Last week was the budget. This week is the leftovers.
- I've developed an interest in correction tracking for new media
lately, and there are two interesting developments on that front. Kurt
at Ars Technica has debuted Copypasta, a tool for adding
collaborative editing to any site. Mediabugs, on the other hand, is more
of a centralized database of errors, and they just introduced a WordPress plugin for
journalism blogs.
- Know how we used to post corrections to blogs in the old days? The
comments. Uphill, both ways. Now get off my lawn.
- I don't know what's more terrifying: that they've actually finished
Atlas
Shrugged, The Movie, or that this is "part one." As always, we quote
John Rogers:
There are two novels that can change a bookish
fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas
Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong
obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally
stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real
world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
- Yeah, so maybe buying
a Robocop statue for Detroit is not the best use of $50,000. But on
the other hand, if you needed a great example of the ways that the
Internet tends to privilege frivolous gestures over useful action, it's
the best thing since OLPC.
- Speaking of Detroit, it
does actually have grocery stores. Some good thoughts on
urbanization, corporate branding, and perceptions of poverty.
- I complain a lot about the current state of rich HTML graphics:
<canvas>, for example, is in the running for the worst API I've
seen since the original DOM. If you're used to Flash's excellent display
tree API, you may want to look into AS3 guru Grant Skinner's Easel.js
library. Myself, I think it's still unclear that browser performance is
there yet.
- Android 2.3 ("Gingerbread") was just pushed out to my Nexus One.
Right off the bat, the new power off
animation cracks me up--it's basically the "shrink to a white dot"
from very old CRT television sets. Of course, that effect was caused by
the physical movement of the cathode ray gun inside the set, which has
no equivalent in the LCD/OLED screens we use for almost everything
today. It's like a comedy record-scratch: cultural artifacts that
everyone recognizes more for semantic meaning than through any direct
physical experience with the original. There ought to be a name for
that.
- I switched my laptop to a solid-state drive this week (an Intel
X25, after a Corsair drive flaked out during sleep mode). I'm not
getting the full use out of it, because my BIOS doesn't support full
SATA2 speeds without a hack that I'm a little scared to install, but the
improvement I have seen is impressive--games, especially, load almost
instantly, which has done a lot to move my spare time from the XBox to
the PC. Given that CPU speeds have topped out, if you're looking to
rejuvenate an aging laptop, this is probably the way to go.