punkassjim

TRON: LEGACY - Official Trailer I’m a little more excited...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:11:27 -0800

TRON: LEGACY - Official Trailer

I’m a little more excited about Iron Man 2, but still: I can’t wait to see this.

atsween: New Trailer for Iron Man 2 I may have squealed. I may...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:28:43 -0800

atsween:

New Trailer for Iron Man 2

I may have squealed.

I may still be squealing.

Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock? | The Onion

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:49:43 -0800

Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock? | The Onion:

A classic, brought back to mind by the recent outbreak of gay-rights-opposing politicians turning out to be gay.

(via Josh Marshall)

This is why Rachel rules: misseffieb:

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:26:35 -0800

This is why Rachel rules:

misseffieb:

Adam’s not kidding, this video is beautiful in its...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:18:56 -0800

Adam’s not kidding, this video is beautiful in its simplicity, and I’m more than a little surprised at how excited it makes me to iron my shirts. Seriously.

lonelysandwich:

“Ironing techniques by professional craftsmen (shirt)” - プロの職人によるアイロンがけテクニック(ワイシャツ)

This short instructional film showcases unmatchably masterful ironing technique that we’d all do well to learn from, but it’s also one of the most absorbing, delicious demo videos I’ve ever seen.

via Joel Zimmer, from a series of similarly beautiful instructional videos at Garra.jp (WARNING: ALL-FLASH and Japanese)

This brings me great joy: atsween: Twitter: The Criterion...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:02:35 -0800

This brings me great joy:

atsween:

Twitter: The Criterion Collection

What if Twitter… came to life?

We asked some of our friends to film their favorite tweets. We didn’t care how they did it. They could read it. They could act it. They could do it with puppets. Whatever they wanted. The only rules were it had to be a tweet written by someone else and it had to contain the entire tweet and nothing but the tweet.

This is what they gave us.

We hope you enjoy it.

@poeks & @sween

iPhone’s Missing Feed Reader

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:02:12 -0800

iPhone’s Missing Feed Reader:

The predicament with feed reading apps is most certainly not in the quantity of the selections; rather, the quality. This is not to say that most of the legitimate feed reading apps on the iPhone have not been developed with care — but as agents of delivery for my favorite authors, and as contrivances meant for enjoying lengthy bits of text, I prefer a simple app that does less and does it better.

Read Shawn’s whole article, linked above. It’s a little meandering (as am I, and often), but he’s right on the money.

I’ve been on a hunt for the perfect RSS reader for iPhone since day one, and as excellent as I think the major developers are, somehow every single app has a wart on its nose.

I’ve used NetNewsWire (AppStore link) for years on the desktop, so I always tend to go back to that on the iPhone. But even with the large number of improvements that Brent put into it for v2.0, there’s still something that feels not-quite-right about it. Shawn talks a bit about it in his post, and I don’t have much more concrete to add.

When it was released, I was pretty enthusiastic about Fever°, especially since it claims to enable you to subscribe to as many feeds as you want (way more than you’d ever read on the whole), and it’ll aggregate the hottest items that you should check out. The idea is excellent, and the implementation is indeed all I was hoping for…but without a native iPhone app to access the content (it’s self-hosted and browser-access-only), it falls very short of my daily needs. Several months ago, I stopped using it because I was commuting via train and subway. I’m no longer doing that, but the thing that’s keeping me away is the iPhone-optimized web UI. While pretty good, it makes superfluous use of CSS transitions which only serve to slow down the UX. Just not speedy enough. One of these days, when I’m feeling particularly nerdy, I’ll go into the source code and see if I can create my own front-end theme for Fever°…but now that I’ve made the transition from NewsGator to Fever° to Google Reader, I’m hesitant to spend the time on anything that’s outside of the Google ecosystem. The switching was getting tiresome.

Before NNW was updated to 2.0, I took a chance and bought Byline (AppStore link). The UI has a certain visual quality that resonates poorly with me, buttons that don’t have easily-identified meanings, and inferior visual feedback for certain tasks. Is it a good app? Yeah, it’s good. But with the glut of free and cheap apps out there, I feel like I would have been better served to save my money until something excellent came along.

A month or two ago, I saw Merlin post a screenshot of his iPhone, which had Reeder (AppStore link) prominently displayed. And Merlin’s not only a man who knows the value of time and attention, but he also gets quality design. So I figured I’d check it out. But even though it seemed rated highly in the AppStore, I saw a lot of negative comments about a) no saved state, b) slow updating, and c) non-intuitive UI. So I stuck with my old standby, NNW.

But today, after reading Shawn’s post, I decided to give Reeder a run for its money, and so far I’m quite happy. I realize that a) my actual usage relies very little on saved state, and b) saved state is coming in the next version.

shoesonwrong: Vampires that would make Edward Cullen their...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:42:34 -0800

shoesonwrong:

Vampires that would make Edward Cullen their bitch listed from most to least scary:

Dracula

Lestat

Spike before he became Buffy’s bitch

Spike after he became Buffy’s bitch

Angel

That namby pamby guy who only drinks fake blood on True Blood

Count von Count from Sesame Street

Count Chocula

Click through for the original on DeviantArt.

[gamefreaksnz:shotgunnoblitz]

You forgot:

Count Blah from Greg the Bunny
Count Floyd from Second City

…I’d imagine they get listed in order, just above Count Chocula.

Photo

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:22:36 -0800

Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:38:50 -0800

Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey:

nickdouglas:

Huge illustrated list of the iconic images Shepard Fairey ripped off from other art.

“I’ve never seen any evidence indicating Fairey can draw at all.”

When I was younger, I totally dug the Obey stuff. And when he did the Obama poster, I thought he was pretty well within fair use, but it’s certainly debatable. But the further he went toward 100% sustaining himself with this type of artwork (and copyrighting the derivative works of public-domain originals), the more I think he’s doing it wrong and being unethical. I don’t agree with all of the points in this article, but most of them ring true for me.

Why I'm Funny, by Joel Johnson

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:39:47 -0800

Why I'm Funny, by Joel Johnson:

An extremely painful, personal story of sexual abuse. It’s hard to read, but it’s amazingly self-aware and well-written. If you decide to click through and read it, when you’re done, go up to the top-right of the page and click on “I’ve Done Things.” I had no idea who Joel is, and having read his story, I am now blown away by his perseverance, and how far he’s gone in life.

(via Andy Baio)

Fucking Windows

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:28:22 -0800

Fucking Windows

Shaun’s working on a platformer that seems pretty...

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:42:32 -0800

Shaun’s working on a platformer that seems pretty frickin’ excellent. You collect power-ups, but rather than making you more powerful, they change the environment from 2-bit to 4-bit, then 8-bit and 16-bit. I’m not sure what the storyline of the game is going to be, but I’m loving the video progress reports he’s posting. More here.

Photo

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:14:22 -0800

In case you hadn’t seen this before, it’s pretty...

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:41:50 -0800

In case you hadn’t seen this before, it’s pretty amazing: Take a picture of some text with your phone, it gets OCR’ed and translated into your language of choice, on the fly.

(via GoogleVideos)

On Having Standards (Double or Otherwise)

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:30:06 -0800

Last week, Apple started to ban “sexy” iPhone apps from the App Store. Today, in a New York Times article, Phil Schiller was asked about a glaring double-standard:

Indeed, a Sports Illustrated application tied to its annual swimsuit issue was still available for download on Monday, as was one from Playboy.

When asked about the Sports Illustrated app, Mr. Schiller said Apple took the source and intent of an app into consideration. “The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,” he said.

Lots of iPhone developers and other commentators are throwing the “hypocrite” flag at Apple this week, but there’s a pretty clear undercurrent that many people kind of agree with the decision while also abhorring the double-standard. As Steven Frank puts it:

Really exasperated by the Apple vs. Sexy Apps thing. Good riddance, but really this is an attack on a symptom rather than the problem.

The problem is, most of us (at least, those of us who haven’t written a “sexy” app, nor do we want one) are a little conflicted about this, because we’ve always been told that “double-standards are bad.” But in this case, is that really true? Does the App Store really have to be an equal-opportunity marketplace? Are you entitled to acceptance in the App Store, no matter what the content?

It seems to me that the concept of “you spoiled it for everyone” is pretty apropos here. When a few people had boobies apps in the App Store, I rolled my eyes and moved on. When hundreds appeared, I started to think that the whole marketplace was turning into a cesspool. Over the past couple months, when the number of them elevated into the thousands, and they started taking over the “Top Free” and “Top Paid” charts, and they started being tagged to appear in every category from Productivity to Fitness to Weather? I simply stopped going into the App Store.

Apple is essentially acting as the new-world publisher, and publishers have always had standards by which they’ve said “nope, we won’t publish that.” Anyone from the past century with a dusty manuscript in a drawer, which was rejected by a publisher, knows that this is just how the game works. You can’t get a bodice-ripper accepted by a “classics” publisher.

Granted, the game is changing a bit in this century, and the rules are kind of still taking shape. But the point is, while Apple may indeed be fine and dandy with allowing some “sexy” content into the App Store — as long as it’s not pornographic — they’re clearly unwilling to publish 5000 apps of that ilk.

I’m glad they had the balls to recognize a problem and to act on it. But this all calls into focus the fact that the parental controls on the iPhone (and iPod Touch, and eventually iPad) are inherently broken. I’ll write more about that on my iPhone tumblr later.

(via merlin)

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:38:37 -0800

(via merlin)

Social Security isn't (and never will be) "unjust" unless you dismantle it.

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:03:00 -0800

sds:

What I mean here is that it’s unjust for the government to force people to save to a general fund where they will never get back what they put in. I am “saving” into the system so that the retirees have cash today; I will never see any of what I put in. The longer the scheme goes, the less benefit to all involved.

This shows a complete misunderstanding of how the system works.

The only American citizens who could potentially suffer anything “unjust” are the people who are now paying into Social Security, but would never collect on the benefits if “modern conservatives” decided to dismantle the system and “privatize” it. The system would fall apart, and whoever was the last generation to contribute would be the ones left holding the bag.

Sure, the enormous numbers of baby boomers are really gonna tap the Social Security system as they continue to retire. We’re gonna need to figure out how to weather that storm. But the whole privatization movement, if successful, could only lead to two possible outcomes: the “profit free-for-all” that we now see in the health insurance arena, or just a horribly-botched and destroyed system.

Epic Beard Man

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:51:39 -0800

Epic Beard Man:

Words cannot describe how glad I am that I was elsewhere that day. Last thing I need is to be a bystander in a full-on 4chan meme.

Video

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:56:16 -0800