The doughnut wars (and indeed, the coffee wars) in Canada are long over. Tim Horton’s is the undisputed king, looming over the nation’s landscape like some sort of (we hope) benevolent hydra, stretching it’s tentacles into every corner of the nation, and indeed – at this point – into a number of bordering states. The “Timbit Nation” is slowly but surely becoming the “Timbit Continent”, with one company winning in the same sort of way that the Harlem Globetrotters win – decisively, and to the great delight of the majority of the paying customers.
That said, Tim’s is far from a monopoly, and there are other outfits that fight for the “Washington Generals” scraps (yes, I now, that was a fairly sorry attempt to maintain the metaphor here) in the realm of the “coffee also-rans”. One company that has always managed to hang in through thick and thin (and I think that there is a lot of thin here) is Country Style. I have always liked them – they have far better coffee than Tim’s (not saying a lot there, that is akin to saying someone is less short than Gary Coleman, or perhaps less two-faced than Hillary Clinton) and they have always competed in this sector with some outright fervor, bringing lots of good ideas to the table in an effort to stem the tide of overall Tim-ness.
One of those good ideas is really good sandwiches. I mean, we are talking night and day to the sad little “meat on a bun” things that Horton’s is selling.
Another of those good ideas (and the point of this whole post) is free WiFi in a lot of their stores. YOu sign up once, for free, and off you go. None of this Starbucks or Second Cup “give Rogers more of your fucking money because it isn’t like they have enough” bullshit, it’s free, no catches, enjoy your coffee and maybe your nice sandwich and surf your head off.
Apple has officially released version 1.1.4 of the iPhone software, and it is available in the iTunes upgrade pane as of right now. If you have an unlocked or jailbroken iPhone you should not take the upgrade at this time. While it appears that the upgrade will not re-lock or otherwise hose your phone, it isn’t worth the risk.
The dev team is already modifying ZiPhone to account for the change and that should be ready in a couple of days. Until then, don’t take the chance.
If you are buying a new iPhone, the one you get today (and up until about March 7th) will come out of the box with version 1.1.3 and you can still unlock it with the instructions and tools found here. It’s so simple that even King Turd, known for his legendary skill in not following instructions and bricking phones, was able to do it. As soon as the new version of ZiPhone is out, I will link it up and update the instructions.
So Zibri – one of the dev team geniuses-in-residence – has whipped up a fully-automated, GUI-driven unlocker for any iPhone. Any version, any state, it works. I upgraded and unlocked two older phones to version 1.1.3 on the weekend, and unlocked and upgraded a previously-off-limits 1.1.2 phone.
So – if you have a previously unlocked phone and you are still at version 1.0.2 or 1.1.1, now is the time to upgrade to the current version of the iPhone software. It is better, faster, has cool new features and you will need it to run anything programmed with the SDK that is coming out next month. You need to do this now.
And, if you don’t yet have an iPhone and have been thinking about it (but hesitant because of previous unlocking issues), now is the time. Get a phone, and unlock it. You will never have a better opportunity or an easier method to do so. It is literally a few clicks of the mouse – no editing, no file copying, just running a couple of applications.
For all of you who have been patiently waiting for an iPhone unlock. some good news. The secpack for the new (and until now) unbreakable bootloader is in the wild, and has been analyzed to the point where any 1.1.3 or 1.1.2 iPhone can be downgraded to 1.1.1 and subsequently unlocked and used on any EDGE cellular carrier.
I have linked all of the necessary files from the iPhone unlock page, and have provided step-by-step instructions. You will still need an SFTP client, and a wireless router that you can join to. Beyond that, the instructions are much simpler this time around – you should be able to do the whole thing in about 15 minutes. Just make sure you read the instructions and you know how to type.
As always, fucking up your phone is your problem, not mine. But if push comes to shove, I will try and help you out of a jam, just drop me an email.
Last year at this time I was pimping the groovy online coverage of the Amgen Tour Of California – specifically, how Adobe was powering the realtime mapping of each stage with something they called the Tour Tracker. I raved about the thing at the time, but compared to this year’s online coverage … well, in retrospect it was tin cans and string at best.
This year’s most insanely awesome version is a veritable Festival O’ Flash, with a nice big real-time video feed, your choice of cameras, overhead and profile views of the course, live video mapping and the traditional text dispatches from the chase vehicles. It could be the future of sports broadcasting – I would love to see a lot of this shit show up at the Olympics in 2010.
The Tour runs until the 24th – be sure to give it a peek.
Firefox sidebars are awesome – you can watch your RSS feeds or maintain a history or whatever – but the fact that you can only have one at a time is a bit of a pisser. Or, at least, it was. If you have a delicious widescreen monitor then you should defnitely grab the MultiSidebar plug-in – it lets you have sidebars open and positioned at both sides, the top (and if you really must) the bottom of your active browser window. The settings are pervasive and sticky, so once you get things set up you are good to go every time you surf. It really is a beautiful tool. Enjoy.
I wasn’t really going to say anything further about the Macbook Air because I (stupidly) assumed that everyone would understand this device and what it is supposed to be for. Sadly, I have once again overestimated the collective intelligence, and have forgotten that the average tech “journalist” has barely enough neural organization to qualify as a vertibrate.
For all of the whiners and feebs who are going on about the Air being underpowered, here is a news flash: If you care in any way, shape, or form about the performance specifications of a computer then this product is not for you. The Air is designed and manufactured for exactly three segments of the population:
People who buy and provide props for movies and television shows.
People who really want the people around them to go “ooo” when they pull it out in a coffee shop or the business class section of an aircraft.
People who usually decide on which electronic devices to purchase by the “fashion colours” they come in (Hi, Missy).
That’s it. Period. The Air is staggeringly beautiful because that is its prime – and some might say – only design criteria. Everything else – the performance or lack thereof, the wicked cool wireless sync system, all of it – is a result of that single overriding concern. This is a device that exists for only one reason – to get on TV and in the movies a lot and to make people say “damn, I’d love to have one of those”.
It’s an advertising device, a loss leader, and a sales hook. No more, no less.
It is also, as previously mentioned, staggeringly beautiful. And yes, I do want one. Quite frankly, I really like it when people around me go “ooo”.
When I was a wee child, I absolutely adored puzzles. Puzzles of any kind – jigsaws, magic squares, cryptograms, acrostics, crosswords, you name it. Even something as inane and simple as the “Jumble” feature on the comics page was latched onto and savoured. Puzzles were my pals – much more enjoyable to spend any sort of time with than the cretinous little jerks that I was forced to endure as my classmates or (dripping sarcasm coming) “peers” (dripping sarcasm ends).
Let me tell you, finding out that school was more “being cooped up in a room full of semi-literate morons” and less “reading cool books” was a huge and life-changing shock for an impressionable 5-year old.
Ahem. Anyway, I loved all puzzles, but the absolute best puzzles were the logic and perception kind. I would search for these everywhere – books, magazines, even the occasional Reader’s Digest – and delight over every manipulation and solution. If there were 12 visually identical weights and a scale that you could only use 3 times, I was there, baby. All of which – and in a rather roundabout way – brings us to the most insanely awesome videogame release of the last 2 years, Professor Layton and the Curious Village.
This is a game that you must buy if you have a Nintendo DS, and if you don’t have a Nintendo DS you should go out right now and buy one. Period. And if you know someone who doesn’t own a Nintendo DS you should go out and buy one for them and then give them a copy of this game to prove what an awesome friend you are. Really.
The game is a joy on virtually every level. The art direction and animation is impeccable, with a classic European feel (think Belle and Sebastian or Tintin) that is wonderfully refreshing in a world saturated by cheap anime. The sound and voice acting is impeccable, the writing is delightful, and the presentation classic and clean.
All of which, of course, pales in comparison to the puzzles. Everywhere you go, everywhere you turn, some door or entrance or clue is blocked by a puzzle, which you must solve to unlock the next step in the adventure. Hundreds of puzzles, lurking around every corner and waiting to delight and reward you. I have taken the liberty of reproducing one of the first puzzles in the game here – just a warm-up, found in the early minutes of the game to get your brain lubricated and working. It is a variation on a classic, and still a fun little diversion:
As shown in the diagram below, you have exactly one quarter of a circle. Within this circle is the rectangle ABCD, which touches the edge of the circle at D. Point B is located at the exact centre of the circle, and all of the angles of the rectangle are 90 degrees. How long is the diagonal line AC?
See? Awesome. Imagine an adventure game that lets you poke around and explore a world that is packed with these little gems – every one demanding that you produce the solution before you can move on to the next. And, via the built-in WiFi functions of the DS, new puzzles to download from the Nintendo mothership each and every week.
I’m not religious, but if I was – and by extension believed in some sort of “heaven” concept – it would be like living in this game forever.
In what is probably the first-ever marketplace victory of “quality” over “shady marketing” the suits at Toshiba threw in the towel and pulled the plug on HD-DVD. About time. Much like the Beta/VHS wars of days gone by, one product here was noticeably superior – HD-DVD isn’t high definition at all – it only drives a resolution of 720 lines, making it “mid def” at best. The problem in the past, of course, has been that “typical consumers” drive the marketplace, and that usually means the inferior product, no matter how bad it is (*cough cough VHS cough*) wins if it is cheaper.
I’m not really sure what happened to short circuit the usual process here – some people will point to the inclusion of Blu-ray in the PlayStation 3 as a driver, but I don’t think that there are enough PS3s in play to make a real difference – but I am not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Blu-ray driving a proper 1080p television with a proper HDMI cable is a completely and utterly glorious thing to behold, period. For once, the best product won.
So, yeah, the worst-kept “secret” in the videogame world is now official: today Activision officially announced the impending release of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. All Aerosmith, all the time. The game will ship in June and be available for the Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, and (maybe) the PlayStation 3. Activision is definitely hedging their bets on the PS3 thing in the press release, which much be causing yet another round of eye-gouging and self-flagellation over at Sony.
To promote the news (and to get to the whole point of this post) Activision is offering a free (that’s free, as in gratis) download of Dream On for owners of Guitar Hero III on the Xbox 360. It will only be available from February 16th to the 18th, so don’t miss out.
Meanwhile, the first screen shot of the game makes Joe and Steve look far less hideous than they do in real life. Whew.
There has been a fairly massive rash of comment spam lately – the spammer or spammers in question seem to have found a way to get around Akismet. Not good. Normally I just use Mr. Kenny’s Extended Comment Optionsplug-in to deal with this sort of thing when it crops up, but when I was going through the comment logs I noticed that all of the comments that were getting past Akismet had the same IP address.
Heh heh heh.
This means that – instead of turning off all comments for a period of time, or closing comments on all posts more than a couple of days old (two of the functions of Extended Comment Options) – I can leave all of the posts open and just trap comments coming from that single IP address. Better yet, that means that I could use Dougal Campbell’s Tar Pitto make things even more entertaining. Tar Pit looks for hits coming in from any IP address that you specify, and after a looooooooong delay presents the spammer with an “access denied” message. The idea here is that you both stop the loser from hitting your blog and you piss them off with a seriously slow load time.
Tar Pit is super easy to use – just slap it into your WP-Plugins folder, activate it, and then put any suspected IP addresses into the Comment Moderation list under Options -> Discussion. Tar Pit watches for hits from those addresses, leaving everyone else unaffected. It will also email you whenever it traps something, just in case. Neat, clean, and vaguely satisfying.
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you install Tar Pit and then you think you might want to test to see if it really works by putting in your own IP address … don’t. Trust me, it works, and what will happen is that you cant access your own blog – even the control panel to take out your own IP – and you are well and truly hosed. Locked out of your own flipping site until you manually remove the plug-in from the WP-Plugins folder.
Learned that one the hard way.
IMPORTANT NOTE 2: Because of the huge rash of spam, I may have missed some legit comments, inadvertently leaving them to rot in moderation hell. Sorry about that.
Cover Flow is, quite frankly, a lot of fun. It was fun in iTunes when it first showed up, it is fun in the Leopard finder … and it would probably be tons of fun when using Flikr or Google Images or some other such portal full or picture goodness.
Regrettably, there is no Cover Flow style of browsing built in to these sites. Not so regrettably, the gang over at Cooliris have whipped up a faboo little plug-in called Piclens for both Safari and Firefox to give you something that is acceptably close. In fact, with the new “wall of images” function, you might think that this is even better than Cover Flow. Either way, it is definitely worth a try. Head on over to the Piclens site and grab yourself a copy, and then go surf one of the sites that the thing supports. I think you will be suitably impressed.
When I was working in the U.S. of A. there would be moment when friends, acquaintances, and even random folks who were born in the Great 48 would ask me what being a Canadian was all about. They would ask the question in different ways and with different words, but the gist of the thing was always the same – they were looking for to find out why were weren’t just “Americans with back bacon”.
I always found it hard to come up with a good answer for that one – most of what being a Canadian is all about is more in the “doing” than the “saying”, and the parts that could be explained in saying would probably come off sounding kind of condescending, so I used to mostly beg off when this sort of thing happened. Getting a laugh with a “how’s it goin’, eh?” would usually be enough to pave it over and move on.
That strategy used to bug me, though … I wanted to have a real answer, to give them something concrete, and it irked me when I couldn’t do it, and that question has stuck in the back of my mind for a long time. Which brings us to right now, where I actually do have an answer – something that I saw on the annual Hockey Day In Canadabroadcast that really summed up in words and pictures what being Canadian is really all about.
I have always been a fan of Joe Juneau – his willingness to forge his own path, his balls for going to a U.S. college to study engineering despite speaking no english at all, his ability to get a degree at that same college in three years with a 4.0 GPA, and his sublime touch with the puck around the net were all things that made me root for the guy even when his team happened to be playing my beloved Red Wings. M. Juneau was, to use a somewhat unoriginal phrase, the man.
Which is all fine and dandy, but it is what he is doing after his life in hockey that really sums up what being a Canuck is all about. So if any of those people who ever asked me this question happen to read this, here is your answer. It’s a few years late and a country removed, but it works.
How’s it goin’, eh?
NOTE: This video is posted on the CBC Sports website in a higher-quality format, but there is no way to link directly to the video – their flash player is self-contained and the playlist is always changing. So I have done A Very Bad Thing here and ripped the flash to an MP4 file and posted it on YouTube. Definitely against the rules, but such is life. I really wanted to be able to point people to this item and if that means a rule gets bent, so be it.
Looks like the general panic is starting to set in. Check out this awesome memo that the fine folks at Rogers Communications (Canada’s Worst Wireless Service!) sent out to all of their customers, just twenty months after a very expensive branding campaign to make sure everyone had the “Rogers Yahoo” name hardwired into their skulls:
Back then it was like “Sign up with us and get a real internet company, not just Rogers!” Now it’s like “er, we don’t want this particular clump of dog shit sticking to our shoe.” Big thanks to Smartie Jack for the tip.
I have been known to sing the praises of Perian in These Very Pages on more than one or two occasions. This is because Perian is very very good. It is also, as of this week, very very updated. If you use it, you should grab the new version. Toot sweet.
Terry was kind enough to point out that if I had just taken the time to search for the thing I would have found a number of copies of Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal online. I have no idea why I assumed that the document would have never made the transition from pre-Gopher times into a modern storage and distribution format. I guess I had mentally filed the thing into the same stratum as pop-top cans, punch cards, and homemade RS-232 cables … things that I know existed, but just never expected to see again. So, for those of you that don’t read the comments, here it is. Enjoy.
CODA 1: Sorry for the delay on comments, there has been a new rash of comment spam lately.
CODA 2: For those that wondered about the title of the document, it is a riff on Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, a famous book from the 1980s. And you can look that one up.
You may not know this, but when a publicly-traded company is involved in any sort of transaction, everything they do becomes a matter of public record. If you happen to be such a corporation in the United States this means that every bit of communication or official activity gets archived and then posted on-line by the SEC.
Which brings us to this awesome memo from Jerry Yang to the masses at Yahoo. Under normal circumstances, we would never get to read this sort of internal missive. But because of the Microsoft screw-job, this is now a matter of public record. Of course, Jerry has to be careful – this level of scrutiny means that he has to couch everything in multiple layers of management-speak and rampant bullshit. But if you read between the lines, you can tell that there are a lot of long faces at the Yahoo campus.
NOTE: It was pointed out by multiple people that both Gruber and Hodgins had essentially the same things posted – although they didn’t use the “r” word. I dont care so much about Hodgins, but I will always defer to Gruber – I link to him, not vice versa. And his was better anyway. Great minds may think more or less alike, but I will always defer to the master.
There have been sundry and prior mentions in These Very Pages of attempts to launch enterprise-quality web-based business applications. The biggest attempt thus far has been Writely, which has the Might Of Google behind it, but was still more than a bit lacking. Okay, a lot lacking. Which means the door is still open on this potentially lucrative idea, and the folks at Adobe have stepped into the fray with a Flash-based entry called Buzzword. It’s open for user testing now and it is definitely worth a look.
On the plus side it looks fabulous, the toolbars are smart and mostly logical, and – best of all – it maps whatever editing keys you use in your normal desktop environment to the Buzzword window. If you (properly) use Command-C to copy, you don’t need to do the mental switch to the jarheaded Control-C combo just because you are in a remote application. Big kudos there.
On the minus side of the ledger, there are a few things that get annoying fast – the biggest being the fact that opening a new document opens a whole new browser window. Tabbed browsing exists for a reason, dammit, and if I wanted my screen cluttered with browser windows I would use fucking IE, okay? Knock it off.
Hmph.
Otherwise, it is clean and easy and quick and if the collaboration tools work as advertised (more on that later) then this thing could deserve a serious look. Sign up and try it out today – you just might like it.
More people are calling them out over this reprehensible tactic. The latest attempt by Bill to remind people that Obama is black with the off-handed comment that the challenger “has a lot in common with Jesse Jackson” is making even the most milquetoast commentators take notice. I mean, enough already.
Realizing that people are starting to see through this tactic, the Clintons have switched tactics and are trying to pin the whole racial divide on the Obama camp. They went so far as to trot out Andrew freaking Young (honestly, I had no idea he was still alive and kicking) to proclaim that Bill and Hillary couldn’t be racist because Bill was just as black as Obama. Why? Well, because Bill has banged more black women, that’s why.
So yeah, big surprise, that failed, and the Clintons resorted to trying to cast doubt on Obama’s long-standing opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Sadly, his stance is pretty much unassailable, and all this did was make people remember that Hillary the Opportunist – having no principles or credibility of her own – was the first to stand up and applaud with G.W. Bush announced that they were invading another country for no apparent reason all all. “Yay!” said Hillary. “Yay George!” The whole thing backfired so badly that Hillary had to issue a statement trying to distance herself from Bill and the whole mess.
And that brings us to Super Tuesday, where pretty much the fate of a nation is in the hands of the card-carrying members of the Democratic party. Do they elect the elderly, spineless, and more-than-a-bit distasteful representative who embodies everything that is wrong with old-school politics, or do they have the balls to look past the skin colour and go with someone young, dynamic, credible, and honestly passionate? If you happen to be reading this from below the 49th and you still are unsure, then maybe this thoughtful piece on the two candidates’ web sites will seal the deal for you.
Geez – another death notice. This time it is for Adobe Stock Photos, the image browsing and shopping service tied to Adobe Version Cue. It was a healthy – and quite frankly, good – library of royalty free images that you could browse and purchase right out of your Photoshop or InDesign session. I thought it was pretty much brilliant, and if I was still designing I would have used it a lot. But the people who are still designing obviously don’t agree, because sales have been in the toilet from the word go. Too bad – another good idea bites the dust.
So one of the sidelines of the whole MicroHoo story that isn’t getting much play in the media is the rampant panic among Flickr users. There are a lot of people who don’t trust Microsoft to keep the service intact and at least vaguely usable, and some people are more than a bit worried that the draconian content ownership policies that Microsoft has displayed in the past will come back to life here. People have lost the rights to their own content at the hands of the Redmond Collective before, and are worried that it is going to happen again.
