http://www.aquick.org/blog entertaining hundreds of millions of eyeball atoms every day Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:10:45 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There's a bit of a debate going on about whether the lack of cooking at home is responsible for people eating unhealthily. Matt Yglesias has a piece arguing that cooking at home isn't fundamentally different from restaurant cooking, and "If someone - Jamie Oliver, for example - devised an appealing ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2009/10/15/cooking-at-home-is-different/ "I have purchased a number of household appliances, more than a few of them made by the Dyson corporation, and never have I been so embarrassed about any of them as I am about this Dyson DC16. I am embarrassed for myself that I didn’t immediately return this unit after ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2009/09/22/attn-dyson-inc/ We used to have a 6-at-a-time Netflix plan. We'd get 6 movies, but then sometimes we'd go months before watching them, or even just deciding that enough was enough and sending them back. And frequently, even among those 6 movies, there would be nothing we wanted to watch on any ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2009/07/22/something-interesting-about-scarcity/ First, I loved it. I think it was the best movie I've seen in a long time. It treated the source material with respect, but established its own direction. The casting was basically flawless, and each of the major characters settled into their respective roles as gracefully as putting on ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2009/05/11/thoughts-on-the-new-star-trek/ It just doesn't look like a very good movie to me. I didn't like 300 terribly much. It was visually accurate with the book, but I found it fairly boring for most of the way through. I'm tired of ILM demo reels masquerading as masterwork films. The actors, with the ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2009/03/06/why-im-not-going-to-see-watchmen-tonight/ BoingBoing reports that new rules on consumer safety threaten to put small producers out of business because the testing is too expensive. http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/10/consumer-safety-rule.html I have a few thoughts on this. This is a pretty common libertarian vs. nanny state disagreement - should consumers be allowed to make their own choices, but I don't ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/12/10/toys-and-testing/ I've long been looking for a good replacement for teflon for making classical french omelets, and I'd pretty much given in to the idea that it needed to be teflon or nothing. Cast iron (enameled or not) gets a nice big hotspot in the middle from the gas flame, and ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/11/11/possibly-the-perfect-omelet-pan/ Get out there tomorrow and do what you feel you need to. This country has gone astray, and we need to fix it. The next four, eight, twelve years are important, and what you do tomorrow will dictate the path for those years. We need strong leadership who will listen ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/11/03/vote/ Some number of years ago, I used to think that the ability to get any kind of fresh produce any time of the year was a mark of an advanced global civilization. We had conquered a small piece of space and time and weather to bring me blueberries in February. ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/11/01/why-i-eat-what-i-eat/ My company (Morningside Analytics) has just launched our Political Video Barometer, which tracks the movement of YouTube videos through conservative and liberal blogs: http://www.shiftingthedebate.com/shifting/videobarometer.html The Barometer is updated 4 times a day and allows you to see which new videos are starting to break through within either the conservative or liberal blogs ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/10/24/shifting-the-debate/ This is a list I put together for my father. I thought you'd enjoy it. Got anything to add? I've been putting together a more detailed response for you. There's a reason why nearly every computer professional I work with has switched to the Mac in the past few years. This is ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/10/16/why-the-mac-is-better/ For some time, I was a staunch Libertarian. That lasted until I started to examine the boundary cases where Libertarianism didn't seem to offer a good answer. I still hold a lot of those principles dear, but I'm no longer convinced that complete Libertarianism can work in the real world. ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/10/02/on-libertariancapitalist-intent/ This was posted to a politics discussion list I'm on. I've been meaning to write something similar, but he beat me to it. I thought it was good, so here it is reprinted with permission: Dear XXXXXXX, Over the years we have know one another, I've steadfastly avoided discussions of politics and religion, ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/09/26/martins-letter-to-his-mother-in-law/ Dear Senator McCain, Please remember that you are in America, and in America, we don't suspend elections. Have a nice day. http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/09/25/dear-senator-mccain/ I've been very busy lately, but this is just too much to not comment on. There are other articles about how the Google Chrome terms of service give Google an irrevocable license to use any content you submit through "The Services" (a nice catchall term which includes all Google products and ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/09/03/the-google-chrome-terms-of-service-are-hilarious/ Nasa: ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/08/04/cool-photo-roundup/ Grace Piper interviewed local butcher Tom Mylan at the Unfancy Food Show, and used some of my pictures to illustrate: http://fearlesscook.blogspot.com/2008/07/unfancy-is-new-fancy-grace-interviews.html http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/07/21/my-photos-featured-briefly-in-tom-mylan-interview/ Salmonella-tainted tomatoes aside, gazpacho is about the healthiest thing you can eat, and I look forward to having some decent vegetables to make it with every year. It's pretty good with tomato juice, but I really prefer to use fresh tomato puree. I'm really not a fan of spicy tomato, and ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/06/24/on-gazpacho/ Some people were asking, so I finally got around to making a short video of how I cut a bell pepper. I haven't been able to find anything on the web illustrating this, but I haven't actually looked very hard. [Update: Okay, yes, it's a stupid minor thing, but I made ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/05/07/how-to-cut-a-pepper/ In reference to this Gizmodo piece analyzing the rights granted by the Kindle and Sony e-reader: http://gizmodo.com/369235/amazon-kindle-and-sony-reader-locked-up-why-your-books-are-no-longer-yours I think the analysis in that article is flawed. It doesn't make any sense to be able to resell the reader with the books on it, because the license for the books is assigned to ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/03/24/coming-to-a-rational-first-sale-doctrine-for-digital-works/ It's just extraordinary to me what a boon the PS3 is to the scientific community. "Overall, a single PS3 performs better than the highest-end desktops available and compares to as many as 25 nodes of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. And there is still tremendous scope left for extracting more performance ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/03/13/ps3s-used-for-science/ We have different classifications for the crime of "killing a person", and those classifications encompass whether it was an accident or not, whether it was premeditated, and how many people were killed - e.g.: How serious a crime has actually been committed. But when we talk about terrorism, it's always ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/03/04/why-dont-we-have-degrees-of-terrorism/ I've put up a screen cast made with the very easy Screenflow. This is me trying to reorganize a large number of tables with attached comments in Numbers, such that there is no overlap and no tables cross a page break. As should be evident even without narration, this is pretty much ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/03/03/numbers-is-a-nice-idea-with-some-usability-disasters/ Our food labeling standards are completely out of whack. As an example, let's take "100% fruit juice". I'm pretty sure that at some point, "100% fruit juice" meant that what you got in the bottle was, prior to being put in the bottle, a piece of fruit that was crushed and ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/03/03/fed-up-with-food-labeling/ Here's the thing. The past few years have overwhelmingly delivered a whole class of Apple devices I simply want. I've bought a number of them. Not so for anything announced this year. Here's what we got, and what I would have liked to see Apple have announced instead: We got: A ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/01/16/what-the-apple-keynote-should-have-delivered/ I've become a huge Apple fan over the past two years. I think they've done a number of wonderful things for desktop computing interfaces, and they've far surpassed Windows in usability, stability, and general pleasantness. I spend a lot of time in front of computers, and I try to make ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/01/15/disappointed-in-the-macworld-keynote/ Warner Bros., one of the big dual-format holdouts in HD video, announced yesterday that they're switching to Blu-ray only as of May 2008, abandoning HD DVD. The format war isn't quite "over" yet, but this is a significant victory for Blu-ray. This leaves Paramount as the only major studio still backing ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2008/01/05/warner-bros-goes-blu-ray-exclusive/ Just to add to the confusion: "On Standard-Def DVD, there are essentially only two competing sound formats to choose from: Dolby Digital or DTS.[...]The reality of the situation is that both Dolby Digital and DTS are capable of delivering very good, sometimes even exceptional sound quality on DVD.[...]The advent of Blu-ray ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/10/25/all-about-audio-options-on-hd-discs/ Dear Netflix: I would very much like your website to stop redirecting me to a page that tells me that Im using an unsupported browser. I know I use Opera. I like it. I understand if you dont want to support it, but at least set a cookie so I can ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/10/04/dear-netflix/ [I've posted this as a comment on a few HD DVD vs. Blu-ray blog posts elsewhere, so I thought I'd put it up here as well.] An HD format war is simply the height of stupidity, given the nice example of how quickly DVD was adopted by... everybody. This happened for a ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/09/28/the-hd-format-war-is-lost-by-existing/ "Picture an incident that throws a group of Romulans back in time. Picture that group of Romulans figuring out where they are in the timeline, then deciding to take advantage of the accident to kill someone’s father, to erase them from the timeline before they exist, thereby changing all of ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/09/02/new-star-trek-movie-apparently-reboots-with-an-open-time-loop/ Apparently, Sony dropped including the PS2 hardware in the 80GB model, and the last version that includes it is the now discontinued, recently price-cut $499 60GB model. If you care about playing older PS2 games and are thinking about getting a PS3, you probably want to get that one, before ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/09/02/newer-ps3s-apparently-use-software-emulation-for-ps2-games/ The consumer electronics companies really have their collective head so far up their ass they're wearing their tongue for a hat. ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/07/18/why-am-i-writing-about-hd-home-theater-frustrations/ It seems to be a serious problem for those who live in places where it's not warm all the time that the iPhone will be completely unusable while wearing gloves. [tags]winter, iphone, gloves, cold, apple[/tags] http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/07/05/will-the-iphone-experience-be-as-good-when-winter-rolls-around/ Since I live in the land of the future, we got to see Transformers last night. It was silly, the plot was thinner than the sheen of sweat on hot girl mechanic's belly, and it had faults. The pacing fell apart after the first 2/3 or so, and it was ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/07/03/transformers-was-the-most-fun-ive-had-in-a-movie-theater-in-a-while/ It is simply great. Post after post is just captivating, interesting, and relevant if you have anything to do with tech these days. Go read that for a while: http://blog.pmarca.com [tags]marc andreessen, technology, blogs[/tags] http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/06/19/i-have-been-stunned-into-submission-by-marc-andreessens-new-blog/ I've added a new category to the blog, for aggregating the things I'm proud of. These are pieces I've put a lot of work into, or which I think I have some good insight on. If you just want the highlights without all of the random links, look no further: http://www.aquick.org/blog/topics/really-good-stuff/ There's ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/05/28/just-the-really-good-stuff/ I recently realized that I had a few extra drive bays in my desktop (with corresponding open SATA ports) and a few extra SATA drives lying around. So last night, I put them in and set them up as a RAID0 striped array. I'd always avoided striping because of the instability ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/05/22/the-value-of-raid0-for-caching-paging-and-temp/ I have a personal mailing list for my very close friends, to which I often send a few messages a day. If I stop for a day or two, it's not a problem. If I stop for a long period of time (a week, a month) without telling someone, I ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/05/15/the-first-rule-of-community/ Crappy DRM company says the DMCA forces you to buy their technology instead of building your own because not buying their technology is a circumvention of an effective copyright tool. The thing is, I think they're right. I mean, it's stupid, but then so is the DMCA. There are some other provisions ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/05/10/brilliant-dmca-side-effect/ I happened to take my 6-month old to Target this weekend, and we bought him some socks. He was playing with the package and put them in his mouth, and managed to get the little hanger plastic piece out. There's certainly enough to say about parental responsibility, and not letting ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/05/01/circo-hazardous-sock-packaging/ I got a Canon Pixma Pro 9000 to replace my dead Epson Stylus 1280. Having not bought a new inkjet printer in about 7 years, I'm totally stunned by how far the technology has improved, even over the previous round which was pretty impressive. First, it's REALLY fast. While a letter ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/04/20/the-canon-pixma-pro-9000-is-a-great-inkjet-photo-printer/ It is well known that free products are used more widely than products that people have to pay for. If Vista is so much better, then people will still pay money for it, and having more installations of XP around to keep people using Windows apps instead of switching to ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/04/19/microsoft-should-release-xp-for-free/ "This work began on the day when we had made a extra big candy like a bowling ball by ourselves. Since that day, we had been licking the candy day after day for about six months.' http://homepage.mac.com/m_plus_n/candy.html [tags]candy, big, bowl, licking[/tags] http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/04/16/well-thats-just-about-the-strangest-thing-ive-seen-all-day/ I'm extremely proud of the Confabb site, and it's nice to see it evolving past the limited feature set we were able to squeeze in before launch. There's a LOT more great stuff coming. The development team has been working very hard for the past few months, and a bunch ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/04/16/new-social-networking-features-on-confabb-launched-today/ I pointed out that YouTube was a particularly valuable acquisition to Google because their videos are the most embedded in other pages of any of the online video services. When you embed your own content in someone else's web page, you get the ability to track who visits that page ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/04/14/google-has-just-bought-a-lot-of-browsing-history-of-the-internet/ Oh yeah. ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/04/14/remember-when-doubleclick-was-pretty-universally-reviled-and-sued-for-privacy-violations-a-few-years-back/ I used to get a Cadbury Creme Egg a year about the same time I had my annual McRib. Since I've realized over the course of the past few years that you're only supposed to eat food, I didn't know that Cadbury reduced the size of the Creme Egg this ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/04/13/cadbury-got-busted-for-reducing-the-size-of-the-creme-egg-and-then-lying-about-it/ http://www.diabetesmine.com/2007/04/an_open_letter_.html [tags]apple, open letter, design, medical[/tags] http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/04/13/open-letter-to-apple-asking-for-help-improving-medical-design/ They took the best of the magic wand, color range selection, magnetic lasso, and channel selection, and rolled it all up into a new kind of brush - the quick selection tool. You paint with the brush for broad strokes to define your selection, then you have a dialog box to ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/04/09/new-in-photoshop-cs3-quick-selection-tool/