l-dopa

Anyone who knows me knows that I like to stay on the bleeding edge of technology. That’s why after several of the most recent years of playing Super Mario Brothers 3 for NES, I opted to upgrade to Super Mario World for SNES this past Christmas season.

It was around this time that I discovered something on the Interweb that I’d not seen before: Tool-assisted video game speed runs. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s sum of someone with too much time on their hands, console emulator software, and someone with too much time on their hands. They’ll create a near-flawless video of a game being completed, “rewinding” thousands of mistakes to do so, finally, posting the video for us all to enjoy.

Alexis Neuhaus’ run of Super Mario World through Bowser in 10 minutes, 51 seconds can be found here. It’s worth a little watch, even if you’re not into the latest technology the way I am. Via the Internet Archive.

There! I said it, and I’m glad I did. However, Flash 7’s “Spark” video format is unfortunately the basis of what you’ll see on YouTube and Google Video — and both services suffer greatly from blurry, pixelated video as a result. For me, both services border on the unwatchable.

The real shame is that video in Flash 8 is so much better. Check out this side-by-side comparison. The moral of the story is: if you have to do video for the web in Flash, insist on encoding it using Flash 8’s “VP6″ codec. Or even better, encode it using QuickTime 7’s industry-standard H.264 codec, which is also killer. And, most importantly, do not encode your video in Windows Media format or Real format, as those formats have been implicated by an international consortium of video experts to cause cancer.

~jeff

This is your construction technique.
This is your construction technique caffeinated.

I thought this was a pretty complete database until I needed to find out if Squirt was caffeinated or decaf. According to the information posted on free public message boards — which are always dependable and accurate — the Ruby Red variety is charged-up, but the reg’lar kind is not.

I would have just checked the information on the side of the can, but it was in a recycling bin somewhere downtown.

And this just in: “In Canada, carbonated beverages other than cola are not caffeinated…. 7-up, Root Beer, Mountain Dew, etc. are caffeine-free.”

Finally, Carrie, please do not go and drink 68 shots of Sky Rocket Caffeinated Syrup.

Mad science is the best science!

187+ mph fueled by sheer awesomeness!

I started feeling vaguely funny about my new 5G 60 GB iPod purchase* upon hearing the rumors that Apple was coming out with Yet Another iPod model. So soon, Apple? The rumors peg the new iPod as having a larger, widescreen format — and some even suggest HD video capability that would tie into a new, HD-enabled AirPort Express and a Front Row sportin’ Intel Mac Mini.

Let’s put aside the problem of sticking decoding hardware capable of decoding HD video into an iPod form factor, which is simply 100% impossible right now. Let’s instead examine the particulars of this beautiful H.264 HD clip, and let’s even start the math with the “lower-res” 480p one**:

81.8 MB / 262 seconds long = .3 MB a second.

2 hour movie = 7,200 seconds.

.3 MB a second x 7,200 seconds = 2,160 MB, or about 2 GB.

So a 60 GB video iPod could hold up to 30 480p HD movies… which, to “buy” one online, you’d have to download 2 GB worth of video for apiece. Which would take upwards of: forever. Or, you could convert your DVDs to an iPod friendly semi-HD-resolution H.264 data format, which given how long Handbrake takes to convert one DVD to a MPEG-4 file of 320 pixels by 240 pixels to fit on the existing iPod, would also take upwards of: forever.

The main problem: neither “30 Movies in Your Pocket” nor “30 Movies on your Mac Mini” have the immediate marketing impact of “1,000 Songs in Your Pocket”.

Plus, I dunno, I think I’d kind of resent those large honking files hoggin’ up all my precious portable hard drive. Keeping 2-4 GB around of sometimes-watched, archived offline video on a DVD is fine, because it’s not clogging up my drive, and the existing low-res 320×240 iPod videos are around 400 MB at movie length, which is right on the edge of acceptable. But who really wants to manage files that are 2 GB a piece on their hard drive? A drag is what it is. If only you could keep video… archived offline… on some sort of removable media… maybe something circley and shiney***.

This isn’t to say that Apple isn’t working on cool stuff along these lines — a larger screen certainly would be nice — and surely the simple fact that I just bought one of the 5G models is enough incontrovertible evidence to indicate to everyone that the 5G model is very soon to be wildly obsolete, stuffed ignominiously in a closet with a ColecoVision Adam, daisywheel printer, and “Buck Rogers” cartridge.

But no, what I’m saying is: file size and hard drive capacity are going to be the big issues with any iPod or PVR that holds anything other than smallish, 22-48 minute, low-res TV shows. TiVo is skirting this issue in their upcoming generation 3 units by allowing for external storage; unfortunately for Apple, external storage for an iPod seems somewhat inelegant.

~jeff

* which, don’t get me wrong, I totally love. I bought it for the capacity; for reasons I won’t get into here, I have enough legally acquired music to fill two of the things. It’s kind of a problem, actually.

** the math for the higher-resolution 720p and 1080p HD formats is even more impractical; 720p is ((219.7 MB/ 262 seconds) x 7,200 seconds) = 6,037 MB, or about 6 GB per movie, with 1080p averaging 7.5 GB per 2 hour movie, making your 60 GB drive hold a whopping 7-9 movies — and nothing else. Hope you like archiving to DL DVD! which completely negates the point, and might actually end up costing more for the archival media than the price of the video you’re archiving.

*** I dare to dream.

… for my nineteenth post today, I’m posting about Ensemble Robot. I don’t have the passion for robot-music that I once did, but I still feel nostalgia when I see stuff like this.

In related, up-to-the-minute news, Jonny, Jeff and I just got back from seeing the world premiére of Ballet Mecanique six years ago. It was interesting, but not overwhelmingly so. Not loud enough, not weird enough, not musical enough. Am I getting old? I still like Art of Noise. Does that count?

(no.)

Karl Rove is trying to make an end-run to keep Bush from being prosecuted for breaking the law with his wiretapping program. He is approaching Judiciary Committee senators directly and appealing to their sense of self-preservation, at the expense of their sense of morality.

Congressional sources said Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove has threatened to blacklist any Republican who votes against the president. The sources said the blacklist would mean a halt in any White House political or financial support of senators running for re-election in November.

[...]

Over the last few weeks, Mr. Rove has been calling in virtually every Republican on the Senate committee as well as the leadership in Congress. The sources said Mr. Rove’s message has been that a vote against Mr. Bush would destroy GOP prospects in congressional elections.

This stuff gives me the shivers. Write your senator, especially if they are a member of the Judiciary Committee, the ones being most targeted by this backhanded extortion.

Link, via Kuro5hin

Pandora’s pretty neat: you tell it some music you like and it finds not only that music, but music that’s “like” it… and plays it. Well. You mark things you like and dislike, á la Amazon, and it chooses based on those.

… OH, NO, PANDORA! THIS IS CRAP!

Whew.

That’s what I get for doing a review while listening. The next track is neat and I’ve never heard of it before! “Army of Me” by Atoi. A bit like Portisehead covering Bjørk. With deliberately amateur engineering.

I’m encouraged by their extensive Wire library, they got some Natacha Atlas… what else could you need?

Most touch-screens allow for only one contact at a time. Not this one. That’s some hot fucking interface they’ve got there.

Now, we had a multi-contact touchscreen in my research group when I was in college, but for some reason, no one would write drivers for the thing for any platform and we were really a bunch of interface people, not driver-writing, crazy-low-level programmer types. So we never used the thing to its potential.

(This is cross-posted to Monkey Kings Play)

It’s a little bit crabby, but I’ve never seen such a manifesto that so clearly discusses just what a designer does for a client and how to get it out of them.

Some nuggets:

“Just as writers are not just people who can type, designers are not just people who can use graphics programs. Good Design is more than skin deep.”

“Tell your designer what you want to say rather than how you want it to look. Don’t ask for a color, shape, or style–ask for meaning or emotion.”

I would add something to this that’s hard for everyone to swallow: if someone “likes” it, it doesn’t matter. You don’t want people to like it if something they don’t “like” works better. Google is fucking ugly and it works great. It’s not that I don’t think they should have made some design decisions in the beginning that they would be less stuck with now, but I heard many people say that they “liked” Yahoo!s terrible, confused interface, and where are they now? People also “liked” Ask Jeeves. But something was lacking in those designs.

I’ve heard from clients every so often that they don’t like a design because it’s aggressive and they’re afraid it will scare away their customers. They’re wrong. Aggressive design grabs customers and, if what the client’s selling isn’t porcupine enemas, the customers then stay and next time, they remember where they got those great porcupine-reduced enemas. And that’s a design someone won’t “like”.

Now, if that design says something you don’t want to say, be clear and tell the designer. But if it says what you want to say more strongly than you thought it was going to be said, or it says it differently, well, that’s why you hired a designer.

Dear ldopa.net,

If you had to choose one part of your body to uncontrollably and constantly glow — given that the intensity of the glow was so great that it would shine right through your clothing with no hope of concealment — what body part would you choose? Also given: you cannot choose your nipples or your genitalia.

Thanks to a generous DARPA pre-study mini grant, I have been provided with 24 monkeys and 250 typewriters to further the scientistic world’s understanding of pre bee beard thought processes in males age 62-89. After 1,000 years of carefully randomized testing, we are now able to update the list provided in our proposal with the addition of the following potential thought statement:

 Woah– GLTerminal? Cool!

As per usual, that was 1.3 million exceptionally well spent. Follow up studies may include whether I am at risk for suffering through a bee beard, since the above statement ran through my mind too.

Reassess.

What did I do before internet resources? Well, certainly not have a conversation with my wife over dinner like this:

ME: “[...small talk about the various parents-of-small-kids connections we're making in Portland, our soon to be home city...]”

SHE: “Oh! Have you seen Urban Mamas? It’s for parents in Portland, and it’s great. You have to check it out.”

ME: “Really? Okay. Well, can it compare to Berkeley Parents Network?”

SHE: “Maybe better. It’s more focused, the topics cover the spectrum of our needs. And it’s actually not-ugly.”

ME: “Ha! Say goodbye to that Craigs List, listserve-style interface, huh?”

SHE: “Right. It’s more like Dooce, but not that pretty. And with more contributors.”

I’m pretty sure we refrained from implying hypertextual markup in the rest of our meal talk.

As I later found out, Urban Mamas does make me tingle in that special way that means “I have found a resource that I will one day soon wonder how I led a complete life without.” Which set me to thinking, does every city have such a “guidebook” for young parents who are trying to forge that network so critical to emotional survival? Or, to put it another way — both more generally and specifically — the things that matter to you* in your city: is there an online resource that you can tap?
___

*…And I’m implying “things that make sense to publicly share.” MyBestFishingSpot.com, for instance, would be a sucky idea.

… I KNEW this woman looked familiar!