Will Mark Cuban (Finally) Revolutionize Hollywood? - His plan to break the video window. By Edward Jay Epstein
What has prevented the studios from closing the video window is simple: Wal-Mart. The company, which is the single biggest seller of DVDs, has made it clear that it does not want to compete with home delivery… Enter Mark Cuban.
Monthly Archive for October, 2005
Brewster Jennings Protects America: The Google Map Hunt Game
This is fun. It’s like Carmen Sandiego with GMaps hunting for terrorists.
Project Syndicate
Project Syndicate is an international association of 244 newspapers in 114 countries, devoted to the following objectives:
* bringing distinguished voices from across the world to local audiences everywhere;
* strengthening the independence of printed media in transition and developing countries;
* upgrading their journalistic, editorial, and business capacities.
(Thanks Sharon)
Eco-tipping points
An “environmental tipping point†is a point in a linked eco-social system where a small action can catalyze major changes in the system’s health.
Wired News: Radio Industry Hits Shuffle
That stupid DJ-less Jack-FM format we have in Toronto now is picking up steam in the States. Sparknet Communications has software which basically shuffles a playlist of about 1000 songs + ads. The death of radio is here.
Boing Boing: Katamari Damacy: the text adventure
You are standing on the floor of a bedroom.
Your Katamari is 10cm.
> N
There is a PAPER CLIP here.
> ROLL CLIP
I do not know what a CLIP is.
> ROLL PAPER CLIP
You roll up the PAPER CLIP.
Halloween: costume ideas? | Ask MetaFilter
My brother went as Zombie Michael Moore and had a zombie camera crew with him filming Farenheit 9-1-BRAINS. I guess I have a soft-spot for zombies with personalities.
Wired News: The End of the Affair
How after two weeks, many of us get bored of the games we obsessed over. This is me.
Calvin and Hobbes Snow Art Gallery
Earlier this month, they released a box set of the complete Calvin and Hobbes. Three volumes hardcover. $200, but 30% off at Amazon.
Treehugger: WalMart To Use Corn-Based Plastic
In the ongoing trend of me blogging about corn. My dad was shocked I could talk for hours about corn.
It’s no secret I surf a lot. There isn’t much time of my time at bennybook where I’m not inside a web browser. As such, it’s fitting that I have (and occasionally use each of) no less than now FIVE web browsers.
Firefox, Camino, Opera and Safari all get some occasional love. But I think the buzz around Flock, a so called “social web browser” is interesting. It integrates all those damn Web 2.0 products, like del.icio.us tagged bookmarking, integration with this weblog and flickr photos, all in a pretty looking application with simple drag and drop functionality.
Check out the Flock.
KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS - HIDEOBLOG
Hideo Kojima’s blog is now available in English. Metal Gear Solid games are known to be incredibly intellectual and at times very nonconventional for videogames.
SkyscraperCity Forums - My visit to New York!
Kermie the Frog visits NYC.
Wow, thanks to Sharon for the invite to see her class’ special talk from an industrial designer from Apple headquarters in Cupertino. Systems Design engineering students have wacky classes like Cognitive Ergonomics, which is a kind of human factors course.
Apple employees are so tight lipped about everything that happen on Apple campus - it’s their main advantage over their competitors, so we didn’t get to find out everything, but the insights we did get were fascinating. Their other advantage is great design, which I appreciate even more after hearing from a few engineers and designers from Apple this week. Here are some juicy tidbits for your pleasure.
* The screws on the iBook and PowerBook are custom - because standard sourced screws don’t have pretty heads.
* The reason the Mac Mini can have such a tiny form factor, and everything is so tightly packed? Every component is milled. The plastics are milled after moulding. As a mech eng, this blew my mind. That’s a ridiculous amount of like 12 extra processes.
* Look at the connector set on an iBook, Mini, iMac or Powerbook. Notice how they’re all the same colour? You can’t buy connectors like that - they come in very standard colours (think the back of a PC or laptop). Each connector is custom painted to match.
* When the new iMac was debuted (I wrote about it last week), they needed to connect Steve’s iMac that he was demoing live to the projector. But you can only buy 200ft fibre-optic cable in this orange colour - unacceptable! They painted this one-time use cable “Moon Grey 4″, so that it matched.
It’s frankly ridiculous how dedicated Apple is to producing the best design possible. I could go on and on about their engineering practicies, which are even more mind-boggling. Quality is outstanding on levels much deeper than the UI.
There is a great article in Time this week about Apple and their design ideologies, which was a really good primer to hearing the Apple engineers talk.
Also, the Apple store in London, England is a site to see.
Surf-Bits, The Switcher’s Website » Blog Archive » Hacking Your iTrip
Yes, I would like my iTrip to transmit 60 feet. Sign me up.
FFX on NES
While there’s all this talk of remaking FFVII for the PS3, some great folk decided to create an 8bit version of FFX that will run on the NES.
You may or may not know that in August, I spent 30 days backpacking through Europe with Sandra and CJ. We went from London > Amsterdam > Copenhagen > Hamburg > Berlin > Paris > Biarritz > Barcelona > London. It was lots of fun and exciting though very tiring.
And despite my camera breaking about 10 days into the trip, we did manage to get a lot of nice photos to remember our trip. Some of my favorites are the dorkiest ones. I’ve uploaded a selection to my Flickr account. Enjoy.
“Joke” Conversation Thread in which the 
Was Invented
The 1982 BB thead where the sideways smiley was invented is quite hilarious itself. Dugg!
Escape My Head: TTTk, Travel Tinker Trouble Kit
_This_ is a great idea.