“Friday Fish Day” Edition
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Apparently pretty freaking stupid.
Yesterday, Apple released an update to the iPhone firmware (1.1.1 - nice little video detailing the changes), which adds some cool features like a double-clickable home button that brings you straight to your favorites list, one tap away from making a call (this same action can also call up controls for music, so you can pause, adjust the volume, etc., without leaving the application you are using). Other new stuff includes the iTunes WiFi store (which works like BUTTER. Beautiful butter.), support for closed-captioning, louder speaker volume, some nifty little keyboard enhancements, and some security patches and bug fixes.
This stuff is all cool, sure - certainly not earth-shattering - but what I can’t comprehend is the reasoning that compelled people who had hacked their phones to install third-party apps (or even to unlock it for use on a network other than AT&T) to risk everything and attempt to install the update, even after Apple explicitly said that such updates would likely render their phones unusable. Well guess what? Apple wasn’t lying.
I guess for these (seemingly plentiful) people, the lure of being able to download DRM-laden music on the go and double-click a button was strong enough to trump the ability to use some great native third-party apps like faux-GPS, games, chat, VoIP (forthcoming, I’ve heard), etcetera, etcetera - not to mention the ability to, uh, make a freakin’ phone call with their phone.
What were these people thinking? If you hacked your phone, and had any sense whatsoever, you would have waited for the tech blogs and the development team who provided the hack to test the firmware update for you and report back. Now you’re screwed because of your overzealousness, . I, for one, am not the least bit interested in listening to you complain about something you brought on yourself.
My roommate has a hacked iPhone. His still works today. Want to know his secret?
He’s not a fucking moron.
I’m embarrassed to be associated with these idiots.
(Lots more on this subject on Techmeme)
Amazon, everybody’s favorite online book (movie, electronics, food, and now mp3) store, is currently testing a complete redesign of the site. Andywirtanen on Flickr has a great screenshot of the new design, and Amazon has a FAQ (an F.A.Q.?) about the redesign. Here’s the meat of it:
We concentrated on shopping, searching, saving, and buying--the four activities that customers have repeatedly told us are the most important to them. They're now prominently featured at the top of every page on the site.Here are some before/after pics:
Shopping: Jump to any department from the upper left of any page. Individual departments are grouped into categories like "Food & Grocery" and "Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry" to make them a little easier to find.
Searching: Find someone's Wish List or registry from the top of any page.
Saving and Buying: Your Lists--where you can save all the items you'd like to look at later on--and your cart are more prominent and easier to find.
“Check Out Veggie-Style” Edition
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This is the first post in a new series here on Frivolous Motion called Big Ugly Fonts.
The first on the chopping block is our old friend Arial.
Arial, designed in 1982 for Monotype Typography, is widely used on modern computers, and is quite commonly found on web pages, due to it being “bundled” with both Windows and Mac operating systems.
Letting the typeface speak for itself, this is what’s embedded in the OpenType file:
Contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century. The overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial style sans serif faces. Terminal strokes are cut on the diagonal which helps to give the face a less mechanical appearance. Arial is an extremely versatile family of typefaces which can be used with equal success for text setting in reports, presentations, magazines etc, and for display use in newspapers, advertising and promotions.Much controversy surrounds this ubiquitous typeface, with the bulk of it stemming from Microsoft deciding not to license the much higher-quality Helvetica (with whom it shares nearly identical glyph width, weight, and proportion) for use in its Windows operating system. Arial is a poor knock-off, a double-copy, in fact, as it was originally designed as a slightly modified (to be more screen-readable) version of Monotype Grotesque.
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art,
bad,
BigUglyFonts,
helvetica,
microsoft,
typography
Check out Prototypicality, a stirring blog by photo-retoucher Monique Bergen Henegouwen. She is taking comments from her readers on how to modify a portrait of herself to make it more “beautiful,” more “perfect.”
I'm looking for a democratic perfect image of myself. So it is up to you to give me directions how I should change my face and body. ... What do you like to have changed in order to see your beauty in me. big eyes/small eyes/cheek bones/large mouth/thinner/taller/skin tone/,.....what is your idea off beauty in me?
The progress so far.Colin McEnroe of the Hartford Courant with much better copy for the introduction of President Ahmadinejad yesterday at Columbia:
You say, "Welcome to this forum. Our values are not your values; and I think that will become even more evident as we go along here. But the planet gets smaller every day, which means that all of our elbows touch. It's vitally important that we learn to share this tiny space in the universe. What we do to the atmosphere and what we do with weapons won't stay in our own immediate neighborhoods anymore. Even our words go everywhere, driven by satellites and cables. We will not shy away from sharp statements today, but let's keep in mind that if either side emerges from today with a tiny grain of better understanding of the other, it will have been worth what we put it into it."
The latest iTunes Store competitor has hit the public airwaves. None other than Online Retailer Supreme Amazon.com has joined this forward-moving market, and its amazonmp3 digital music download store is now open in public Beta. They’ve got a couple million songs from the EMI and Universal Music catalogs priced at $0.89 and $0.99, with a whole host of varied album prices. Downloads are in DRM-free MP3 format.
This actually looks like it might be pretty good. Amazon knows how to do business over the web, so time will tell if they’ll be able to compete in the digital download space, as well (so far their movie download service, Unbox, hasn’t gotten the best reviews).
Apple may finally have a worthy opponent on its hands. Sweet.
Check out my new blog Veggie-Style.
Veggie-Style is the daily chronicle of this self-professed carnivore’s 30-day sojourn into the land of vegetarianism with the hopes of overcoming the temptations of the flesh in order to develop healthier eating habits, unclog some arteries, and attain spiritual transcendence.
Nothing too tough for me.
But I’d love your comments, tips, tricks, recipes, encouragement, chastising, and experiences.
Click here to read the back story, and then take it from there. Subscribe to the RSS feed for daily updates.
30 Days. No Meat. God Help Me.
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food,
health,
meat,
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Three words:
Disappointment
Embarrassment
Sigh
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censorship,
free,
national,
politics,
world
Beginning next week, Starbucks will hand out complimentary download cards to their customers, redeemable for a free track from the iTunes Store. Each day, the coffee giant will feature a different artist (Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Joss Stone and Keith Urban being some of the participating musicians mentioned), and once you pick up a card from the store, you can redeem it until the end of the year. This is a nice little promo to spread the word about Starbucks’ recent partnership with Apple to offer Wi-Fi downloads from the iTunes Store on iPhone and iPod Touch (and, I’m sure, future devices). The promotion will last until November 7, and cards will be available at around 10,000 Starbucks locations nationwide.
Unclear if you have to buy a coffee to get the free song, but if you’re gonna get the caffeine fix anyway, this is a sweet extra.
(Image credit: "Fuse-Project" - Creative Commons, Attribution ShareAlike 2.5)
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“Digital Weekend” Edition
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Some really nice new widgets from Amazon were released today. They’re all very nice looking, and extremely customizable. By far the best part from a publisher’s perspective is the flexible width and height. Most other widgets come in fixed sizes that you can’t modify because there’s no access to the javascript serving the widget. Here are a couple of the fancier ones in action. These aren’t screen shots, so feel free to click and interact with them, and do some early holiday shopping.
I can’t believe my tax dollars are used for such vapid, waste-of-time pieces of symbolic legislation as the one that was passed in the Senate earlier today.
The statement of purpose:
To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.Have we so lost our way in this country that our lawmakers see fit to enact legislation with the sole purpose to “express the sense” of something? Oh right, it’s also to “strongly condemn,” which, last I checked, means it means nothing. All this is is a big, happy can’t-we-all-get-along happyhappyjoyjoy kumbaya my lord moment in Congress, where Republicans and Democrats alike hug and laugh and bump chests, congratulating each other on the collective brilliance behind this political posturing. “Just in case our constituents were wondering,” they seem to be saying, “we are not such poorly polished politicians that we know no better than to stand behind something that could be potentially divisive, even implicitly, whether or not we happen to agree with the sentiments expressed.”
I mean, isn't this what John Lennon was talking about when he wrote "Imagine"? Imagine all the people using the same iPhone with the same carrier. Instead of "me versus you," or "us versus them," how about just one big "us"? These Euros say they're not going to rewrite their national boundaries just for a phone. I'm like, A phone? You think that's what this is? A phone? Then you know what? I'm not even sure you deserve to get iPhone.Poetry. Pure poetry.
Much to the chagrin of hypocritical technophobes and stodgy old timers (or idiot young people acting like they’re 100 years old), New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has announced details of a deal with Transit Wireless to wire all of the 277 underground subway stations for cellular service. The city will receive $46.8 million over ten years, and the entire cost of building the network ($100 to $200 million) will be paid by Transit Wireless.
Under the agreement, the first six stations are to be those at 23rd Street and 14th Street on the Eighth Avenue line, 14th Street on the Seventh Avenue line, 14th Street on the Sixth Avenue line, and Eighth Avenue and Sixth Avenue on the L line.For me, this service can’t come fast enough, but the real holy grail is to extend cellular signals through the underground tunnels, so riders can use the phone and/or data services while actually riding the subway, not just when they’re on the platform. It’s a great step into the future, and one that’s been a long time coming.
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phone,
transportation
So many links!
Next time you’re trying to remove a background from an image using Photoshop (and you haven’t heeded my other advice), you’ll be doing yourself a huge, huge favor by using a Layer Mask.
It’s really quite simple.
With the layer you want to remove the background from selected (Mine is empty. How’s that for a Zen puzzle? Remove a background from an empty layer, and you shall find peace.), click the layer mask icon in the Layers palette (see below).
It’ll add something that looks like this:
Then all you have to do is use a black, soft-edged paintbrush to paint away what you don’t want (or use the pen tool, if you’re feeling like a pro). Anytime you mess up, you can simply press X to switch the brush color to white, and wherever you paint, the stuff you just got rid of will come back, because it was never actually erased - it was only “masked.” Resize your brush, zoom in, zoom out, wash, rinse, and repeat. You know, the usual trial and error stuff. At least this time you won’t actually lose your original photo because you forgot to save it as a new file before you started working on it.
This is what’s known as non-destructive editing. Lord knows you could probably use a little bit more of that in your life.
Before iPhone, I couldn’t have been less interested in the start of the fall television season. But since getting the device, I’ve burned many hours watching full seasons on my morning and evening commute, as well as online at home on my Cinema Display. Without so much as having seen an episode (or even an advertisement) prior, I’ll jump in to a show from the beginning, and spend the next week watching all twenty or so episodes that are available. I even bought a season pass to the show Damages through iTunes based on the free pilot and nothing else. There’s some gems out there in TV Land, that much is clear. But it’s not so easy to pick the winners.
Shows that I’ve recently watched (making no claims to their quality, though some I very much enjoyed) include: Weeds, Heroes, Ugly Betty, Greek, and Jericho.
What I would like to hear are your thoughts on what shows to catch this fall. Of course, America’s Next Top Model will probably make the cut, and that starts tomorrow night, but what else will be awesome enough to pay attention to? House also goes without saying.
Older show recommendations (that are available for download or on DVD or whatever) are also welcome. What do you like?
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iphone,
television
Last month it was rumored that the New York Times was going to be phasing-out the for-pay access to its archives and “special” articles known as TimesSelect.
Well, today it has become official.
Effective “midnight Tuesday night” (that’s Wednesday, I think), this move reflects “a growing view in the industry that subscription fees cannot outweigh the potential ad revenue from increased traffic on a free site.”
Which is to say, the Times finally figured out that they can make a ton more money advertising and expanding their readership through search engine results and links than by charging a relative handful of people what amounts to a convenience fee for content that should have arguably been free and open to the public from the beginning.
Past demons aside, this is a great move for the Times, which, alongside the pretty cool My Times and the Times Reader, positions this newspaper of newspapers a leader in the transition into the digital age.
Maybe, just maybe, this is one dinosaur that will make it through the Cretaceous.
Offending people is quite simple, really. Just try out one of these plug-and-chug phrases, filling in the blanks with an appropriate word of your own (and modifying the sentence structure as necessary to not sound like a complete idiot who read some stuff on a blog and tried to use the knowledge gained in real life).
You can even string several into a combo of offensitivity to score mucho extra points-o (pretending to speak another language goes miles, as well) and earn a power-up bonus at the end of the level.
Did you buy an iPhone before the crazy price drop? Well, then head over to the Apple Online Store, you crazy early adopter you, and pick up your $100 store credit. Woohoo! Just enter your cell number, iPhone serial number, and wait for a text message with a confirmation code to magically appear. Type that baby in, and you’re set. Took me all of 45 seconds.
Didn’t buy an iPhone? Well, I guess you must be feeling left out of all this free money.
That, or you’re gloating.
To each her/his own.
“Get Yer iPhone Rebate And Spend It This Weekend” Edition:
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Are you using this precious web technology to commit crimes against humanity?
Here’s a checklist.
Do you...
A great-looking new site called Satisfaction (www.getsatisfaction.com) has opened into public beta.
By their own words, Satisfaction is
...people-powered customer service for absolutely everything. More specifically, though, it's a place where communities of customers come together to answer each others questions, share ideas with each other or with an organization, report and solve problems and generally talk about about what matters to them around these products or services.As of this writing, there are over 250 companies listed, with a good handful of them “participating,” which means that company representatives are part of the discussion that takes place. Here’s an example of a pretty active company page.
When the organization or company is involved too it gives them a way to engage with their customers around the issues that matter to their customers most. Satisfaction provides a neutral playing ground where companies and customers can interact to everybody's benefit.
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Dear Businesses Everywhere,
Please, please, please start serving RSS feeds for all of your individual product pages, category pages, search results, and (especially) sale items.
Please, please, please let me share my wish list as an RSS feed, by email, on del.icio.us, in embeddable widget form, and as a standard URL.
Please, please, please let me sort by color, price, brand, size, newness, materials, rating, popularity, number of reviews, etc.
Please, please, please link to reviews of the product on other sites.
Please, please, please show me the only the most relevant information, but let me easily find the tiniest little detail about the product if I’m curious.
Please, please, please give me very high resolution images of your product, rather than simply opening a pop-up window containing a photo exactly the same size as the one I was just looking at and pretending that it’s somehow larger because it’s in its own box.
Please, please, please let me see the total cost of the contents of my shopping cart (not just number of items), including estimated shipping and tax at all times.
Please, please, please don’t force me to open an account in order to buy something from your store.
Please, please, please let me create an account so I don’t have to enter my shipping/billing information every time I want to buy something.
Please, please, please don’t try to be all cool and social-networky unless you really go for it and offer me something of value, rather than simply assuming that adding a “friends” feature will help you sell more stuff.
Please, please, please have a customer service number (or at least an email address!) visible on every page.
Please, please, please make it as easy as possible for me to give you my money.
I want to, believe me. If I’m on your site, I want to give you my money. Simple as that. If I’m there, it’s because I’m looking for something to buy. Sometimes now, sometimes later. But most likely now.
Come on, I’m begging you. Look - mooooooooooooooooney!!!!!!
Let me click “Buy Now,” close the tab, and get back to reading my feeds in Google Reader.
You know, the feeds with your products in them.
I created the rather giant infographical poem below (originally 42,000 pixels high) out of the natural near-mirror image created by the names of those killed in the attacks on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent American casualties in the Afghanistan/Iraq Wars/Military Operations.
Invisible in this design, as in much of the Western world, are the names of the thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women, and children, whose lives were also cut short, simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Unlike most memorials, the names here are all unreadable - stretched past legibility into distorted, primary forms. Pixels, anti-aliasing, blurs, blobs.
Something about souls and the essential human and our eternal connection to one another.
And look around. All the white space in this design, on this blog, and everywhere represents the ever-living spirits of those who have died throughout history. The million million million pixels on computer displays and television sets are for us the stars upon which our ancestors gazed. The sky has become too full, too heavy with the souls of those who have come before.
Now we may gaze into the infinite representative space called “cyber,” and in the swirling dots of light and color and non-light, remember our loved ones for all eternity.
“I Am Totally Getting Drunk Tonight But Probably Not” Edition
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Today is the sixth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon which, at least here in America, are known as, simply, 9/11. The rest of the world uses a different date format, so 9/11 would refer to November, but that’s not where I want to go with this post.
I remember watching the the events unfold in real time on various televisions in my freshman-year residence hall and dining facilities as though it were just yesterday. Fresh off the plane from Las Vegas mere days earlier, all by myself in Hartford, Connecticut, witnessing the horrific images with a few people I barely knew, but with whom I will always share something humongously important.
And now I live in New York - which is, after all, where I was born. I moved in to my apartment in September of 2005, and have just “celebrated” the beginning of my third year here. Funny, I guess, how these anniversaries coincide. How, for me, September 11 brings to mind a sense of moving - moving away, moving in, moving on. I think ahead to next September, to what will likely be one of the biggest moves of my life, and I feel an overwhelming sense of hope for the days and months and years to come. The hardest part for me about remembering September 11 is dealing with the semi-controversial feeling that somehow, inexplicably, I am better off now.
No - we are better off now.
But as I sit here thinking back, I can’t shake another, more persistent thought. It’s callous, perhaps. Embarrassing, sure. But it feels so immediate, honest, and true.
When will Apple announce the details of the $100 store credit?
Does this mean that I’ve moved on with my life?
Or that I no longer care?
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9.11,
apple,
inspiration
“Eat Meat” Edition:
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Just 74 days after its release, Apple announced that it has sold one million iPhones, a milestone that apparently took nearly two years for the iPod to reach. That is, for those keeping score at home, an average of over 13,500 phones per day.
They were predicting to hit this number by the end of the month, though some analysts were worried that last week’s price cut was motivated by Apple failing to meet its goals.
Seems not to be the case, now does it?
Dear internationally-travelling iPhone owners,
If you receive a cell phone bill for thousands of dollars upon returning to the U.S., I pity you.
I pity you, because it’s more than clear that you lack the ability to perform critical functions of the brain most commonly associated with the evolutionary ascent from Pongo pygmaeus to Homo sapien. Which is to say (more slowly so you may comprehend), you are a stupid monkey.
Here’s why:
Every single phone will incur the same exact international roaming charges for voice or data usage unless you’ve contacted your carrier about a specific travel plan.
The iPhone’s email-checking function is set to manual by default. This means that it is your fault and no one else’s that your phone is connecting to the server every 10 minutes. Turn it back off, dodo-face!
When the iPhone (hell, any phone) is off - yes off - not just sleeping (you know the difference, right?), it will not receive any calls or messages, nor will it attempt to download content from the web. Are you expecting a call or something?
What the heck are you thinking using the internet from a cell phone while overseas? Are you crazy? Turn it off! Go to an internet cafe, pay about a nickel an hour to check your MySpace.
What possessed your pre-primate brain to bitch about this to Consumerist and the New York Times like it’s somehow Apple’s problem and not AT&T’s (or any freaking cell company)? Really, it’s neither. It’s all you. It’s pretty clear that every cell plan in the U.S. does not cover international calls or data access, and that per-minute charges will destroy you. Have you been living under a rock? Two rocks? Do you remember a time not even 10 years ago when it still cost $2 a minute to call your grandparents in Pittsburgh from your land line in Denver? Just because you can now do it “free” as part of your still-a-rip-off Triple Play phone/web/cable plan, doesn’t mean that you can take that anywhere.
Why didn’t you even think to check with your carrier before traveling thousands of miles away to a country that doesn’t speak your language? You know, just in case.
The same reason you checked with your ex-girlfriend who went to Paris in the 80s to see if you should bring a roll of quarters to get into a public bathroom if you really, really, really had to go but were away from your hotel room.
You know, just in case.
Sheesh.
“Weekend Before iPhone Crybaby Store Credit” Edition