Month: November 2005

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Tivo Killer?

Think Secret reports rumors about the “rebirth of the Mac Mini” as a home entertainment hub, featuring an Intel CPU and including “both Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality.” True, there are already several Mac-based living room video recorder arrangements available… but not ones that come from Apple, who can now capitalize both on its iPod success and on the lower cost of x86 chips. Allegedly, its DVR functionality will be stellar: “Sources with knowledge of the project have dubbed the latter a “TiVo-killer.”

I’m still flummoxed by the relative lack of success of the Mac Mini as a general desktop computer. Amy’s has been flawless: Cheap, tiny, silent, attractive, and 100% stable. I’d be very inclined to use a home entertainment variant of it in place of the Tivo, especially if it offered a way around paying the monthly subscription, and let me burn DVDs.

Music: African Head Charge :: Primitive
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playingthenews.com

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Playing the News, a web site supporting a (not yet released) documentary film on the convergence of video games and real war.

In a thought-provoking 20-minutes, Playing the News explores these issues and challenges us to imagine a not-too-distant future when we might read an article about the war on the New York Times’s website, and then link to an interactive game to replay that same event. Sound scary? It’s only a matter of time.

Music: McGee Brothers :: C-H-I-C-K-E-N Spells Chicken
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Relics

Scot-Mbhs-1976 Over Thanksgiving, mom finally asked brother and me to get all of our remaining stuff out of her basement and garage. Felt like a character in a Tom Waits song going through all the things I, for whatever reason, felt sure 25 years ago that I would want to see again one day. Haven’t yet finished wading, but a quick laundry list of dusty relics, circa 1978-1983:

  • Bag full of punk rock, new wave, and dada buttons and badges (I actually owned a badge-a-matic badge maker for a while), though only about half the stuff in this bag is homemade.
  • Brutally embarassing daily journals from my year in Australia, 1983. Hardly seems like these words came from my own mouth. Am I still me? Equally embarassing box of love notes to and from random girls.
  • Boxes and boxes of sealed-but-dusty MAD Magazines, plus comics: Howard the Duck, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Flakey Foont, Mr. Natural…
  • Pioneer-Sx450 Reams of output from a junior high mechanical drawing class, including this worshipful rendering of the Pioneer SX-450 stereo amplifier, mysteriously dated 5/18/20 rather than 5/18/80. Probably an early example of the same kind of inexplicable screw-up I’m famous for today.
  • Box of Boy Scouts and Indian Guides merit badges, medallions, belt buckles, headbands, and wood-burning experiments.
  • Piles of early 80s Surfer, Surfing, and Thrasher magazines (yesterday hauled these down to the surf shop I used to work at and gave them to the current employees, who were “way stoked”).
  • Boxes of class papers from high school with mortifying titles like “Toe jam through the years, or the rise and fall of communism” (Got an A on that one, which says more about my teachers than about me).
  • Hand-made ceramic tennis shoe in black & white, with real shoelace. Hand-made ceramic “anarchy A” glazed in bright orange.

The task now is to trim the pile to just a couple of boxes, which guarantees an entire weekend shot. Such a sentimental fool.

Music: Pere Ubu :: Ray Gun Suitcase

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Open-Source Merriam-Webster’s

Possibly piggy-backing on the success of Wikipedia, and using the collaborative potential of the internet to keep themselves current, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary has opened the doors to user contributions. Submissions go online immediately and unedited. And it’s catching on — re-load the new words page a few times a day and you’ll see an entirely different set.

What’s missing here is any kind of collaborative filtering. You can’t edit the “open” entries, you can’t even vote on them. Which, I assume, will soon leave MW with a “ginormous” pile of mostly garbage entries that they won’t know what to do with. And, I just realized when I tried to link to “ginormous,” they’re providing no interface to permalinks for individual words. So it’s a start, but a weak one. I’m wondering whether MW really gets it, or is just riding a buzzword, trying something – anything – to not look like a crustacean clinging desperately to the back of a giant turtle.

If they do decide to open the dictionary further, it raises all kinds of questions about their status as a lexical authority. And they’ll have lots of fun new infrastructural problems to grapple with (wikipedia consumes massive amounts of technical and human resources that the closed MW doesn’t have to think about).

I wonder what the first word to migrate from the open dictionary to the canonical one will be.

Thanks Paul

Music: Tennessee Ernie Ford :: River Of No Return
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Carbon-Sucking Synthetic Trees

Synthetic Tree If global warming is at least partly a function of global deforestation, we’re left with the problem of how to replace the de-carbonizing power of the billions of trees we’ve collectively disappeared in the blink of an historical eye. Dr Klaus Lackner has an idea: Deploy vast farms of synthetic trees, each with 1,000 times the carbon-sucking power of a real tree. You wouldn’t exactly want to picnic under one (“It looks like a goal post with Venetian blinds,” said the Columbia University physicist…”), but it’s an interesting idea.

While real trees properly dispose of (i.e. utilize) the carbon they trap, the problem with synthetic trees is that we’d have to manually reclaim the carbon they absorb. And what are we going to do with mountains of recycled carbon? “Make pencils!,” Amy suggests.

Music: Television :: Little Johnny Jewel
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Cruise/Lauer via Aliens

The infamous exchange between Matt Lauer and Tom Cruise about the efficacy of psychiatry, re-staged by a pair of aliens speaking through text-to-speech synthesizers. Back in June when the interview originally aired, it was widely regarded as an example of a typical Scientologist going off his nut. Which is why this “alien” rendering is so interesting: Take out the star power, take out the vocal intonation and the finger wagging, and you’re left with pure dialog. Without having your anti-celeb, anti-nutjob radar bleeping away in the foreground, you get to focus on the words. And somehow, I expect that most people listening to this exchange, stripped down to its actual words, will find a lot to agree with in what Cruise was trying to express.

We may not share his adamant stance, as pretty much everyone is close to someone whose lives really have been helped by psychiatry, but at the same time, it’s good to see someone famous look out on an over-medicated world and say “This is getting ridiculous.” Scientologist or not, he’s not all wrong.

Oh, and it’s funny too.

Music: Mike Watt :: In The Bunk Room/Navy Wife
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Outsourcing Outrage

SF Chronicle:

In a recent 16-country Pew poll, India had the highest percentage of citizens with a favorable opinion of the United States, 71 percent.

But that favorable perception is starting to fade as Indian employees working in outsourced call centers spend day after day being berated, slurred, and degraded by American callers frustrated both with their computers and the effect of outsourcing on the U.S. job market.

Saurabh Jha, a 22-year-old in blue jeans, says a woman phoned from Texas recently and told him that, thanks to outsourcing, “You are getting money, food, shelter. You should be starving.” She berated him for 12 minutes before she finally allowed him to offer advice that promptly fixed her problem: to unplug her computer and plug it back in. “I was speechless,” he says. “She didn’t even give me a chance.”

Yeah, uh, really makes you proud to be American. Urgh.

Music: Unknown Instructors :: I Think
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God Wants Milk

Miles: Daddy — Mommy is a robot!

Me: Mmmm hmmm. So if Mommy is a robot, what is Daddy?

Miles: Daddy is a Odd God.

Me: Now we’re getting somewhere. So tell me, what is God?

Miles: Daddy — Mickey Mouse knows God.

Amy: Miles, what does God want?

Miles: God wants milk!

Music: Dos :: Dream of San Pedro
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Server Toys

We’ve installed the Magpie RSS parser on Birdhouse Hosting for web developers interested in including other sites’ RSS feeds on their own sites. Usage instructions are in the Magpie FAQ.

We’ve also installed the PHP GD library for developers wanting to generate graphics at the server level, or to install imaging applications that require it for manipulation of existing images. Usage instructions are in the GD FAQ.

PHP itself has been upgraded to version 4.4.1

Music: The Buzzcocks :: I Don’t Know What To Do With My Life
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SpotMeta

Haven’t tried this myself, but a reader just pointed out SpotMeta, which extends the Mac OS X filesystem to include fully customizable metadata fields, presumably searchable by Spotlight.

Based on how OS X has progressively integrated some of the coolest features of BeOS, I predict that something similar to this will soon ship natively in the system. So I’m not exactly eager to start tacking on 3rd party extensions to the filesystem — yahweh knows how the two would interact when extensible metadata becomes “official.” But it’s cool to see people thinking in these terms.

Thanks David Richardson

Music: Coldcut :: Autumn Leaves