things

Who is going to make this mod?

Redbox stuff

I’m really enjoying watching this develop.

If I understand correctly, the studios want to sell DVDs to rental stores at higher prices than consumers, despite the product being identical. One reason Redbox is able to rent movies for so cheap is that they refused, and purchase DVDs at consumer prices.

Even if studios manage to stop their distributors from selling en masse to Redbox, this won’t be the end: crowdsource it! Allow customers on the street to “sell” DVDs to the Redbox machine. This would be complicated, requiring verification, etc, but it could work. Imagine - you buy the movie at walmart and sell it to the Redbox machine on your way out for a quick $1 profit.

somewhere in the iPad video: “…so now we have three phenomenal stores on the iPad.. the iTunes store, the app store, and now the bookstore.”

… each of which sells goods with zero per-unit manufacturing cost! What a wonderful business.

I mentioned to Gabe that the LendMe feature didn’t extend to all books, and he was surprised to learn this, as “lending” a book digitally removes it from your device. It is, in many ways, like lending a person a real book. I suggested to him that this was precisely what they didn’t like - you have to warp your mind to perceive it, to understand why a publisher of books would hate the book as a concept, but there you have it. They don’t like that books are immutable, transferable objects whose payload never degrades. A digital “book” - caged on a device, licensed, not purchased - is the sort of thing that greases their mandibles with digestive enzymes.
Imagine what these people must think of libraries.

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—	Tycho, Penny Arcade

last.fm Most Unwanted Scrobbles »

This is a novel and absolutely hilarious use of data.

drivers who switched »

I was going to rant about this, but somebody already did it for me.

I imagine that playing the game is very easy for Tony Hawk, a person who makes a living twisting his body with precision while in mid-air. I would say that mid-air twisting is something I get up to with less frequency. I might suggest that I invest my leisure hours in videogames quite often, where slight, precise inputs are interpreted by a piece of software as grand gestures. If this is the embodiment of the franchise going forward, they’ve made the last skating game I have any intention of purchasing from them.

I never actually lost my balance so utterly that I fell on my fucking ass, but the board itself not a stable platform, almost entirely convex on the bottom. On more than one occasion, in an attempt to demonstrate the full extent of his dominion over the sport, Gabriel spun all the way around and fell. Injury was the result. For my part, the time I spent with the device called to mind a newborn foal, unable to find purchase on the wet hay of the birthing stall. In other words, the experience mirrored exactly our time spent on actual skateboards. So, in this way, Ride’s simulation of the sport may be called absolute.

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—	Tycho, Penny Arcade While the comic can be a bit hit-or-miss, the newsposts are frequently stellar.

I kind of want to try something like this now

Thoughts!

the above video

This guy is kind of weird in front of a camera. Seems really rehearsed. I’d rather have employees do this stuff, though, than paid actors.
I wish for “search along route” almost every time I use my Garmin. Voice search will be neato, as will augmenting the interface with streetview photos. I’m skeptical about the “museum with the king tut exhibit” search.

Garmin/Tomtom stock plummets

They (existing automotive GPS manufacturers) have to have seen this coming. A few months ago I bought a new GPS because it was cheaper than buying new maps for my old one. (Nuvi 255 replacing a 200, I think) The interface is reskinned and slightly faster, but there are no conspicuous new features. Charging so much for map updates and not innovating much, they kind of asked for this.
At least for Garmin, in-car navigation is only one of their markets. It’s probably their largest, but they won’t go out of business if they lose this it - they’ll fall back on aircraft, boat, hiking, and athletic GPS products. Another interesting market is in-dash GPS for new cars.. I don’t think google will be very interested in this unless there is some way to guarantee a cellular data connection.

My PC is out of commission until I get a new motherboard.. this is my temporary Mac workstation. I made the stand out of cardboard =]