September 2009
31 posts
1 tag
How Many People Are in Space Right Now? →
August 2009
41 posts
3 tags
According to a study by the Cleantech Group, you need to download 23 books for the Kindle before it breaks even in CO2 use.
Also, as pointed out in the comments, Kindle versions are $9.99 compared to maybe $15 for a new book, but you need to add $299 to the price of the device. At that rate, you have to buy a Kindle and 60 books ($900) before the Kindle’s prices win out.
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Frank Quitely's Daredevil, Superman, and More
Just wanted to share a few amazing Frank Quitely images. He’s one of my favorite artists, partly because he works with Grant Morrison so much, but also because, well, I think you’ll be able to tell why from this Daredevil he drew:
(click to embiggen)
How fantastically dynamic. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud discusses how a single panel, like the one above, can show both...
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Sending a Ping to PubSubHubbub from MarsEdit
MarsEdit is a handy Macintosh application that I use to compose entries for my website. Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t understand, when I publish a post with MarsEdit, none of Movable Type’s plug-ins seem to fire off. At present I use Multiblog to rebuilt my Debigulated URLs blog, which allows short URLs to work for all of my main blog’s entries, and I use MT-PubSubHubbub to...
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The Conversation
A few weeks ago, Khoi Vinh wrote “Conversation Pieces” about one of my all-time favorite movies, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Then it was playing in The Galaxy Hut last week when I was hanging out with @princeofwhy. And now Jim Emmerson’s Scanners blog writes an Opening Shots piece on it. See also, from a few years ago, “What Netflix Could Teach...
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If/Whether
Here’s a finer point of grammar that I probably learned years ago. On page 763 of Infinite Jest, Mario is talking to his mother:
Mario: “How can you tell if somebody’s sad?”
Avril: “You mean whether someone’s sad.”
Not being able to recall the distinction between “if” and “whether”, I asked the question of the Infinite...
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Annotated map of all of the events of The Walking Dead (which I’m a bit behind on).
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Mac OS X Over The Years →
It’s neat to see how the interface has been refined over the years.
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Project Runway Episodes (Barely) Online
Staci D. Kramer reports that Lifetime will not offer Project Runway on iTunes. You can watch it on Lifetime’s website starting two days after it airs, but that’s it. This quote by Lifetime Digital’s Dan Suratt shows, characteristically, that Lifetime still thinks of the internet as a nuisance that detracts from their real business of television: “I think what it really goes...
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Labeling Tie-Ins
For future reference, Secret Invasion reading order.
One of the things that annoys me about superhero crossover stories is that they’re very hard to reread later. Secret Invasion was a miniseries with tie-ins in New Avengers and Mighty Avengers. Many of those (horrid) tie-in issues respond to events in the main series, so it’s important that they be read in the right order. But how,...
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Popular Collective Nouns on All Sorts
I really love this: All Sorts, a Linguistic Experiment scrapes Twitter for new terms of venery. The game of venery, of course, requires a bit of linguistic finesse, so it’s fun to see others’ ideas.
See also, of course, An Exaltation of Larks.
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Movable Type PubSubHubbub Plugin
Movable Type Plugin to ping Google’s PubSubHubBub when you post. I’ve installed it but don’t know of a good way to test it out.
Update: strike that. FriendFeed displayed this post faster than I could switch windows to watch for it.
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PETA vs. Women
The Onion’s recent video Advocacy Group Decries PETA’s Inhumane Treatment of Women is a parody, but isn’t this a valid critique of PETA? My typical policy is just to ignore everything they do because I think their stupid stunts are harmful to the cause, but it’s always bothered me that they parade women around for publicity stunts. Says a fake Onion PETA spokesman:
We...
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30 Real Animals with Science Fiction Names →
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Dive into HTML 5, an online book by Mark Pilgrim, with illustrations from the public domain. Looks like it’ll be published in a few months.
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Rich Sommer hosts a heavily redacted tour of the Sterling Cooper set.
Also discovered: The Footnotes of Mad Men.
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Shaun Inman releases Lessn, a very simple URL shortener.
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The Impossible Cool →
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MMO Champion publishes leaked information about the next World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm. With the presumed the defeat of Arthas coming at the end of the Wratch of the Lich King expansion, Blizzard has played out most of the plot threads left over from Warcraft III. Cataclysm will let them move on to newer storylines that (more or less) started in WoW.
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I was just talking earlier today about how much cooler technology looked when switches, knobs, and lights all looked like airplane components or parts of complicated radio equipment. I think you could make some money selling retro wood console cases for HDTVs. Speaking of: The Tech of Mad Men.
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Two great Beach Boys Pet Sounds links today:
A capella versions of the album, which really let you hear how cool their harmonies are.
Julia Nunes plays God Only Knows on a Ukulele
(Funny how YouTube has made it so easy to share media, people just upload music with static video. Surely there’s a better place to share music, but YouTube is easy and known.)
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Onyxia Raid in 3.2
My World of Warcraft account is inactive, but this news makes me want back in!
This permanent update to Onyxia will convert the dungeon
into 10- and 25-player modes. We will be adding new
items to Onyxia’s loot table that have the same model as
some of the classic loot from this dungeon, like Tier 2
helms, with stats updated to match the current level of
content. There will be...
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Harmony Comes to the Nation is a new, short Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic on Dark Horse Presents by Jane Espenson and Karl Moline (artist on previous Buffy book Fray), featuring Harmony and Stephen Colbert.
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Twitter will soon provide an official way to retweet. From the sketch they showed, I liked this implementation. Instead of junking up my timeline with the noise of “RT: @username”, I’ll just see the referenced post. Much better.
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Short Film Freak Central documentary on the cinematography of Mad Men. I love the point about the show not using steadycams to give it an older look.
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Epitaph One
The 13th episode of Dollhouse, which Fox didn’t air, is now available on iTunes.
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Steven Soderbergh on Aspect Ratios
Essay by Steven Soderbergh on how premium movie channels are showing anamorphic films in flat. Not ever having had HBO (nor even cable right now) I haven’t noticed this, but Netflix’s Instant Queue movies all seem to be 16×9. I haven’t bought any movies from iTunes, so I don’t know what they’re doing. See also An In Depth Talk with Leon Vitali, about Stanley...
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What I like about this video, n00b Boyfriend, is how attractive the daughter and family are vs. the boyfriend. It would have been easy to make the gamer characters look like dorks, but the joke works way better making them look normal.
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Using Movable Type as a Simple URL Shortener
With today’s news that tr.im is shutting down, I decided to take on a small project and write a URL shortening service within Movable Type. It’s probably not the most elegant solution, and could well break some best practices, but it works for now.
First, I created a new blog in Movable Type. With ely.fm I already have a pretty short address, so I have the blog at...
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Grant Morrison's 18 Days
Bleeding Cool reports:
Liquid Comics and Perspective Studio are pursuing the property
as a CGI drama as 18 Days: The Mahbharata Retold, for
broadcast next year in multiple formats depending on territory
and format—2×90 minute TV movies, 6×30
episodes, an extended 200 minute DVD release or
18×10 minute web episodes. There will be online and
console games alongside the show and...
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Neat article on the original movie Buffy versus the series. There aren’t many other cases where you can see how a screenplay can get mangled as it becomes a movie and then compared it to a TV series where the creator was able to bring it to life. The American President and The West Wing come to mind. Comments are open if anyone has other examples.
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A health-conscious zombie might wonder, how many calories are in a human brain?
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ThisService is a handy MacOS scripting doohickie you can use to turn any Perl, Python, etc. script into a systme-wide service. I’m using it to convert older weblog entries from HTML to Markdown.
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Wal-Mart is going to start selling knock-off Girl Scout cookies, which is completely messed up.
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Apple forced the makers of a dictionary to remove “objectionable” words before allowing it onto the App Store. Waiting for that Steve Jobs blog post saying they’re changing how they’re going to run that any day now…
I’d been looking for a good iPhone dictionary and was unhappy with the Dictionary.com one, which I deleted almost immediately. Since I already...
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Timeline of Pepsi and Coca-Cola Logos
See Pepsi and Coca-Cola’s logos over the years. The chart is a little unfair in that Coke changes its can design just as often as Pepsi, but not its logo. Still, does anyone prefer the new Pepsi logo?
Update: Brand New fact-checks the image, showing that Coca-Cola really has changed over the years.
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10 Muppets and Their Mad Men Counterparts →
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Netflix is reportedly going to start offering its Instant Queue streaming service for the iPhone and the Wii. This makes a great value-add for the Wii, which has been on the XBOX for a while now. It’s already plugged into your TV, which is likely placed in a better spot for movie-viewing than your computer.
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Hmm. Google’s launching a campaign called “Going Google” designed to get companies to switch to Google Apps from (though unstated) Microsoft stuff. I do think that Gmail provides about the best email experience there is, be it desktop- or web-based, I don’t think Google Docs are at all ready for real use as a primary authoring tool, bloated and annoying as Word is.
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Misuses of Twitterfeed
Blogger’s website today advertises a “Tweet Your Blog” service from Twitterfeed, whereby you can have it automatically post a tweet whenever you write a blog post. In other words, you can fill up your Twitter account with crap more easily!
But let me back up for a moment…
I’m a firm believe that things have their place, even on the internet. One shouldn’t,...
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Hiding the "n People Liked This" Thing in Google...
Google recently added some social features to Google Reader that I found to be terribly distracting. The footer of every post now has a button you can press to show that you “like” that post. Any post that anyone “liked” now has, at its top, a smiley face with “n people liked this”. Annoying because:
I don’t care how many people liked that post. I...