l-dopa

(SCENE: a strip mall Radio Shack with a single Radio Shack EMPLOYEE standing behind the sales counter. CORY DOCTOROW enters.)SFX: electronic doorbell goes “Dooo-weee!”

CORY DOCTOROW: Hmmph. I certainly hope that doorbell isn’t keeping private records of who enters and exits the store.

EMPLOYEE: Um, I’m fairly sure it doesn’t. What can I help you with today? RCA cables, perhaps?

CORY DOCTOROW: No, thank you, I’m actually here to purchase a cell phone as you see I am the keynote speaker at a vitally important Web 2.0 conference this week and apparently my current cell phone does not get service in this backwater area… most probably due to the total asshats at the MPAA and RIAA.

EMPLOYEE: Yes, well, we have many excellent phones and plans –

CORY DOCTOROW: Listen. Before we even get into this, let me ask you something. Will I be able to transfer all my existing cell phone ringtones to my new phone? Because on my cell phone, I have a hilarious mutant hybrid remix of Queen’s “We Are The Champions” and the side-splitting “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” internet meme.

EMPLOYEE: That can depend on the hardware of your existing –

CORY DOCTOROW: I also have a community flash mob created hip-hopera version of the Dr. Who theme and M.I.A.’s “Galang” released under the Creative Commons license.

EMPlOYEE: I can’t say for sure but I doubt –

CORY DOCTOROW: And I have a background wallpaper skin of the Ontario subway system with all the stop names cleverly rearranged to spell out the names of the characters from “Harry Potter”.

EMPLOYEE: …

CORY DOCTOROW: Let me ask you this: does this phone play quadraphonic Ogg Vorbis music format? Or FLAC encoded video? What about the Bittorrent client on this phone, is it GPL’d?

EMPLOYEE: I’m not entirely certain that the phone actually has a Bittorrent client. This brochure –

CORY DOCTOROW: You’re not certain? I guess you’ve forced me to ask: is the source code available for this phone? Not that I plan to do anything personally right now with the source, but I’d like to see it. Now, if possible, my good man. Chop chop!

EMPLOYEE: Oh look! I have an informational PDF brochure I could print out for you.

CORY DOCTOROW: Ahh, PDFs are DRM-encumbered as per secret instructions contained in the Patriot Act!

EMPLOYEE: But I could still print it out for you. Listen, let me know if you have any more questions; now I have to get back to my other customers.

CORY DOCTOROW: There’s no one else here.

EMPLOYEE: Oh, I thought maybe there was.

(AWKWARD SILENCE)

CORY DOCTOROW: Google maps 37Signals with Flickr iPod.

EMPLOYEE: What?

CORY DOCTOROW: I didn’t say anything. Now, about this cell phone…

EMPLOYEE: Are you sure you wouldn’t be happier with perhaps a remote controlled buggy? This one goes forward and backs up while turning right. I’ll throw in the “D” cells.

CORY DOCTOROW: No, no — intriguing — but I do need a cell phone. Internet sensation and total hottie Xeni Jardin might be calling me right now!

EMPLOYEE: Well, now I understand the urgency. How about a Sprint flip-phone? $99 with three year contract.

CORY DOCTOROW: Does it have a always-on, 802.11g wifi connection to the podcasted RSS reddit digg instapundit blogosphere?

EMPLOYEE: Uhm, sure. It really does.

CORY DOCTOROW: That will do nicely.

FIN.

EPILOGUE:

EMPLOYEE: Could I please have your phone number, area code first?

CORY DOCTOROW: …

~jeff

(thanks to w for the epilogue)

Despite looking remarkably like a guy in the local reggae band that I used to buy QPs of weed from in high school, Jaron Lanier makes some excellent points in this article about the “race to become the most meta site on the internet”. I just wish he’d cut his hair — dreadlocks on a technologist are so Mondo 2000.

~jeff

Looking for some old daguerreotypes or sepia-toned tintypes to liven up your site? OMFG me too! Let’s both visit fromoldbooks.org for some lovely public domain scans from old books.

~jeff

There’s something very Arthur C. Clarke-ian about having “blood rains” (what one might consider a sign of that elusive beast, Satan, or at least of the impending apocalypse. . . of course, I’m using the term “one” as shorthand for “psychotic religious nut”) turn out to be an alien life form. Although I can’t say that I don’t love the idea that’s it’s just a really fine misting of bat blood.

DNA-less bat blood.

That self-replicates.

At temperatures exceeding 600ºF.

QuickTime as a video container format used to be the shit — I remember oohing and ahhing over postage-stamp sized video on my LC II — but now it’s in danger of being surpassed in obiquity by Flash 7/8 as the internet video delivery mechanism of choice. QuickTime as a technology simply hasn’t been truly innovative in a decade; Apple has just continually bundled more codecs in and called it a point release. What is needed instead, I feel, are some new capabilities for digital media in general, and QuickTime is uniquely positioned to be capable of them. Here’s some examples of what I’d expect from a truly next-generation format like QuickTime:

• There should be some way for me to specify a timecode as well as a link to a particular part of a longer video. If I wanted to reference a moment exactly 22 minutes into Steven Colbert’s speech, that should be possible. As far as I can tell, no existing video format will allow me to do this.
• I should be able to meta-reference several different audio and video tracks from several completely disparate server locations and pull them together into one presentation via QuickTime. We are living in a recombinant, “mash-up”* culture, it would be useful to have QuickTime reflect that. As I understand it, SMIL promised this ability, but I’ve never personally figured out how to use it.
• DIVX support, for the love of god — it’s fucking embarassing that an open-source project like VLC continues to kick QuickTime Player’s ass in the sheer number of video codecs supported. If I download a video from the internet, QuickTime Player should be able to play it, no excuses.

~jeff

*(shudder)

Let’s all agree that Firefox is a wonderful browser, and a revolutionary platform unto itself — for me, the Firfox extensions are what really clinch the deal — but can we also agree on one thing? On a Windows PC, it looks about the same as IE 6; but on Mac OS X, compared to Safari or Camino, even Opera — it’s fugly. Luckily, that same extensibility extends to the appearance of the app itself:

• First, apply a lovely OS X theme.
• Then, fix the interface widgets (buttons, text fields, etc.).
• Now, improve the look of the web itself — block ads and make sure your ad filters are updated regularly and automatically.

…the next version of Firefox is looking to be a little prettier (with built-in spell check!) but it’s not ready for prime time yet, so until then, work with what you got, that’s what I say.

~jeff

Ubuntu 6.06 is final, and it’s a wonderful release. In fact, I’m ready to declare Ubuntu the one true linux distribution, not that anyone asked. Ubuntu is just a delight to use — I’ve been using it on my work laptop for months — and it really is easy enough that your grandmother could use it. There’s also a nifty script available which will set up all the “non-open-source” stuff that is normally a royal pain in the ass to do in linux (mp3 support, browser plug-ins, etc.).

They’ve got free downloads available for PCs and Macs, and if you don’t feel like burning a ISO to CD they’ll even send you a couple copies of Ubuntu on bootable CD free of charge. And: they offer a free server edition which will allow you to set up a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) with one click. This is way, way cool, as there are a lot of free software projects using LAMP as their base technologies.

All this magnanimosity is courtesy of probably-crazy South African multi-millionaire Mark Shuttleworth, who’s put a lot of his own money into polishing this flavor of linux. He’s also put resources into a lot of nifty free scheduling and calendaring tools for schools. Hey, thanks, Mark!

~jeff

I can’t truly think of a practical use for this application whatsoever, but it does have a neat preference dialog, and the Pixie Dust setting will gay up your mac by about 35% additional gay.

~jeff

WARNING: when you drink Sambuca, when you’re riding that ‘buca train, please note that when you inevitably inject it directly into your heart, you should always use clean needles. The more you know!

~jeff

I’ve been watching MyTunesRSS develop for a while, and with the last revision it seems to have gotten good enough to recommend. See, it’s a Java applic — hey, come back! — it’s a Java application, but it doesn’t totally suck, and it will allow you to search, play, and set up RSS feeds of your iTunes playlists. Combine it with a little DynDNS action and you could be listening to your music at work or in class, and that crusty old dean doesn’t even have to know.

~jeff

There’s a extraordinarily comprehensive, excellent article on Pitchfork that discusses some of the new competing digital music personalization and recommendation services — like Pandora, which I like a lot and have discussed before, and Last.fm*, and also new one which I hadn’t heard of before: MusicIP.

MusicIP has the benfit of working locally, analyzing your actual music files and comparing their signature and sound to other music you might find similar, music located both in your local collection and out on the internet. On a good sized collection of digital music, it takes a satisfying amount of time to chug through it all, but once it was done, I clicked on a Django Reinhardt song and it made some fairly astute recommendations, as well as building me a playlist that contained some similar tracks of gypsy jazz that I had kicking around my hard drive. I’m not completely sold on the interface, but hey! it’s free and worth a try.

~jeff

*(which I’ll be honest, looks cool in theory, but I can’t get working right)

Human Vending Machines (found in a Russian-language livejournal community by way of geisha). Клас!

An amazing thing is happening: an entertaining and actually understandable programming book is being written, with actually good cartoons. You will like it. It’s not finished though.

Since 1996, when I went to the one in San Francisco, I’ve wanted to make one of these. Probably I’d need an off-the-grid-type lair to put it in.

I hadn’t yet heard of the webcam.