Mr Owen added: “Popeye is one of the first of the famous 20th-century cartoon characters to fall out of copyright. Betty Boop and ultimately Mickey Mouse will follow.”
Recently in Geeky Category
Someone, somewhere must have uploaded End of Part One to the net by now. I've tried, believe me, but without a UKNova or TheBox login, I think I've hit a dead end. If anybody does have an idea where I can either download some episodes or obtain a bootleg, it'd be great. There's a couple of bits on YouTube, but nothing approaching complete programmes...
Is using The Flaming Lips's Do You Realize? sending out the right happy notes? Really?
Hasbro: delighting 80s children decades on:
(still time for Christmas!)
2009: Bring back The Reynolds Girls!
I thought the glitter spray was wonderful.
(it'll be ten years next week, fact-fans. And now reduced to swapping second-hand clothes. Okay, fancy second-hand clothes and in front of TV cameras, but still!)
A sans-serif face walks into the street and is hit by a Swiss Modernist truck. The carnage is grotesk... but you know, akzidenz happen.
So why can't these Genius playlists work on the iPhone, Steve? Steve?
Trying something new. Heavens.
The first thing that struck me about this book is that I didn't realise just how bad things were in the 1960s. Protests, yes. Unrest, sure. But report after report of rioting, snipers, police brutality, lynchings, and the rest, all ripped from newspapers and TV coverage of the era really do make you feel that America was almost in the grip of a second civil war. The second thing is the familiarity of the 'dirty tricks' that Nixon used. You can see them every day on Fox News. The pushing against 'liberal elites', cowing the media, dog-whistles, and out-and-out lying are all prime Nixon strategies (a young Karl Rove cut his teeth in the 1972 election). And finally, so many names that strike a chord. Romney Sr., Daley Sr., Al Gore Sr., etc. There is a huge streak of dynasty in American politics that I didn't fully comprehend. As you can imagine, a somewhat depressing read.
Fear & Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72, Hunter S. Thompson
Part of my US election ritual. Every four years, I re-read this book (admittedly, I only started this ritual in 2000, so it's only the third time I've done this). It's a wonderful political journal that throws out objectivity in its first few pages; every chapter is brimming with hate towards Nixon, but yet even more vicious invective is reserved for the Democratic machine desperately trying to stop McGovern from getting the nomination. Thankfully, it's also hilarious, right up until the last few months where it's apparent that Nixon is going to win, and win big.
The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite, Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá
Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol crossed with The Royal Tenenbaumns and written by the singer of My Chemical Romance? Yes please! It perhaps started out a little more promisingly than it finished, but then the first part had the Umbrella Academy facing off against Zombie Gustav Eiffel, and it's difficult to top that.
Fashioning Technology, Syuzi Pakhchyan
I'm in another of my crafty moods. Should I make a magnetic wallet that glows in the dark and blinks when it encounters a mobile phone signal? I really don't have too much time on my hands, honest. I'm working on a few projects for my return to November, and this book is just what I needed - how to sew electronic circuits!
The Predator State, James K. Galbraith
The free market has failed. Conservatives realised this many years ago, and it's time that the Left did the same, according to Galbraith. He berates the current orthodoxy for balanced budgets and applying free-market economics to places where it cannot, and will not work, taking a side jaunt at the beginning to explain the death of monetarism, supply-side economics, and how the Reagan boom was caused as much by Keynesian principles as much as anything else (I've heard a similar argument about us during the same time, but haven't had the chance to explore that just yet). Just what you need on a Friday night, obviously. Whether any of it is applicable to Britain, I don't know; a lot of his argument rests on the idea that America occupies a special position in the economic world which we don't. Somehow, I don't think he's a fan of Obama's fiscal policy...
This month looks like finishing up my trip around B. S. Johnson's works and making a start on the architecture/urban planning books I've been stockpiling. No, I don't know, either. Either a career in public policy beckons, or I've gone mad. So, it's the latter.
Superman: Beyond is completely impenetrable: written in a strange hyperlanguage known only to Grant Morrison, reviving a pet storyline last seen almost twenty ago, featuring a character designed to annoy Alan Moore, guest starring the Yellow Submarine, and requiring 3-D glasses to read properly.
It is, obviously, wonderful.
I've now had an iPhone for a week. This picture roughly shows how I feel. Admittedly, part of this is probably because my previous phone couldn't even send text messages in capital letters, but it feels like it should come with a jetpack. It's the future, right there in your hand. A communicator out of every science fiction movie, except this one screams "Yeah! Yeah!" every time somebody calls (Davo, Lolly, I'm truly sorry). It's the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, except it plays music whilst you're checking to see if Earth is being demolished this week or next. Other phones are crammed with buttons; the iPhone makes them look as outmoded as a rotary dial; instead, your fingers swish over the screen and make it dance.
Shiny. But, just as with the jetpacks and lasers, it's not quite there just yet. There are a few things which make you remember that the future is still a little way off:
- The camera. Actually, I don't mind the 2 megapixel aspect of the camera, as the sensor is small enough that cramming more pixels probably won't help improve the image quality too much. It is a shame that it doesn't allow you to record video clips, however. There's an application available for the jailbroken phone, so this seems to be an Apple restriction rather than a problem with the camera itself. It's also a bit awkward having to unlock the phone, press the camera icon, wait for it to power up, and then to take the picture, in comparison to a normal camera. But then normal cameras don't tag photos with GPS information and upload them to flickr.
- I haven't hard too many problems with 3G/Edge connectivity problems, but did find that I couldn't get a signal in the middle of Oxford, which is a tad worrying (though that may have been down to me - I'll be trying it out again next week).
- The keyboard does take quite a bit of getting used to, and it'll never be as comfortable as a proper set of buttons, I think. However, you do find yourself typing away quite happily most of the time with only a few errors. I've been answering work emails on it all week!
- The App Store bothers me a little. It's very nice to have a central place to go and find all the interesting things people have written for the device (at the moment, I'm using Twinkle, Mobile Fotos, and LondonTube, as well as stalwarts like NetNewsWire, Facebook and Google), I find it disturbing that all this work exists solely at the pleasure of Apple. At any time, they can pull your application with no warning and no recourse. There's no way to put your program on anybody else's iPhone without going through iTunes. If Microsoft tried to pull this, we'd be up in arms, and rightly so.
No buyer's remorse yet, but the future still needs a little work.
David Tennant must light the Olympic flame in 2012. IT'S IN CONTINUITY, PEOPLE.
For those of you who have been missing RSS updates over the past month, I think I've fixed the problems now. You may have to unsubscribe and resubscribe (click here!) to make the changes show up.
Making a Johnny Boy ringtone is all sorts of wrong, isn't it?
This can only end badly.
The Actor Kevin Eldon as an EVIL HYPNOTIST in New Tricks.Next week: INTERNATIONAL STARING!
Forgive me. I seem to be addicted to concrete. And LEDs. In the past year, my bookshelves have been swelled by works on architecture, radical typographical manifestos, the mystery of the Factory Records numbering system, and computer processing. It's got to lead somewhere.
Saint Etienne at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in September for a start, I guess.
"Did you know you can rent a generator for $52 and set up and play ANYWHERE until the cops come?"
I was in the Prague Centre for Contemporary Arts and trapped on certain floors due to a bizarre ticketing method. I found myself confronted on all sides by beautiful brutalist models of Soviet architecture from the 1960s and was reminded, of all things, of the start of The Likely Lads; the old pub being demolished to make way for high-rise flats. The urbanism of the 1960s failed in this country, but why? Failure of upkeep? Building the high-rises while neglecting the other parts of Le Corbusier's vision which made Unité d'Habitation a success where others failed? Or are we just bad at doing things?
"I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul"
Or perhaps he just saw Georgia burning. An awkward moment in Beijing today, I imagine.
"Turn on the real drums"
Online dating sites are just odd. Though my faith in the country is heartened by people that are even more left-wing than I am. Watts Breakaway on iTunes, which is probably a sign that I should stop typing and return to Nixonland.
We all knew there was something about John Edwards, didn't we?
Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he'd never told anyone else—that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before—and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn't pick Edwards unless he met with him again.
NO DOCTOR WHO SPOILERS.
*cries*.
It really is bobbins, isn't it? Ten minutes from first start-up to getting to a Desktop, Internet Explorer doing odd things with downloads, the whole thing shuddering to a halt when I plugged in a USB mouse…
EDIT…and then it through up a UAC dialog to change the name of an icon. Now, I can rationalise why it did that, but my goodness, the UAC implementation is annoying.
I will run right back into the arms of my Mac, thank you very much...
Oh yes. My biggest fear? That he'll go the same way as RTD when he has to run the show, but in Series 1,2, and 3, he wrote the best episodes, and he's got the best of 4 right now. Long live Moffat!
Bonnie says Donna is going to die.
My quest for the sales figures of Robocop on the Spectrum seemingly has no end in sight. But I can tell you that Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles sold 420,000 copies on the Spectrum in one month in 1990. Yay research!
It's a weird sensation to be wiped from a discussion. You would have thought that after being on the Internet for eleven years, it would have happened to me sooner. In the end, it was the Spectrum that brought me down; sins of the past and all that. Of course, with his edits, it now reads like Bruce Everiss is arguing at thin air for a lot of the time, but he's done so well at looking silly this week; he might as well finish as he started.
But hey, it's not like somebody made a copy, is it?
(For all the praise it gets, I never really liked Arcadia either. I do remember getting a collection of Imagine games like Pedro, Cosmic Cruiser and The Alchemist, but I didn't understand why those Imagine games were awful, yet the current ones like Target: Renegade were rather splendid. It wasn't until a few years later that I learnt the full story of Imagine.)
UPDATE: Intuition Told Me Part Two: A couple more links will probably follow after reconstruction is completed on the second article: Or How Ultimate Stopped Worrying And Made A Fortune.
Once upon a time there was a software company called Imagine. It existed in the heady days of the early 1980s, where hundreds of software companies sprang up to try and make money from these new-fangled ZX Spectrum things. Some were pretty good at it. Others...well not so much.
Imagine's first game, Arcadia was well-received at the time of its release in 1982, becoming a big Christmas hit. The company was propelled into the press as an icon of Thatcher's new Britain, making a fortune in new hi-tech worlds, and in Liverpool, of all places, to boot.
They released more games during 1983, of somewhat varying quality, but the company continued to grow at an impressive rate, moving into bigger and more expensive office spaces (twice!), showing off their wealth with an impressive array of sports cars (which were apparently on hire purchase rather than bought). They made a huge deal with magazine publisher Marshall Cavendish, rumoured to be worth £11m, to produce games to go with a new magazine series the publisher was planning. Imagine were the country's premier games company; practically unstoppable.
They announced that they had exhausted the limits of the Spectrum; their next games would be dubbed 'Megagames'. These would come with a hardware attachment that would boost the abilities of the computer and give rise to a 'whole new world of gaming'. Oh, and they'd cost £40 instead of the average price of £7 for Spectrum games. They also agreed to have the BBC produce a documentary to showcase them to the British public at large.
You know how this story is going to end. At the end of 1983, Imagine decided to book the entire capacity of one of the major tape distributors in the UK, preventing other companies from getting their tapes made in time for the Christmas market. This would have worked well, if the games sold. Unfortunately, Christmas 1983 was a rather bad year, and Imagine were left renting a huge warehouse full of unwanted tapes. Oh, and they hadn't finished paying the duplicators yet, either.
As 1984 rolled on, things just got worse. The megagames were dogged with delays, and the cost of producing the hardware add-on were twice as much as Imagine's profit from 1982/3. One of the games only existed on paper. Still, Imagine went on as if everything was fine, placing advertisements for these games, telling the duplicator firms that they'd be ready soon.
They weren't. The BBC team filming for Commercial Breaks were present as Imagine began collapsing all around them. Magazines filed suit to get money for unpaid advertising space, the duplicators came for their money, Marshall Cavendish asked for theirs back after unsatisfactory work on their games...and the directors fled the scene, squirrelling away some of the company's assets in a legally-shady manner. The liquidators came in soon after, leaving PR director Bruce Everiss standing in an empty room talking to a BBC camera wondering where it all went wrong (and in Crash explicitly blaming the directors of the company).
The best part is that Manchester boys Ocean picked over the corpse of the company, taking the name and even redeeming it with games like HyperSports and Target: Renegade.
Fast-forward to 2008, and Bruce Everiss has a blog. A couple of weeks ago, he indulged in a little historical revisionism, blaming Imagine's woes on the scourge of piracy. There it sat, unnoticed, until somebody pointed it out to Stuart Campbell.
Stuart Campbell is, to use a heavily-abused cliché, the videogame journalist equivalent of Hunter S. Thompson: funny, passionate, and full of seething contempt for a vast swathe of the industry. Like Thompson's brush with politics, Campbell also worked in game development himself for a short period, being responsible for most of Cannon Fodder 2 when he was working at Sensible Software.
The blog entry suddenly got quite an audience, and poor Bruce never knew what hit him, although he remained steadfast in his views, actual evidence be damned. Read it and be amused. And if anybody does know the sales figures for the Spectrum version of Robocop, I would really like to know how much it sold.
YouTube version of Commercial Breaks
Jack McCoy will sell you some:
Last year, three armed ground bots were deployed to Iraq. But the remote-operated SWORDS units were almost immediately pulled off the battlefield, before firing a single shot at the enemy. Here at the conference, the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey, was asked what happened to SWORDS. After all, no specific reason for the 11th-hour withdrawal ever came from the military or its contractors at Foster-Miller. Fahey’s answer was vague, but he confirmed that the robots never opened fire when they weren’t supposed to. His understanding is that “the gun started moving when it was not intended to move.”
THEY WILL RISE!
Almost five years since the launch of the iTunes Music Store, it is now the biggest retailer of music in America.
We can pause here to laugh at the RIAA, who were so afraid of unrestricted music that they handed the keys to their kingdom to Apple Computer, Inc. Good show!
Oh yes.
You gave us the Internet. Microsoft gave us the marquee tag. It was never fair.
Manchester University getting the St. Anselm question on University Challenge! Very apt!
SOUNDWAVE BRINGS THE ROCK!
The guitar turns into Laserbeak! LASERBEAK IS A GUITAR!
But whenever this story has come up in the news today, I find it troubling to reconcile the MPAA/RIAA's woes with this story. But I'm sure it's a misunderstanding. Or that it's not really 'stealing' money from the Toklien estate...
I did have a grand plan for this week, but unfortunately, I've been ill all week and I didn't feel up to the task of messing with lots of chemicals. That'll be next week. Instead, I decided to revisit the homemade aero experiment from last time.
It's actually fairly easy, if you have the right equipment. And the right equipment is an iSi whipper (I have a Profi model, but if you're looking to buy one, I'd go for the Thermo version, as it offers the most flexibility). This is a device that was originally designed for making whipped cream very quickly, but has been adapted by the magicians at El Bulli and The Fat Duck for a variety of uses. To whit, homemade aero.
Firstly, get a lot of chocolate. Last week, I tried using Cadbury's Dairy Milk. That didn't work, but I think it was more down to me than the chocolate (I'll be trying it again soon). This time, I used 400g of 70% cocoa chocolate, melted using the traditional double boiler method (pan of water on the stove, glass bowl sitting in the lid of the pan - the chocolate melts inside the bowl. Or you could melt it in the microwave if you'd like).
While the chocolate is melting, get a hairdryer. Yes.
The idea is to warm up the steel of the whipper so the chocolate doesn't seize up when you pour it inside. Plus, it makes a fun conversational piece afterwards. You could possibly put it in a pot of warmed water and get the same effect, but it's not as much fun.
Eventually, the chocolate will all melt. Hurrah! Pour it into the whipper (you'll probably need a tea towel, because - surprise! It's now really hot), and assemble the top. Now, the recipe that I followed last week and in North Carolina only required one charge of NO2 gas to be shot into the chocolate, but this time I wasn't taking any chances and used two. One good shake later, and this was the result:
You'll know instantly if it has worked or not; if the mixture of chocolate expands as it goes into the mold, hurrah! Otherwise, something has gone wrong. Anyway, providing it has gone fine, place in the fridge to set.
some time later...
Success! I intend to try milk chocolate again, obviously, and also white chocolate, but that's the basic idea behind making aero chocolate at home.
Next time: I use syringes. Oh yes.
Funnily enough, like Simon Sweeping The Nation, I also watched Pop: What Is It Good For? recently (at about 1am this morning, as I couldn't sleep). Simon's right in that it was a very, very condensed and brief version of Words And Music (definitely an acquired taste, but it's one of my favourite books about music), and that the best bit was when Richard X turned the tables on Morley somewhat.
Firstly: I never really thought Richard X would look like that. I'm not quite sure what I was thinking, but erm, not that, certainly.
Secondly: it's actually something I've noticed about Paul Morley in the last couple of years. We know all about how he was intertwined with Factory Records, with Joy Division and the new world of New Order. We know about the Morley/Penman axis which ruled the early 80s. And we know about his current 'commentator for hire' phase, taking wonderful pot-shots at Robert Elms on I Love The 80s and generally winding John Harris up on Newsnight Review. But we almost never hear about the ZTT-era version of Morley.
I have a few ideas as to why (some personal, some surrounding how the idea of ZTT went a bit sour when they sued Frankie Goes To Hollywood/Holly Johnson), but it is curious how there's this big period that he doesn't talk about much, a period where he was co-running a record label that had one of the UK's biggest chart acts on its books. You would think, for a pop commentator, that would be an interesting period to document. So it was nice to hear a little about his time at ZTT and The Art of Noise.
But where was Cathy Dennis?
This is tapioca maltodextrin.
It's a starch that bonds really well to fatty foods. In the fancy-free world of molecular gastronomy, it has been used for weird and wonderful things like making peanut butter powder; I just had to have a go.
On the left we have 40g of nutella, whereas on the right there's 26g of maltodextrin. You put them in a food processor, blend until mixed, and then sift them out into a contain. BEHOLD, LOOK WHAT I HAVE CREATED!
It's a rather odd sensation; the powder recombines in your mouth and tastes exactly like nutella, albeit somewhat less strong than if you just have it straight. For those of you wondering just what use this is, erm...I'll come up with something eventually.
That is olive oil powder. I'm still struggling to think of any use for this, but think! You can carry olive oil on a plane now! (okay, so maybe security might wonder what the mysterious unmarked powder is, but I'll sure they'll be understanding...)
For my next trick, I mixed chocolate with space dust (or pop rocks, as they're known in the US). My theory was that the dust reacts with water, but as there's no water in chocolate, it would set until it was eaten. I was partially right; some of the rocks starting popping as I poured the bag into the melted chocolate, but enough of them stayed dormant to make the finished sweets rather interesting (the flavour of the rocks seems to get washed away in the process, but the popping still works wonderfully!). Just wait until I conquer tempering.
My repeat of the aero experiment from North Carolina failed miserably. I'm not quite sure why. At the moment, I'm thinking that I didn't shake the whipper enough (one recipe says to do it for a minute, whereas the iSI instructions say only 3-4 times). That and maybe plain chocolate works better, so I'll try it again next weekend!
The final experiment for this weekend was Salmiakki Koskenkorva. It's the drink that I had on New Year's Eve at Christa's (remember?), a mixture of Finnish liquorice and vodka. You can see why it appeals to me.
The most difficult part was obtaining the sweets (I eventually tracked them down via eBay). After that, it was simply a matter of pouring the broken liquorice into a bottle of vodka, giving it a vigourous shake, and leaving it all to dissolve. Hurrah!
Next week: the next attempt at aero chocolate, and SPHERES!
They will give you almost exactly what you want, except through in two or three things that hobble it. The Macbook Air looks beautiful, but it's too wide, almost as expensive as a Macbook Pro, and slower than my current machine. But look at it. MmmmmmmMMMMMmmmm.
(Actually, of all the current Mac line, I think the Macbook is a wonderful little machine; it's fast, has a decent display, and is probably the first Apple laptop where you can change the memory and hard drive without having to disassemble the entire case first)
Time Capsule also looks like it might bug me. I hold out hope that wireless Time Machine will be something that they switch on for all NAS systems, and not just the Apple-branded box...
Page 80. Panel 1. “Miss Night” is better known as Emma Peel, the best of John Steed’s partners on The Avengers. Although in The Avengers she is Mrs. Peel, her birth name is Emma Knight, as her father is Sir John Knight, which explains the “John Night’s daughter” reference on Page 78. Peter Sanderson adds "Mrs. Emma Peel's maiden name and the name of her father were established in the 1966 "Avengers" episode "The House That Jack Built" (The fake newspaper from the episode should interest you). If we presume that Mrs. Peel is the same age as Diana Rigg, who played her, she would have been 20 years old in 1958." Philip & Emily Graves write, "Ms Knight was 21 when her father died, so we can reasonably assume that she is about a year older than Dame Diana Rigg." Andrew Teheran writes, "Might be out on a limb here but... John Night is continuously referred to as an industrialist. What keeps popping into my head is Knight Industries as in "Knight Industries Two Thousand", our favorite American Trans Am. Is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang a KITT prototype? There is a British connection with the Devon Miles character." Andrew Bonia echoes this: "The Night Foundation - mentioned throughout as designing hi-tech equipment for both the UK and US could be a double reference to the Knight Foundation, the organization responsible for building the supercar K.I.T.T . in the television series Knight Rider."
Alan Moore is geekier than all of us. Put together.
I have MovableType 4 installed. Current damage seems to be limited to the comment template. which I'll try to have a look at during the weekend.
I was also promising a new design, but I'm concerned that my Futura-heavy idea is a little behind the times these days. Back to the drawing board...
Also, I seem to be having a few troubles with Dreamhost and Gmail. I can't log into Gmail at all right now, and Dreamhost is about 24 hours behind on forwarding mail to my account. So if I'm a little tardy in replying, I swear it's not my fault…
Update: Gmail seems to be back, so if you want to mail there, I'll get the message a lot quicker!
SELECT * FROM BIG_DATABASE
vs.
SELECT CHILD_NAME, NI FROM BIG_DATABASE
Does EDS really charge that much? Really?
So far, three stars in:
- I have fed a creature so much he turned into a planet
- I went into the centre of another planet to deactivate its star core
- Running around a planet where gravity changes from one zone to another
- I have just become BEE MARIO
You can almost see the hearts popping around my head...
25m records down and they've pretty much destroyed the ID Card plan. I am impressed. Take that, No2ID! (Though I did pay you £10 yesterday...)
BBC One is showing a shortened version of Helvetica tonight. Worth the license fee all by itself (perhaps). And for those of you wondering just how a documentary about a font could give way to such a warning…you haven't met Erik Spiekermann yet...
It says that it includes green tea. Which means that the bright spark that came up with Coke Blãk must still be with the company. They've obviously got good blackmail material on the CEO.
Diet Coke Plus (antioxidant) is a mixture of normal Diet Coke, green tea, and 175% of your recommended daily amount of Vitamin C (if you manage to finish an entire bottle). It's healthy! Much better than pesky orange juice!
I know what you're wondering - how does it taste? Hrm. Bizarrely, it seems to taste like carbonated flat cola, if such a thing could exist. That might be the tea taking the edge of the usual flavour, I guess. On the bright side, it didn't make me want to go down to Atlanta with a shotgun like the Coke Blãk experience…
But there's still enough of an unpleasant aftertaste to make finishing a full bottle a chore. But I managed two-thirds! That has to count for something! At least I've had a lot of vitamin C!
Aside from that, though, everything else is lovely so far…
NBC U wanted to explore higher pricing for hit shows such as "Heroes" by raising the price from Apple's standard $1.99 to $2.99 on an experimental basis. "We wanted to take one show, it didn't matter which one it was, and experiment and sell it for $2.99," he said. "We made that offer for months and they said no."
Apple wouldn't let us fleece the customers! Waaaah! Waaaah!
In lieu of more flexibility on pricing, NBC U sought a cut of Apple's hardware sales."Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content, and made a lot of money," Zucker said. "They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing."
And when we're done, JVC, Panasonic, LG, we're coming for you! We've heard about these 'VCR' machines! We want our share!
Zucker took on a wide range of questions from Auletta and the audience, including whether NBC U would be spun off from GE and what he thinks of the newly launched Fox Business Network.
Hi, I'm Jeff Zucker. I took NBC from ruling all in its path to turning into a laughing stock! And I can still screw up the Leno/O'Brien deal! Just watch me!
Mighty Morphing Power Rangers in the Whoverse.
The Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis, or what happens when comic geeks watch too much TV.
Erm, does anybody know a high street clothing emporium that sells black turtle-necked jumpers?
lalalala
This picture fills me with far too much joy than is healthy for a perfectly-adjusted 28-year-old.
Heh.
You know, I'm a black turtle-necker sweater away from being an Apple fanatic, and yes, the news today that MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) is coming out in a few weeks is exciting, but I'm starting to think that it's going to be a bit of a disappointment.
Apple are going out of their way to emphasise the 300 (insert Sparta joke here. Or perhaps not) new features of the operating system, but, eh, most of them aren't all that interesting. Woo! Mail can now use hideous stationary! iCal probably doesn't completely suck! 'Descriptive Error Messages' in AppleScript!
Even some of the new features that I was looking forward to, like Time Machine, now seem a bit limited. Oh sure, I have a large external disk sitting around that I can convert to HFS+ and render it unusable to all other computer systems (except for Linux, of course, but even there, HFS+ support wasn't perfect last time I checked). Also, given that ZFS is looming on the horizon, surely this is going to be a bit of a problem?
Still, it's not all bad. Spaces looks rather useful, and Xcode continues to impress (Ruby and Python are now first-class citizens in Cocoa, so I might have a little dabble!). But it's more of a gradual advance rather than a revolution.
Maybe they've fixed the Finder, though…
There is so much joy in these two images. I can't wait....
BUY ME! BUY ME! BUY ME!
But.
Ha.
My Google-Fu is mighty.
The last day occupants of Whitehaven, Cumbria will be able to wake up to this glorious sight:
Our digital future is a bleak one.
This is a no smoking cinema!
It's like a whole barrel of nostalgia at the moment!
It doesn't have a camera. It doesn't play music. It doesn't do bluetooth. It can only display six characters at a time. It is an uncompromising slab of plastic that is cutting-edge yet harkens back to the LED displays of the 1970s. And it cost me £10.
It is a phone of Futurism.
Somebody needs to drag BBC Wales off to America. Then, instead of whining about the stresses of a 13-episode series, they can witness a 22-part season being put together, with comparable levels of special effects, set design and levels of cast turnover. And at a fairly similar level of budget too.
Slackers.
And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.
The hacienda must be built.
I must say that I'm surprised that the web hasn't been more enthusiastic about the new release of Movable Type this week. I read a fair few computer blogs, and they're either trying to continue pointless format wars (Atom is simply better. Please, let's move on) or talking about Erlang. Or explaining why Ron Paul is the man to lead America forward (fine if you really want a borderline racist and conspiracy theorist in the White House, I guess). But very little on Movable Type 4, a release that we've been waiting on for what seems like years.
I said a few months ago that I'd create a new design for the site when I upgrade to MT4. That's still the plan, but I'm waiting for the MT4 GPL release later in the year (so I can use the blog for commercial purposes without breaking the licence), but I have installed it on a test server so I can work on the new design there. So far, it looks much better than MT2/3; AJAX-y goodness all over the place in the web interface, a snapshot of the current site with imported without a hitch, and it all runs off a svelte SQLite database. Looking good so far.
Perhaps RTD can get 1994 Cheney to meet 2007 Cheney via the magic of the TARDIS...
My favourite part of the interview comes towards the end; of late, Stewart has just been throwing his hands up in air and laughing, because there's nothing else he can do. Here, though, he shows, albeit briefly, just how angry he was with Gibson's little tirade earlier this week.
The World of St. Elsewhere Spreads.
(The World Explained. It's all Munch's fault…)
(Get Omar on Sesame Street! Get Omar on Sesame Street!)
I did buy an Apple a couple of weeks ago. For work, yes, but the law of Apple strikes again: they will always release new machines approximately two weeks after you decide to buy one. Grr.
Still, the new iMac looks so pretty. And with a wireless mouse and keyboard, almost as portable as the MacBook / MacBook Pros themselves.
Seeing as how I'm not really interested in a new machine right now (although the new keyboard looks interesting; it could be a possible replacement to the trusty IBM one I use at the moment), the changes to iPhoto and iMovie are what interest me in today's announcement. iPhoto has got faster (again), plus some fancier editing tools and web gallery options, but iMovie is a completely new application, borrowing a little from iTunes by giving you a video library to store and select clips for when you're making little movies. And if you can get it into MPEG-4 format (ffmpeg is your friend), you can have it in iMovie (it also does HDV/AVCHD for higher-end camcorders!).
Oooh, that's fancy. One-click upload from iMovie to YouTube.
I have this in my room. Grant Morrison's Dare and Really & Truly; the first reveals that Margaret Thatcher was in league with The Mekon (secretly, we all knew this, right?) while the second is possibly the only comic to be written by Ecstasy. Oh, and how it shows.
(in fact, R&T is probably one of my favourite Grant Morrison stories; pared right down to the bone, the gorgeous Rian Hughes art, the fact that I first read it hopped up on Lemsip on the couch, curtains drawn while pausing to be sick…good times. I think.)
Perhaps I should do a proper comics round-up soon. News that Warren Ellis is going to be following Joss Whedon on X-Men won't entice me back, but Grant Morrison doing Final Crisis, which sounds as if it's based on his old Hypercrisis idea? Oh yes. More of this sort of thing later in the week. With pictures!.