From: bromee
Subject: Steve Jobs is not cancer-free
Boy eats cats daily
[URL redacted]
(I just don’t know…does eating cats give you cancer? Cure your cancer? Who clicks on a link about eating cats? Don’t they know Steve Jobs is a pescetarian? What does this have to do with the iPhone? Anything?)
In our continuing self-appointed duty to bring you all the news that is fit to electronically print about our favorite cryptotechnological means of conveyance, I just wanted to point out to you that one lucky person will be able to take home the actual hoverboard used in Back to the Future II. Along with a handful of other rare artifacts such as the Holy Fucking Grail, it’s being auctioned off on July 31st. Granted, you’ll need to pony up $30,000—but come on, I mean, a hoverboard pays for itself, amirite?
There’s kind of a cruel bent to this auction. I mean, selling of C-3PO’s feet? And what about Geordi’s visor; how’s the poor guy going to see? Why don’t you auction off Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair while you’re at it?
Oh man, it’s an embarrassment of riches, though: I mean, The Rocketeer’s helmet? Kirk’s phaser? A Tusken Raider costume from…Attack of the Clones? Ew. Lame.
Unfortunately, I suspect I’ll be missing the event, as I’ll be busy helping some jackass unload his moving van. But if anybody is looking for something to commemorate a certain blog’s upcoming fifth anniversary (hiatuses not included), well, I’m just sayin’.
In our continuing coverage of all things hoverboard (a topic that our demographics clearly show that readers crave), we bring you the latest developments in hover technology.
Researchers at Cornell University—my alma mater, no less!—have apparently managed to pair superconductors with magnets in order to make hovering vehicles theoretically possible. Of course, science is not without its catches: in order for this to work, the temperature needs to be under -300°F. If you’re wondering, the coldest temperature ever measured on Earth was apparently -129°F, so seriously, people: it’s time we start doing something about this global warming shit. If we keep going the way we are now, we’ll never have hover vehicles. Then what will you tell your children? “Sorry Bobby, but because I couldn’t go without driving my Hummer to the corner store, you can’t have a hoverboard for Christmas. Because they don’t exist.” I hope you enjoy having your children grow up hating you with every fiber of their being.
Anyway, if I can earmark my donation for hoverboard research, I might actually consider giving money to my college for once. Let’s see: I’ve got about two dollars in change in my pocket…and some lint. I expect return on my investment. You’ve got seven years.
Here is a boring story about RSS feeds I felt compelled to share.
For a while now, I have been using Bloglines to manage my RSS feeds. I’ve been using it because I potentially check up on my feeds from any of three computers—my laptop, my home desktop, and my office computer—and I want to make sure everything stays easily synchronized. It’s kind of a pain sometimes, though, so I’ve been thinking about switching.
Joshua Glenn, writing at the Boston Globe, tries to solve the age-old dilemma: was Black Sabbath’s classic heavy metal song “Iron Man” inspired by the Marvel superhero of the same name? The conclusion is a qualified “yes,” though it suggests that Ted Hughes’s book The Iron Man, upon which the 1999 animated film, The Iron Giant was based. Glenn’s piece is worth a read, however, if for no other reason than to watch the opening theme song to the 1960s Iron Man cartoon. I’ll be walking around the rest of the day, humming “Tony Stark makes you feel/he’s a cool exec with a heart of steel.”
As we’ve seen, I have a strenuous regimen of television watching—one that, if confined to traditional broadcast methods, would probably occupy most evenings of my week, lowering my productivity to near-zero. But we live in the twenty-first century and so technology helps me take what once might have been a crippling condition and make it manageable.
Unlike music and movie piracy, television piracy didn’t really start to become popular until the advent of BitTorrent. While TV shows are usually shorter than movies and thus have smaller file sizes, they more than make up for that smaller size with increased frequency. Distributing a movie is difficult enough, but if you’re trying to keep up with a weekly show, there’s a heck of a lot more data to be transferred on a repeated basis. BitTorrent made that much easier, due to a couple of factors: 1) The de-centralized nature of the file-swapping technology shares the burden by making every downloader a server as well, which leads to 2) the somewhat counterintuitive proposition that the more people who download a show, the faster everybody downloads it.
I’ve often wondered if some metric could not be divined from the relative speeds of downloading. Some shows seem to transfer very quickly, while others simply crawl. This is due in part to differences like file size—for example, downloading an entire season usually takes longer than downloading a single episode—the overriding mechanic at work here is popularity. Again, in optimal conditions, the more people downloading a file, the more servers, and the faster it goes. And if popularity is the deciding factor, it would seem logical (if simplistic) to conclude that the shows that download the fastest are the most popular.
Television ratings are an imperfect science—if they can even be called a science. Even today, Nielsen relies heavily on written diaries kept by their selected “families,” tracking their television watching habits (they do have an electronic device called a “Set Meter” as well, and have been slowly adapting to other forms of technology—while the company moved to start including digital video recorders, such as TiVo, in ratings, it did not do so until 2005).
But do ratings even work?
Read More…
[Updated 12-05-07: the story continues! Jump to the end to read the latest.]
In the course of my job, lots of people email me with questions about their Macs, Mac software, and—more recently—their iPhones. As someone who writes publicly about these topics, I’m expected to be conversant with many of their intricate details, and in most cases I am.
But what I’m not is a personal tech support guru. I try to help out people who email me, because, well, I spent years working in tech support and I like to do what I can to make sure people have a good experience using technology. As someone with specialized knowledge, I feel an…perhaps obligation is too strong a word, maybe call it an inclination to help out those who don’t possess that knowledge, just as people with more money often feel an inclination to help out those who are less fortunate. Again, to be clear, it’s not my job, and I don’t respond to every email, but I try to when I can.
Most of the time the people I deal with are polite and appreciative that someone has even responded to their emails. I don’t want to get into a position of saying “Hey, you should be glad you even got an email back,” but let’s face it: a lot of people whose positions are similar to mine don’t have the time or interest to respond to queries that will take hours away from their actual paying work. But the rule of thumb seems like it should be this: when you ask a favor from someone, you should be civil and gracious for any time they take to help you out. That goes for dealing with people in pretty much any walk of life, in my opinion.
My latest email help request started innocuously enough. It wasn’t sent to the catch-all for the iPhone blog, or through Macworld’s contact form, but directly to my work address:
hi,A valid question, but not one I was prepared to spend a lot of time on: the fact is that YouTube is a closed system and I don’t know the intricate details of how it works. But I’ve uploaded a video or two to the site and a quick check shows that at least one of them shows up on my iPhone when I search for it. Going on the basis of that, and my general knowledge on the topic, I jotted back a quick reply:i put a video on youtube.com and it worked fine. I listed it as global event as the key word search and then I tried to view it on the iphone. i couldn’t find it in the listing. Do you know why this is?
Matt [Just as a note, I've changed the man's name.]
Hi Matt, My first question would be how long between uploading and trying to find it on the iPhone? YouTube videos need to be specially encoded in a format for the iPhone, and I don’t know if YouTube does this when the video is uploaded or later on. My suggestion would be to wait and try again later. Hope it works out.Admittedly, not the most in-depth reply I could have offered, but I did invite further information from Matt to see if we could try to approach this in a logical fashion.Cheers, Dan
Twenty minutes later, I got a response. I quote the entirety of the reply below:
this was a lame response. Do some digging. jeez.
A recent post at BoingBoing compares two television viewing programs for computers—or rather, simply states bluntly that “Miro Kicks Joost’s Ass.” Even having not used either program before, this seemed potentially simplistic to me, so I figured I might as well download both and see how they work. Here is my very brief review, based on admittedly very brief usage on my Macbook.
My continuing quest to make my Mac products work better has met its newest obstacle: funny keyboards.
I got around this by using Doublecommand on my Powerbook, which gives a few options for remapping generally useless keys into rather useful keys on a Mac keyboard. The only option I was using was one that remapped the extra Enter key, next to the right Command key, into a second Option key. This meant I could navigate through tabs in Camino with just my right hand. (Get your dirty jokes out now. It has nothing to do with that. Probably.) I also updated the keyboard shortcuts for Safari to work the same way; by default, you navigate tabs in Safari with Shift-Command and an Arrow key, but that just ends up selecting a line of text if your window happens to have Gmail or Wordpress up. Option-Command just works nicer.
Or rather, it just worked nicer. Somehow, this only partially made the transition onto my Macbook. Option-Command-Left Arrow works normally, and I can use it to navigate tabs without a problem using either the original Option key or the modified Enter-as-Option key. However, Option-Command-Right Arrow only works with the original option key. My computer firmly refuses to believe that this keystroke even exists, to the point where I can’t even manually assign it as a shortcut in the Keyboard preference pane. I press it, and nothing registers. I am totally at a loss and mostly just wanted to vent, but feel free to speak up if you have any alternative ideas.
This doesn’t even begin to address how challenging it is to use a Mac keyboard when running Windows, so I’m looking for a keyboard remapper for that, too. (Or maybe it’s just that Windows keyboard shortcuts generally suck. I mean, seriously, Ctrl-everything? I am much more dextrous with my thumb than with my pinky. That is how we defeated the apes.)
Oh, and in case you were wondering how things went with Fusion, I’m going to try getting my money back, but I will probably fail. Running it off a Boot Camp partition just doesn’t work as well, as it forces Windows to shut down every time you quit (as opposed to saving the state). So, in addition to taking awhile to start every time you want to use Windows, it means that Windows is stuck installing a crapload of updates while you’re trying to get out of it just to free up some freaking RAM.
Cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch and 200 students at Kansas State University created a video about students in today’s college classrooms. It is an example of “digital storytelling” with an interesting mix of low tech (words on paper, chalkboard and walls) and high tech (time-lapse footage of a Google Doc being edited by the 200 students). It doesn’t offer any concrete solutions, but rather poses some though-provoking questions for anyone trying to reach 21st centurty students in a 19th century setting.