Angry Robot

Joseph Ducreux / Archaic Rap | Know Your Meme

stevenf.com – Lowrider:

“You have to admit it would be difficult to get much lower.”

Amazon opens up Kindle to Developer Apps – Update2

Obsessed With the Internet: A Tale From China | Magazine

Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy And Why Lala Is Critical

his prediction is of a cloud storage feature for the tracks one already owns (part of mobile me?), meaning no subscription fee (but also not unlimited music)

Apple iPhone OS 4.0 features detailed! Also, Apple calling tablet the iTablet?

they gotta drop this ‘i’ thing at some point

Indie+Relief

proceeds from these Mac + iPhone apps today go to Haiti-related charities

EVIL little cameras | MetaFilter

I had no idea my camera was EVIL.

Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0

in summary, don’t use yelp.

Ribbon Hero turns learning Office into a game

still waiting for Avid hero, I’d win that

Pinboard - Yay!

I signed up for “social bookmarking for introverts” site pinboard back when it cost only $3- it’s now $6, and it goes up by a tenth of a penny with every user signup – make of that what you will, math fans!

I suppose at the time I did not see much of a difference compared to delicious, the service that invented the genre, so I put the account aside. I revisited it recently, and I can certainly see its advantages. Amongst others:

That’s a pretty impressive array of features, and it’s under active development. I’m not sure if the same can really be said of delicious.

YouTube – Alaska Nanooks 2009-10 Hockey Intro

my new favourite video.

The Tao of Leveling

RPGs as applied to real life: “what level are you?”

Final Season Of 'Lost' Promises To Make Fans More Annoying Than Ever | The Onion – America's Finest News Source

hell yeah.

I've messed up the feeds

To those following the site via RSS – I’ve temporarily botched the AngryRobotAll feed, that normally would give you a list of both blog entries and links posted to the site. Right now it’s only showing blog entries. I’m definitely going to fix it, but I don’t know how quickly – might be a couple days. In the meantime, you could subscribe to the new links feed on pinboard, which is where I’m posting my links now, or manually check the site, or (more reasonably) enjoy a refreshing break from notifications of internet trivialities.

Publisher in Talks With Apple Over Tablet

Bert Simons portfolio | paper sculptures

In The Games Of Madness: How Gameplay and Narrative kill Meaning in “Games”

fascinating thoughts from a developer

3D Interface for Apple Tablet

This is one of the facets of the ongoing Apple tablet megarumour that really intrigues me – an Apple 3D interface patent.

In “Systems and Methods for Adjusting a Display Based on the User’s Position,” Apple proposes a display that can automatically adjust the point of view and angle of 3D objects, or even 2D objects arranged in 3D space, based on the changing position of the viewer in relation to the display. Example: imagine you are viewing some 3D object on your monitor. A sensor could let the computer know when you move your head to the left, and the object would subtly change position and/or rotation so you could see the left side of the object. Alternatively, you could move your head up so you could see the top better.

Head tracking. Fuck yeah. There was another 3D-related patent filed in January, and while it didn’t have any head tracking, it does lend credence to the notion that, come Jan 27, shit be poppin’ – in 3D. (Well, hopefully without the glasses.)

For interest’s sake, here are a couple of old posts of mine in which I drool over 3D interfaces: one two.

Why Some Comics Aren't Laughing at Jay Leno

AV Club’s Nathan Rabin writing in the WSJ about the whole mess

Would You Have Spotted the Fraud?

ABM card skimmers are increasingly sophisticated. Yikes.

VVVVVV  | Games | Review

sounds pretty awesome.

8-bit Mario sweater is incredibly nerdy yet cute

It sure is.

Site Changes

Man, there have been things I’ve wanted to do on this site for quite some time. Ever since turning it back into a personal blog, I’ve wanted to blend photos and links into the main content area like I used to do with d.sankey.ca. Philosophically, I never saw the links I post here as any less important than the articles I write, so it bothered me to have them shunted away to the side – and the same goes for the photos.

Thing is, I didn’t know how to do it in the manner I wanted to, which was to use delicious (actually, soon pinboard) for links and flickr for photos, yet have them show up on this site. I tried out Tumblr and was sorely tempted as it can do what I want, but I was unable to pull the trigger, perhaps because I love textpattern so much, perhaps out of laziness.

In steps this TXP plugin asv_tumblelog. Or rather, I stumble into it – it’s been around for ages, I just never noticed it. It can basically replicate a tumblr-like tumblelog within textpattern. It takes a lot of setting up and troubleshooting, but it can indeed work, as you can see if you’re reading this from the site proper. There’s an aspect of risk here, since it doesn’t seem to be actively developed right now, but I’m so happy with what it does that I’m willing to go along with that.

I’m still not sure about other categories of content. Quotes I don’t think I’d use much, or just post them as links. I can see grabbing my YouTube favourites feed would be pretty cool, and probably my uploads from youtube and vimeo. On flickr, I’m only pulling photos that I specifically tag for posting here, as I don’t want to drown the other content. And while I think I sometimes post interesting stuff to twitter, I haven’t yet figured out a way to only import select tweets, and ignore all the @replies that probably won’t mean anything to anyone. So, they stay shunted off into the side column still.

If you don’t like the new changes, there are options. Going to the article page will give you a list of only blog posts. The feeds (blog posts only, posts and links) will stay the same for now, but I will eventually change the latter to include photos. I may make the everything feed the default feed for the page.

While I’m on the site news tip, there’s still a long-overdue redesign coming. Probably nothing structural, but a new logo / colour scheme.

Best Films of the Decade

In this reporter’s opinion:

I’m too lazy to be too fussy about it, so that’s not necessarily in any order, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten something great, or failed to see something mindblowing. I haven’t put films from this past year which is probably a mistake, but it feels too hard to make an accurate judgment of anything so recent.

My conception of an ideal film is something that makes you think and feel. Preferably both, but films that provoke only thought are better than those that provoke only feeling (Forrest Gump can make you sniffle, but that doesn’t make it a wonderful film). I measure the greatest films by how much I reflect on them afterwards, and that is often a combination of thoughts and feelings. As a consequence I love open-ended, somewhat mysterious films whose meanings are elusive, rather than films that tie everything up into a neat little bow.

I know, the last two entries on that list don’t quite match those criteria. I just added them because I’ve probably watched them the most, so they would be more in the ‘guilty pleasure’ category.