Farsong Blog-o-Matic

BBTV Syd Mead, futurist, car designer.



(Watched this on the bus, and I couldn't get it out of my head)

Found here

Of course it's going to give me an error; I'm not even using a Gecko-based browser!


• And speaking of the webkit base, “Firefox seems to think they've built a better browser than Safari.”


I didn't download Firefox to-day. Mostly, this was due to the fact that everyone kept telling me to do it, and that made me not want to do it. When someone tells me to do something, I immediately don't want to do it.

Well, that, and the fact that the actual execution of Firefox's GUI on OSX, while better than 2.5's, is still sub-par. In fact, it's downright ugly and doesn't even use Cocoa! That's on top of the odd behaviour of the address bar, which also doesn't follow OSX's normal GUI standards.

Opera is no better, either — they both have pseudo-aqua interfaces that don't conform closely to OSX; while that's fine on systems like Windows where every application has a different GUI, and nothing conforms or looks like it belongs together — but OSX is well-designed in the fact that it actually tries to be uniform throughout both the OS's own windows and third-party applications. While I do bemoan the loss of both the pinstripes and the brushed metal, OSX has outgrown its pinstripes, and the system that had three different interfaces (Pinstripes, Brushed Metal, and Unified) in 10.4 has become unified into one standard visual interface in 10.5.

The third reason is because Safari is faster, both when loading and when rendering both pages and Javascript. Webkit is simply a far smaller engine. And I'm beginning to find that every processor cycle is valuable, with a slowly-aging computer, and Safari is simply lighter on its feet than Firefox. Plus, it has break-away tabs.


Though, I did hear that Internet Explorer baked Firefox a nice cake.

I just remembered why I used Opera:

( image )

Opera 9.5 seems to be out of beta, plays better than Firefox does within OSX, and it supports bookmark syncing. I might switch back to it again.

--
* Naturally, my ire at this implies the fact I have none of the listed things.

I copied fenmere, but it was started here.

Apropos of nothing, I've been wondering how tall Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo is for quite some time (like, since yesterday). I actually decided he was about 5'7" and no taller than 5'9".

So, I decided to ask the Google.

( Google, how tall is Rivers Cuomo? )

Starting off with a bang — the video Podcasts I've been watching on the bus to-day.

• Ask a Ninja explains New Media
Best (and funniest) explanation of new media on the Internet on the Internet.

• Cory Doctorow reads from his latest book, Little Brother. I'm going to have to go and read this book now.

• The Futureheads have a new album coming out soon, on their own label. Musical interlude here, with a cool music video that looks like the production of a music video.

• Things are getting interesting on the “Netbook” front, with Dell entering the fray with a computer that looks like delicious space candy. Why do you do this to me, Dell? (Netbooks are the little sub-notebooks like the eeePC are increasingly referred to as — I've got a folder that parses my RSS feeds for the words “eeePC,” “subnotebook,” and “netbook.”

• And ASUS has released word of an eeePC 1000 and a 901. Guess what sizes they are! They'll most likely have Intel Atom chipsets. I still want an eee mostly because of the SSD — all the competition seems to think I want MASSIVE HDD STORAGE in a superultraportable subnotebook netbook, when the SSD is one of the big reasons I want one of these.


• “Clean coal” false hope
I keep seeing these adds for “Clean Coal” on television, and they irk me. “Clean coal” is an oxymoron, and the produced ads are downright misleading. Honestly, nuclear fission is a cleaner and safer way of producing power. Power sources need to be renewable, not based on fossil fuels — wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power.

And from the “Didn't your mother tell you not to do that?” department:
• Two Girls hit by Train While Sunbathing
They were sleeping on the tracks. Trains have too much mass to stop quickly, even though it's going a ridiculously-slow 15mph. I wouldn't be surprised if the train, conductor, engineer, and company are found responsible for these girls' stupidity.

If there were any more internet memes in here, this video would cause the tubes to collapse upon themselves. Spontaneously. As it were, this is executed with precision.


If this is what the eponymous red album is shaping up to be, I’m excited. It sounds like the old Weezer we know and love. Pinkerton is still one of the best albums ever. “Pork and Beans” sounded silly upon the first listening, but it’s as introspective and representative of Rivers Coumo as Pinkerton was, but with a good bit of self-snark and dry meta-humour in the video, and plenty of Coumo’s personality in the song.

Though, I don’t know about the choice of the word “hoot” instead of “fuck”; frankly, I’d have preferred the latter, as “hoot” seems to send it straight into the post-ironic-rock, and Coumo failed utterly at that with “Beverly Hills”; that song utterly backfired in its intent, and was the worst on the album, despite the fact people loved it. With this one, Coumo seems to be saying that he’s just going to do what he wants (and briefly lamenting the fact he's growing older). Which is perfectly fine with me. He's always been better when he's being genuine. That's his strength, and the reason Pinkerton was so excellent.

But still, it’s a good song. And oddly, the video reminds me of the one for “The Good Life” off of Pinkerton.




June 3^rd.


I’m overthinking this, aren’t I? That’s okay, too.

The dissection of a meme:

But if Seinfeld episodes like "The Soup Nazi" had aired ten years later, think of how much more grating the reaction would have been. Millions of images of Jason Alexander emblazoned with the caption "I LIEK SOUPS." Millions more pictures of the Soup Nazi, posted in retaliation: "NO MOAR SOUPS." Naruto music videos based on the joke. Soup references in every webcomic. Soup Nazi cosplay. Peak Oil reached. Ron Paul elected President. The world's volcanoes erupt in unison. All because the Internet ruins everything.

Link

More amusing things about twitter.

Frankly, I'm obsessed with it. It helps me not deal with real life problems.

As a followup to the previous post:

I was attempting to listen to John Gruber's podcast about the Apple Extended keyboards. As Gruber rightly says, keyboards are one of the most important things that most people never pay any attention to. Consequently, the market is saturated with crappy, cheap keyboards that work about as well as the cost that went into their manufacture, despite the fact that the keyboard is used to interact with the computer more than even a mouse. It's sad that the best keyboards of today are models from 1992.

The Talk Show, Episode 20

We discuss one of the most important topics of our time: the Apple Extended Keyboard and Extended Keyboard II.

 ★ 

[Daring Fireball]

I have finally put words to a flaw of the iPod that I found hard to vocalise until now — a thing I think is probably also a flaw of the iPhone and iPod touch, and something that's apparent only to a few.

It's nothing so simple as a bad menu or a poor design — it's about usability on the go. In fact, it's all about how syncing is flawed, fundamentally.

Now, I browse and sync my RSS feed reader between my two computers — a G5 desktop tower and a Core2 duo MacBook Pro — because of NetNewsWire, a thing which has streamlined the processes of reading articles and blogs with its syncing feature*. I can read something from my laptop and have it marked as read when I get back to my desktop. When I've read the feeds for the day on my desktop, my laptop echoes this and shows that there are no new feeds to read.

Basically, the previous paragraph means that I read things on the go; I have decentralised my computing. It's only becoming more decentralised with web-based synchronisation. My laptop is not my main computer (it is a laptop that just happens to belong to me); I don't have more than my text-documents and project files on it — the desktop is the machine with my photo and music archives (mostly because the laptop does not have enough HDD storage for that function, but way more than enough room for usage as a mobile terminal). This is an important point.

See, I sync my iPod with the desktop. It keeps my music with me on the go in a way that's easier to use than listening to it on the laptop (plus, it frees my processor to do other things; I can bring my music with me and not be tied to a computer**).

However, almost every day, I find cool audio I want to listen to on the blogs I read. This is not always music, and as I said before, the laptop very cumbersome for listening. I want to listen to these things on my iPod.

But I can't.

I can't update the iPod. Syncing takes several minutes and the iPod is down for the count during the interim while. Moreover, I don't have cables for this with me. I don't even bring the laptop's power brick with me most days (the MacBook is heavy enough as it is).

I can't sync my iPod with more than one computer. I can't sync it on the go.

What I want to do is to be able to connect to the device from my laptop — preferably over a wireless network, but I'd be fine with bluetooth. The idea that I have to go back to a single terminal/workstation/computer to synchronise my files is a fundamentally flawed idea. It's inefficient. The iPod Touch/iPhone don't even sync wirelessly with the standard Apple hardware and software. It can be done via SSH, but that's hardly transparent.

Plus, the iPod goes down for the count while iTunes updates the iTunesDB. That's not necessary. In fact, the current iPods have more than enough processing power to support live updating — but for some reason, the newest iPods lag more on commands and menus than my five-year-old iPod.

Basically, my point is that the idea of syncing to one computer is flawed and I'd like some way to update my iPod wirelessly, quickly, from more than just one computer.


--
* This syncing is one of the several things that has more-or-less stalled my switch to the eeePC or linux in general — but point me to a news aggregator that syncs with NewsGator and I'll be happy. That will be the clincher.
** Like the above comment, having a decentralised computing system like (ie, an iPod with my music on it, instead of a laptop with music) this allows me to switch to a much smaller subcompact notebook like the eeePC which has a small storage capacity in terms of music and media, but more than enough for internet, text, and terminal usage.

Because I find these things like this interesting.

WELL party video, 1989: proto-online social network meetup

Howard Rheingold's vlog today features a rare gem of cyberculture history...

Nearly twenty years ago, people who had met online began to meet in person at the WELL office in Sausalito. These interviews from a WELL party, circa 1989, include me, Stewart Brand, Flash Gordon, M.D., Hank Roberts, Janey Fritsche, the late Tina Loney (the woman with the bird) and the late Bob Bickford. Party material courtesy of and copyright by InCA productions.

Link. The video is lacking only one thing: IDs for the people on the screen, as they talk. Anyone want to take a stab at that in the comments here?

[Boing Boing]

Seriously, I'd transcribe the whole thing, but from about 4:50 on, it's gold. You couldn't get this sociological stuff if you wanted to, but it's really at the core of what Geeks and The Internet are all about (and the places that conventions sprung out of). Yes, myself included. So genuine.

Specifically:
@5:50 “I use it as a blowoff if TV's really boring.” (a sentiment echoed again @5:56, and which is only nowdays becoming a mainstream sentiment — watch here for how static media like TV is broken nowdays — which echoes Lawrence Lessig's talks about user-generated media and Sousa's views on these things too)

@6:42 “You end up being in some ways more personal because you can't see who you're talking to. […] It's a strange dynamic: people can get really intimate online, and when there's a real face-to-face party like this people are kind of amazed at who they've been communicating with.”

It's subversive. It's a way of interacting that's easier for geeks. I think that Rands* had written something about this a while ago, summarised: “Geeks like to compartmentalise things. Interacting on the computer

Oddly enough, with things like Make, it still feels like the community in central California is radiating the same vibe now, nearly 20 years later. It makes me want to be there then with what I know now. It makes me just want to be down there in California now. I think I might move there after I'm done with school here. Grad studies in design? Architecture maybe? I like all these things.

I've just given you about 10 minutes of media to watch, read, and interact with on the low end, and closer to an hour if you keep following links and watching related subjects. You really do owe it to yourself to watch and read these things if Cyberculture, Newmedia, or Open Source are things you think are interesting. I think this stuff is interesting, which is why I not only repost links but also my thoughts and reactions to it. It's why I hope you read it, too.


--
* Seriously, if you haven't read the things he writes, do yourself a favour and go read them now. Witty and intelligent, he breaks down the way most geeks' minds work. He's also got some great ideas on design and breaking down applications, programs, layout, and graphic design.

I'm not about to register for free internet when there other unfettered accesspoints abound. The fact that I have to log in to use the wireless at EWU just about every hour is bad enough (and I really need to figure out a script to do that for me).

APIs for that twitter thing I'm fairly addicted to.

Quotably — Threaded twitter conversations.

Twitter feed as an image:


Who's following whom — Your Twitter Karma

TweetStats

This quarter is already busy! That's why there's been this radio silence.

Flickr has a new video upload feature, limiting videos to 90 seconds and 150mb. I like it a lot more than YouTube for short clips of things — the kind you take with the camera? Yep. Quality's really good, too. Embedding's slick, too.

So, to break the radio silence even briefly, I regale you with video clips from the summer at camp (this is actually what it is like all the time)!


Friend Herick, from Tanzania, dancing. Please excuse the fact that it is sideways. I know I do, because it's just that awesome. (Besides, rotating it in Final Cut is too much processor work for the output).



Friend Dan elucidating swordfighting for our Viking Movie (of which, only one person has a copy, and it is neither me nor Dan).



Some boys found a lizard and picked it up. Really cool (this was the same day I was running around covered in beetles). Lizards are so friggin' cool!

( three more videos! )

Anyway, I'm exhausted from this week. Run-down, harried, haggard, and quite possibly getting ill from not having good sleeping hours, so I take this time to sleep so I can actually take tests in the morning. Naps are also good.

[I just had a] Four hour nap (or something). @nicolerae was right about that. I should finish up math and get back to sleep, but this was so bloody excellent that I need to link it here. Too excellent not to.

It's twenty minutes long and you owe it to yourself to watch it.

Lessig gives a talk at TED on copyright, the culture of remix, and how it's being strangled by the law:



Also, if anyone knows where to find a good Cuban sammitch somewhere locally (ie, in Spokane), I'd gladly go with and pay for lunch for both of us or be your friend forever or something. That is how much I want one right now, though I would settle for a decent Monte Christo or even where to find a good Ruben in town.

Daring Fireball states:

Forwarding is not replying. If you’re forwarding an entire message, sure, add your own remarks at the top, as a preface. But the idea that each new reply in a thread ought to contain the entirety of each previous message in the thread is silly, wasteful, distracting, and unnecessary. The point of quoting isn’t to maintain a self-contained copy of the entire thread in each single message; the point is to provide context for your own remarks.

To which I reply:

There's no reason not to have the full text of the previous e-mail in the reply, especially since email replies in text will be mere kilobytes, at most. I can understand removing these for clarity, and while things like Gmail, Mail, and Thunderbird do thread messages by subject, not everyone uses these nifty apps.

Then again, replies can get cluttered, but when popping e-mail hither-and-yon in leu of IM (for many people) it can be better to have the entire conversation in the message.

But I am in agreement: reply at the TOP of the message. For serious. I don't read the inline quoted text, most of the time.


...

Maybe I should put inline replies in things less frequently. Or not at all.


Edit: maybe there should be a link?
http://daringfireball.net/2007/07/on_top

Cool animation; smooth and nice and of a cool design.


Also, if you want some lulz, there's a British 80s horror tv show spoof called Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, with some of the cast of The IT Crowd.