad I didn't get this yesterday when I can save another $10 today on the id Super Pack over on the Steam Store. Sadly Mirror's Edge is up to $19.99 from $4.99 yesterday... Ah well, win some, lose some.
Follow Christmas Tweets of the year to see what people are saying about #christmas. Cool site for sure.
The trailer for Cop Out, the great Kevin Smith's latest project, is out.
Nice list of Amazon.com Free MP3 Songs (including lots of Christmas music).
Quake Live has gotten a nice little holiday facelift. Link has changelog, new map and new skin details.
AppCubby has released their excellent Gas Cubby in a free, ad-supported version in the form of Gas Cubby by FRAM. I got the trio of AppCubby apps and am pretty happy. I dislike the ad-supported versions of software, but I have to say that Gas Cubby is a great iPhone app and hopefully this does App Cubby well.
The interwebs are abuz with the Apple Special Media Event Scheduled for January 26th. Tablet time? Complete rumor? iPhone version 4?
Ah, more deals... Backupify Cloud Backup is free until January 31. I've never heard of this service before, but it allows you to back up your cloud services (facebook, twitter, flickr, etc) to another cloud service. I'm not sure it totally makes sense, but backups are good right? The deal is free and unlimited backup after you're signed up, which is nice. Still cool (but remember that you need to trust any service you give over the keys to your online services to).
Aryk sent over a great gizmodo linked video of If Only Cats Hunted Computer Viruses Instead of Small Innocent Mammals. Sure it's only posted for the kitteh cuteness, but what a cuteness!
Geez, $34.99 for the id Super Pack which has pretty much every single iD related game ever, from Wolf3D to Spear of Destiny to Doom 3 to the entire Quake series (well, not Quake 4 sadly). I know the "you save $159" is a bit contrived, but still, under $40 for every iD game ever? Even if I get all nostalgic and want to play the first FPS I played ever? Tempting.....
Note: I'm not a steam shill, honest. Also the Edios pack looks pretty good if you're into those games (Hit Man, Dues Ex, Theif, etc).
OK, not for kids for both content and language, but if you've been paying any attention at all to the Kick-Ass movie, you'll want to check out the Hit Girl trailer. Not only does it validate what I've been hearing about it not compromising on either violence or language, but the action they show is (pardon me for saying this) completely Kick-Ass. April can't come soon enough.
NERROT is about as low frills as you can get. Put in a title, get a torrent file. There is no step 3.
Shacknews writes to let us all know that iD software has kicked off their 12 Days of Christmas iPhone sale, with significant savings on their games, with Doom down to $2.99 from $6.99, Wolf 3D from $1.99 to $0.99, and two others.
The latlong blog tells us that there are now 4 more cities using the Google street view imagery on the 3D buildings in Google Earth.
Title basically says it all. Video in the link shows some gameplay... pretty damn awesome!
Wired has a really good look at How Success Killed Duke Nukem. A bit of trivia from the article below:
As one patient fan pointed out, when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie -- Toy Story -- and Xbox did not yet exist.
Scruffy the Elf is about as festive as I get at Christmas.
OK, I'm not sure if after watching this unboxing video of the Nokia N900 is epically cool, or possibly the most annoy thing in the world. I'd go with "cool"!
The Opera Desktop Team have released a pre-alpha of their next Opera Browser, 10.5. Their opinion is that this is fast, really fast, with a completely re-written JavaScript engine 7x faster than the previous one, CSS3 support, new graphics rendering, and some sexy new dialog handling. More here along with download links.
I really really wish I was more of an Opera fan. It's a great browser, has pioneered a lot of the technologies we take for granted now (such as tabbed browsing) and has a bunch of new technologies that I see becoming integral in web surfing life in the future (ie: the Opera Unite feature which I've used a couple of times), but I just can't seem to get into it. Maybe one of these days I'll do a week of Opera only to force myself to use it.
Perfectly done comic by The Oatmeal. Reminds me why I avoid talking about what I do to people.
Evernote for Mac got a nice upgrade. Mostly performance and tweaking, but nice to see that 1.6.0 is out the door. Good job @evernote guys!
Great T-Shirt of "Zombie Food". When food goes bad.... hehee. Thanks S for the link.
Great article and pictures on Model Makers of Young C. Park and his amazingly crafted model aircraft.
It's not often I go "oooh" when looking through these "top X of Y" lists on the net, but the 12 Fascinating Motorcycles over at Oddee.com is pretty good, especially the first one.
Anyone who has been following the Artie Lange saga lately on the Howard Stern Show will know he's been on and off drugs, and was off last week as he was told to take a break (the audience wasn't really let in on what was going on). The clip below however is a great use of the "Hitler subtitling" meme for just this occasion :)
Note that if you're not into the show most of the references in the video won't make much sense to you.
The firefox UI team has posted some mockup ideas for the Windows Theme/UI for 4.0. Some interesting stuff in there such as putting the menu in a button, a la the MS Office button, moving tabs to the top, sexy toolbars, and a bunch of other tweaks. Screenshots in the link for you to check out.
Tombuntu has a quick First Look at Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha also known as Lucid Lynx.
My ex-boss John discovered what does indeed look like the Best unsubscribe page ever.
X-Equals is giving away their +X=IMAGE KIT, 2 years set of presets for Lightroom. Hat tip @nicolesy.
Official Google Mobile Blog talks about their process to make the GMail mobile web app faster, stronger, more feature rich (and less calories).
According to this tweet (and others if you search for rogers on twitter say that there's a data network outage on Fido/Rogers in BC and Alberta. So if you can't get your twitters or email on your smartphone, that's probably the reason.
Also this link has some more info (well, tweets from people experiencing the same thing anyway).
Update: Looks like it might have just come back. Fingers crossed that's it. To be fair this is the first issue I've had in over a year of Rogers data service.
Seth is pimping out his new ebook: What Matters Now available for free on his site. The book is on what to think and do to make a difference, gain friends/influence people, that sort of thing (from what I can see).
Just heard about, and watched, the Ridley Scott Robin Hood trailer. I hadn't heard about this, but it looks good, though brutal and realistic a-la Gladiator. Russell Crowe looks good, but they'll have a hard time getting a better Sheriff of Nottingham than Alan Rickman!
Hat tip to Geeks of Doom.
Well what are you waiting for, go check it out!!
Cool article on what Apple is doing to improve mobile Safari apps better.
My coworker H threw me over to an Impact Lab Interview with Photoshop Genius Erik Johansson. If you don't recognize the name you may recognize the work, I've seen some of his amazing photoshop work around the net.
Simon's Cat: Snow Business is the latest in the series of simple yet cute and accurate cartoons about a cat. Awesome as usual.
TechCrunch notes that the most awesome Evernote is now officially released for Android.
Interesting looking Google TechTalk by Phusion on How They Built A More Efficient Ruby 1.8 Interpreter.
A long, but completely worth the read story of quite possibly the most horrific date you could imagine... ever. I've been on the internet a while so I can imagine some pretty horrific things, but this tops even that. Yes it's from 2005, but I hadn't seen it until now (thanks reddit) so you get to share in my discovery!
Cool video from 1955 of Tex Johnston doing a barrel roll in a 707 (!!!) a "perfectly safe, 1G maneuver" to show off the capabilities to the Boeing execs.
Very cool Google Chrome extension called the YouTube HTML5-ifer which will replace the standard flash based support with all the funky HTML5 stuff, including automatically loading the best video source and best of all, bypassing flash completely.
Awesome post from Andy Ihnatko on his Lust For Wallcovering. Great poster, if I had a bit of extra cash I'd probably dot he same thing :)
Coding horror has, after their mishap last week, declared International Backup Awareness Day. Speaking again as someone who has had this happen more than once, I have learned about backups and disaster recovery. In fact, I'm happy to say that the last time I had issues, when a bad controller brought down 3 drives simultaneously in my 5 disk RAID5 array, having an "offsite" (read: USB HD plugged into the back of the server) backup saved my ass. Previous times I haven't been so lucky :)
FYI I'm not associated with Appigo in any way. Just gotta pimp out the recent update to their iPhone TODO app. The 3.2 update adds a bunch of nice features and while there are many other todo lists on the iPhone, for some reason I'm drawn to this one. Not completely because it's the only one I've got either :) However, other apps like Things or Omnifocus seem to require fairly expensive desktop software to go with it to get the "full" experience.
There are a couple of downsides to TODO though.
Again, no association, just showing some love for an app I use.
Ode To Joy video. I gotta say, Beaker is awesome :)
Cute video busting some myths about how some weapons and deaths work in Modern Warfare 2.
Coding Horror has a message that I'm pretty sure I've put up more than once. Sorry to hear about that, hope you get things back soon.
If you can help Jeff out check out his @codinghorror or hit up his recovery thread at superuser.com.
As a note to everyone, I'm trying to establish the @ufies twitter account as an alternative notification method for people if the server goes down or is having issues that I can't communicate through it. Please follow!
I honestly don't know exactly what Alan's Rock Video is, but it's catchy and funky looking.
Boing boing brings us the latest from the Techcrunch / Fusion Garage debacle. Seems that Fusion Garage registered JooJoo domain weeks before ditching TechCrunch, misrepresented production costs Boing Boing. All completely shocking to me, that this would turn into some sort of a clusterfk was completely not a given from the start. No, really.
Valve has expanded their excellent Team Fortress 2 with Demoman and Soldier updates. I think what they're saying is that every soldier -> demo kill and demo -> soldier kill is recorded, and whichever class wins at the end of the week gets a super secret weapon unlock.
Via reddit comes a link to the Guardian review of Avatar. Honestly... regardless of whatever types of reviews come out for Avatar I'm going to see it for the big-screen spectacle and because James Cameron has had far more winners than losers in the last 25 years.
Great info-graphic of sushi etiquette. Good thing to know about the wasabi + soy sauce combination.
Time has their top 10 video games of the year.
Why I'd rather be punched in the testicles than call customer service is a fantastic graphical journey into the reasons why tech support (for the most part anyway these days) sucks. I feel the same way.
Oh man I so need this: How to Start Running - Without Feeling Like a Failure. I've been running weekly for a while now and still feel like a failure!
Best Article... has a cool list of the Most Unfairly Overlooked Movies Of The Decade. Some good ones in there I've seen, some I plan to see soon.
Neowin has some shots of Windows Live Messenger 2010 revealed. My first impressions, "cool they are integrating social networks, but good gods that looks awful!" Seriously, almost a full 25% of the UI is an ad!
Thankfully I still have Pidgin.
Continuing on a Google and Chrome oriented day comes a great article with a lot of screenshots about the close tab behaviour in Google Chromee. Very interesting look at the UI design.
The Google Earth blog has a nice selection of a few spots in Vancouver to check out if you're interested in the city that will host the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Ever wanted to check out one of the funky new iTunes LP albums from Apple but not want to pay for it (you cheap bastards!)? Well, now you can get not only a free iTunes LP formatted album, but also 20 tracks of Christmas music in their iTunes Holiday Sampler (itunes link). I'm not a big Christmas Music fan, but hey, free music!
Regardless of if you care about Chrome, you have to admit that this video advertising its features is incredibly creative and cool! Also if you read more meaning into it, showing how the ad was made could represent the open-sourceness of Chrome.
Just a note that these appear to be continuing and we are working to resolve them.
Update: Looks like it was a rate limiter kicking in for the bandwidth, meaning that a semi-free ride for server bandwidth is over. However things are resolved now and we're back up to speed. As always donations are appreciated (paypal link in the sidebar).
Aryk pointed me to a deal that Gizmodo blogged, where you Buy 200GB of Google Storage, Get a Free Eye-Fi Card. The eye-fi geo card details are here.
This pains me a bit. On one hand, I don't need extra storage from Google. On the other hand, 200G of online storage would be kinda nice. On one hand I know this deal is basically hoping that you forget to cancel the 200G of space and keep on paying the $50/year, but hey, you get a $60 wireless eye-fi card for $50, plus online backup.
Some more info here as well, including some of the fine print. One of the items indicates ("...includes one free year of Web Share and Geotagging ($24.98 value)") that the Geotagging is actually a service, not built into the card.
Great tutorial on how to Setup Ruby Enterprise Edition, nginx and Passenger (aka mod_rails) on Ubuntu. There are a bunch of nice subtle things that this tutorial goes through and learns you that you might not have gotten (or have had to search for anyway) with just doing a standard "apt-get install rails" on your shiny new Linux server. Wow, english is hard for me today.... "learns you"? Geez...
Boxee Blog announces the official Boxee Beta. New hotness, changed underlying graphics library to aid in 1080p playback, support for Linux Karmic and Snow Leopard, and lots more. 9-5 Mac has some news on the Boxee Box hardware.
Google Chrome has released an almost-feature-parity version for Mac. There's been a development version available for a while which I've used and has seemed to work mostly fine for what I use. Nice to see it's gotten stable and feature complete enough to attach the "BETA" tag onto it.
The Apple Blog has details on what's there and what's not.
9-5Mac has a good demo of the new Dragon Dictation for iPhone a free app for the iPhone that seems to have good results for voice recognition.
The only thing to keep in mind here is that sometimes when checking for updates to apps sometimes you'll get notification that there is an app with an update, but when you click 'view updates' there aren't any. If this is the case, it's probably a non-local app has gotten notification of an update, but your check in the local iTunes store doesn't find any. Just log into your other iTunes account and hit the 'check for updates' button again.
It's completely over the top, and "physics on drugs" environment, but after watching the
Just Cause 2 'Vehicle Stunts' Video I gotta say it looks like a heck of an awesome game to play!
Looks like google's integration / partnership with Twitter and friends has put something pretty interesting out there. Check out the video of Relevance meets the real-time web over on the Google blog. Basically results will have "real time" results brought in with AJAX magic from Twitter, Identica, Facebook, etc in a cool scrolling box. The features aren't rolled out yet, but you can check it out on the Trends page under hot topics. IE: check out this search for joojoo.
Via S comes Space Brains: Zombified Star Wars Posters. Awesome.
Venture Beat has details on the new CrunchPad. Now it's renamed to JooJoo, will launch Friday at $499. Post title pretty much says it all. Wonder if it'll live up to the hype. Keep an eye here, the net, Twitter, etc for details from those who might have gotten a hands on with it.
So after allegations of fake reviews and various other slimey-feeling activities, app maker Molinker as expelled from the AppStore.
There's nothing wrong here I don't think, the app maker was doing slimey things, they were called on it, Apple was notified, and they were removed. Good on Apple for responding appropriately (IMHO).
If you're familiar with the excellent CameraBag iPhone App, you'll be happy to know that it's now available as a desktop app for Mac and Windows. There's a 15 day trial (no saving, images are watermarked) or you can purchase the app for $19 USD.
Gizmodo has the details for the Fusion Garage's 'Crunchpad' Unveiling Liveblog.
Basically this is the the company that TechCrunch worked with to create their cheap media pad, then a week before the release of it decided to boot TechCrunch out of it, and now is somehow releasing it or unveiling it. I was under the impression that TechCrunch owned enough of the IP of the product that Fusion Garage couldn't release the CrunchPad, but apparently not. Read the liveblog for more details.
If you've got a bunch of money, time, and hardware, then you too could set up some thing like the eight screen Google Earth setup that googlers (googlies?) setup. They call it "Liquid Galaxy", I just call it awesome.
Do you have one of those annoying "apple" people in your life? You know, the macbook lugging, starbucks swilling, must have a clean aluminium and glass desk or he cries types? (Also known as a hipster) If you do you'll be happy to know that Shawn Blanc has a great list of presents for you. From iPhone holders to $40 notepads to coffee, it's a great list :)
Via Aryk is the Camangi WebStation, which claims to be a 7" Android powered Internet tablet. Pricey ($399) and pre-order only, but if it's real, it could be cool. Wonder if this has any heritage in the now-dead(ish) crunchpad?
I'm all for people having hobbies, but this guy, who face paints himself every day with a different face, seriously is either the coolest guy ever or someone who really needs to get out more. Ironically, the whole project started one day he was stuck at home.
io9 has a gallery of Geek Tattoos,The Good, The Bad, And The Just Plain Crazy. I don't know about some of them, but I'd totally get a 'Don't Panic' tattoo. Also I think that while I'm sure she's insane, I'd totally marry this girl (if my wife said it was OK of course).
Excellent 8 part series on Creating a Web App from Scratch. Basically if you've ever had to do do this and found that you had no idea where to start, from the point of view of the designer or the programmer, this is a great resource to read and bookmark.
Laughing Squid has a link to The Evolution of the Hipster 2000-2009. Wow, I never thought that "hipster" was anything other than a fake style and word. Apparently it's not just used to describe one of those mac-lovers!
Interesting post from Leo (of the world famous TWiT network) posts that he is changing how he is paid. An excerpt:
Up to now I've been taking my pay from TWiT's general fund (along with all the other employees). Not any more. From now on you'll pay me directly with your contributions. I won't take a penny out of the operating funds.Think of your contributions as a tip jar.
Definitely an interesting move which ups my respect for Leo as well. Many thanks to West Coast Geek for the pointer.
Darren found this one, it's called Ataque de Pánico! (Panic Attack!) and it's pretty awesome. Be interesting to find out what it cost to make or what the back story is. Cool to see what you can do on a small (I assume anyway) budget. Also http://www.aparato.tv.
In their evil attempts to take over the internet, Google just announced Google Public DNS, a free service that aims to give speed, security and validity for users who choose to use their DNS service. I'm guessing that this will do similar "searchy" things on host not found errors, similar to the OpenDNS service. John Gruber (Daring Fireball) has a few quick thoughts on this as well.
So my question is "is this a bad thing?" Google has services that are part of pretty much every aspect of our online lives, should we decide to use them. RSS, phone, email, contacts, documents, etc. Is this move an indication that they're moving into providing other sorts of connectivity solutions (ie; free bandwidth from Google as long as you use their ChromeOS on a free netbook maybe?) Or just an honest attempt to use their infrastructure to make the web faster?
As an aside, check out the book Google Planet (I got it from the Audible free audio book giveaway at thanksgiving). Great look at how Google does it's things and why, and that (at least as far as I've gotten) most of their motivations are fairly pure and non-evil.
Update: I just did a 2 minute test and there's no domain wild-carding (ie: giving you back a page of ads or suggestions when you go to a non-existant domain) and the service seems speedy enough. Seems all very benign.
Pretty amazing HTML only particle system called Parcycle. A bit slow on my dual core system, still amazing to see though.
As usual, IE users need not apply until their browser supports HTML5 and standards....
Every day that I am a programmer I am thankful that I don't have a job like figuring out The "Who Knows?" Code that this poor guy had to deal with.
*shudder*
The awesome Gina Trapani has posted The Human's Guide to Running Google Chrome OS over on Lifehacker.
Wow, news that a Taiwanese man beat World of Warcraft and got every achievement means something. I doubt he has a day job somehow though. Good job Little Gray!
In the world of "who would really do that", the idea of Attaching SLR lenses to an iPhone is pretty high up there. But when you know people attaching SLR lenses to normal video cameras, this isn't that far away. Pointless, but still a nifty little hack.
Sun Releases VirtualBox 3.1 with "Teleportation", which lets you:
[...] move running VMs between machines - servers or clients, different architectures, different host operating systems, it doesn't matter to VirtualBox.
Looking forward to trying this out!
Lifehacker nice roundup on How HTML5 Will Change the Way You Use the Web.
Ever get tired and pissed off or the google analytics holding up a web page loading? Now that they have Launched Asynchronous Tracking this might be a thing of the past. Folks, go forth and update thy page templates!
Today's UserFriendly Strip harkens back to the days when I had these conversations with SilverStr, Fozbaca, Solas and Engel on the exact same subject. Those tended to go to a bit more of an extreme though, I recall getting to "I flipped the ones and zeros with the magnetic pull of the earth and had to wait a year to flip the next bit" more than once.
