January 2010
49 posts
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Comics on the iPad
The iPad, as rumored, looks like it could be a great device for reading comics. But having a computer in the right size and form factor is only part of the battle. Someone has to develop an app for reading comics and negotiate deals with the publishers. Here, then, is my unsolicited advice to would-be digital comics providers.
Use a standard format, if possible. Give us
or
ePub files so...
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Uncoupling the Heisenberg Compensators
I wonder if it’s possible that all the worry around the Web about the iPad is, perhaps, not the iPad’s fault. Surely there’s nothing about a computer that’s just a touchscreen and only runs one program at a time that will bring about the downfall of civilization.
I do think there’s a lot to worry about how Apple’s leaning lately, though. If the iPad...
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Steven Frank on Old World vs. New World Computing →
I’ve seen the quote a little too often, but I think the computing world is about to suffer from the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”
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10″ Tablet with 16×9 Screen
Check out the photo of the device in this Engadget article. The iPad doesn’t have a widescreen display because it would be a strange shape for reading books. (I’m still surprised they didn’t go 3×2, but you think they didn’t build a few at each difference size/shape combination before settling on what they’re going to sell?)
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Comics by comiXology Concept →
Comixology already has an app out for the iPhone that lets you read comics. Here is a quick concept video they did for the iPad.
Really, I think it’s overdone. I don’t see value in being able to zoom in on particular panels individually. Just give me the page and let me pinch and zoom around. Otherwise, mimic exactly however one interacts with iBooks in Apple’s own store.
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Initial iPad Thoughts
The apparent lack of user accounts troubles me a lot. I don’t know that we’ll be buying one of these, so two is very unlikely. If I set it up for my email, Twitter account, cookies, logins, passwords, etc., anyone else in the family has to do quite a bit to pick it up and use it with his own info, or we just have to try not to pry into each other’s inboxes.
The 3G version...
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All Time Box Office Adjusted for Ticket Price... →
Avatar is 26th according to Box Office Mojo if you adjust the amount of money it made for the cost of tickets over time. I wonder if other adjustments should be made. Should we account for the size of the US population at the time? Marketing budgets?
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Flight 815 Crash in Real Time →
The plane crash from Lost, cut together to show all the footage the show’s ever aired of the event all together.
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Frantic Steve Jobs Stays Up All Night Designing... →
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USA Today Has a "First Look" at Marvel's new... →
I wouldn’t call myself a purist, and there’s no guarantee that the photo in the article is Bendis’s new Avengers lineup, but I don’t think mutants should be on the team. In my mind, Marvel has three main categories of characters:
X-Men
The Fantastic Four
Avengers
Wolverine was fine on the New Avengers, but ultimately Bendis didn’t do much with him. Spider-Man...
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Football Games Have 11 Minutes of Action →
According to a Wall Street Journal study of four recent
broadcasts, and similar estimates by researchers, the
average amount of time the ball is in play on the field
during an NFL
game is about 11 minutes.
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Coca-Cola "Happiness Machine" →
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Heritage Dr. Pepper →
Remember Pepsi’s brilliant idea last year? To do a special
limited-time run of beverages made with real sugar? Well,
theyve expanded this wonderful program this year and added
Dr. Pepper to the “Throwback” lineup.
Also: “Why doesn’t the Coca-Cola Company ever come up with ideas as good as this one?” Agreed, though the taco stand near the capital on D...
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How to Use a Semicolon →
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Brain Slug Cupcakes
A sign the internet has matured: it’s gone from being just about sharing pictures of women with their clothes off, to a place where you can show naked girls and/or pictures of your cat, to now a place where you can also share pictures of creative desserts. Ex.: brain slug cupcakes.
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“The impact of Blade Runner is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the...”
– Philip K. Dick, just months before his death, in a letter to the production company adapting his short story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”. By the way, the “final cut” of Blade Runner is available on Netflix’s instant streaming.
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The Impossible Cool's Entry for Martin Luthor... →
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“All I ask is one thing, particularly of young people that watch. Please do not...”
– Conan O’Brien
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“The game console is actually one of the ones that works the best and causes the...”
– Jon Stokes of Ars Technica interviews Google’s Matthew Papakipos and Eitan Bencuya about Chrome OS. I wonder if, over time, gaming is going to go more and more this way. The iPhone has opened up casual gaming to lots of people, and with laptops (and maybe tablets) more and more becoming what...
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The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures
OKCupid shares more of its data.
In terms of getting new messages, the MySpace Shot is the
single most effective photo type for women. We at first
thought this was just because, typically, you can kind of
see down the girls shirt with the camera at that
angleindeed, that seems to be the point of shot in the first
placeso we excluded all cleavage-showing shots from the pool
and ran...
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Man Stuck In No-Man's Land Between Two Domino's...
This report by The Onion essentially happened to us when we moved into our place. Each area Pizza Hut thought we were in another’s territory. Eventually we just placed an online order and let the internet solve it.
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YouTube HTML5 Video Player →
Sign up on this page and YouTube.com will give you HTML5 versions of their pages with higher quality videos instead of using Flash.
Update: and Vimeo, too.
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WatchTrailer for Rock Band: Green Day. I’ve had a very hard time avoiding the purchase of Rock Band. It’s like Harmonix knew it and designed a game they knew I wouldn’t be able to resist.
See also Newsarama’s interview with MTV Games’s Paul DeGooyer.
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Charting the Beatles →
Neat set of pictographs about The Beatles. Love this one:
Song Keys
The shape of these pictographs is defined by what keys the
songs were recorded in for each album. The relative
distribution of keys (with mid-song key changes considered)
have been mapped over a graph framework based on the Circle
of Fifths. The pictographs are in order of album recording.
Check out Revolver...
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Robot 6 Interviews Sean Murphy About Joe The... →
Murphy talks very candidly about some of the business-y things here, and has this to say about working with Grant Morrison:
Grant’s scripts are loose and the dialog is incomplete, but they’re also filled with very particular details about the environment, some of which are suggestions and some of which have to go in. I feel like I’m in a batting cage with the pitching machine going wild. And...
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Behind the Idea: Royal Mint Coin Redesign →
I saw this a long time ago, I guess when the design was announced, but I hadn’t heard they were actually in circulation now. Granted, I haven’t spend much time in the UK, but I think I would have noticed them when I was there a few years ago.
Each coin between the penny and the fifty
pence piece features part of an image.
They can be put together like a puzzle to
create...
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What to Wear as a Wedding Guest →
Put This On’s followup to their piece on wedding attire.
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Color Me A Dinosaur →
Neat illustration of how many Crayola Crayons colors there are now vs. when the company started, with eight colors.
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WatchSaturday Night Live: Larry King Cold Open
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WatchSaturday Night Live: Laser Cats 5
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What Should I Wear for My Wedding? →
Critical advice from Put This On, including, “one commandment from on high: do not wear a tuxedo during the day. It’s called an evening suit for a reason.”
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On Rotating The Dishes →
I think about this all the time. (via)
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Jay Leno: The Self-Styled Forrest Gump of Late... →
Andy Ihnatko’s article about the current late night skirmish is the best I’ve read on the matter. (Contrast with, say, the Washington Post’s article, which merely quoted Conan’s press release and interjected a few comments. Why not just reprint Conan’s letter and then write an opinion piece about it?)
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Handheld is for Casual
I think if Apple releases a tablet thing later this year, it’s going to prove Nintendo to be an odd visionary. They were right that casual, innovative gameplay and not cutting edge graphics was the future of gaming, but wrong when they built a console around it. A dwindling population of PC gamers aside, console systems (mostly just the XBOX 360) are where people play serious games, and...
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Nothing Suits Me Like a Suit →
Neil Patrick Harris’s musical number from this week’s How I Met Your Mother is a free HD download from iTunes.
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Netflix Coming to Nintendo’s Wii Console →
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“I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to...”
– Conan O’Brien
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E-Books - The Bigger Problem →
Thoughtful piece by Ben Hammersley about the challenges that e-books (for, say, a tablet device) pose to existing publishing houses. How do you take your current method of getting Word documents from writers to print a magazine and turn that into an e-reader-friendly thing?
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Superman: The Man of Tomorrow →
Letters of Note is the sort of blog I’d love to read regularly, but they stuff they post is involved enough that it doesn’t fit into my typical casual reading routine. I think I’d find myself just added almost all of the letters to Instapaper and then never getting back to them. Maybe with a Kindle or Rumored Apple Tablet™ I’d read them on the Metro or something.
The...
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A Peek Into Netflix Queues →
Fascinating New York Times chart on what movies are popular in different areas, by zip code. Check out the difference in, say, Rachel Getting Married vs. Tyler Perry’s the Family That Preys.
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Apple vs. Google
David Pogue’s review of Google’s new Nexus One telephone elicited a lot of hate mail. He notes, “It’s been awhile since I’ve seen that. Where have I seen… oh, yeah, that’s right! It’s like the Apple/Microsoft wars!”
I’ve seen this, too (in my more casual world). What interests me is that Google and Apple don’t compete directly in many spheres. Cellphones, now,...
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The Na'vi's Lack of Faith
Roger Ebert published a letter from a fan writing about the religion of the Na’vi in Avatar.
[O]n Pandora, the connectedness of life, the sacredness of the
forest and the existence of a benevolent higher power are all
impossible to miss. The Na’vi aren’t creatively interpreting
their world: they are merely acknowledging the obvious.
[…]
The...
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Dept. of Un-Asked-For Tech: Would You Watch TV in... →
I’m a four-eyes who refuses to get contacts
or Lasik, and you better give me a damn
good reason to put a second pair of specs
on in my own living room.
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Emily Nussbaum on When TV Became Art →
As the sixties are to music and the seventies to movies, the aughts—which produced the best and worst shows in history—were to TV.
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