http://www.aquick.org/blog entertaining hundreds of millions of eyeball atoms every day Fri, 09 May 2008 13:38:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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/ The iTunes store is about to start selling the entire EMI catalog DRM-free. It's slightly more expensive, but also higher quality. This completely destroys the rationale behind having any DRM at all. It can't be because they're afraid of the higher quality recordings getting out, because those are the ones they're ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/04/02/the-end-of-drm-is-nigh/ I have an old Playstation 2 (30001 series). It has never played dual-layer DVD movies - it plays the first layer, and then freezes. Everyone I know with this model has the same issue with it. It was never a problem, because all of the games on DVD that I ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/03/19/does-your-old-ps2-play-dual-layer-dvd-games/ Apparently, "anonymized" clickstream data (the urls of which websites you visited and in what order) is available for sale directly from many ISPs. There is no way that this is sufficiently anonymized. It is readily obvious from reading my clickstream who I am - urls for MANY online services contain ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/03/16/isps-apparently-sell-your-clickstream-data/ Well, that's a nice start. Good for them. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/03/google_to_anony.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/taking-steps-to-further-improve-our.html http://216.239.57.110/blog_resources/google_log_retention_policy_faq.pdf [tags]google, privacy, purge[/tags] http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/03/14/google-to-purge-some-data-after-18-24-months/ Exciting! -- Confabb is hosting the site for Personal Democracy Forum 2007. The science of politics is changing, and these are the people who are doing interesting things about it. You can browse information about the conference (news, events, sessions, speakers, and more), and register from the site. You can use your ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/03/14/confabb-is-hosting-the-personal-democracy-forum-2007-site/ Interesting post about the Penny Gap. I think this is directly related to a similar concept which might be called the Unlimited Chasm. http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html The Penny Gap says that if your service is actually free, it will have a much greater uptake than one that is merely very very cheap. Rather than ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/03/14/the-penny-gap-is-the-difference-between-free-and-mostly-free/ Perry said "I think you held back too much. Tell us what you really think." Okay. I think Windows is rotten to the core and always has been. Between Windows 3.1 and XP, there were no serious contenders. With Win2K and XP, it's at least had the benefits of: ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/03/14/followup-commentary-on-windows-vista/ My Treo 700p has many problems, but one of them is completely infuriating, so obviously the result of a bug, and so invasive that I can't imagine that everyone with the same phone hasn't seen it. When Palm introduced the 700p, they replaced the SMS application that was used on the ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/03/10/treo-700p-text-messaging-problems/ Congress changed Daylight Savings Time, and the changes take effect this weekend. Most Windows and Mac machines will auto update if allowed to do so. If you have a unix box, you probably already know about this. Don't forget to also update your Palm and other handhelds that are DST-aware. If you have ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/03/09/daylight-savings-time-updates-this-weekend/ I'm probably a bit behind in hearing about this, but very cool nonetheless. http://themachackers.com/2006/12/19/zfs-on-mac-os-x-105-a-closer-look/ [tags]apple, leopard, filesystem, zfs[/tags] http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/03/07/leopard-has-support-for-zfs/ I haven't run Vista. I have no intention of doing so. Here's my "review" anyway: SCANNER COMPATIBILITY PROBLEMS?!? What year is it?!? What a total embarassment. [tags]windows, vista, goodfuckingluck[/tags] http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/02/28/my-windows-vista-review/ I've been thinking about the issue of Mac software vs. PC software a lot lately, particularly with the cross-platform beta and coming production release of Adobe CS3. I've only been a recent convert to the Mac, and the thing that was holding me back was that certain software that I absolutely ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/02/21/it-is-time-for-the-distinction-between-mac-software-and-pc-software-to-go-away/ Jim Gray, an influential computer scientist, is missing at sea. Amazon has provided satellite imagery and is using the distributed Amazon Mechanical Turk system to enlist the public to sift through the massive amounts of data to help find him. http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=J0XZ58STDWJZ5QY4F9M0&signature=AiiDWIlwk21vgw1bn5UhVpRDZ2w%3D&iteratorSkipGroup=false&hitId=B8KZ23NCDS4ZY1ZVXVF0&externalHit=false This is pretty extraordinary. [tags]jim gray, amazon mechanical turk, lost[/tags] http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/02/04/jim-gray-is-missing-help-find-him/ I've been continually unhappy with all of the ultraportable tripods I've bought. They're too heavy, not flexible enough, take too long to set up, and the smaller ones won't support my big camera. The gorillapod fixes all of that. It's incredibly light, totally portable, and even sufficiently adjustable to wrap ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/01/18/gorillapod-yes/ Robert Anton Wilson is dead. http://robertantonwilson.blogspot.com/2007/01/raw-essence.html I can't say enough about the importance of his writing to our national culture of weirdness. He will be missed. [tags]robertantonwilson, raw, illuminatus[/tags] http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/01/12/dont-look-at-the-fnords/ growl is a unified notification system for OS X. While that doesn't sound like much, it's a transformative UI experience to have all of your apps notify you through the same customizable interface. After installing it, I immediately wanted to look around and find other things I could route through ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/01/10/i-like-growl-a-lot/ Cisco owns the trademark on "iPhone". Apple was apparently in negotiations to license the term, but had not actually completed doing so prior to the product announcement. Negotations would not seem to be going well, as Cisco has filed a suit against Apple for trademark infringment: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2007/corp_011007.html [tags]apple, iphone, cisco, lawsuit, trademark ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2007/01/10/iphony/ Last week, we relaunched the GOOD site, with the very first round of new community features. We've got a lot planned for the next few months - this is just the beginning. But now, you can register with the site, comment on articles and posts, and vote for your favorites. Check ... http://www.aquick.org/blog/2006/12/22/the-waters-good-come-on-in/