It's a free iPhone app with decent movie effects in it (2 free, $.99 for more) and it's given me and the coworkers here a lot of fun this afternoon blowing each other up and dropping cars on the office dog. Check out Action Movie FX app and enjoy!

Apparently Best Buy isn't able to deliver on all those "we'll get your stuff by Christmas" promises they made. Seems like something you'd want to check before making the promise....

Best Buy started reaching out to customers earlier this week -- you know, mere days before Christmas -- that the retailer was unable to fulfill orders placed as far back as November. Big Blue was sorry but they were canceling the affected orders. Happy holidays! Signed, your merry friends at Best Buy!

The just released Prometheus trailer looks pretty amazing.

You can also grab it in higher def from the apple trailers page.

If you didn't hate them enough as it is, GoDaddy Faces boycott over SOPA support. From the Ars article:

We contacted GoDaddy for comment. A spokesman declined to comment on the boycott specifically, but reiterated the firm's support for the legislation. She sent us a link to the company's written testimony to the House Judiciary Committee last month.

"This debate is about preserving, protecting, and creating American jobs, and protecting American consumers from the dangers that they face on-line," the statement reads. "US businesses are getting robbed and US consumers are getting duped."

Gotta say that the New Firefox for Android looks pretty nice.

Firefox for Android introduces a completely redesigned experience that is optimized for tablets and makes mobile browsing more intuitive. New tools in Firefox enable developers to create interactive mobile Web experiences.

Unlike Gruber I don't think that the scrolling and panning looks that bad, maybe not as smooth as iOS, but not what I'd call "herky-jerky" necessarily.

Nice article from Vanity Fair on Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer?.

Bruce Schneier's exasperation is informed by his job-related need to spend a lot of time in Airportland. He has 10 million frequent-flier miles and takes about 170 flights a year; his average speed, he has calculated, is 32 miles and hour. "The only useful airport security measures since 9/11," he says, "were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can't break in, positive baggage matching"--ensuring that people can't put luggage on planes, and then not board them --"and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater."

Not that I'm bitter, I got my Christmas bonus, but still, the Dilbert comic strip for 12/21/2011 hit my heartstrings somehow.

The Icon Handbook is a great site with all sorts of information about the new book from Jon Hicks. Also of note is the awesome scalable website (try resizing the browser window down to smartphone width and watch how everything resizes and rearranges appropriately).

A great Doctor Who Timeline / Infographic over on Forever Geek.

Ok, I'm getting sick and tired of the whole "lets remake everything from the 80s" trend in movies lately, but the New '21 Jumpstreet' Trailer looks pretty damn funny. Not smart-funny mind you, but funny-funny.

Marco has done it again with an amusing Amazon Kindle Fire vs. iPad 2 comparison chart.

Anyway, the main attraction of Amazon's Kindle Fire vs. iPad 2 page is the big comparison table. Other people's feature-comparison checklists always leave out factors that are important to me, so I made my own additions that Amazon is welcome to include on their page[...]

This is obviously a "fanboy" response to the Kindle, done in (mostly) jest, but demonstrating just how silly feature lists really are, because they really will never show you the real story, but just what whoever is selling you wants the story to be (though, that's basically what marketing is all about).

Wowza, the Lego Production Factory in Billund, Denmark looks a lot like nirvana to me.

Janky was open sourced today from the fellows over at github. This is a system built on top of a few other open source systems (Jenkins, Hubot, Heroku) and looks like it could be a nice addition of usable software for a small office.

Cool little video from a photographer that I greatly admire, Chase Jarvis, announcing the Polaroid Z340 Camera, a digital camera with instant printout. Or maybe an instant camera with digital? Either way it's a fun video and an interesting looking product.

Best Fails of 2011 has some spectacular examples of bad decision making and bad luck. I especially like the tractor at 1:44.

As this reddit thread notes, the fact the grand prize for Steam Holiday Contest is mad. Every. Single. Game.

Some in here I hadn't seen before: 12 Funniest Beer Commercials from Oddee.com.

I don't expect anything more than 2 hours of shit blowing up based on the First Teaser Trailer for 'The Expendables 2′. I plan to enjoy the heck out of it too :)

Looks like now that the new Facebook timeline is rolling out globally it's now available on Android and mobile. You can hit my mobile profile (and hey, while you're at it you need to check out my photography company page too :D ) to check out how it looks.

Kids Receiving Intentionally Crappy Christmas Presents Is The Funniest Thing You'll See Today. Pretty much exactly what the title says. Via friends on Facebook and the comedy of Jimmy Kimmel :)

Nice collection from Best Article Every Day. Some are a bit lame, but some (such as the Art of Flight one embedded below) are epic, and require 1080p and large monitor playback.

Today there was the announcement of The Hipstamatic D-Series - bringing analog back, one exposure at a time. Basically it's a new twist on social networking + camera apps + "toy camera" apps + the iPhone.

The idea is that you set up a group of people who share a "roll" of 24 exposures (argh, why do we have real world limitations in a digital world without the concept of a limit on the number of exposures). Each users' images contribute to the roll and are synced up with everyone else. Release date of tomorrow (Thursday the 15th).

The business model will be the same as hipstamatic, selling camera upgrades and film types, and you get a free camera with connections to your facebook account.

This is a neat idea, sort of a more concentrated and realized version of Color which took a similar tack of sharing photos, except it was a geo located sharing not a social network sharing.

There are a few barriers to having this work I think. The 24 exposures thing, having enough friends who use the app (but not so many that the "camera roll" is used up in 2 or three shots). That said, it's still a neat idea and I plan to download it as soon as it's up and available :) The possibilities for sharing day to day activities with friends who aren't around town are pretty interesting though. Imagine you live in say, Vancouver and have friends you would love to keep in touch with more in say, Philadelphia and Lexington. It'd be pretty cool to share a roll with them and see day to day type images as their day progresses and sharing your own. Now that's something I can get behind.

New to me anyway: Simon's Cat in Fowl Play. Another excellent entry into the Simon's Cat compendium.

Watch Now: First Trailer for 'G.I. Joe: Retaliation'. Via Geeks of Doom.

7 Awesome Bits of Tech That Just Freakin' Disappeared.

It got me thinking about awesome technology that we somehow ditched. The airship? Awesome. Slide rules? Awesome awesome. Mir Space Station? Boss-level awesome. And now just thinking about wristwatches with calculators makes me suffer a sense of short-term nostalgia (as in Douglas Coupland's Generation X).

Here are some of the coolest features and products that we've lost along the way to 2012.

Nice article.... Unsurprisingly a lot of the cool tech was killed by larger industries such as the RIAA and MPAA as it would make people happier and give them less money. As usual.

WordPress 3.3 "Sonny" is out and about. Start your downloads! Notable updates are drag and drop uploading, better UI, co-editing support, and more.

... and begs them to fight against their true enemy, Twilight.

I admit it, I'm Takei for George. And that's ok.

Amazing trailer for the Fall of Cybertron game posted on reddit. I don't know about you, but I'd watch a full movie if it was like this.

Of course, the actual game will be nothing like the trailer, but that's not really the point here is it :)

It's now over 5 months away, but the Men in Black 3 trailer was just released.

HoudahGeo is sort of the defacto geotagging app for the Mac. Very similar to GeoSetter on Windows, but (unfortunately) not as nice to use.... until now. HoudahGeo Version 3 was just released and it is a huge change. A reworked UI (single window now, one of the best changes), every aspect tweaked for performance, and much more. The only reason I mention it is that I didn't see any notification of the new version when I would check for updates from my old version 2.x version, and if you got your version 2 license after June 2011 you get the version 3 upgrade free.

To celebrate The 10th Anniversary of Ultraman is Airwolf is Now A Free Download. This is the spoken word album by Ernie Cline (currently of Ready Player One fame) that introduced me to him in 2003. Hilarious stuff. Definitely something to download ASAP!

Marco is softening on Android, or at least developing an Android app for Instapaper. Or at least being open to the idea of it.

I can't afford to invest months of development time into learning the platform and making an Android app, then supporting and maintaining it in parallel with my iOS app indefinitely, with so many other data points telling me that it almost certainly won't be worth the investment.

He concludes with a challenge to Android devs to use the Instapaper API to create an awesome Instapaper app which he will bless as "official" and support.

Marco's reasoning for concentrating on iOS instead of all mobile is pretty obvious to anyone who has listened to the excellent Build and Analyze podcast.

HP to Contribute webOS to Open Source. Guess they finally figured out what to do with it. Interesting to see if anything happens now....

Pretty amazing story: Days of his Life in Polaroids

His first photo was of his then girlfriend Mindy Goldstein and a friend on March 31, 1979. His last, 6,000 shots later, on October 25, 1997 - his birthday was of Livingston on his deathbed, dying from cancer.

According to Mashable, Facebook has begun Official Timeline Rollout. I have it active on my personal account, though I did the hack to enable the facebook timeline a while back, so I'm not sure if it's because of that or not. Still, privacy concerns aside, it's a cool feature with a pretty sweet presentation, and it's good to see it moving forward (so people can bitch about it, wring their hands, and then eventually start a class action lawsuit).

Announced over on the Twitter Blog is the new mobile version, web look, and Tweetdeck look.

We'll be rolling out the redesigned Twitter over the next few weeks. You can see it immediately on the just-updated versions of mobile.twitter.com, Twitter for iPhone, and Twitter for Android. You can get early access on your computer by downloading and logging into Twitter for iPhone or Twitter for Android. We're working on updates for other apps, such as Twitter for iPad, and will share news as they become available.

You can hit fly.twitter.com to see more.

HDR: Before and After is a pretty impressive collection of HDR images showing the before/after in a cool flippy javascripty thing. A nice illustration of when HDR does work and what you can do with it.

The fine folks at Evernote have gone absolutely bonkers and just released Evernote Food and Evernote Hello, two specific apps for remembering food and getting notes about people.

Six months ago I mentioned the OpenPhoto kickstarter project, and now, six months later, they open the doors (if you have an invite code). The full writeup is over at Hacker News and according to @openphoto they're a bit overwhelmed right now (but are saving invite requests).

Huge kudos to these guys for making this happen and it's a very cool project. My best wishes to them!

Cool, Shaw is launching WiFi Trials in Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton. Course, you have to have an @shaw.ca email account (and who uses those?). Still, free wifi is nice, and better than all the "free" wifi that pops up unprotected and then gets you to pay for it when you join. Here's a list of more info and hotspot locations.

Via the nmap hackers mailing list (and Gruber): Nmap Hackers: C|Net Download.Com is now bundling Nmap with malware!

People still use download.com?

Thanks Aryk - Eight Ferraris in $4M pile-up.

Eight Ferraris and a Lamborghini -- plus a Toyota Prius -- were among the vehicles involved in the crash, which witnesses said happened when a speeding car slid across a wet road surface.

All I can say is "oh my".

Well, as I predicted, it hasn't been all that long and a Siri Port For the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G has been Released. Not strictly legal as it requires some files from the 4S that aren't publicly available, so we'll see how long before it's taken offline. Until then though, the Cydia store has it up and ready for your jailbroken iDevices.

Kindle Touch compared to Nook Simple Touch, Kobo Touch, and Kindle 4 - Marco's review.

A bit of a mashup of Avatar and Star Wars Episode 1 and 2.... but still, the Second 'John Carter' Trailer is online.

So when Path launched version 2 of their iPhone app a couple of days ago I though "meh". The app isn't even on my iPhone anymore as when it first launched and I checked it out it was YAIPSA (Yet Another iPhone Photo Sharing App). I heard a couple of people mention that it had a very and good UI, so I grudgingly re-installed and logged into my account.

I love it. Love it. I'm not a huge UI guy but even a goon like me can recognize how good it is.

Basically path is like facebook, but private by default, a limit on friends (50) to keep it to your "real" friends (not your facebook friends) and lets you create a news feed (sorry, "path") where you can share things about your life, places, people, thoughts, music, and images. I'm not huge about sharing everything in my life (well, I'd like to think I'm not), but the private by default and limited friend list means that (in theory) you're sharing things that you care about with the people you actually care about.

Again the UI is gorgeous, and all sharing is distilled down to a single button, which works really well. For a extended look and interview with the founders, check out the prolific Robert Scoble's interview below, which includes a bunch of neat tidbits about the design and how they got to where they are now.

Path 2 is now available for iPhone and Android.