All Things Ng

Leander Kahney of Wired Magazine has released his books Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod free to the P2P networks. An interesting (and nice) move.

Bell is sneakily converting high-speed unlimited Internet users into a "Total Internet" plan that has a 60GB/month bandwidth cap.

I got a call from a Bell telemarketer offering me double the speeds at around the same price. Sounded a little too good to be true, but why not... Then as he started going through the conditions and the cap word appeared, alarm bells went crazy. He tried to comfort me by saying that I could buy "insurance" to get an extra 30GB for an additional ten bucks. Once I realized that this deal was a wolf in sheep's clothing, I nixed it right away.

It might be time to revisit the Canadian ISP directory again and see what other options there are.

Ars is reporting that a new Mac Mini could be on its way soon.

Unfortunately, it probably won't be using a tower form factor.

This is what happens when you allow a gaggle of gaming nerds to congregate.

I don't know what to make of this device from Myka... It's got the BitTorrent logo splashed on the front of it.

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I'm sure your local cable provider will be pleased that you have this connected to your TV. In any case, BitTorrent is so 2003.

Thanks to the Joy of Tech, I now know why Monster Cables are so damned expensive.

Don't tell my wife, but Urban Outfitters is selling a Twinkie Bake Set.

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Nullriver just released version MediaLink 1.3 this week.

If you're a Mac user who wants to stream media to your PS3, you don't really have too many options. I like MediaLink because it's inexpensive, and for the most part, works well.

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It still doesn't support transcoding like TVersity for Windows does, but since I bought my copy, they've released a nice little stream of upgrades. I would really like to see Nullriver set up a public discussion forum for support, but I guess I'll have to wait on that one.

Ars has a bit on Punakea, a new app that lets you tag files in Leopard. It's a little early in the dev cycle, but it is showing potential.

I'm a big fan of tagging - I use Yep to tag my scanned documents and PDFs. Speaking of Yep, the boys at Ironic Software have their own tagging software for OSX called Leap.

I haven't had a chance to try either, but being an existing Yep customer, I will probably look at investing in Leap as well.

Scott Stevenson wrote a nice little article on how to write copy for a product page. While it is Mac oriented, the advice, in my opinion, is universal.

Wired has some footage of Capcom's upcoming games, including the long awaited Street Fighter II HD remake.

Scribd iPaper is a pretty interesting offering.

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It's basically YouTube for documents. You can render a word document, PDF or PowerPoint on a web page with a flash object instead of a more resource heavy viewer.

It's also free, which is a Good Thing.

Jonathan Coulton, who I never heard of until he was on TWiT a couple of weeks ago, sings some pretty catchy songs. My personal favorite is Code Monkey, which has been transformed into several home-grown music videos on YouTube.

Anyways, you can preview the music on Coulton's web site. Also recommended: the song from the game Portal, and a great cover of Baby Got Back.

There's a difference in terms of how the Mac and Windows antialias text with subpixel rendering, etc. Cleartype on Windows is a pretty cool technology, but there's a vast differential in the approach taken by both operating systems. This is clearly visible when viewing this very web page across two different operating systems.

Click on the image below to see a zoomed in comparison of the differences I'm talking about.

You'll notice that on the top half of the image, that a Mac rendering of a page resembles something more akin to what you would see on a printed piece of paper. On the bottom half, you'll notice that the page still looks... "computery".

I won't get into the argument over which one is more readable... People who use one platform get used to the rendering on that platform, so it isn't even really a matter of taste.

What is more interesting — and I don't have a screen cap to show it — is that Safari on Windows renders its pages just as they are on the Mac.

So what's the point of all this? It appears that this site is best viewed on a Mac (any browser), and Safari on Windows. It will look fine in IE and Firefox, but the text won't render quite so nicely as in Safari for Windows.

I haven't had the chance to test the page on the Wii or PS3 yet, but for the time being, that can wait.

I was trolling the Internet Wayback Machine to see what remnants of my older blogs were indexed (unfortunately, only stuff from 2001 forward), and I saw a blast from the past in my links. Sam Brown's Exploding Dog used to be one of my favorite sites when I started blogging around 8 years ago. The stick men and robot drawings made to match submitted captions were really quite endearing.

Thankfully, the site is still kicking around, and they've got a nice little rss feed going too. It's worth a look, you might even end up with a grin on your face.

Eric Burke has a pretty incisive comic on usability at stuffthathappens.com.

Boing Boing was at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference and shot an episode on how easy it is to steal information from your RFID embedded credit card. While these cards are more prevalent in the US, they are showing up here in Canada more often.

Mastercard now has a version that you can use at Tim Hortons and Loblaws. These new credit cards have also brought on more lax rules. If your purchase is below a certain amount, they don't even require a signature any more. I'm not too sure I'm comfortable with that.

With only an $8 device bought off eBay and a laptop computer (nice to know that the Macbook Air's stealthiness can come in handy for something), the "futurist" was able to get all relevant info by passing the reader near an unsuspecting mark's butt.

They did show one defence - a steel-lined wallet. Not sure if that's a solution for everyone, but it's a good start.

A dog and a cat playing Wii Tennis.

Not much more to say about that.

This quadriped robot from Boston Dynamics is pretty impressive.

Spooky too.

Some young lady on Music Idol (Bulgaria) is singing "Without You" by Mariah Carey... or is it "Ken Lee"?

Here's the audition... The thing that makes this video great are the subtitles. Good stuff.

The show brought her back to perform again... her English is a little better this time.

IGN has pics and info of the new port of Guitar Hero for the Nintendo DS.

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Looks pretty freaky, but I'm sure it will be fun. Just to make things interesting, here's some footage also.

The Torontoist has a detailed review of red bean buns in the GTA.

Can't say that I'm a fan of red bean buns. I'm more of a curry beef bun man myself.

More Rock Band stuff... Jayfng has posted a positive review of the Rock Band mega pedal. The pedal, which is sold by area51moto, should help alleviate any fears of snapping the plastic pedal that comes with Rock Band.

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It looks pretty snappy, and can be assembled in about 30 minutes. I gotta get me one!

If you're a Rock Band freak, and would like a solution to tone down the sounds of beating on the drums, then you should consider Drumshhh pads.

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I got a set (the Bullseye pattern shown above) at the beginning of the year, and they basically worked as advertised. They definitely cut down the noise generated by the drum kit. My wife wasn't big on the dampened sound (she liked the bashing noise), but I'm plenty thankful that my eardrums get to hear the actual music from the game over the drums now.

There's not much to say about them - they are peel and stick, and are made of industrial quality felt. And they work.

I've been listening to a lot of Internet Radio lately. More specifically, I've been listening to C9 radio, a pop station from France.

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You can listen over the web, or in iTunes (it's in the default list under Pop). It's commercial free, interspersed with some chatter in French, but most of the music is in English, with the bulk of the playlist being American music.

CHMOX is a useful app for the Mac if you like to read CHM files, which are prevalent on Windows.

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While I was editing my new web site template, I used a tool for the Mac from Cultured Code called Xyle Scope.

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It's a pretty nifty little (and fairly inexpensive) tool for looking at CSS code rendered in web pages. You'll easily find that you can find out how objects on your page map to your CSS styles. This little app can be a major time saver if you're doing a lot of web development. I've been using it under the 10 day eval period, and I think it's good enough to buy.

If you recall, Cultured Code is the company behind Things, which I raved about last month.

So I finally got around to editing the RapidWeaver template for my site. No more "Alpha" for me.

Goodbye Alpha Theme:
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Hello Custom Theme:
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One of the most annoying aspects of creating your own template in RapidWeaver is that everything is in packages. The templates are buried deep in the RapidWeaver application package, and then each of the actual templates are packages themselves. Fortunately you can use Coda to remember the location of the project files, which makes editing much simpler.

A big gotcha is that you need to back up your template file from the RapidWeaver bundle, otherwise you'll easily forget about it and lose it when disaster strikes.

It would be nicer if you could have a little more granular control over how content is embedded in the divs, but when you're using an inexpensive tool like RapidWeaver, you get what you pay for. As it stands, RapidWeaver is a pretty good deal, and it does give you a little more flexibility than iWeb. I'm looking forward to big things in version 4.0.

Update: I just realized that the old, out of the box "Alpha" theme in RapidWeaver didn't render nicely in IE. Naughty, naughty, Realmac! Can't blame them, I guess... I mean, seriously, who can even stand using IE these days?

Don't you just hate that clear, hard packaging that encloses just about everything these days? I sure do... and I have the scars to prove it.

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The Gadgeteer has a review of Zibra's Open It! cutters. Once you get past the irony that the cutters come in the very package you're supposed to hate, you'll love how easy it will become to unbox your favorite gadgets.

Apparently Guitar Hero is infringing on a Gibson patent. Interestingly enough, they still licensed the guitars for use with Guitar Hero when it got released. Sounds like a cash grab.

Of course, if it were not for Activision's previous bad behaviour with guitar compatibility with the PS3 version of Rock Band, I'd actually feel bad for them.

Well, I don't need to tell you what karma can be, do I?

This is absolutely awesome. Makes me wish I had a robot. And a dog. Not necessarily in that order.

ThinkGeek is selling a device called the Phantom Keystroker, which basically sends random keystrokes and mouse movements to a computer.

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Plug this device into a non-technical colleague's computer and watch him (or her) freak! The best marks for such a prank are probably the ones with the shortest tempers. Just don't do it to someone with the power to fire you.

First Steven Levy tosses out his Air with his newspapers, and now, Charlie Rose is sporting a shiner trying to protect his Air from slamming into the pavement.

If Mario was real, this is what he'd look like:

He'd definitely be one creepy looking dude.

Now that I've had the chance to spend about a week or so on CodeIgniter, I really have to say that it's a marvelous MVC framework for PHP.

There are a few things that I'm finding that really make it stand out:

Lightweight and flexible - you have a lot of control over what code is loaded, and what is not. Extending the code library is incredibly easy.
Solid base libraries - most of the libraries you would need to start a web app are already available as libraries, helpers and plugins. No reinventing the wheel here.
Stellar documentation - the documentation is outstanding as far as open source projects go.
Install and Go - starting is a matter of dropping a folder into your web server, and you can start writing code within minutes. You don't have to sit with the documentation for hours before starting.

I know that CakePHP is probably way more popular right now, but CodeIgniter is nothing to sneeze at. Choosing a framework can be a very personal thing, because everyone has a different way of programming. The thing that I like about CodeIgniter is that it's designed the way I would probably design a framework... if I was crazy enough to do such a thing.

Are you a road warrior? Belkin has a nifty little surge protector with USB ports as well. Now you can be in an airport or coffee shop and charge your laptop and portable devices as well.

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There's an awesome modification of the Mac Mini at Unplggd. The detail is quite impressive.

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March 22, 2008

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March 19, 2008

March 18, 2008

March 17, 2008