Principle Skeleton by Graham Annable

 
(click to watch)

creator: Reeves category: Web/Weird pubDate: Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:49:01 GMT

Say you make consumer broadband routers and you’re looking for a new revenue stream. Your customers expect you to spend money upgrading the firmware for their routers, but you’ve already taken money from them... they’ve paid already.

Don’t despair, there definitely are ways to squeeze more money out of your unsuspecting clients. For example: in your next router firmware update add a new feature that directs all mis-typed URLs to your own search page. Bingo! You get a brand new pipeline of money from all those paid search results and your customers will never know what hit them. Heck, they’ll probably think it’s spyware on their computers and spend a bunch of time trying to track down the bad bits and never even blame you!

Some tips:

1. Call it an “advanced” feature - Novice users will never touch anything labeled advanced for fear that they’ll break something important. You can rest easy knowing that you’ll be able to keep raking in the revenue for years to come.
2. Turn in on by default in your next upgrade - People can’t turn off something they don’t know is there. And how are they going to know it’s there? Dig through all the menus to see what’s changed? I don’t think so. They’re not going to find it in the printed manual you gave them either... because you don’t give out printed manuals anymore.
3. Throw in some security language - Who doesn’t want Anti-Phishing features? Protection from identity thieves?  Of course people want that, the net is a scary place and if you turn off security on your router pedophiles will move into your basement, eat your last Oreo and leave the lid off the toothpaste.

One final tip: don’t name your search site “dlinksearch.com”, it will shorten the time it takes for your customers to figure out that it’s D-Link who is being a dick and stealing traffic. If you make it too easy for them to figure out who’s stealing the traffic, but hard for them to figure out how to turn them off they’ll get pissed off and make blog posts telling their friends not to buy your hardware (yes, I’m looking at you, D-Link).

But, hey, no big deal, right? They’ve already paid money for your router. Once you’ve made the sale the existing customers are just a drag on your revenue. You can make it up in volume.

creator: Reeves category: Tech/Hardware pubDate: Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:51:49 GMT

Two monitors are great for productivity, but aesthetics are important too. Who wants to stare at the same picture on both desktops? No one, that’s who.

The NVidia display control panel that came with Vista allowed me to set a unique image for each monitor. But fie, Windows 7 hasn’t caught up yet and I was stuck staring at the same image, duplicated on both monitors. Well thanks to Arian Kulp’s Multi-Monitor Wallpaper code sample I’m no longer annoyed by my desktop.  No longer do I see sameness, I instead have a beautiful view of Killary Bay.

creator: Reeves category: Useful/Software pubDate: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 02:50:00 GMT

Gran Tourismo, Playstation’s ultimate driving simulation game (some argue it’s the best on any platform), has announced a feature that bridges the gap between video games and track days.

Back in the good old days, when Mike and I used to have “racing budget”, we practiced driving Laguna Seca on the PS2 with Gran Tourismo, then went and drove the track for real. If we did it now, however, we could take it one step farther by bringing the results of our track day back home and reviewing them on the new version of Gran Tourismo.

Here’s how it works: while at your track day you record your lap times and lines using GPS and “CAN”. When you return home you put the data on a USB stick and plug it into your PS3. You can replay the data by watching your run around the track or use the data as a ghost and race against yourself to improve your lines or see how you would fare against, say, an F1 car (spoiler alert: not very well).

What type of data logger hardware you need isn’t terribly clear in the press release, it just says you need log CAN data. As for tracks, I think it’s a safe assumption that the feature will be limited to the tracks already part of the software.

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Cars category: Idle/Video Games pubDate: Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:10:26 GMT

Panoramic pictures are a great way to convey the scale and beauty of a scene, but building a panorama requires a good set of tools. Fortunately Microsoft Research is giving one away for free.

For the longest time I kept Microsoft Digital Image Suite on my computer only for the purpose of stitching panoramas. My photo editing tool of choice is Photoshop, but Photoshop CS’s panorama stitching was so cumbersome and ineffective that I didn’t even try CS4 until I was writing this. Digital Image Suite does a good job... but only if images are really well lined up. Thankfully, however, Microsoft Research released Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE).

I’ve compared the results of Microsoft Digital Image Suite, Photoshop CS, Photoshop CS4 and Microsoft ICE.

Photoshop CS did only a passable job at creating a panorama. Items weren’t lined up and there is obvious banding where the exposure differs between pictures.

DI did a beter job of lining up the pictures and blending the exposures, but still not great.

Photoshop CS4’s Photomerge feature does a nice job both of lining up the images as well as adjusting the exposure across the frame.

Microsoft ICE generated very similar results to Photoshop CS4 on my set of test images. Both CS4 and ICE had trouble lining up the railing in the center of the picture (probably a result of me shooting the sequence without a tripod). CS4 has a more even feel to the exposure and the perspective feels less warped.

Bottom line: ICE is by far the easiest tool to use of the set and generates results comparable to the $700 CS4. While I still live in Photoshop for image editing I use ICE for stitching panoramas. It’s a smaller application and has nice features like "autocrop" which automatically removes the inevitable curved seams on a stitch.

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Photography category: Useful/Software pubDate: Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:02:00 GMT

Looks like my volume of unread mail has passed the “too much” threshold and has hit the level of “down right evil”.

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Life pubDate: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:10:48 GMT

If you find yourself anywhere near a mining operation: hail a cab, pronto.

In the future we’re big on strip-mining other planets. I have yet to see a Sci-Fi movie where a freighter full of soldiers and Mega Corp employees travel light years to a foreign solar system then farm the hell out of some unsuspecting planet. Know why? Because bad stuff doesn’t happen to farmers. Miners, on the other hand, seem to have the karmic deck stacked against them. Archeologists are only slightly safer. The conservative among you should just avoid breaking rocks at all.

Short, dark and pretty

If you’re joining a military squad, look for the one with the tough Latina. The universe is chock full of massively muscled, BFG-toting ultra soldiers. If you spot a little woman from Puerto Rico you can be sure she’s something special... she’s made it this far. Rest assured, when all the other space marines wet their pants and go to pieces, this woman will keep you alive.

Avoid robots, robots are bad

Sure, they may seem like they’re there to help you, but then that’s when all the screaming and running and blood starts. There are robots out there to kill you too. You can trust them, at least they’re honest wanting to kill your worthless meatbag self. Basically avoid them all. The good ones will break, then kill you. The bad ones will just kill you (yeah, you wish they’d break).

Don’t touch that

No, seriously, don’t touch it. Do you know what it’s for? Do you know how to use it? Is it poisonous? How about what happened to the last guy who touched it? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Please just put your hands in your pockets.

Keep your friends close and your engineer closer

Your junk is going to break because it’s... well... junk. The big mega corporation that is funding your little operation only cares about the bottom line (note: evil corporations don’t need a separate warning because corporations are evil and cheep, just like the real world). So, as sure as death and taxes, you better be able to fix it when it breaks. I know, the engineer is chatty, overweight and a general PITA, but keep an eye on him. After all, you can’t toss the bad guys out the airlock when the latch is jammed.

Finally

No good ever comes from pissing off Sigourney Weaver.

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Movies pubDate: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 19:29:01 GMT

You want to market your new smartphone? No problem, just figure out the feature the public really wants and put that into your display ads.

Pick a really cool feature, something like, oh, I don’t know... wallpaper?

creator: Reeves category: Web/Weird pubDate: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:04:49 GMT

You’ve made it to the end of the movie and the credits start to roll. Your soda is empty, your pop corn bag is mostly empty (it’s cold and you’re out of soda) and you probably really need to use the restroom.

Hang on a second... there might be still be more movie. Should you leave?

Worry no more, MovieStinger has the info you need, and it’s in a handy mobile phone friendly format (if you visit from your phone).

New releases will tend to show on the first page, but if a movie isn’t shown (or if you’re watching an oldie) you can also browse their database by genre or title.

You also don’t need to worry about MovieStinger spoiling the surprise either, it just tells you if there are extras or not. Note: if you want to know exactly what to expect, you can click on an entry to get the full details, but where’s the fun in that?

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Movies category: Useful/Sites pubDate: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 06:48:00 GMT

I really don’t quite believe it myself. I just watched a seventy minute review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Yes, 70... an hour and ten minutes. I honestly thought “meh, I’ll check out the beginning of the review, the first part is about the characters, it’s just 10 minutes, then I’ll move on.”

There was a slight problem. This review is fantastic. It’s brutal, funny and, at times, a truly bizarre dissection of the Star Wars “prequel”. The reason I was able to sit through all seven ten minute segments is because this isn’t a two-bit hack job by a bored teenager with a pirated copy of Final Cut Pro. This is a detailed analysis of the plot, characters and structure of the film by a filmmaking professional. It’s entertaining because it’s dead on… and because the reviewer likes Pizza rolls and appears to have a woman tied up in his basement.

I know, I don’t believe myself. Sit through over an hour of analysis of a major cinematic disappointment? Would you believe Damon Lindelof, co-creator of lost and producer of Star Trek? Mr. Lindelof said: “Your life is about to change. This is astounding film making. Watch ALL of it.” (no, I had no idea who Damon Lindelof was either)

So, go ahead and try it. It’s wafer thin.

See? Told you so. Go on over to Slash Film for the rest, they have all the segments conveniently embedded in a single page. I’ll bet if you click play on all of them in rapid succession it will take less than 70 minutes to watch. It will, however, probably be hard to understand.

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Movies pubDate: Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:03:49 GMT

 

Created by Oatmeal

creator: Reeves category: Web/Weird pubDate: Tue, 05 Jan 2010 05:05:51 GMT

As the years go by I get more and more blasé about celebrating New Year’s Eve. I’m not quite at the point where I need to whip out the walker, but staying up to midnight just to so I can shout “Woo! Goodnight!” doesn’t have the appeal it used to.

New Year’s Eve 2007/8

While I don’t have to worry about the sleep deprivation or hangover there still is post-party fallout to deal with: going into work and facing the inevitable “so... what did you do for New Year’s Eve?”

Well, I, for one, am not going to worry this year. I’m going to party my socks off.

At least, as far as you know.

Lay the ground work

You can’t just roll into a night of non-partying unprepared, you will have to get your act together first.

1. Make sure everyone knows you’re serious about tonight

With all the twittering, facebooking, texting, etc. going on these days, you can’t just show up to your fake party unannounced. First thing you need to do is publicize how excited you are about the upcoming festivities. Make sure it’s suitably vague but extraordinarily enthusiastic. I recommend the use of caps and exclamation points.

“I’m SOOOO stoked for tonight!!!!!”

2. Do a little alibi building

These days people don’t just expect you to have fun, they expect you to prove it. Any party animal worth their salt leaves a wake of twitpics, facebook albums and confetti where ever they go. To get ready, take your camera, wait until it’s dark out, then step outside and take a picture of yourself. Most party pictures are the same: bright flash and dark background.  Smile like you’re having fun and you can pass off the dark background as just about anywhere. Plus, the dark background allows you to stick yourself into other party pics as needed.

Party like you mean it

People now expect you to be partying, and you have photos to back it up with some good times. The key is to keep your fans in the loop throughout the evening. Since watching Golden Girls then nodding off at 8:30 isn’t going to cut it, you’ll need to get some fun ready before you turn in. Fortunately you won’t need to stay up late, you’ll just need to have your computer do the partying for you. Set up a bunch of “parking sucks!”, “awesome fireworks!” and “i’m soo drbunk” e-mails and then have your e-mail client or a web service like time cave trickle out the evidence over the course of the night.

Having a little bit of “real fun” couldn’t hurt either. Satellite, cable TV and even the interwebs give you a great opportunity to still ring in the new year, just celebrate with your fellow humans a few time zones to your east. Here on the west coast I was free to count down the new year’s ball drop in Times Square with my buddy Ryan Seacrest. Just don’t forget, this is also an opportunity for some more party evidence: turn up the volume on your TV and get a little video of you counting down, cheering and singing “Old Ironsides” (or whatever that once-a-year song is). Just be sure to keep the video tight on you, show just the ceiling or the TV behind you. If you don’t have a partner-in-crime to smooch, just fumble the camera to your chest like you’re getting unexpected hugs. Either that or you can kiss your cats.

Seal the deal

What’s a good time without a bit of lasting pain? When you get up on January first be sure to complain to all your virtual friends. Depending on how hard you “partied” you can make a post about anything from how tired you are to your splitting headache to how you woke up next to a tranny.

One request: if you do plan on waking up next to a tranny, please friend me first. I really want to see the reactions.

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Life pubDate: Fri, 01 Jan 2010 02:50:16 GMT

Next time you’re shopping for a new smart phone and the salesperson at the counter tries to sell you brand X... ask them to pull their own phone out and show you what they use every day.

When I was doing a little Christmas shopping this weekend I couldn’t help but giggle when I saw the Google “Android Specialist” checking his e-mail on a Blackberry.

 

In retrospect I should have stopped and quizzed him. Perhaps I’ll go back this weekend to throw stones at him and brand him an heretic.

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Overseen pubDate: Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:45:21 GMT

My favorite Muppets were always the Swedish Chef, Beaker, Animal and the yip yip aliens. Three outa four ain’t bad.

creator: Reeves category: Web/Weird pubDate: Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:30:27 GMT

Up & Up is Target’s new generic brand. I find, however, I can’t stop looking at the logo upside down as Down & Down.

Does that make me a pessimist?

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Overseen pubDate: Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:04:14 GMT

It takes a very cute kitten to make me write like a teenage girl.

creator: Reeves category: Web/Weird pubDate: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:35:00 GMT

When weather, traffic or other conditions delay my packages it’s all good and well. The shipping companies can’t be penalized when a package gets delayed due to outside influences.

If my package were to arrive early, however, that’d be great. FedEx, though, has decided that it’s too early to deliver my package. Turns out that if a shipper pays for three-day shipping it doesn’t mean that a package will be delivered in three-days-or-less, it means three days. We wouldn’t want anyone to get two-day shipping for the price of three now, would we?

Taking off my cynical, the man’s out to get me hat for just a moment, I could imagine there’s a perfectly reasonable, logistical business decision for this move. If you have too many packages to handle on a given day (perhaps we’re getting into holiday shipping season) it may be a good idea to hold back packages that won’t be late.

It really comes down to this: it’s MY package and I want it! GIMME! FedEx must realize that, other than my wife, I’m the most important thing in their world. Apparently the memo hasn’t circulated yet.

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Life pubDate: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:58:12 GMT

Yesterday we released the public beta of Office 2010, you should go download it right now.

There’s a bunch of new stuff, so it’s really hard to predict what’s going to be exciting to you, but here’s the top feature for me: ignore. Yep, ignore. Outlook has built in a big, beautiful chunk of anti-social awesome. You know when you get added to that really long e-mail thread that won’t go away? The one people keep replying to, dragging it on until it sucks the air out of your office through your monitor. Now you can just right-click, select ignore and the thread goes away... even future mails to the thread.

Another of my fav Outlook features: the Quick Steps. They are, at their heart, macros. Select a message and click a quick action to create a task, mark the message read and dump into into a folder all in one button press. I’m currently working on giving my quick steps the GTD treatment.

It’s the nature of my job, I live my life in Outlook. There is, however, a ton of goodness in all the apps. Go checkout the beta site for a run down of what’s new in each of the Office applications. There are features to make your life easier (e.g. multi-user editing of docs) and features to make you look good (e.g. spark lines in Excel).

But can you really use it? Absolutely. I’ve uninstalled Office 2007 on all my machines and only run Office 2010. Sure, it’s a beta, it’s not perfect. But it never stops me from getting my job done. So, If I can live using only the beta, you should feel comfortable at least trying it out for a bit.

creator: Reeves category: Tech/Microsoft pubDate: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:35:13 GMT

Tonight I watched three hours of television, and two hours of it were in reverse.  It seems more and more TV writers are using the flashback episode as crutch.

By flashback episode I mean those episodes where at the start of the show you come in at the end of the action.  So, after ten minutes of "look, here's how the show ends!" you have to sit through 30 minutes of review explaining how you ended up where you started.

Here's my request to TV writers out there: either learn how to develop tension through foreshadowing and character development or go back to film school.

creator: Reeves category: Idle/TV pubDate: Sat, 14 Nov 2009 01:28:00 GMT

I was checking out some tracks on Rapsody. Evanescence was playing and a vampire movie was the the sponsor.

I’ll wager I’d get the same advert if I were listening to Liberace (who is not quite as goth as John Tesh, but close).

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Music pubDate: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:42:00 GMT

Here’s how my brain works:

1. Paula sends me an instant message asking my schedule tonight
2. I tell her I have to finish some slides
3. Paula tells me she’s going to take a short nap, so don’t call when I’m coming home, just e-mail
4. I say okay, then I think: “e-mail”
5. Then I think: Homestar Runner saying “e-mail”
6. Then I think: I want to look at a thing in a bag
7. Then I watch this:

The thing in the bag, “it’s friggin’ awesome!”

creator: Reeves category: Web/Weird pubDate: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:17:51 GMT

After bemoaning the fact that my wife’s little D40x does a better job capturing pictures than my D100 I immediately starting thinking about how I could go about getting a new camera body. I am, however, cheap and certainly don’t have a couple spare Grover Cleveland’s to throw in Nikon’s tip jar. Fortunately, there’s a solution: just be a better photographer.

My first step: take Scott Bourne’s advice to heart. Scott has published a list of 10 ways to improve your photography without buying gear. Scott’s suggestions were inspired by David duChemin, but David’s tips cost $5 (I refer you to paragraph one for information on my fiscal leanings).

My second step: start taking pictures. I know it’s the only way to get better, and yet I still don’t do it. From now on, more pictures, I promise (I promise myself, that is, most of you really don’t need any more pictures to look at).

Blur of fur
My greyhound spazing out at with .5s shutter speed and rear curtain flash

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Photography pubDate: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:44:34 GMT

Yes, there are people out there who will click on ads, on occasion I’m one of them. Today I was intrigued by an ad’s description, saying something about a crazy man’s landscape... so I clicked and was taken to Foreverscape.

Imagine what you’d get if you handed Salvador Dali a pen and an endless roll of paper... then you started feeding him acid. What starts out as a fairly ordinary scene slowly melts into a stream of consciousness rolling dreamscape, with meteor showers, train wrecks and fishing astronauts.

The landscape (by Vance Feldman) is embedded in the page and will automatically scroll by. Just head on over to Foreverscape for the visual treat. Be sure turn down the lights, put on “The Dark Side of the Moon”... and don’t forget to wrap a towel around your head to keep the mess to a minimum.

---------

Update: I wasn’t sure who the foreverscape artist was, but via comment and e-mail Vance hooked me up with links to his site. Thanks Vance!

creator: Reeves category: Web/Weird pubDate: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:37:18 GMT

Maybe I just need to find the right cat. Perhaps this guy:

creator: Reeves category: Web/Weird pubDate: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:56:10 GMT

Like this: at the top of UPI’s “Top News Photos” section today were pictures from inside and outside the general assembly... where it looks like everyone is dancing.

Incidentally... is Kadhafi engaging in a little stealth disco?

creator: Reeves category: Web/Weird pubDate: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:10:34 GMT

Want a vanity font to go with your vanity plates and vanity domains? You can do it without having to learn post script or hiring a typography expert. Just hop on over to http://www.fontcapture.com.

The process is simple: print out their form, write out the alphabet, scan the form back in and upload to their server. Your font is available pretty much instantly. Best part: it’s free (we’ve already established I’m cheap).

How long does it take you to write 127 letters?

It’s dirt cheap and spike-through-the-head easy. It’s not, however, failsafe. Here’s some stuff to keep in mind:

• If you have crappy handwriting, this isn’t going to make it look any better
• You’ll probably be much happier with the results if you use your favorite image editor to line up letters vertically and horizontally
• Consistent width on the letters will also pay dividends (my “y”s are skewed, making the spacing look bad)

If you take the time to line up all your letters your font will be much nicer

It honestly is easy, I made the first draft of my font in less than 10 minutes. If you want a quality font, however, you will want to tweak the letter size and alignment to make them consistent and aligned. For me that was another 30 minute investment.

And, no... this ain’t one of them crappy bit-mapped fonts. The clever folks at fontcapture.com turn your handwriting into a true type font, so you can blow it up to 120 points if you want:

Clickey for biggie

To be clear, you should not scan letters from your friends and create a font to impersonate them. That would be wrong Steve.

creator: Reeves category: Useful/Sites pubDate: Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:00:07 GMT

Well, nothing to do with jewelry per se, but I did replace my own watch batteries tonight.

Over the past year my watches have been slowly dropping off, about one per month. A few weeks back my last running watch finally ran out of will. I had a drawer of 10-15 watches, all without juice and being a cheap bastard I couldn’t bring myself to take them to a jeweler and pay $10 and up per watch to have 40 cent batteries put in them.

Lucky for me there’s this cool thing called the Interwebs. A watch back removal tool from eBay and a pile of batteries from watchbatteries.com and I’m back to being on time again!

I learned two things:

1. You can save money replacing your own watch batteries
2. If there are tiny screws between you and the battery, let a jeweler do it

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Life pubDate: Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:01:39 GMT

You can either treat your fans as a necessary evil, or you can embrace them. The Japanese band Sour went one step further and made their fans the stars of their latest music video.

The concept: ask your fans to do specific actions in front of their web cams, then assemble the individual actions into a complex dance involving people from around the world.

The result:

SOUR / 日々の音色 (Hibi no Neiro) MV from Magico Nakamura on Vimeo.

creator: Reeves category: Idle/Music pubDate: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:03:26 GMT

[From Almost Makes Sense]

creator: Reeves category: Web/Weird pubDate: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:10:58 GMT

70’s meets 80’s.

But don’t stop there. Watch the mashup side by side with the original and marvel at the mashupyness of it all.

[The Daily What > Nerdcore > Gizmodo > Here]

creator: Reeves category: Web/Weird pubDate: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:14:20 GMT