Also? Really, and I say this with utter seriousness, it is not possible to see the Mutant Enemy, grrr arrgh, too much. As a wise man once asked, “Why doesn’t my TV have a Joss Whedon channel?”

Also, also? What’s the Timescience Bloodclub?

“It’s a good day to be homeless.”

I think this is live and free till tomorrow (Sunday) and then you gotta bust it out on iTunes. Acts I and II, just in case you haven’t seen them or want to watch again.

So? What’s your verdict?

(via)

Seriously, right? It’s too much? The rabbitten’s name is Bubbles!

AIM and Facebook

I downloaded AIM all excited and you know… it works. It’s nice that you can text people over AIM so that you can avoid the outgoing text charge. I haven’t used it much but when I did it worked pretty well. It’s just that without any kind of background operation, it really isn’t generally that useful. I could see it coming in handy while travelling if you just pop on to see if someone’s around, but as a general purpose tool, it’s, ok.

The Facebook app is even more underwhelming. Other than integration with the iPhone’s camera which is nice (although, not a huge deal since there’s a very reasonable normal mobile photo upload that you use without it) it offers less functionality than the iPhone friendly Facebook website. The iPhone site is quite quick (although not quite as fast as the app, granted) and shows you your events, your friend requests, and an easier to use interface to see all your friends’ pictures. The app, at least, was recently updated to support writing on Walls (how did it not support this to begin with? The iPhone site always did) and it does support Facebook chat which the site does not. But it seems crazy to me that with an iPhone site with a very reasonable and usable interface they’d devolve their iPhone app with a crappier UI.

Yelp, Urbanspoon and iWant

Yelp’s app is pretty darn good. It’s location aware so you can always find stuff near you or you can manually enter your location. Then it finds you nearby food and drink (and other services like banks, gas and drugstores) all handily laid out in map form if you so desire. Of course it shows you the ratings, gives information about the restaurant and lets you read the reviews. Strangely, I don’t think it lets you log in and leave your own reviews. Nevertheless, it’s definitely a very useful app.

Urbanspoon’s an app of a different color. It’s designed to help the indecisive among us. It has three scrollers one for location, one for cuisine and one for price - any or all three of them can be locked. Once you’ve locked (or left all open) the scrollers you shake the iPhone and it picks any unlocked options and then randomly suggests a restaurant to you that fits the bill. It’s pretty great! It’d be nice if it was location aware so you could press a button and it’d find and lock your current location, but you know, it isn’t hard to do it yourself.

iWant is similar to Yelp, but less good when comparing it to the categories that Yelp does. It’s got a simple, location aware interface and for food and drink, I think it actually uses Yelp but doesn’t give you nearly the information that the Yelp app does, just the basics, location and top level ratings. What it does provide, though, is a lot more categories, like hotels, car rentals, movies and various shopping categories. It seems pretty useful so I’m keeping it around.

The Rest

Lots of other stuff, I’m running Exposure (the free one) which is a nice interface to Flickr, easily showing your pics, your contacts pics, letting you explore new ones and even location aware photos so you can see shots taken near you (although, that so far has proven a lot less interesting than it sounded to me). I tried NearPics, too, which is all about the showing you shots taken near wherever you are. It has thus far been unimpressive, showing me photos of central park and the empire state building. Shrug.

Also grabbed Pandora which seems to work very well, even over EDGE. It streams in that sweet, sweet music right away. I mostly don’t use Pandora, though, but there’s definitely times in the past (mostly on long drives) where I would have loved it. I can see it taking a bite out of terrestrial and satellite radio, be cool if it took voice commands so while you were driving you could yell “Next!” to skip the song. Anyhoo, I wonder if the RIAA will take exception to it. Huh.

Oddly there’s four, count them, FOUR free flashlight apps (even a pay one! who the hell is paying for one??). The best one is FiatLux, it’s good because you can easily pick a non-white color and brightness. I could see picking a dim red light to see something in the dark without completely ruining your night vision. There’s also a Flashlight (by john haney software) that provides different colors and an epilepsy inducing strobe effect. But no dimmer. Bleah. Or Light which just has white. Or newcomer SOS Flashlight which has some colors (but no dimmer) and it’s SOS flashing mode. Eh.

Oh, Remote is awesome. It will be even more awesome when I get my AppleTV after I move, but even just the iTunes control is very, very great. Midomi is pretty neat, too, kinda hit or miss, but sometimes when you just need to figure out what song is running through your head, it’s just the trick. Also downloaded Shazam which seems to be similar to Midomi but for like if the song is actually playing somewhere. Haven’t had the chance to use it, though.

The VNC Lite app is also pretty sweet, limited, small screen size, but still it’s smooth and fast. Was able to get connect to my mac, close some windows, type in some terminals, very little lag. I was impressed.

Well, that’s mostly it. What’re you rockin’ on your iPhone? Did you jailbreak 2.0?

Next up we have the mayor of the year. Yes, the mayor of a Jersey shore town has smacked down, very publicly, the Staten Island girls who seem to infest his town. You have to love that this public official published this:

The spat ended the way most fights with SI girls do. The SI woman grabbed the Boonton woman by the hair… and began punching her face in….As the Staten Island girl was pummeling the Boonton girl’s face, she used the hand she was still holding her drink glass in. Now, we’re not sure if the glass was stuck to her hand cause of all the hair spray or if this is a technique Staten Island girls learn in Brownies, but we are thankful she left her brass knuckles and straight razor in her other purse.

Come on! I mean, the whole newsletter is awesome, from the first article on the first houses to attract their sheriffs attention on down. Even has a spotlight on njguido.com, where they totally make fun of that crap and offer a $100 reward for information leading to a noise summons to an anonymous poster! That guy should totally blog. I’d read the hell out of it.

And then there was the list of Top 10 Tattoo mispellings. Up front, I’ll say it’s not really the top 10 because several of them aren’t really mispellings, just bad tattoos, I guess they couldn’t find 10 actual mispellings but still needed to linkbait. On the other hand, they’re all pretty funny, so you know. I’m only annoyed on principle. I’m a very principled person, you see. Whatever. Tomarrow never knows.

BONUS LINK: Well, not only is it iPhone week, it’s also Joss Whedon week! You saw Dr. Horrible Act I and Act II already, right? Well, while you’re waiting for III (on tomorrow) you can catch Joss on Best Week Ever tonight at 9 and 11pm.

Ahh.. just watch it. Geez. Then buy it on the iTunes…. Or, buy it on the iTunes then watch it. Whichev.

“The hammer is my penis.”

Also, who doesn’t love Moist? That guy rocks.

So I downloaded a few games, some free some not, was looking to see how the accelerometer worked on these bad boys. Generally speaking, it works awesome. I really like all of them.

Super Monkey Ball

Unsurprisingly, this is the first game I bought. $9.99 and worth every penny. I know some folks have complained that the controls are hard, and they are. I suck at it, I still haven’t unlocked anything but the “hard version”, which just involves getting through all the boards by any means possible. But it is fun as hell and the amazing graphics don’t hurt. It looks kind of like old N64 games and that ain’t bad.

Like with almost all the accelerometer games just remember, small moves get the job done. The device is remarkably sensitive and going too fast often involves flying off the rails. I wouldn’t know it, but there’s apparently over 500 stages to get through, which is a lot of bang for your buck.

Labyrinth

The other game I bought, this game is super disco breakin, man. I knew I wanted this game from playing it on all my other friends’ jail broken iPhones (I’m too much not a man to have done it to my own). It’s like those old school marble games where you navigate a marble through a holey maze by using two knobs to rotate the board on two axes. Except on the iPhone you don’t have two knobs, you just freaking tilt the iPhone a little bit.

This game is super simple and super fun. It’s really addictive, one of those games where despite thinking “Ok, this is the last try”, it never counts because the game totally cheated that time. The best part of it is that you can download tons of level packs that people have designed (just use any SVG editor and the magic happens for you!). So far the level packs I downloaded are “Can you do this?”, “Extreme levels”, “Intense Level Pack”, “Intense Level Pack - Extreme” and “The Hell Pack.” And that’s just a fraction of them. I haven’t designed any levels yet, but maybe one day. Easily worth the $6.99. Also I will crush you at this game. Just sayin.

Cube Runner

This was a free game but was temporarily removed from the App Store, should be back up whenever Apple gets its lazy ass to approving an update. It’s a real simple flying game, you have only two controls, tilt left to veer left, tilt right to veer right. Avoid the blocks. Easy to learn, hard to do. Addictive. It reminds me in some ways of my favourite game ever, Spectre from back in the day. (please someone port the game to the iPhone with multiplayer over WiFi!).

Like Labyrinth, you can design your own levels, it’s even easier here because it’s just a text file! You then put it up on a website and download it to the game, which is about as easy as it gets. The problem, though, is that there’s no central repository. I’m lazy, I want to play other people’s packs - in addition to the url method, there should be a central place with easy point and click download. That would be a huge improvement. But defintely grab this game when it comes back, very worth it.

Tap Tap Revenge

This game is like one of those rhythm games where you basically hit one of three buttons on a beat. You pick a level, pick a song and then go. Very simple, it also uses the accelerometer for special beats that has you flicking it left, right or forward. That is somehow more embarassing to do in public than flying your spaceship or rolling your monkey (your super monkey ball, I don’t know what you were thinking there), but it’s fun. Eventually there’ll be more songs to grab, which will be even better. You can also play in heads up mode against someone which is pretty great - although the quarters are cramped on such a small screen.

It does seem to not really tell you when you miss - that is, sometimes it tells you but a lot of times it doesn’t seem to. You should be able to turn off the buzzing when you miss. Still, this game is really addictive and it’s free so give it a whirl!

And those are the games I play. All use the accelerometer to good effect. You playing anything? You got any Labyrinth level packs to recommend me?

In the meantime, though, I suppose I could occupy myself with Rock Band 2! I guess I’d have to actually get a game system, but I’ll probably get a Wii before long for some hot Wii Fit action. It’s got some fancier sync method which should make life better and the drum kit has cymbals! Good times.

In addition to the Wii, I’ll mostly likely also pick up one of the new civilian Ospreys that’re going up for sale. Personally, I’ve always felt that a personal jet that wasn’t VTOL was a joke and was slightly embarrassed for people who purchased them. That’s why I don’t have one, yet. Now, though, I can finally ride in the style I would like to. I think the $20 or $30 million is totally worth it.

REMINDER: That’s right, you knew it was coming and Dr. Horrible Act II is now out. Just in case you missed Act I, you should watch that first. It’s good.

“Me love-a ping pong long time!”

Here’s a link to a higher res version of the trailer if you can’t get enough.

iPhone 3G (the hardware) and iPhone 2.0 (the software, confusing! I know!) are raging successes. Apple’s sold 1 million phones and had 10 million app downloads. In 3 days. It took the first iPhone 74 days to do that. Search the net for iPocalypse and iFail, no shortage of reporting on what a failure this launch was due to a big snag early on Friday. I hit the snag myself, just updating my 1st gen iPhone to 2.0. Fail? Are these people watching the same product launch I am? As of yesterday there were still up to 5 hour lines at the Apple stores! Every company in the world wishes their failures were so good. Even the folks caught up in the problems on friday were in good spirits. You know Apple’s doing all right when even the Pope is down with the Jesus phone.

Interestingly enough during this period a whole bunch of other handset news has come out. Huh! Who knew there was other stuff to talk about!

Google

First were the gPhone rumors, bunked then debunked. Not surprised, I just don’t think it makes any sense for Google to make a handset. Then they have to somehow get the carriers to carry it and then sell it and support it and they’d have to be making an unsaid statement that this, their phone, was better than the others. And they’re not so good at having the confidence in their own products. Of course it would be interesting model to build a phone and get the carriers to carry it by saying, this phone and its OS is free. And then reap the advertising rewards, somehow.

In the meantime they’re still plugging away at Android. Except they’re raising the ire of their developers by ignoring them while they’re trying to get an actual phone out. Makes you think, huh, maybe actually having a product first is a good idea, then get the developers. Nah, that would mean doing a lot of work all by one’s lonesome, Google wants an Alliance!

RIM

So the Canadians are still going strong. RIM’s new Bold has been fondled and reviewed, mostly positively. Much more interestingly, though, are the pics of RIM’s BlackBerry Thunder. The differentiator between RIM and iPhone has always been people saying they couldn’t live without a hard keyboard and RIM makes the best. Um. Ok, so RIM’s big hope is now a keyboardless phone? Haptic shmaptic.

The problem with the iPhone’s keys isn’t that you don’t know you’re pressing it. I don’t need the phone to buzz. You still simply can’t touch type on a virtual keypad, it only counts if your fingers can feel the move from key to key. Anyhow, so this new Thunder has a glass screen, multi-touch and uses webkit for the browser. Huh. Sounds familiar. With Apple’s increasing friendliness with the Enterprise and the burgeoning App Store and great low price on its phones (with contract), why would people want this new BlackBerry? Ok, it’s got copy and paste, but beyond that?

Palm

So, you probably didn’t notice, but Palm launched a new WinMob phone, Treo 800w on Sprint. Palm asks, is this the best Treo ever? I guess the real question is, does anyone care? Everything that doesn’t involve their new Linux based OS towards the end of the year (my guess is not till next year) is pretty much irrelevant. Sure it’s nice that they’ve finally got WiFi on one of their phones and it seems they’ve got A2DP which the iPhone somehow doesn’t. Sure the reviews are positive. But really, that 320×320 screen used to be impresssive, but now? Not so much. And nobody’s buying phones that are Apple’s, RIM’s or under $100. I’m just saying. Hurry up Palm, just get with the next gen OS.

OpenMoko

And dark horse OpenMoko just went live with their fully open source hardware and software platform. Help yourself to freedom with the Neo FreeRunner. This Linux based phone is probably not for the average consumer right now, filled with nerdly goodness and with too many decisions to make (which software stack do you want? GNOME? Qtopia? FreeSmartphone.org’s?).

Nevertheless, a full open hardware/software platform, a nice big 480×640 touch screen shouldn’t be ruled out of the game. Open Source is never that good at building UI’s and smart phones are, more or less, all about the UI (as 1st gen iPhones proved). But there’s always surprises in life or some individual or company could take interest and build something amazing on top of it. Who knows? Bears watching, certainly an interesting competitor to the other linux OS’s (Android and Palm’s next one, oh and Access Linux).

I think that’s most of the phone news that’s occurred in the past couple weeks. Lotta interesting stuff out there. Hoping it does nothing but speed up. What’s your phone of choice? What’re you looking forward to?

I remember from my first trip to Tokyo as not an 8 year old, seeing signs in the subway that told women that if someone groped them they should say something. I thought that that was screwed up and that they’d never need anything like that in NYC because you’d catch a beatdown if you tried that here. Apparently, I’m wrong. NYC is thinking about joining the club of cities with anti-groping ads all up in their public transport. Gross. At least we have hollabacknyc a place for folks to post their pics of subway pervs.

And to leave you with happy thoughts, just in case you somehow missed my many posts yesterday about Doctor Horrible’s launch of Act I, I’m reminding you again that it’s out and free this week. It was so popular that it crushed their servers, but is back up and in business again. But the word is out and it is good. It’s even the #1 TV show in iTunes now, not #1 sci-fi, just #1. You ought to buy it. Anyhoo, that’s it for this morning. Go watch it again and sing along.

UPDATE: Oh, I forgot, if you’re a twitterer, you may want to follow @drhorrible which gives updates. Pretty low traffic, but you know, keeps you on top of business.