chapnickman

26 More Ridiculously Questionable T-Shirts

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:56:20 -0700

26 More Ridiculously Questionable T-Shirts

I was showing Aaron the Red House commercial since I found out...

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:35:00 -0700

I was showing Aaron the Red House commercial since I found out he’s embarrassingly behind the times and got this gem of targeted advertising. The Red House, targeted advertising, and AfroRomance… bringing black people and white people together!

Buy One Anyway: How to Save Newspapers

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:25:00 -0700

Buy One Anyway: How to Save Newspapers

Amazon Remotely Deletes Legitimately Purchased Books From Thousands of Kindles

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:14:00 -0700

Amazon Remotely Deletes Legitimately Purchased Books From Thousands of Kindles:

“Apparently, the publisher changed its mind about having electronic versions of Orwell’s books. So Amazon removed them from the store and in the process remotely deleted the books from the Kindles of anyone who bought them, depositing a refund in their account in the process.”

“…the fact that this happened to 1984, of all books, makes this even more surreal.”

Lame. I own both Animal Farm and 1984… I guess owned is more appropriate.

I want.

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:59:00 -0700

I want.

davidkaneda: Buzz Aldrin punches Bart Sibrel after he claims...

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 12:59:32 -0700

davidkaneda:

Buzz Aldrin punches Bart Sibrel after he claims Buzz never went to the moon.

"If you base your savings on a percentage of your income instead of a fixed amount, then you..."

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:34:20 -0700

“If you base your savings on a percentage of your income instead of a fixed amount, then you won’t find yourself three raises down the road still saving like a rookie.”

- Use Target Savings to Beat Back Lifestyle Inflation

Tegan and Sara - Soil, Soil

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:28:00 -0700

Tegan and Sara - Soil, Soil

Worth It? The Panasonic Lumix LX3

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:06:53 -0700

Worth It? The Panasonic Lumix LX3: I have the LX3 and have been very happy with it.

Hypothetical Apple.com, circa 1983.

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:59:00 -0700

Hypothetical Apple.com, circa 1983.

These Window Blinds Are Better than Most Views

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:57:03 -0700

These Window Blinds Are Better than Most Views

This @font-face demo from teehan+lax is less than successful on...

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:46:00 -0700

This @font-face demo from teehan+lax is less than successful on Windows. From left to right: Safari 4, Firefox 3.5, Chrome 3.0.193.1. See the larger image to see the crumby font rendering. I’m not sure where the blame lies, but this is disappointing.

pseudomeaningful: Giving it Away (via artpixie) Everyone...

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:40:10 -0700

pseudomeaningful:

Giving it Away (via artpixie)

Everyone knows true happiness is KEEPING it. Unless you literally mean that tiny shell in your hand. In that case, yes, we agree, get rid of it. Holding onto little trinkets like that can easily fill your house with garbage. Then true happiness becomes just making it one weekend without your wife asking you to clean out the garage.

iPhone video from the bottom of an RC plane.

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:28:00 -0700

iPhone video from the bottom of an RC plane.

"When we look at the age in which we live - no matter what age it happens to be - it is hard for us..."

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 06:01:00 -0700

“When we look at the age in which we live - no matter what age it happens to be - it is hard for us to not be depressed by it. The taste of the age is, always, a bitter one. ‘What kind of a time is this when one must envy the dead and buried!’ said Goethe about his age; yet Matthew Arnold would have traded his own time for Goethe’s almost as willingly as he would have traded his own self for Goethe’s…Do people feel this way because our time is worse than Arnold’s, and Arnold’s worse than Goethe’s, and so on back to paradise? Or because forbidden fruits - the fruits forbidden us by time - are always the sweetest? Or because we can never compare our own age with an earlier age, but only with books about that age?”

- Randall Jarrell, The Taste of the Age

Here’s the simpler remote that came with my XBox. The...

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:52:00 -0700

Here’s the simpler remote that came with my XBox. The larger remote came with my HD DVD drive, so I guess this would be a better side-by-side with the Apple remote.

marco: These two remotes, by Apple (left, Apple TV) and...

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:46:00 -0700

marco:

These two remotes, by Apple (left, Apple TV) and Microsoft (right, Xbox 360), do approximately the same things with a few exceptions:

The Microsoft remote uses two AA batteries that need to be replaced about every 6 months. The Apple remote uses a single CR2032 that has never needed to be replaced.

The Apple remote has 6 buttons. The Microsoft remote has 46, only 15 of which are regularly used for media playback.

The buttons on the Microsoft remote are backlit so you can see what they do in the dark. The Apple remote doesn’t have this feature because you never need to look at the buttons after the first minute of use.

The Apple remote works from nearly any position in the room with approximate line-of-sight between itself and the front of the Apple TV. The Microsoft remote has the worst reception angle of any remote I’ve ever used (supposedly 90°, ±45°). Mine starts failing consistently at about 22° right of center at a distance of 8 feet, putting it right at the bottom of their specified total radius (~44°). It won’t even work from the right half of the couch.

This is a pretty good indicator of the two companies’ design philosophies and quality goals. And this isn’t even considering the software interface that each remote is respectively controlling.

I think this is a rather silly comparison. I don’t necessarily disagree with the main point trying to be made, but the XBox remote is made for a much different use case. How would the Apple remote jump to a certain channel? How would it record programs? I have a stack of AA batteries in my house and not a single replacement for the Apple remote. This is a typical scenario where the the device or interface seems absurd for what one’s individual use case is. I would contend that someone else would find the Apple TVs remote abhorrent due to its lack of buttons and functionality. One could also make the point that the XBox remote does a better job describing available functionality where the Apple remote would hide it in an onscreen menu. I find both remotes to be quite useful as I use them both regularly. My one complaint would be the Y, X, A, and B buttons, as those are not immediately obvious choices even though the XBox UI does show them in the bottom corner. I do not have any problems with line of sight on the XBox although I do agree that the Apple remote is superior in this regard.

I think that the two remotes are a good example of the priorities of the respective companies, but I don’t agree that it’s safe to assume that one option is more inherently right than the other. I think they each solve the problem at hand quite well, and I find both quite useful in their overlapping functionality without ever looking at the remote.

Edit: Here’s a picture of the smaller XBox 360 remote that came with my 360.

Ironing Board Doubles As A Full-Length Mirror

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:07:19 -0700

Ironing Board Doubles As A Full-Length Mirror

Chromium Blog: Smaller is Faster (and Safer Too)

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:06:00 -0700

Chromium Blog: Smaller is Faster (and Safer Too): “Rather then push put a whole new 10MB update, we send out a diff that takes the previous version of Google Chrome and generates the new version. We tried several binary diff algorithms and have been using bsdiff up until now. We are big fans of bsdiff - it is small and worked better than anything else we tried.
But bsdiff was still producing diffs that were bigger than we felt were necessary. So we wrote a new diff algorithm that knows more about the kind of data we are pushing - large files containing compiled executables.”

Gates Puts Feynman Lectures Online This is so fantastic. I love...

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:19:00 -0700

Gates Puts Feynman Lectures Online

This is so fantastic. I love Feynman, and I am so grateful and excited that these are online!