Today’s amusing diversion for anyone who spends at least some portion of their life creating verbiage: I Write Like. You take a sample of your prose, slam it in, their engine masticates it for a while, and out pops the name of some probably-more-well-known-than-you author that you write like. Personally, I would enjoy this a lot more if there was some sort of explanation of what specific parts of your writing matched up to the famous person you are reminiscent of, or how the algorithm works, or something beyond “You write like so-and-so” but it is an amusing diversion nonetheless.
For what it’s worth, I got two hits on H.P. Lovecraft and two on Cory Doctorow for random submissions from this blog and the other (less profane) one. So I guess I can’t complain. It certainly beats ringing up some talentless hack like Dan Brown.
Stupid name, yes. But, if you are a publisher looking for direction on how to provide content in the new age of mobile media, this would be a great place to start. Or you could, you know, just stick your head in the ground and block certain browsers. Let me know how that works out for you.
If the final product here is anywhere as interesting as this demo it’s going to be a winner. No word yet on pricing or frequency, but if this sort of thing strikes your fancy you can sign up for email updates here. You’re welcome.
So today I sat through a meeting were it was determined that we should maybe block any web visitors to our site if they are using Safari 5. Why? Because the new “reader” function in Safari takes completely unreadable pages on the web and makes them easy to read. Contrary to the ravings of the panicked publishing biz, it doesn’t block ads, or replace ads, or “declare war on newspapers”. What it does is take the actual content from a web page and lift it up into a single item that you can actually read. The function only works on pages that are cluttered with crap and/or use that reprehensible technique of splitting the thing you want to read across three or four pages – something content providers do to try and inflate their total number of ad impressions without any care for the fact that it makes readers crazy.
In a nutshell: Reading content via a web browsers sucks giant logs these days. Online content providers treat their readers like garbage to try and pad their revenue streams. So the solution is not to fix the content, no, it is to block a browser that lets readers fix this problem themselves and actually read your goddamn page, in the bizarre assumption that they will quit that browser, fire up another, and come back. Instead of, oh, fucking off to another site and never ever bothering with you again.
And the newspaper biz wonders why they are dying a painful digital death. Idiots.
The most reasonable take on the whole thing is here. But a far more entertaining way to grok this is to download Safari 5 and then follow Ms. Fletcher’s link to this bizarro rant. Try to read the lunatic ravings, but good luck to you, since there is so much crap on the page that it is generally impossible. Then hit the handy “reader” button in your Safari address bar. Voila – now the thing is easy to read, and even easier to laugh at since everything he whines about is his own fucking fault.
Apple hasn’t “declared war on newspapers” (and yes, I heard that three times in the stupid meeting I was in). Apple has given readers a tool to decide whether or not online publishers are treating them like shit and if they are, to do something about it.
If your readers are pushing a button that tells you that you suck, maybe you should have a meeting or two about that.
I don’t want to sound like I am saying “I told you so”, but … no, fuck it. I told you so.
And if you believe the response from Facebook and actually think that Shmuckerberg and his minions are going to give up this insanely lucrative stream of revenue, then I have a Brooklyn Bridge in Florida to sell you. This is the “enhanced value for advertisers” that they are always crowing on about, the holy source of their money torrent. Give it up? Not a chance.
UPDATE: If you are wondering how it actually works, wonder no more.
I have committed more than a few pixels to extolling the many, many virtues of Soma FM on These Very Pages over the past handful of years. This week (and next, barring some sort of unforeseen but sadly-not-unprecidented disaster) they are offering something new and wickedly original. Mission Control is a new (and necessarily short-lived) channel that mixes the brain tentacles of electronic ambient music with the live feed of mission audio to and from STS-132, the last hurrah of the United States space shuttle program. It runs until shuttle touchdown, scheduled for May 26, 2010.
It’s funky and cool and hey – you just might learn something. They offer the usual spread of iTunes playlist feeds in AAC and MP3, a firewall-friendly MP3 feed, and the Soma pop-up player – which would be a cool idea if it wasn’t Flash, but it is Flash so it pretty much sucks. And, as always, it’s presented sans commercials and 100% free-as-in-beer free.
Whenever someone mentions Facebook to me I don’t know whether to look at them with scorn or pity.
Okay, scratch that, I do.
Pity would be the response if I was just judging them on the fact that they are dim enough to willfully connect their computers to the world’s largest source of malware and system corruption. But scorn – outright scorn with a side helping of venomous disdain – is the correct response to people who willfully accede to the most reprehensible user agreement since … well, ever. Of course, feeble-minded people such as this probably don’t even read the agreement. They are happy enough to click on the “I agree, fuck me over” button every time there is a change, blithely giving away more and more of their personal data so that Goat Boy (yeah, I’m looking at you, Zuckerberg) can pad his pockets with a few more grillion bucks.
If you actually have more that a couple of functioning brain cells and you sit down and look at the evolution of the so-called privacy agreement over time, you realize just how distasteful this whole enterprise is. In fact, it blew right past “distasteful” and settled in at “downright evil” somewhere around the end of 2009.
The scariest part is how clear the language is. There is no legal mumbo-jumbo here – they let you know in plain english that they are going to bend you over and drive you nice and hard.
The end result of the New York Times’ “bravery” here is that people will read the articles until they hit the “pay event horizon” and then they will go somewhere else until next month. What none of these fenderheads seem to get is that good content wins if everything is free. But, as soon as you have to pay for on-line generic content … that is when similar-but-not-quite-as-good content is the easy winner. Game over. The worst part about this is that the winning equation for on-line news is really really simple. So simple that I could type it here in one sentence. But seeing as how none of the “traditional media” outlets seems to be able to come up with the same simple answer, I am going to hold off for a bit and try and sell the solution to these morons for Big Consulting Bucks.
I was chatting with my pal Shaun the other day and the topic of horrifyingly intrusive web advertising was flabbergasted to find out that he had never heard of ClickToFlash. I was more than happy to clue him in – it was akin to a duty. Flash has morphed from its original purpose as an interesting and efficient way to deliver content and is now a despicable scourge of the same sort as H1N1 or The View.
Fortunatelty, Flash is easier to deal with than either of those other two abominations. Just download ClickToFlash, restart, and off you go. You only get the flash you want, when you want. Wanna watch the latest episode of Homestar Runner? No problem. Wanna see bumper-face guy? No problem. Don’t wanna see yet another full-page take-over-your-screen ad aimed at morons? Once again, no problem.
I was halfway through a long and totally gushy post about Google’s “Chrome Frame” project, wherein they use Microsoft’s own tools to replace the guts of Internet Explorer with a web engine that actually works (cough cough WebKit cough). In a nutshell, it has the potential to let people who are stuck using IE due to work constraints or whatever (I assume at this point there is no one left on the planet who would use IE by choice) have a real web browser. And, to put it mildly, it is fucking brilliant.
But then I was pointed to this bit from Jimmy Ray and thought “okay, why bother re-writing what he just wrote when I could be lazy and just point folks to his stuff?”
Super awesome photo archive of the Apollo 11 project and landing right here. A fitting commemoration for the 40th anniversary of the whole thing. Certainly a better effort that the one from the ‘tards at CNN, who mark the day by putting a story about the “it was all a hoax” morons on the top of their home page.
The pictures are glorious. Enjoy.
UPDATE: In a fitting tribute to both the Apollo mission and the legendary Walter Cronkite, Kottke will stream the original coverage in Walter’s own words at exactly 40 years (to the second!) later. And yes, I am aware that you could just go watch all the clips whenever you wanted, but this is much cooler, so shush.
Just leave the page open and your volume up and you won’t miss a thing. The show starts at 16:10 EDT, and in the immortal words of Billy Red Lyons … “Don’t you dare miss it!”
Meanwhile, various fenderheads out there have decided that painting your Twitter portrait green will somehow put an end to the repressive goings on in Iran. Yes, I am sure that shady and semi-totalitarian regimes everywhere live in constant fear of … gasp … green avatars!
One thing that was missing from the the conclusion of the whole Phoenix Coyotes saga was “Fake Gary Bettman” – as much as I am not a Twitter guy, his feed was pretty funny. But he seemed to fade away just when things were getting good. Too bad – like the Fake John McCain, he could be a real hoot at times.
My views on the whole Twitter thing are out there in black and white (or purple and mauve and green and blue and goldenrod and black and white, if you prefer) so I won’t go through all of that again. And normally that would be the end of it. Usually the way it works is that if you think something is stupid – Facebook, whore brands, chewing tobacco, whatever – you can just ignore it and it won’t have any sort of effect on your otherwise tidy life.
Usually.
The growing problem with Twitter, however, is twofold. Thing the first: The media. In typical fashion (ie: three years after it was actually a Big Deal) the churning mill of mainstream broadcasting and press has finally learned about it. Now you cant even get the weather report or maybe listen to some tired classic rock without some drone prattling on about some celebrity tweeting this and twittering that. Ugh. Thing the second (and very much the worst): There are now self-important wankers running around introducing themselves as “at so-and-so” and referring to their friends as “at whatshisface”. Honestly. I heard this twice today and both times had to bite back a big ol’ mouthful of puke. I mean, really.
Is there any recourse? Is there any way to give this whole thing a poke in the eye and feel somewhat good about it?
Wow. This is not how the league wanted things to go. Bob Duff over at the Windsor Star summed it up best:
“The television cameras caught NHL commissioner Gary Bettman in his seat during the second period as the Wings poured it on. Bettman’s expression said it all. Watching the team he’s tied his league’s future to go up in flames, he looked like a guy who was suffering from kidney stones.”
You can bet your ass that the league will have McCreary working game 6. This is not the sort of thing that they are apt to stand still for.
The topic of Twitter has been done to death on these pages. In the interests of everyone’s sanity, I won’t bother linking back to previous rants on the subject. But regardless of your take on Twitter, you cant deny that one of the more interesting – and potentially useful – side effects of the whole thing is the rise of “short URL” services. Sure, everyone knows about TinyURL, but when you are really tight for characters even “tinyurl.com” takes up too much real estate in the message. If you really want to save space, then head on over to “is.gd” and get the shortest possible URL on the planet, period. it will be at least 60% smaller than the same link through TinyURL, and it works a treat. Perfect for SMS messages, browser email links, and – if you are so inclined – the dreaded Twitter.
NOTE: If you want super-duper ease of use then you should make a “bookmarklet”. Create a new bookmark, and paste this in as the address:
Then clicking on that bookmark will open a new page with an “Is.Gd” URL linking to whatever page you were just on. Stick it in your bookmarks bar or link a hotkey to it for extra-quick action. And don’t say I never did nothing for you.
So I am told by Reliable Sources that there is a new Muppet Christmas special tonight. Part of me wants to be all happy about that, but a larger part of me is less-than-enthused. Because the show will have the same Muppets, but – after the passing of Jim Henson – the Muppets aren’t the same. You might have to dwell on that for a while, but trust me, you will eventually get to the same point.
So yeah. Instead of doing a new Muppet special, why not get busy and free up the old Christmas Together special with John Denver and the Muppets of yore. I am of the understanding that the thing is tied up in the reams of litigation that still surround the Denver estate, but come on people – this is Christmas. Find a solution and get it done. Between that and the perfectly delightful Muppet Christmas Carol” you will have all the holiday Muppetry you need, without bastardizing the legacy in the pursuit of a few more bucks.
In the meantime, watch this. The sound quality sucks, and the video looks like it is ripped from a copy of a copy of a copy of a bad VHS, but it’s still … magic.
Yes, Christmas music. Not “seasonal” music, not “holiday” music, it’s fucking Christmas music.
Anyway – it’s that time of year, and the fine folks at Soma FM are once again streaming the two best channels of Christmas music on the whole damn planet. For your chilled out and laid back times, there is “Christmas Lounge” (fireplace defintiely recommended) and for the rest of your day there is the insanely awesome “Xmas in Frisko” which I could not praise highly enough even if I sat here and typed non-stop until my fingers were bloody stumps and I passed out from lack of egg nog.
The desktop channels are old hat, and will probably talk to your box no matter what OS or software you have. And new this year is streaming in an alternative format specifically for mobile iTunes-based devices – if you have an iPod Touch or an iPhone, you seriously need to check this bit out. It’s way cool.
This is, to put it mildly, just about the most awesome thing you could get anyone. And, even if you don’t plan on buying one, playing around with the online Muppet design tool is a hoot. Also, you can gift one so that your recipient can go on, build their own, and have the whole thing prepaid.
Unless you have been hiding under a rock, or your life is so vapid that you are completely consumed with pop culture and don’t actually realize that there is this thing called “news”, you have been hearing about the “credit crunch” and the associated whining and panic that goes along with it. You hear big time financial players go on about how the whole world will go down in flames unless there is some sort of financial rescue plan with taxpayers money, and you have this sneaking suspicion in the back of your brain that this all might be hooey but you don’t know for sure because, quite frankly, you – like pretty much every other average mope – don’t know enough about this whole thing to really be able to parse it out.
This might help. It is the most concise and easy to deal with explanation of who is actually at risk here, what kind of money is involved, and where the chips are going to fall either way. It is also not something that the doom-and-gloomers want you to read, because you might come to realize that a small handful of people controlling a lot of money that doesn’t really exist are the ones making decisions – and stupid ones – that affect everyone.
As a complete aside, it might also help of companies like General Motors didn’t take a short term loan every other fucking week to do their payroll. Just saying.
So yeah, once in a while professional journalism still manages to hit the mark. Good stuff.
So the previously discussed “Do Not Call” registry actually went on-line as promised (which makes me think that this would be better as a Geekback, but I already typed the title up there so what the hell, let’s keep going) first thing this morning, and if you were clever you got your number onto the thing early because by 7:00 am the thing was choked out with a user overflow, tossing random errors. Which was much better than the situation at 9:00 am when the page wouldn’t even load, and all you could get was the dreaded IIS “sorry about your luck” page.
Take a bow, Bell Canada. Thanks for coming out.
However, to be completely fair, the “I Opt Out” page was also dead in the water by mid-morning, with the Joomla engine giving up and cowering in the corner.
The difference, of course, is that Geist is just running his page out of his pocket to make up for the oversights and weak spots in the legislation. Bell is running their page with taxpayer’s money, so there is no excuse. Fuckers.
There is a new Wario title out for the Wii, and it is loaded with seriously cool old-school 2D platforming goodness. For the most part it is 2 buttons and a D-pad, the way things were meant to be … but with a bit of a twist involved. Or in this case, a shake.
You may have noticed a horrid rash of telemarketing calls to your home and your cell phone over the last two weeks – the usual plague of 1 or 2 calls a day has become a torrent of intrusive assholes, invading your privacy with endless pitches for free cruises and cheap long distance and duct cleaning. The reason for the sudden deluge of irritating crap is, or course, the upcoming launch of the long-overdue and probably-mismanaged Canadian “Do Not Call” list.
After four years of mindless discussion, the thing is finally getting off the ground. One of the constant jokes about the whole thing is that much of the delay has come from Bell Canada, who has been contracted by the government to run the thing. The problem? Bell is one of the country’s top purveyors of telemarketing nonsense, and had no real reason to try and get the thing up and running. The longer they continued to botch it, the longer they could continue to ruin your dinner by calling to offer Yet Another Long Distance Package.
That said, everything is finally in place and as of September 30th, you will be able to log in to the web site (which has a turd useless URL, because they didn’t have the brains to register a half-decent one you could actually remember) and put yourself down for some blessed peace.
Well, sort of. See, the current government of Canada is a bunch of do-nothing hacks and losers, and they kowtowed to the powers of darkness by giving all sorts of businesses and organizations a free pass around the list. Charities, business with “prior relationships with you”, political parties, survey companies, and newspapers are all allowed to continue to ruin your precious hometime, unless you specifically tell them not to.
This is where “I Opt Out” comes in, and is (finally, and about three paragraphs too late) the whole point of this post. Our pal Michael Geist, Canada’s selfless hero of privacy and on-line rights, has set up a one-stop and easy-as-toast portal for you to tell the rest of these mopes to leave you alone. Its quick, its free, and when you are done you get an email “receipt” of what you have done so when the assholes try and call you after October 1, you can tell them to fuck right off.
Also, keeping a Fox 40 whistle beside the phone works wonders.
Anyway. Log on, get yourself opted out, and be sure to read Geist’s other stuff while you are there. The man is a font of clarity in an increasingly muddled digital world.
