Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Mind Hacks

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Just added to my daily reads: Mind Hacks, the companion blog to Tom Stafford and Matt Webb’s book Mind Hacks, recently released by O’Reilly.

Full of fascinating brain play (literally), like this post on how we perceive our sleeping habits:

Our own perception of how much we slept during a night can be startlingly inaccurate. Dr Allison Harvey (now of UC Berkley) took insomniacs and measured how much they actually slept during the night. Despite the insomniacs reporting that they had only slept for two or three hours, they had in fact been asleep for an average of 7 hours – only 35 minutes less than a control group who didn’t have any problems sleeping.

This shows that insomniacs (and probably the rest of us) are very bad at judging the time it takes us to get to sleep, and the time we actually are asleep. It also suggests that worrying about sleep, and our beliefs about how we’ve slept, have a big role in the negative affects of what (we believe) is a sleepless night.

I’m looking forward to seeing what else pops up on their weblog, and I will definitely need to pick up the book as soon as I get a chance.

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes “This Hollowed Ground” by Legendary Pink Dots, The from the album From Here You’ll Watch the World Go By (1995, 3:04).

Blade Trinity

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I’d been iffy on whether I wanted to bother, but this pre-release review of Blade Trinity just put it on my “must see” list:

I attended a free sneek preview of Blade Trinity this evening at Pacific Place…. I expected very little from this movie and I received my expectations in abundance.

Pluses:
– Parker Posey as a vampire
– Ryan Reynolds mostly naked
– visual effects

Negatives:
– plot
– dialog
– editing
– direction
– poor action scenes
– Kris Kristofferson
– cliche footage of the city moving at 20x normal speed
– unintentional comedy
– excessive product placement (iPods)
– lame pop cultural references
– vampiric pomeranian (really!)
– “Dracula” err, I mean “DRAKE” groan

Parker Posey is always fun to watch, and a vampire kick-me dog?!? Oh, this I’ve gotta see!

(Maybe not until it hits video…but then, I’ve occasionally paid for worse in the theaters…)

iTunes “Melt” by Leftfield from the album Leftism (1995, 5:13).

A Book of Blogs

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Thanks to Alicia, I just found out about this project of Tvindy’s:

With all the phenomenal writing that has appeared on our various blogs over the past several months, wouldn’t it be cool for us to get together and publish a physical anthology of our greatest posts?

The way I envision it is that several of us agree to participate and have a couple of their entries published in the anthology. Since most people (myself included) find it hard to evaluate their own work, we can make suggestions as to what the best entries of our fellow bloggers are and urge them to choose those. That should make for some interesting debates.

The final product would be a paperback, containing hopefully as many as fifty entries in no particular order. Each entry would identify the name (or pseudonym) of the author and the URL of her/his blog. We’d make a nice cover using combined artwork from various blogs, and there would be an introduction at the beginning explaining what the book was.

He’s got more thoughts on how to approach the project in his next three posts (make that four).

I think this sounds really good, and would love to contribute, if anything I have is deemed worthy of inclusion.

Taking a quick look at my recent Four Years post where I pulled out a lot of highlights, I’m thinking that the following posts would be most likely to work well:

If anyone else has any other nominations, though, I’d be glad to see them. Your views on the “best” posts as readers might be quite different than mine as author.

Cover Tunes

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Mike linking to this punk cover of Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’ reminded me of something that I had bouncing around in my head yesterday.

There’s no end of punk/goth/alternative/industrial covers of pop songs — KMFDM’s cover of U2’s ‘Mysterious Ways’, 1000 Mona Lisa’s take on Alanis Morisette’s ‘You Oughtta Know’, Bigod 20 doing Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’, and countless others (including the only-in-my-head, never-going-to-happen cover of Garth Brooks’ ‘Ain’t Goin’ Down ’til the Sun Comes Up’ by Ministry with guest vocals by Les Claypool).

I want it to go the other way.

I want to hear Britney Spears cover My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s ‘Days of Swine and Roses’ (“Christian zombie vampires!”). N*SYNC or whatever boy band is around taking on The Sisters of Mercy’s ‘Dominion/Mother Russia’. Janet Jackson’s version of the Violent Femme’s ‘Day After Day’. Eminem doing Concrete Blonde’s ‘Bloodletting’.

And so on.

It’ll never happen (the closest thing to this that I know of is Russian pseudo-lolita-lesbian duo t.A.T.u. doing Morrissey’s ‘How Soon is Now’), but I would so buy an album of covers like that.

iTunes “Jesus Christ Superstar” by Laibach from the album Jesus Christ Superstars (1997, 5:45).

Panoramic Experiments

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Yesterday afternoon I decided to go for a bit of a wander through the weekend downtown shoppers to work on an experiment I’ve had in mind for a bit.

I’ve found over the months that I’ve been using it that the camera I’m currently borrowing does really well at evening, low-light photography, dropping the shutter speed down to do so. I’ve been curious at how panoramic shots would turn out if I took them in the evening, where the long exposures would blur any cars and passing shoppers.

After some experimenting yesterday, I’m somewhat pleased by the results, though I definitely still have some tweaking to do before I come up with something I really like. The issues I’m running into are twofold.

First, I need to try to track down some information on this camera and how to use the manual mode. Last night I left the camera on fully automatic, which works well for single shots. However, as it’s metering separately for each shot, I’m ending up with brightness and color shifts when I stitch the panoramas together. I think I should be able to compensate for this by noting the settings the camera chooses for the first shot on automatic mode, then switch to manual mode to duplicate those settings for the rest of the shots.

Secondly, I’m still figuring out the settings for the stitching software I’m using. I’ve been taking the shots with the camera positioned for portrait (vertical) shots — it takes more shots to create a full 360° panorama, but there’s more vertical image in the final panorama. However, this also means that there’s more distortion at the top and bottom of each image, so while the final panoramas are close to seamless across the middle of the shot, there are occasional artifacts (such as buildings or poles suddenly splitting in two) at the top and bottom of each panoramic.

Still, I like the direction that these are going, and each time I try, I’m getting a bit closer to what I’m aiming for in my head.

Here’s the best of my experiments from last night:

4th and Pine, kitty-corner from the Bon

4th and Pine

This is actually pretty close to what I had in my head, aside from the color shifts. One thing I didn’t think about ahead of time that amuses me in the final image is that of the four stoplights in the shot, two are green, one is yellow, and one is red. Seems a wee bit confusing for the drivers!

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (3.7Mb): westlake2.mov.

Pike Place Market Main Entrance

Pike Place Market Main Entrance

Standing in front of the famous fish market, surrounded by Christmas shoppers. Lots of movement in this one.

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (2.5Mb): pikeplace2.mov.

Pike Place Market Flower Stands

Pike Place Flower Stands

In one of the side entrances to the market, right between two of the flower vendors. I like the sudden switch between the bright bustle of the market itself and the darker outside world.

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (3.4Mb): pikeplace4.mov.

Pike Place Market and Waterfront

Pike Place and Waterfront

Outside the far end of the Market, looking over the waterfront. I think this one’s probably my favorite of the batch (of course, it’s also probably the one with the least amount of odd artifacts).

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (3.5Mb): pikeplace5.mov.

Waterfront and Seattle skyline

Waterfront and skyline

Standing on top of a picnic table in the park directly behind the Market, overlooking the waterfront, the Alaska Way Viaduct, and catching part of the downtown Seattle skyline.

Here’s a Quicktime VR panoramic movie of the image (3.6Mb): waterfront2.mov.

And that’s it for this round of experiments. More (and hopefully better quality images) will follow later on, I’m sure.

iTunes “Hard Day Blues” by Waters, Muddy from the album Folk, Gospel and Blues: Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1946, 2:51).

Netflix Friends

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Yesterday word starting flying around the ‘net about a new feature on Netflix‘ site: Netflix Friends. I read about it on Hacking Netflix and was definitely interested, but by that point there were already a ton of people asking for invites, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable joining in the “add me!” crowd, so I just tossed a link into Eclinkticism instead.

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Of course, what I didn’t think about was MovableType’s automatic Trackback discovery feature, so when I posted my link, Hacking Netflix got pinged — and Mike was kind enough to toss an invite my way after all.

After playing with it a bit last night and this morning, I’m really enjoying this. The first thing I had to do was toss out some invites to people that I knew had NetFlix accounts, and some have already responded and joined in. The more people listed as friends, the more choices there are on your friends page, of course, and it’s been fun watching the recommendations change as more of the few people I invited in join in the fun.

NetFlix Friends

The main NetFlix Friends screen is divided into a few sections. Over to the right is a list of your friends and how many movies they’ve rated, a list of people you’ve invited but haven’t accepted yet, and links to either invite more people in or edit your friends list (delete friends or edit their display name on your list). The main column of the page starts off with a list of movies that your friends have watched and rated recently, with their ratings displayed in purple below the movie. Further down the page (and not displayed in my screen shot) are sections for “New and Upcoming Favorites” (recently released and soon-to-be released films), “Unique Films Your Friends Love” (movies that people you know have given an above-average rating), and “Friends Top Favorites” (four- and five-star ratings from your friends).

NetFlix Friends Share Page

Clicking on one of your friends names in the “Your Friends” section of the page takes you to that person’s “Share Page”, with a larger list of what they’ve watched recently on the right side of the page, along with the same “Recently Watched” and “New and Upcoming Favorites” lists (in slightly longer form) from the main Friends page.

Netflix Movie Page

One of the nice touches is that once you’re part of the Netflix Friends program, there are little adjustments throughout the Netflix site that tie in to your Friends pages. On any page in the site, if a movie is displayed that one of the people on your Friends list has seen, a little purple person icon appears in the lower-right corner of the movie icon or next to the movie’s name. Also, on individual movie listing pages (which recently gained a “Watch Preview” option — nifty!), there is now a listing towards the bottom right of ratings from any friends who have rated the film, and you can add short one-line blurbs about what you thought of the film.

So far, it’s looking like Netflix has a really good thing going here. If you’ve got a Netflix account and want to join the fun, just let me know!

iTunes “Connected” by Alabama 3 from the album Exile on Coldharbour Lane (1997, 6:15).

ecto 2

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So ecto 2 is updated, and one of the nifty new features is Amazon integration. It’s pretty slick, with a handy little search window within ecto to find items, one-button posting once you’ve chosen what you want, and a few options for how you want the finished link to appear.

I do have one concern about the link format, though.

I’ve been very careful to make sure that all my Amazon URLs are formatted a specific way, after reading this from kottke early last year:

I’ve noticed lately that when I browse items at Amazon, the URLs now take one of two forms:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/ http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/

The former URL style has been around for some time, but the latter is relatively new. If you’re an Amazon Associate, the proper way of linking to an individual item (per their linking guide) is to append your Associate code (mine is “0sil8”) to the first URL style, like so:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684868768/0sil8

But if you run across an item at Amazon with the second type of URL, this won’t work:

http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684868768/0sil8

If you’ve linked to items using that style of URL (something I’ve seen on several sites), check your reports at Amazon…you’ll find that you’re not getting any Associates clickthroughs or credit for those purchases.

Obviously, since I would like to get credit for any clickthroughs I might receive (rare though they may be), I’ve been very careful to make sure to use the ‘ASIN’ format of link, and not the ‘tg/detail/-‘ format.

While experimenting with ecto’s new Amazon integration, I put together a quick link to Neal Stephenson’s ‘Quicksilver’, and checked the URL — and, unfortunately, it came up with the ‘tg/detail/-‘ format (though I’ve fixed it in that link). After poking around in ecto’s settings for the Amazon integration, it doesn’t appear that there is any end-user control over the links (that is, the URL format, not the format of the link itself) other than manually fixing them after they’re inserted. While this really isn’t a major dealbreaker — it’s essentially what I’ve been doing for a while anyway, and the ecto integration does make it much easier to find items — it does leave me with a few questions…

  1. Most importantly, does this still matter? Or does Amazon now give credit correctly for both styles of links? On the assumption that it does still matter…
  2. When constructing the link, does ecto receive the entire URL string from Amazon, or just the ASIN?
  3. If ecto only receives (or needs) the ASIN, can the URL string be changed to the ‘ASIN’ style of link in the next update to ecto?
  4. If ecto receives the entire string…
    1. …is the returned string always ‘tg/details/-‘ format, or does it switch between that and ‘ASIN’ format?
    2. If it’s always ‘tg/details/-‘ format, can that be automatically adjusted within ecto to ‘ASIN’ format?
    3. If it switches, can ecto watch for that string and adjust it when necessary?
  5. And lastly, according to the tail end of Jason’s post, adding ‘ref=nosim/’ before the Associate ID forces Amazon to skip the “You may also be interested in…” page and send you straight to the actual product page. Can an option be added to ecto to add the ‘ref=nosim/’ string in the right place for people who might worry/care about such a thing?

If not…well, I’ll live. I can hope, though! :)

iTunes “Leæther Strip Part II” by Leæther Strip from the album Penetrate the Satanic Citizen (1992, 6:00).

MSN Spaces reactions

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Robert Scoble is collecting reactions to MSN Spaces, including mine:

Michael Hanscom: “Power users and web standards geeks (who are probably not the target market anyway) will definitely want to look somewhere else.” (Scoble’s note to Michael: hey, did you see the Macintosh in the video?)

I actually haven’t taken the time yet to watch either of the two introductory videos that Scoble posted, so no, I hadn’t seen that yet. :) I’ll try to get a look at them later today, maybe this evening.

iTunes “Get to Know Ya” by Johnson, Jesse from the album Pretty In Pink (1986, 3:35).

Balloon Feather Boat Tomato

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Jason Webley has updated his site with information about his most recent show. He has links up to the photo galleries that Josh and I have posted (nifty!), plus a few other goodies.

The “Life of Webley” animation that opened the show can be downloaded as a 4.8Mb .wmv file, and he’s posted the text of the four stories from the evening:

The Story of Balloon:

What is it about holding a balloon that is so magical and familiar? A hand that is holding a balloon is a content, happy hand. Why exactly is that? I’m sure the scientists and philosophers and marketing people have written dozens of millions of pages about this subject, but I have my own theory.

The Story of Feather:

Feather was a girl who trusted her feet. She ran so light, so fast and so reckless that she never had time to fall and skin her knees. She had big bright eyes filled with bees a-buzzing and long yellow hair that trailed behind her when she ran through the garden. There was always dirt under her fingernails and snot on her chin. But never a scrape on her knees. Because she trusted her feet.

The Story of Boat:

Isn’t it interesting how differently people move through the world? One person walks down the street and everyone he passes immediately likes him and thinks to themselves, ‘what a nice pleasant fellow! I should invite him over for dinner!’ But when another person walks down the same street in much the same way, people lock their doors and grumble to themselves, dogs bark, he is met with suspicious glances until eventually someone throws a shoe at him.

The Story of Tomato:

Tomato was the most beautiful woman in the world. She never knew her mother, but she never gave that much thought. She was the most beautiful woman in the world and there were always plenty of people around to shower her with attentions and affections.

iTunes “Music That Tears Itself Apart” by Webley, Jason from the album Viaje (1998, 3:22).