Why You Should Never Pay More Than $10 For HDMI Cables. Something to pass on to your Monster Cable loving friends and family.
Not that I'd advocate this of course, but the Crash jQuery Plugin is there to use if you need to for some reason.
Seriously though, crashing someone's browser isn't cool, cause lets be honest, the people that are still running ie6 are either a) people like your grandmother who doesn't know any better, or b) people have have to because they work with some sort of antiquated company or software that requires it.
Course, these people aren't going to be surfing to sites that will have jQuery enabled anyway....
IBM Developerworks has a great article with An introduction to Rails 3.
For those xkcd fans out there, you'll be hapy to know that the game from the last comic, 'flatland' is
real. If you don't get any of this stuff, check out this video of Carl Sagan explaining it for us mere mortals. Bonus: or this.
Holy crap! After seeing this MacBook Pro SSD/HDD Performance Comparison I'm thinking that if a 200G SSD drive wasn't $799 CND I'd be picking one up in a second!
The Engine Yard guys go over The Lowdown on Routes in Rails 3, for those rails folks so inclined.
Well, reddit asked the question about about your best April Fools Prank gone wrong and I decided to reminisce the infamous User Friendly april fools day prank from 1999.
Ahh.... memories....
An awesome explanation of elementary resource-locking strategy. Hilarious.
Google Chrome Set to Gain Integrated Flash Player Plug-In. Not sure if I like this, or if I should attribute this as a poke at apple's lack of flash support on the mobile platform from google.
As a first step, we've begun collaborating with Adobe to improve the Flash Player experience in Google Chrome. Today, we're making available an initial integration of Flash Player with Chrome in the developer channel. We plan to bring this functionality to all Chrome users as quickly as we can.
Via @curtismchale (again) comes 50 Inspiring, Awesome & Stylish Mac Setups. Mac fanboy or not, these are some sweet setups. I particularly like the iPhone holder in this shot.
Very cool video of a game called Breach. It's a first person shooter that also uses a cover system from 3rd person shooters, and has a destructible and degradable environment. I think my mind is blown.
This game will be available for a mere $15 on XBox and PC this summer, and has also been the victim of some drama lately with an attempted source code theft.
More info on the website.
Via S comes this fantastic collection of images of the World's Most Stunning Data Centers. Ah, I can dream...
I don't care if you're a gamer, love or hate Portal, but this video of kids singing Portals "Still Alive" will make your Monday just that slight bit better (crappy camera work non-withstanding).
Christopher Blizzard blogged a beautiful expression of frustration, a really great song about the frustration of web devs and IE :) Funny and catchy.
The Steam on Mac - Beta Application is now open. Note you will need to do this from your mac so you can send along the 'about this mac' information.
Git Ready is a site that looks to collect and display tips and tricks for learning git for users of all levels.
Pretty epic video about hanggliding: RUSH HOUR DREAM. Ah, I wish.
Moving up in computer size, we go from smartphones to netbooks, with a link to The definitive Netbook Hackintosh guide, which lists what parts of what netbooks will work if you want to turn a netbook into a hackintosh running Mac software.
Sounds like the new hotness is The HTC HD2 from T-Mobile. Short story is it's a chunk of sexy hardware (iPhone-esque), running a sexified android Windows mobile.
Some more info and video at Engadget, Gizmodo, or you can check out the official site. Looks nice, though not sure how YAABH (Yet Another Android Based Handset) will do against the iPhone. Also the Gizmodo review is titled "A Tragedy", but I'd be interested in ya'lls take.
Update: OMG apparently I'm an idiot. I was told last night about this and that it was android based, but actually reading the articles now it's Windows Mobile based (not WinMob7PhS based, but Wince 6.x based). Oh my.
Update2: The one I was actually thinking of was the HTC EVO 4G, which is actually the Android powered one :)
Ok, assuming that this Sneak peek of Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop is included in CS5, that's totally worth the price of admission, says the photographer in me, especially the one that loves panoramas. Watch till the end to be sure.
If you remember the Content Aware Scaling from CS4, this is sort of the opposite, basically the ability to fill in an area that has a non-simple surrounding. Healing brush works well for the simple case (ie: a dot on a grassy lawn), but if you're trying to do something more complex, it's a huge PITA. This looks to be an epic addition to your photographers toolbox.
Video of how the Nintendo 3DS might do 3D, based on a DSI game.
The game in the clip above is called 3D Hidden Picture. It's a DSiWare puzzle game, available in Japan, that uses the DSi's camera to track the movement of the console, and adjust the image accordingly to make it appear "3D".It's entirely feasible - taking into account Nintendo's obsession with keeping the cost of its hardware down - that Hidden Picture is a pointer towards how the 3DS will work.
Step 1 - duplicate a Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 map
Step 2 - see if a real soldier can do it better than a gamer can virtually
Step 3 - Profit!
Check out the video.
Cool screenshots and thoughts on the design process on the Instapaper Blog.
Saw on Camera Dojo that Lightroom 3 beta 2 is Now Available. Native canon/nikon tethering, improved performance, and support for managing video files. Looking forward to playing with this!
Shacknews has some Portal 2 Character Concepts, and a Screenshot. Looks like a triumph, I'm making a note of this.
Seems that Opera Mini has been submitted to the App Store. Now to see if/when it shows up on the other side. Google voice is in a perpetual state of not-rejected-not-accepted, while other app updates have been coming through in 24-48 hours. Guess we'll see if Opera Mini violates the "no duplication of iphone app functionality" clause. Assuming we need another browser on the iPhone that is. Not that Mobile Safari is the be-all and end-all, but do we need 2 (or 4, or 100) mobile browsers for the iPhone?
That said, looking at the video on the page, the UI is pretty nice, and if you don't mind sending all your data through the Opera caching servers, the speed does look dramatically better. Ok, I'm sold, gimme Opera Mini!!
You can keep up with how long it's been with the Countup page.
This bubbles perv video is probably NSFW, but it's also pretty funny. And pervy. But really funny.
Well-Placed Pixels is a collection of shots of beautifully designed software. Some of it can be as simple as an iPhone currency calculator, but it's more a celebration of visually great apps (all iPhone or Mac mind you, not sure if that's cause it's a bunch of fanboys running the site, or just cause.... well, I'm just sayin'). Via The Grubinator.
No, not shameless promotion, but if you picked up the latest MacHeist you got CoverScout, and you might be a bit of a dummy (like me) and need a good tutorial on how to Tidy Up Your Album Artwork. Like that by default it only looks in your ~/Music directory instead of where your music might actually be stored (like say, having it on a NAS drive, like me). I thought it was working way too fast...
Good stuff on the AppStorm website for putting up the tutorial. Now to wait for 33,000+ songs to get indexed.
Nice little article on how to Build your own Drobo-Replacement based on ZFS. Of course, there have always been ways to replicate what a Drobo does in Open Source, and lots of criticism about the high cost of the Drobo, but the fact is that I have one and recommend it freely (though if DR wants to pay me I'll pimp it out more!). You are paying for the ability to plug in a black box (in the literal sense as well as the software sense) and have it Just Work and do what it should when you pop in some new drives, instead of mucking around at the command line to expand your raid sets or deal with resyncing.
If you can't afford the drobo though it's a good article on how to set up something that does mostly the same thing (in some ways better, in some ways worse).
In a story entitled Source Is Not a Democracy, Slashdot takes on the debacle that's been created by Ubuntu moving the window buttons from the right to the left in the latest iteration of their Linux Desktop release. Probably the most best comment is the one entitled -1 Troll, where Ubuntu is noted as just a contributer with a very popular source tree, and it's noted that everyone who runs Ubuntu also has the ability to change the buttons to be wherever they want (where or not they can or not is another question).
Personally I think this is the biggest non-story to create a story in the open source community, but then again, I'm a linux and mac fanboy who can deal with buttons on either side of the window, as long as alt-f4, ctrl-w or alt-tab work like they should :)
Very awesome Color Theme Generator for Vim/EMACS and TextMate from a link on reddit. Great work from Sweyla.
WELCOME TO INTERNET! (warning auto playing sound) is cheesy and awful, but is totally going to be my new home page. From reddit.
Heard on TWiT this morning that the Neato XV-11 from Roomba is the new hotness (in a very boring way) in that it's a Roomba that cleans in a back and forth line instead of the drunken circles that the normal Roomba's do.
Hows this for a good deal, if you're into photography you can watch Captured By The Light, a 2.5h webcast, free. Sweet! Kudos to David Ziser for making this available.
Before you watch the Predators Trailer embedded below, make sure you hit the '720p' setting, and turn off the lights, and turn up the headphones. I'm really looking forward to this one :)
After a slew of Alphas, the latest release of Ubuntu has hit Beta. You can see more information at the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Technical Overview page. Looking forward to seeing how this works on my home machine!
Awesome sketch from College Humor on Internet Trolls. Best 2 comments are the "usenet flame war of '99" and the Steve Jobs one. Great stuff as always.
I don't normally pimp random photos, or Trey Ratcliff's work in general, as I assume that everyone already reads his blog. However the latest shot is frikkin' amazing, and best viewed large and on black (click the image to view it). Amazing detail and beautiful HDR work.
Great list of The 20 Greatest Shows Canceled By Fox Before Their Time. Some real classics in there, but some that I've never heard of (though the 'counting with Bruce Springsteen' sketch on the Ben Stiller show clip is great).
Sadly it looks like most of the video clips have been pulled by.... Fox. *sigh*. Tell me again how video clips of cancelled shows is going to threaten them?
Another great set of images of the 2010 Winter Paralympics at The Big Picture. Pro tip (thanks MacBreak Weekly) you can use the j and k keys to move up and down the pictures.
This chat roulette video from Casey is good and goes in and defines what this new phenomenon is all about.
Snuzzy has a video of an Alpaca on a surfboard.
Sometimes the world really just doesn't make sense.
GetHuman.com is a directory of numbers and tips to get a real person on the phone when calling those big companies.
John Gruber points to the "No Dashes Or Spaces" Hall of Shame, showing off stupid sites that can't figure out how to parse CC numbers with spaces or dashes in them.
Boingboing has a horrifying story about a Happy Meal that shows no decay in a year on a shelf. Either it's terrifying that that stuff is eaten (cause it's so damn good) or good to know it'll survive the apocalypse and sustain the survivors....
Ruby Best Practices - Full Book Now Available For Free!
That about says it all! Kudos to the author for doing this, and please donate and support him!
Another great find from Aryk - Top 10 Things That Annoy Programmers over at Kevin Pang's site. I agree with all of these.
From MIX '10 comes some Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview Info. Short story: HTML5, hardware acceleration, and a public download that's appears to be available (Vista SP2 + only).
Personally I don't care about the IE9 rendering engine that much, even if it's faster than chrome/webkit/mozilla by a factor or 10x. What has put me off IE again and again is the user interface that sits around the rendering engine. The feel of it is sluggish and feels just.... "bleah". The big long list of icons to the right of the tabs, the menu bar sitting in the middle, the weird button/dropdowns for things like suggested sites, the little icon that pops up every time I select something and the huge long context menus.... Yech! I'm sure some of these things can be turned off, but honestly I don't get far enough to even bother, cause I just use IE to download firefox/chrome.
However for you fine readers, I'll take a bullet and am installing it on my home machine and will give it a run and report back. Who knows, maybe MS has taken the Windows 7 and Zune approach and hit one out of the park this time?
Update: OK, so the download is a tech preview, of no use to "normal" users as it is basically a rendering window with no UI. Only 55/100 on the ACID3 test, and the one quick test of the HTML5 site I tried (this canvas experiment) failed. The YouTube HTML5 site also doesn't work, but that could be a browser detection issue. Still, I have hopes that the speed/html5/css3 demos that they are showing off turn out being real in the end. Bringing these new technologies (blah blah not an official standard yet blah blah) to the browser that still (somehow) has 70%+ of the market (or whatever it is these days) is a Good Thing.
Oddee.com has a good list of 10 Funniest Wedding Fails.
Kudos to James Strocel for pointing me to the Death Star vs Force comparison chart.
College Humor has a great Chat Roulette Piano video. The guy doing the piano has got some good skillz too!
The Color Fields Colr Pickr allows you to select a color, and it will show you images from Flickr with that color. Pretty simple, but really cool.
Kevin Rose has video of Leo Laporte crowd surfing during the Diggnation filming. I anticipate more of this when the Diggnation episode comes out on Tuesday.
Nice video showing some great Rock Climbing Photography. Well, the videos are ads for Nikon, but the video and stills are awesome, and the scenics out at Yosemite are gorgeous.
Aryk sent over a comic on The Difference Between Firefox, Opera, Explorer & Safari via The Next Web.com
I have to give Vimcasts some advertising and props. I've been using Vi/Vim since I was introduced to Unix in 1994 or so and learned new things in the first podcast. That's either a great compliment to Drew Neil or saying something about my ability to learn new things over almost 15 years :) Either way, if you use vim at all, this is a must-subscribe.
Apple has put up their iBooks page with some extra details on the (available for pre-order today!) iPad iBooks software. Nice that they have a built in dictionary/wikipedia access, and it also has text to speech. Wonder if Apple has the same (stupid) restrictions on some books allowing text to speech and some not? The Apple Blog has more details on the iPad features.
Found the Top 20 5 Second Films where you get 2 seconds for title, 1 for end titles, and 5 for content. Some stinkers in there, and some NSFW language/content, but more gems than stinkers.
My favorite is the guy waking up late... FUUUUUUUUU.....
Yahoo has the Robin Hood (2010) trailer. Looks like another must-see.... Ridley Scott FTW it looks like.
Passed on through an IRC channel is Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective. Really it has almost nothing to do with Gay Marriage, but more the act of iterating through a (seemingly) simple problem for a database design. A good read.
Darren threw me over the Doctor Who Alignment Chart. Interesting placement of the last Doctor IMHO, but someone has to go in that slot I guess. More over on metafilter.
The Mozilla Labs blog has a great series they started called the Concept Series, essentially a "hey wouldn't it be awesome if...". The first one is the Account Manager, where they write about a world where we've moved beyond the boringness of logins and passwords, and are outside the complexity of OpenID. There's even an alpha plugin to check out.
This image is great, the day in the life of a programmer. I'm somewhere just past the "coffee++" at this point.
Pretty damn funny skit from Jimmy Kimmel: Handsome Men's Club. 10 minutes long, but worth it. Thanks S for the link.
The google reader folks have published Google Reader Play, a new thought on the reader. Not for me personally, but pretty cool idea.
Interesting new look at the IDE: Code Bubbles Project.
The Pentax 645D has been Announced. Again. I think. The 645D is a medium format digital camera with 40mp of resolution, backwards compatibillity with film Pentax 645 lenses, and a price point of under (a bit) $10,000. A bit pricey, but compared to the Hallelblad at $23,000, not all that bad if you're in that business :)
Cool video on the next stage in computer graphics, called Unlimited Detail Technology, where we can (theoretically) stop using those boring old polygons and start using point clouds.
Great Real Time Earth Wallpaper 'GloboCarbon' showcased (with install instructions) over at OMG Ubuntu. Not really polished, but if the screenshot on the site is any indication, it's pretty damn cool looking. Linux only.
Damn, just got into work and saw that Corey Haim was Found Dead of an apparent overdose :( That sucks, I watched him in a ton of great 80's movies... curse of the child stars maybe. RIP Corey.
The perfect gift for your wife, husband or loved one is this picturetweeting bathroom scale, assuming of course, you want to be killed. Thanks boingboing.
The Team Fortress 2 blog has answered a bunch of questions about the just announced Steam-on-Mac which I've written about a couple of times. IE:
Q: Is it just some crappy emulated version of TF2? A: No! Also: How dare you! Mac users aren't getting a crappy emulated version of the game. TF2 will run natively on OSX, like an actual big boy game for adults.
Sadly it's not the full steam catalog, but the Source engine games. Still, that's a fair number of games and people like some people I know can worry less about their aging win-boxen's hardware.
Boing Boing has a great commentary on Real and how When RealNetworks Settled on DVD Copying, We All Lost, the RIAA and the death of fair use. Not that anyone would have used the RealNetworks software anyway, why bother when something like Handbrake is out there, but still, like the iTunes music store it's something legit for people who want to follow the law with their media.
LumberJAPH (awesome title btw) has a preview of github explorer, a visualizer for github projects using the github API. Very cool.
I read this story about how the Energizer battery charger contains a backdoor and I have a few issues with it. First, agree with Reddit in this is why the world needs open source. Second though, is WTF do you need your battery charger to plug into the computer, or have it do anything but pull power from the USB. Seriously, am I an old fogey when I say that back in my day you plugged your battery charger into the wall socket...
Google has enhanced their Street view to allow you to Edit places using Street View images, for example if an address doesn't show exactly where the location is supposed to be. Sadly the 'edit' for me is greyed out, but looking forward to being able to tweak google maps a bit. Good on google for crowd-sourcing.
Sometimes you get the chips, sometimes the chips get you.
Just met Ralph on IRC (freenode #fv.rb if you care) and found this great picture from the IE6 funeral. Glad there were at least some protesters :)
As promised the official Tron Legacy Trailer has been posted. The youtube embed goes to 1080p and it runs for a glorious 2:13.
Update: Official site link with 1080 downloadable goodness.
Photo Basement has a pretty accurate Chat Roulette analysis up on their site. If you don't know what Chat Roulette is, it basically turns on your camera and connects you to another random person. Hilarity ensues. And by hilarity, I mean "mostly you see a big picture of a penis".
Portal 2 Officially Announced. Not much more to say, other than "Dear Valve, when can I please give you my money?"
Main site seems to be down so here's the cover shot thanks to the reddit folks.
As usual, Jon Stewart takes on big media coverage and Use Chatroulette on The Daily Show. Hilarious and JS at his best.
The title this is under is: This is possibly the coolest thing I've seen one man and an iPhone do, and while I don't understand the french it's being done in, damn, that is pretty awesome.
IO9 has a gallery of pictures from 15-Year-Old Sven Junga who Creates Starships From LEGO. Wow, I miss being 15 :(
Kudos to Nicolesy for this great find: Judge Joe Brown & Cheap Wedding Photographers. I'm not sure if His Honor Brown really knows his camera gear or is just repeating what his staff has researched for him, but it's entertaining and surprisingly not dumbed down camera lingo. Well worth the 10 minutes to watch the segment, regardless of your opinion of stupid shows like the "Judge [name]" and it's ilk.
Yet another reason I'm terrified to become a wedding photographer :)
People seem to think that Microsoft will Double Down on HTML5 With Internet Explorer 9. If this is true, and they can deliver, then all the power to them.
But we should expect Microsoft to go on the offensive at its upcoming MIX 2010 developer conference in Las Vegas, where, it has been speculated, the company will demonstrate the first beta builds of Internet Explorer 9 and possibly offer a preview release of the browser to developers. Several clues point to the possibility that the next version of IE will include broad support for HTML5 elements, vector graphics and emerging CSS standards.
However, MS seems a bit big of a company to steer on such an altered course, and what about all that talk of people relying on HTML widgets (I know that a 2 year old accounting program I use has an IE widget in it that's broken on Windows 7)? Hey, if they can do it and make a clean break and not keep one foot in the IE6/7/8 world with some sort of funky backwards compatible engine, all the power to them. Course, if they're going to make a clean break, maybe why not just use the mozilla or webkit engines? I know it's NIMBY and all that, but why re-re-re-reinvent the wheel (again)?
Get your wallets ready for a new computer system (or a trip in a time machine to 2015 to get a system that'll play it) cause the First Crysis 2 Screenshots Released and they look gooooood.
The
Brand section of the Ubuntu Wiki has been updated with some of the nice and fresh look that they are teasing for the next LTS version 10.04.
The new style of Ubuntu is driven by the theme "Light". We've developed a comprehensive set of visual guidelines and treatments that reflect that style, and are updating key assets like the logo accordingly. The new theme takes effect in 10.04 LTS and will define our look and feel for several years.
Someone on Digg has put together a nice list of what is known about the Portal updates. The biggest thing found here is either
According to a shacknews article, the original ending of Portal has changed.
It seems pretty obvious that Valve is bringing Half-Life, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 to the Mac. The big question is, will they pull it off. Imagine if Valve could bring, in one foul swoop, all the games on Steam to the Mac. Let's be honest, gaming on the Mac is restricted to a few titles, Wow, iD software games, and a few others that no one plays, except to say "but there is gaming on the mac!"
If suddenly Valve had all the games on Steam on the Mac, with a tried and true delivery platform, that would be huge.
MacNN has some details of a couple of teasers indicating that Valve confirms intends to produce games for mac. Namely, an image with Gordon Freeman with a Mac logo on his chest is a pretty good indication :)
Got the press release that CodeWeavers have released Crossover 9.0 (Snow Mallard), the first ground up revamp of their software since version 1.0. Crossover, if you don't know, is a commercial wrapper around Wine to allow you easily run windows software on Linux.
Thanks to my Coworker Randy for pointing out that through MacHeist that Squeeze for mac is free today. Hit the MacHeist page to generate a key. You'll of course have to sign up for MacHeist and give them your name and email....
Great job Blockbuster, Bringing Back Late Fees after all the big "no more late fees" marketing campaign. Of course, they claim they aren't "late" fees, they are and "additional daily rate". Yea, I totally see the difference there.
Another trailer for the new Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time movie.
Edward Tufte has some interesting things to say about the Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7S) interface design. Basically this is phase 2 in the new product introduction series, where the initial "ooohh! look how nice and cool it looks" fades away and some actual usage thoughts come in. IE:
On a small handheld device, screen real estate is extremely valuable. So the content-free big black band on the right margin is a puzzling waste of space, resulting in a 20% downgrade in screen resolution.
It'll be interesting to see the W7PS in actual use to see if the "oooh shiny" holds up in terms of real world usability.
The Big Picture from Boston.com has put up part 2/2 of their Vancouver 2010 series of excellent pictures. For me #3, #6, and #38 and #39 of course (sorry USA :)
Thanks again for the great shots boston.com.
The GitHub blog just Introducing GitHub Compare View. Nice way to view the differences between branches for projects hosted at GitHub.
To all my Indian friends, happy Holi (the festival of colours)!
A gorgeous Crytek 'i3D 2010' Tech Demo. HD video recommended for full awesomeness.
