September 06, 2008 at 03:39 PM · Posted under politics
Another Presidential Election is upon us, which means a return of the dreaded Forwarded Political Emails with 5% facts, 100% spin, and that trite smugness only Republicans can muster. Somehow the Republicans keep managing to cast themselves as the underdog outsiders with real rural values who would have everything cleaned up and working right if it weren’t for those sleazy Democrats.
In a hundred years modern American history undergraduate students will be writing papers trying to explain how millions of Americans could so willfully ignore the fact that Republicans weren’t the party of financial responsibility, family values, and small government but corrupt, borrow-and-spend, no-bid contracting exploiters who want to legislate morality because letting us make our own choices is just out of the question.
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September 02, 2008 at 11:16 AM · Posted under books, tech
I just downloaded Lexcycle’s excellent Stanza for the iPod Touch/iPhone and, wow! Hundreds of free books all downloadable from the app itself, very nice. The ereader is nicely customizable (fonts, font size, margins, text/background color) and feels very polished. There’s even feed versions of big newspapers / magazines available.
If that wasn’t enough, there’s a desktop program (Stanza Desktop) that allows the conversion and importing of books from other formats, notably PDF. I’ve already imported some of my Pragmatic Bookshelf. The formatting gets a little screwy, but very nice overall. The great thing is that this also opens up Stanza to Project Gutenberg
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August 31, 2008 at 10:38 PM · Posted under family, tech, television, videogames
Vacation! I’m taking the entire week off of work. Four vacation days buys me nine continuous days off. Sweet! No special plans, just relaxing at home with Sarah and Edward. Ahh.
Sarah and I have been watching Hill Street Blues on Hulu and we’ve been very impressed. From the very first episode the characters and story are gripping and nuanced. Of course we have both been imprinted by the theme music, which is now an almost irresistible psychological command to relax and get ready for bed.
Speaking of Hulu: Jaadu has proven to be fantastic for controlling our home theater mac. This great app allows an iPod Touch (or iPhone) to connect to VNC servers (such as Leopard’s screen sharing) and does it extremely well. It comes with some shortcut setups that are supposed to be geared toward driving powerpoint presentations, but also happen to be perfect for controlling mplayer or hulu. Now we don’t even have to keep a laptop on hand, just a couple clicks on the iPod controls anything we need on the tv computer. Establishing the connection only takes a couple seconds, and everything works intuitively. Tapping the screen is a click, double tap is a double click, double tap and drag is a click and drag, and dragging with two fingers pulls the scroll bar for the current window. Jaadu even perfectly scales our odd resolution (when tilted to horizontal mode) to fit, although it scrolls so seamlessly I usually just use it in vertical mode.
Moving on to current videogames. If you have an XBox 360 download the demo for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Unless you think that pulling down Tie Fighters and throwing them at squads of storm troopers sounds boring. While you’re on XBox Live, you should download the demos (or full games!) of Braid, Bionic Commando: Rearmed, and Castle Crashers. The wonderfully, magical, and myterious game Braid is a moving and beautiful mindbender about time. It’s kind of like Einstein’s Dreams in videogame form. If you don’t know about Bionic Commando don’t bother, it’s a perfect remake of an old school Nintendo game of the highest order. If you don’t already have the ingrained reflexes from the ages of high hand-eye coordination games then you’ll just be frustrated. Castle Crashers is the next game from the geniuses behind Alien Hominid. If you get it, hit me up for some four player fun on XBox Live.
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