Mashup Australia
Phil Nelson Australia gets on the open dataset train, with a little contest. Here’s to hoping it’s contagious.
A Concise Summary of Charlie Booker’s Recent Anti(?)-Apple Rant
Cleversimon gets to the heart of Charlie Booker’s strange rambly piece from earlier this week:
Finishing the sentence “I’ll never buy a Mac because” with anything but “it doesn’t meet my needs” means you don’t get to accuse Apple users of making irrational purchasing decisions based on slavish adherence to an ideology.
It’s not surprising that Booker’s view is purposefully self-contradictory. He makes his living being a contrarian. For him It doesn’t have to make sense so long as it is rabble-rousing.
New Shiren the Wanderer Game In The Works
My heart leaps. Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer is my most-played DS game by a wide margin (100+ hours, at a guess). It’s probably the best bang:buck I’ve ever gotten with a game.
If this doesn’t come out for the US I may have to learn Japanese.
How To Strip ID3v1 Tags from MP3s
The post is Ubuntu-specific, but the commands work just fine in Mac OS X.
Jack Kirby’s Heirs File To Regain Copyrights
The author assumes that Kirby’s heirs will probably just end up with rights to royalties, which I can’t say I give a shit about it. Jack’s long gone.
Google Chrome Frame
A plugin for Internet Explorer on Windows that aims to bring modern HTML5 capabilities to IE. I’m not sure exactly how much this will help web developers: One of the major sticking points that makes IE still so widely-used is that users in large organizations aren’t allowed to install things. Not even plugins.
How Useful Is YouTube’s 5-Star Rating System?
5-star ratings utterly dominate the distribution of overall votes. 1 star votes are in “second place”, but as the graph shows it isn’t even close.
Star ratings really don’t work well on the internet. YouTube would be much better off with a simple “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” system, and doing their algorithmic magic on those.
The short answer to the question in the title of this post: not very.
Philadelphia Libraries Saved With Last-Minute Legislation
Passed by a vote of 32 to 17, just days before they’d have been shut down (presumably) for good.
Von Sholly’s STAR SPANGLED DINOSAURS
Very authentic-looking spoofs of DC’s “STAR SPANGLED WAR STORIES” from the 1960s, which did feature the odd dinosaur.
Telltale Games Giving Away Episode 1 of Tales of Monkey Island
“Launch of the Screaming Narwhal” is free for Talk Like A Pirate day, from midnight on Sept. 19th.
Man Replaces (Nearly) All Sound Effects in Half-Life 2 With His Own Voice
An impressive array of sound effects, and very funny to listen to during the otherwise normal playing of the game.
Music Publishers Want Royalties For 30 Second Song Samples
Not a story from the Onion. I don’t know where to start on this, I really don’t.
Philadelphia is Closing It’s Libraries
Yes, all of them. These are the public libraries in Philadelphia. I feel that Ben Franklin would personally beat the shit out of whoever let this happen. It’s a travesty.
Preview of WebKit’s WebGL
3D gaming in-browser without plugins. Playable TODAY with a nightly build of Webkit on your Mac. Wow.
Winner of the Infinite Mario AI Contest Posts Source Code
All of the java components that won the contest. Watch the slow-mo video if you want to weep for humanity’s eventual end.
The Worst Super Mario Player Ever
An experiment in beating the original Super Mario Bros. for the NES while getting the lowest possible score. This guy managed to do it while only getting 700 points. Just getting one power-up mushroom gives the player 1,000 points, so this is no mean feat.
Acorn 2.0
Flying Meat Software release a super update to their image editor, Acorn. It sports an all-new UI designed (mostly) by Brandon Walkin. Gus’ blog post sums up many of the changes. It is, interestingly to me, 64-bit and only runs on 10.6.
Bulletproof @font-face syntax
Paul Irish’s guide to the best @font-face syntax for all compatible browsers.
Preliminary Notes on Apple’s Recent “It’s Only Rock and Roll” Music Event
In no particular order:
-
App recommendations: Wholly necessary, but we aren’t out of the woods yet regarding App Store curation. I bet there’s a good deal of money to be made just doing that: Curating collections of apps. Boing Boing got huge during the blog boom for curating other blogs, why wouldn’t it work for applications on a still-new platform? Someone’s going to get rich digging down on serious Touch applications.
-
iPod Touch No camera, no mention of 3GS-type speed bump. Kinda got the shaft. I can’t think of a single good reason for not including a camera that doesn’t involve trying to trick people into buying a Nano. Surely they aren’t afraid a (not that great) camera is going to steer fence-sitters from the iPhone to the Touch? Update: It’s now come out that the 8gb ($199) iPod Touch has the older, slightly slower, hardware, and all the others in the Touch line have the upgraded “3GS” innards. You’ll notice on the “Compare iPod Models” page on Apple’s site, the 8gb is sectioned off from his higher-capcity and speedier brothers.
-
iTunes 9 Now with more bloat and cumbersome, non-portable, versions of the extra features that people who illegally download albums already get in more useful formats. Still a 32-bit Carbon app. Gruber was right about WebKit.