3: The number of surviving members of the cast of Gilligan’s Island.

If you use iTunes, you may or may not be aware that they offer some stuff – game demos, songs from new artists, interesting new TV shows – free each week. Even if you are aware, you might not know the entire catalogue of free things that is available at any given time – Apple lists the new free stuff each week, but doesn’t keep a running list of the older and ongoing stuff.

This gives you two options – either hunt around on your own, or visit the Free iTunes Store Downloads page, where some enterprising individuals have done all of the legwork for you. Even better, they also offer an RSS feed to keep you up to date as to both new and ongoing items of interest.

You should probably note that the vast majority of stuff is for the U.S. market. If you are reading this page from the Home Of The Free (note: that is sarcasm right there) then you have a much better selection than the rest of us, but there are definitely items in the international stores worth checking out. Have fun.

This isn’t a new book by any means, but it came to mind because of the impending release of a new and related work by the same editor … more on that in a moment. Killed is a compilation of articles that were either commissioned or assigned (and usually already paid for) by various publications who then bailed on the final product, taking a pass on actually committing the items to print for various reasons ranging from “political correctness” through “the possibility of upsetting key advertisers” right on to “pissing off the Vatican”.

It seems that fucking with the church is something to be avoided at all costs.

The result here is rewarding on two levels: One, the articles reproduced here are uniformly excellent. Two, Wallis does an admirable job of presenting the context surrounding the articles and the reasons for their subsequent killing without either overshadowing the original works or being pointless and vapid. The balance of information and enlightenment here is subtle and enriching, and anyone who either likes to read or is a student of print media will enjoy this volume immensely.

This book also serves as a nice way to prepare yourself for Wallis’ new work, a companion look at editorial cartoons that were canned by editors for the much the same kinds of reasons. It seems that there is still much power in the pen … but an increasing lack of balls in the editorial boardrooms across the U.S. of A.

“… and it turned out he was a missing person who nobody missed at all.”

I don’t know why, I just think that is one of the best pieces of musical wordplay to come down the pike in the last few years. Great song, too.

65: The percentage of American adults that listed “TV” as an essential of life.

A long time ago in a blog far, far away I spent some time pimping IClip, which is a seriously useful widget. Since that time there have been a lot of converts to the Apple platform – people who, like Vader, have seen the error of their dark side ways and have embraced the forces of good – and I thought it was worth revisiting the topic.

IClip is a wonderful little widget that lets you keep a gallery of useful things available for copying and pasting at any time – it essentially recreates the functionality of the old Mac OS “Clipboard” but in a much more visually and functionally pleasing way. It is also dirt cheap: The full-blown version costs only 29 bucks, and the smaller version that you can try out beforehand – and that many people will find is all that they need – is free. If you have a Mac, run Tiger, and have any sort of sense at all you will grab this now.

If you already have it then I can safely assume you are a person of style and sophistication.

And if you are still using Windoze, well, sucks to be you.

Here is the equivalent of 1000 stirring words of prose:

Earlier this week there was a passing mention of Google doing things the right way … but it might be worth mentioning that the Google gang also endeavours to be pretty cool. Case in point: The “directions” from New York to London in their mapping application. Head on over to Google Maps, and click on “Get Directions”. Type “New York” into the first box and “London” into the second. Take special note of step 24 in the detailed directions.

Big thanks to DQ for the tip on this one.

It seems that – no matter how appalling or hideous an event is – there is always someone looking to make a quick buck from grief and tragedy. Case in point: Within minutes of the shootings at Virginia Tech people were registering “related” domains with sleazy outfits like GoDaddy, hoping to sell the names on Ebay for instant profit.

Some of the names in the DNS uploads from GoDaddy and Moniker Online were vatechbloodbath.com, campuskillings.com, blacksburgmassacre.com, rampageatblacksburg,com and massacreatvatech.com – all of them showing a wealth of restraint and good taste. All of those domains were subsequently offered for sale on Ebay, although it seems most of them have been (thankfully) taken offline by the Ebay staff by now.

Never fear, though – if you missed them but still want to see how far some people will stoop, head on over to virginiatechmurders.com where you can choose from “seventy-five of the top domains relating to the tragedy at Virginia Tech” … it appears to be your one-stop shopping site for everything that is tasteless and crass and pretty much wrong with American society today. PayPal cheerfully accepted.

Of course, you might be tempted to suggest that the real problem with American society is that any semi-lucid nutcase can walk into a store and buy a couple of guns and a few hundred rounds of ammunition, but that is apparently just naiveté. According to this fellow the problem is that there aren’t enough guns out on the street, and if the kids at the university were all properly armed these things wouldn’t happen.

Er, right.

119,000: The number of names reported on the Transportation Security Administration’s “no fly” list as of the last Freedom Of Information Act request.

Google Reader has been mentioned on These Very Pages in the past … it is a great example of the promise of web-based applications and freedom from the traditional desktop. Google Reader works very well … but like all of the stuff coming from the seething brain of Google Labs it has a usable yet generic cross-platform interface that hovers somewhere between “terminally bland” and “fucking ugly”.

I know, it’s nit-picking … the app works just fine, who cares what it looks like? Well, me. It’s my nit, and goddammit I am going to pick it.

Which is where gReader comes in … it is an exceptionally nice skin for the Google Reader that makes it look and behave like an bona fide Aqua interface. For those of us with real computers – who are used to applications that look as delightful as they behave – it is a welcome little dab of optical salve.

On the off chance you haven’t heard the news, seen the papers, etc. etc. etc … there is a pretty total failure of the Blackberry infrastructure in North America. This is the downside of the monolithic nature of RIM’s setup, and the outage is the price that you pay for “push” technology – the gratification of instant email to your handheld instead of having your device check for mail every few minutes.

The outage is affecting email and web browsing from Blackberry handhelds, but some people have reported that they can still browse the web if they use their service provider’s browser on the ‘berry instead of the one that comes from RIM. Your mileage may vary.

Oh – and when the system does come back up, expect another disaster when the RIM infrastructure collapses under the load of all the stalled messages. Yikes.

It is hardly a secret that Google is kicking gigantic amounts of Microsoft ass in the battle for online supremacy. Most of this boils down to the fact that when Google does something, they usually take the time to do it right. Case in point: They just transcoded and released all of their data APIs as native pieces of Objective-C code so that Mac programmers could work use them in their Cocoa applications.

Google didn’t have to do this. To this point Mac developers have been using the Java APIs to hit the Google data services – GCal, Google Base, Blogger, and the like – and managing to get by. This is just a little bit of extra effort that makes the whole process easier for everyone, and puts the power to work with Google data in the hands of every schlub who codes for a Mac, not just the Java freaks.

Google might not really care, but they sure do a good job of keeping up the appearance thereof. Two thumbs up.

Meanwhile, over at CNN they seem to think that it is still 2002 and are reporting that Jaguar – OSX 10.2 – is being delayed by Apple.

Maybe they are confused by the fact that Vista is pretty much a Jaguar rip-off, who knows. I can tell you for a fact, however, that Jaguar came out exactly on time … five years ago.

The folks at Apple are usually pretty smug about the fact that most of what comes out of Microsoft is a shameless copy of the things they do for the Mac. “Redmond, start your photocopiers!” is the tongue-in-cheek battle cry for pretty much every new product or technology that comes out of the Apple campus.

This time, however, the shoe is on the other foot. The gang in Cupertino are copying Microsoft this time around … they have had to sheepishly announce what a lot of us knew two weeks ago: OSX 10.5 (”Leopard”) is not going to make it’s June street date. And, in true Microsoft fashion, the delay is hardly a trivial one … the thing will be at least four months late.

Sheesh.

The funny part here is the way that they are spinning it – the line out of Cupertino is that they are diverting resources from Leopard development to keep the iPhone on track. That would be odd, since it is hard to imaging that the same gang that is busy coding for OSX is also the one that is bashing out the hardware for the phone. What you have to do is read between the lines: The team that is being pulled off Leopard development is not working on the “phone”, they are working on the version of OSX that runs the phone. The difference in those two statements could have some large implications for the way that the phone ends up working. We saw an iPhone up and running that was based on OSX back at the launch announcement. Now they seem to have the need to completely rework the operating system just a couple of months before the street date. What has changed? No one is saying … yet.

Stay tuned.

The Opera browser for the Nintendo Wii is now an honest-to-goshen final release, and anyone with the little white box of happiness should scoot over to the “shopping channel” and download it right now. While the preview release that we have all been using was also free, most folks figured that the final version would at least cost a pittance … but if you act now, the total cost will be nada zip nothing. You can keep using the preview release if you want, but that would be pretty inane. The final version adds integrated searching, more zoom options, and the ability to hide the toolbar, freeing up more precious real estate on the screen.

The final release is free until June 30, after that it will probably cost 5 bucks. And contrary to what Sony fanboys are trying to tell everyone, the free version does not expire when the pay version comes out … download it now and it is yours for the life of your system.

Silly fanboys …

25.1: The average cost (in millions of U.S. dollars) to develop and produce a game for the Sony Playstation 3.

Some people were apparently cheesed regarding the picture that was posted on These Very Pages this morning. Apologies all around – I realize that a lot of you are rather sensitive when it comes to your beloved Leafs. In deference to those folks, here is something a little less aggravating:

You’re welcome.

3.5: The average cost (in millions of U.S. dollars) to develop and produce a game for the Nintendo Wii.

Back in the day there was an interesting feature in Apple’s System 8 operating system called “Pop Up Windows” … it let you drag any finder window to the edge of the screen and it would turn into a sticky “tab” that would pop up and reveal it’s contents when you moused over it. It was a real boon in the days of minimal screen real estate – this was when 800×600 was a luxuriously expensive display size – and made access to frequently used folders a breeze.

In the 10 years since a lot has changed in the realm of display size … now the average mope has 1440×900 out of the box, and between this and the development of Expose the gang at Apple decided that Pop Up Windows were a thing of the past. Some people apparently miss the little buggers, however, and now you can warp back in time and add this legacy feature with Sticky Windows from Donelleschi Software. It is pretty much the same as the pop ups of yore, except that now you can make any window sticky, not just ones in the finder. I don’t know if I would pay for this – Expose has become too much a part of my life – but you might want to give it a whirl. It’s shareware, so it doesn’t cost anything to look.

Here is something that you may find interesting, mildly amusing, or a complete and utter bore – a compilation of the origins of a huge whack of company names. Note that this is from Wikipedia, so your mileage may vary on the accuracy front.

It has been mentioned before in these pages, but it bears repeating: Hockey is a beautiful game.