email me: chris@chris-karath.com
May 2009
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I want to hear your Let's Go Surfing
» Royalty Free sound effects at Soundjay.com Nice variety of effects.
» Add Facebook Style Chat to your website with this JQuery Chat Code Free for non-commercial use.
» Todo List Apps are a Dime a Dozen... but if you are looking for something very clean and simple with very rudimentary pop up reminders, take a look at this Adobe Air App: Doomi
» Fan made Green Lantern trailer featuring Nathan Fillion (Capt. From Firefly)
» Ubuntu is creating an execution environment that will allow you to run Android apps from within desktop Linux. That's pretty cool. I wonder if Apple will be doing anything like that with their iPhone Apps? Seems like a great way to sell apps to non-iPhone, Mac owners.
» Intel's Moblin Linux Netbook OS. See the video (and listen to the bizarrely relaxing birds and british woman's voice) below.
» A Mouse Guard Role Playing Game. Sounds fun (and I'm not really into RPGs at all) Read about it here. Read ALOT about it here. Buy it on Amazon
» Steve Martin playing Banjo with the Muppets.
» SmartQ 7 Internet Tablet Pretty nice looking device. Fair amount of apps beyond Web Browsing too. Video demo below.
» TinyChat.com has relaunched, it now has video too. Very Slick.
» Google Web Elements Embed Calendar, Conversation, Custom Search, Maps, News, Presentations, Spreadsheets, or Youtube News on your sites. Eh. Most of these have been able to have been done before in different ways. This does bring all the above together on one page though.
» Specto Get instant notifications of Web/RSS items on your Linux machine. Looks especially useful if you use it in conjunction with your own web page that collects or parses data from elsewhere.
» Cameron house from Ferris Beuler's Day off is for Sale in Chicago. Looks like they fixed the window. Pretty cool.
» Plastic Logic eInk Touch Screen Demo. This is like pure computer geek porn. I lust for this device. Avail. January 2010. No idea price.
» I really like the idea of this pop-up table. This could be a great way to build a game room and have lots of in-floor storage as well.
» I'd love to try Hulu Desktop but my media pc connected to my TV is a Linux box, so no Hulu Desktop for me it seems :( (PC/Mac only at the moment)
» iCar remote. Completely fake, but amusing.
l1nf0:0529
Let's Go Surfing
» Farkie.com is an interesting website, give it a page link and it gives you a list of pretty much every possibile image or item on that page that you can directly download.
» Printfriendly.com will take a link you give it and reformat a page for cleaner better printing. It also will let you deselect elements, and images on a page so you only have to print the parts you want. Also will save the page to a PDF. Nice.
» Glympse.com neat service, only on Android at the moment (iPhone, Windows Mobile and Blackberry coming-- and let's hope Pre), let's your friends "get a glympse" of your location and real time track your movements. Thay can actually watch your icon move in real time on a map and know where you are and judge for themselves how long it will take you to arrive :) The privacy implementation is great, since the glympse by default is for a limited time to specific people. Nice idea.
» Yet another eBook Reader, Cybook 6" screen... looks neat, no word on price. I still want to get one of these eventually.
» ABC passed on the American No Heroics remake Just as well, I can't imagine it even being able to come close to what the British version is. American Censors wouldn't allow it.
» Jetpack Neat plugin for Firefox, like Greasemonkey, sort of. Video demo at link.
From Techcrunch<Mozilla has unveiled a new project from its Labs division called Jetpack that gives us a taste of how Firefox might begin extending web functionality in years to come. While the project is still quite early in development, it seems to be taking the form of a streamlined extension system, allowing web developers to introduce new features to the Firefox browser using web-based tools and requiring only a minimal amount of effort on the user’s part.
Firefox extensions have long been one of the best parts of the browser, allowing users to add and remove features to suit their needs. But while the user experience of installing these has been relatively straightforward, it still requires a browser reboot, which can be frustrating when you’re in the middle of something. With Jetpack, this isn’t an issue - you click install and you’re done, with the new widget or application installed a few seconds later.
» Sarcastic Gamer Parody voice over of Microsoft future Vision Video. Cynically funny.
» Create your own bundle of RSS feeds to share with other Google Reader users. You could always do this by making an OMPL file, but using this drag and drop method is even simpler.
» If Apple comes out with a tablet, does that mean we'll get good cheap knockoffs, or expensive knockoffs.
» It's pretty slick that Google Maps is now suggesting multiple alternate routes to destination
» ABC's New V trailer looks really good (and that's an awesome surprize). ONe problem though... do you know how hard it is to accurately google a single letter?
Watch this trailer if you haven't seen it already.
» Repper is a really neat website that makes patterns. You upload an image, then scale and move the little transparent box in the main area, and presto, you have some very interesting patterns.
» Terminator theme overdubbed with a ukulele. Sounds corny but it's actually pretty good.
» District 9 Looks like a very interesting (and thoughtful?) Alien movie.
» Interesting walk thru Green Lantern History with alot of cover pictures too.
» Samsung $129 8" secondary monitor conects via USB. Slick. A device like this is definitely on my purchase radar.
» Wack a Kitty
» A very well written article on motorcycle engine repair.
A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.
» I really really really dislike the Cult of Done Manifesto. Done is not a goal. Done may be a state, but to have "done" as a goal is to miss life's point entirely.
» Want to know what is is like to work as a Graphic Designer in a corporate environment? Watch this:
l1nf0:0525
Random Non-Sequiters
» So today's new tech hotness is The Google Wave. Take every web or internet based communication form you can imagine and roll it all up into one giant integrated real time collaboration ball and you have the Google Wave.
Clear as crystal right? Nah, but it definitely looks like something new and huge-- Real Time Communication tying you into everything. Looks to me like it might be challenging for people who already struggle to keep up with their inboxes, but email is failing at the real-time collaborative world, so maybe this will be something useful.
» Are humans really designed to function well in a constant state of “fight” that real time imparts? If items of note or action are constantly arriving in front of you and require you swat them away with replies, action, or simply digestion of information. How much real time will be too much real time? When do the gnats swarm so tight as to form a viscous cloud hampering breath?
Fight or flight. Where will the flight be built into the system?
» Thinking a lot of about agency and how you balance it with a sense of community , cooperation and collaboration. I've been seeing the phrase “sense of agency” too, which is an interesting phrase since it can imply that someone feels they have agency that they do not actually have. What a complicated thing it is to contribute to someone's “sense of agency” over a period of time.
» Thinking about the use of competition in a corporate environment whereby you structure an outcome that produces more losers than winners. Specifically thinking about how if that is done on a regular basis how that effects morale once the majority, due to the “greater losers than winners” outcome of such a set-up , feels perpetually in a state of loss over time. Competition seems a danger fraught approach if the contestants have no sense of release from the arena and are forced more often than not to be eaten by the lion and to live with the cumulative consequences of their losses. There are tricks to create a “sense of progress” (see my mention of “sense” above) But over time this is destined to be less effective as a sense of recognition of the difference between “sense of progress” and “actual progress” is likely to be detected.
» Also thinking about shared experience. A decade ago you heard a lot about the 500 channel world. Now the channels are infinite and culture so niche and diverse it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a way to speak to commonalities in shared experience, since the current abundance of choice makes the common threads between individuals so potentially thin. I've been thinking about this often, as in order to properly advertise to mass markets of people you have to identify those shared experiences that bond those masses together.
» On a different more country-wide note, I would like to see Obama do something to shake up the ship a bit. I know it's a cruise liner and not a speedboat, but it would be nice if he found a topic or two to make a hard turn to port on anyway.
» Enough randomness for now.
Random Non-Sequiters
Tweet Spam.
I have a computer in my livingroom hooked up to my TV. One thing I do with it sometimes is leave it set on Twitter Search, with a search phrase entered it to it.
This is entertaining because as I come in and out of the room, it's zoomed into the last 3 or 4 entries of the given search. A greasemonkey script autorefreshes the page every few minutes.
When I launched the web browser this morning, the last search in it was for Star Trek.
Everytime the page refreshes there is Spam in it right now with the words "star trek" appended to it so that the spam will show up with that currently popular search term.
The page is zoomed in, mind you, so that you can see the top 3 tweets from across the room and everytime it refreshes one of those three tweets is spam. One in every 3 messages just about with the words Star Trek in it, is spam. That's just incredible.
It's got to suck being twitter right now, trying to get that under control.
Random Non-Sequiters
I just took a shower.
Last time I went grocery shopping, they were out of my regular unscented shampoo. So presented with the available choices, I chose the Vanilla shampoo. It seemed the most benign choice available with unscented not being an option.
I used the Vanilla shampoo just now. It was like showering in ice cream but without the stickiness. Very aromatic.
My hair is clean, but I have an overwhelming desire to go to Coldstone Creamery or Baskin Robbins.
I also feel like I need a Hot Fudge scented conditioner and maybe some candy sprinkles to finish off the experience now. Doubt they make such a thing, just as well.
Random Non-Sequiters
» This is how I want to drive to work. I want to get into one of these little electric taxi's and be whisked away, happily reading an eBook, watching a video or listening to a podcast.
» Zipmaps.net is a neat site that shows you a on a map where a zip code area is visually, in the same sortof way that you see congressional districts cut-up.
» From David Goyer (Dark Knight) New TV Series- Flash Forward. Looks Good.
» DC Blammoids Yet another sortof dumbe format to crank out their major icons in. I'd be ok with just more DC Direct 6" figures.
Still I'm sortof a sucker and will probably get a Green Lantern one. (probably not that Sinestro costume though...l I mean if you're going to go funky... go with his classic look.)
Speaking of DC Direct... There's also a new JSA wave coming out. great for pedo-type-collectors that is, not one but two teenage girl JSA figures. I'll probably get them to keep my JSA collection complete, but it doesn't mean I won't feel a little creepy about it (especially since I already have the Kingdom Come Superman and that Hourman Figure. "Two teenage girl figures only please!") They should have hooked us up with Star Girls' partner Robot-Suit: Stripe instead of putting Cyclone in the same wave. Give a guy a little dignity at the cash register ok ;)
» A $176 laptop Not US yet, but still cool. I saw a 9" Eee PC on Woot yesterday for $150. I'm getting pretty excited for the day when you can pick up a Netbook with Wi-Fi at a Walgreens or Meijer for $99.
» Google Barcode Scanner/Product Search App for Android and all the other Smartphones soon I imagine. It's going to be a rough time soon to have a brick and mortar store that isn't internet-competitive on pricing soon.
And oh, yeah reality better be on the look out because that is going to be augmented in real time soon too.
» It really looks like it would suck to be a designer at Google. Except maybe for all that free food and neato campus. I mean if you are going to be a corporate drone, I imagine that's the way to do it.
» Google Street View Automatically blurs people's faces... that's what makes this so funny
» The Simpsons sung a cappella
» Nice collection of Free eBooks for Web Designers
» Very interesting documentary on Web Collaboration: Us Now Video-60 min. Wisdom of the crowds and democracy writ large (there will need to be protection from the tyranny of the majority though).
» Qimo is a Desktop OS and set of programs especially designed for kids 3 and up. You download the iso, and then burn it to a CD. Then you boot the computer directly from the CD and the kids can play with the programs with no worry of them disrupting anything on your Windows drive. Looks neat.
» Scribd Store an iTunes for Documents. Interesting. Scribd gives you the abillity to embed word and pdf documents, etc. into your website in a flash player. Now they are offering people the ability to sell those documents too. Neat.
» Templatewise.com Free Powerpoint Templates and Backgrounds. Slick.
» Very nice simple TV Calculator compare the size of multiple television sets. Useful.
» Google Desktop Gadgets Add Google gadgets to your desktop, works like the Sidebar thing in Vista.
» Tweet Remote. Interesting Twitter to blog concept. Uses hashtags to allow you to format different tweets into different types of blog posts.
» Seth Godin: It doesn't hurt to ask. or sometimes it does.
Life of a Graphic Designer
This is fantastic! Probably would be funny if it didn't hit so close to home. Want to know what it's like to be a Graphic Designer... watch this....
Thanks to friend Jeff for passing this along
Random Non-Sequiters
Busy busy day today. Work went fast and furious. Then afterwork, hit comic store, Meijer and then had friends over for game night.
DVR wasn't cooperating. Was afraid to turn it off with people here fearing I might lose the TV entirely. Once everyone went home I turned off the DVR, unplugged it and then replugged it in, and it worked fine. Cool, cause I hate calling the cable company.
Game went good. But I'm starting to think that we are all getting a little too good at Heroclix. Dan got completely eliminated, but noone else lost a single character. (Dan unfortunately had a bad night of dice rolls and ended up with himself stuck between the three of us, so mostly just bad luck for him.
Forgot to have my friends take home what was left of their vegetarian pizza. I never touch the veggie pizza myself. I have a couple slices of a Meat Lovers left over for tomorrow. No biggie, but I always hate to waste Papa Johns pizza, even if there is no carnivore stuff on it.
Already looking forward to Memorial Day. I love holidays better than vacation days. So much better to have the day off knowing that noone is back at the office sending emails or dropping projects off on my desk.
Where'd the spring go, we're already into summer temps today. Too hot. :( Looks like weather might be perfect 69s and 72s starting Friday though. Hooray for that.
Random Non Sequiters
I come back to Maslow's Hierarchy a lot. Here are some of my Sunday morning musings on this topic.
Physiological
Breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion.
Breathing, homeostasis and excretion are the least interesting of these physiological needs. Generally they are automatic, one does not spend a lot of time thinking about how to achieve these things.
Sleep used to be in the uninteresting automatic category. For many this is a much more actively sought after activity now. It's largely an individual activity.
Food and Water or let's just say Food and Drink. It's pretty common to meet people who have a large portion of their day focusing on these two. They are however, such an individual activities now. There is so much choice in food and drink and people have developed such individual preferences due to their accustoment to that range of choice, that you are lucky if you can get two people to agree on a meal or even a restaurant, much less a group agreeing on a single meal. For a group to share a meal it helps if they are all directly related, as the odds of shared food customs are more likely to be in sync as many preferences are held over from childhood and passed down generation to generation. But even that becomes a challenge as food preferences does now radically change with age and exposure to greater choice.
There's a psychological component to a shared meal and not just sharing space with others while different meals are consumed. A psychological component that is much less frequent now.
Sex is an interesting point on this chart. Typically it's radically and wildly differently approached by the genders. Discussion of sex between genders can (although not always) rapidly highlight difference. As a perception of sameness builds trust and connectedness, focusing on difference is counter productive to that aim and can cause feelings of distrust and disconnectedness.
Safety
Security of body, of employment, of resources, of morality, of the family, of health, of property.
You could look at his section as the government, employment and religion section. Individual and group enforcement of the laws and mores of these three institutions largely cover the seven bases above.
This whole section of the chart is becoming more and more a function of the collective and less and less a function of the individual. You could look at a farm based society and easily see most of the above areas as an individual act of will under individual control. But in a modern city society control or heavy influence of all the above except potentially morality and health are greatly ceded to third parties or institutions. This lack of control highlights why many in our country may be so pro-gun as guns (and force) give the illusion that control can be reclaimed over these areas. It's an illusion though. Guns have limited functionality when used individually, they also only truly have power when used in the collective, but even then if everyone is using guns I can't see the category of safety being fulfilled.
If sameness, trust and connectedness contributes to a sense of well being, you can see why in a modern city society family is such a highly regarded point in this category. The people that have control over your familial standing are much more likely to share many of your same beliefs and values than the people you interact with within these other safety spheres. You can also see the draw of the family farmer ideal as areas like body, employment, resources, morality and property can all be more closely connected to the interactions with family in such a society.
Love/Belonging
Friendship, family, sexual intimacy.
This is a fascinating level. Very difficult to publicly analyze. These are more easily kept connected to through irrational beliefs than rational introspection. I'm going to skip discussing this on my blog for now, but it's a fascinating topic of discussion in a conversational setting.
I will mention that these three are generally bound by common acceptances, situations, shared interest, shared experience, or goals with the added factor of time. Various combinations of these elements in parallel contribute to their strength. Individuals are often unique in which of these elements is valued more strongly in the overall mix.
Outside of their own intrinsic values, this level can also be greatly dictated by fears of loss in the two levels previous.
Esteem
Self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, respect by others.
After writing the last paragraph, I now wonder if this level is best addressed from a biological and an irrational point of view too. I think I want to think about this level more.
Self-actualization
morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts.
This whole level is very idealistic isn't it? You have to be in a society and situation where almost all your problems are eliminated to fully tackle these ideas. You have to be in a mindset where you anticipate and react to problems building permanent self sustainable solutions and or live in a society that is incredibly utopian to be in a position to deal with these transcendental issues. To properly deal with these it would seem a utopian society would almost be a necessary precursor because the mindset necessary to reach this point may prohibit the mindset necessary to participate within this.
In place of discussing my musements on this topic further, I'm instead going to turn 45 degrees and print a dialogue quote from the movie Serenity.
- The Operative:
- I'm sorry. If your quarry goes to ground, leave no ground to go to. You should have taken my offer. Or did you think none of this was your fault?
- Capt. Malcolm Reynolds:
- I don't murder children.
- The Operative:
- I do. If I have to.
- Capt. Malcolm Reynolds:
- Why? Do you even know why they sent you?
- The Operative:
- It's not my place to ask. I believe in something greater than myself. A better world. A world without sin.
- Capt. Malcolm Reynolds:
- So me and mine gotta lay down and die... so you can live in your better world?
- The Operative:
- I'm not going to live there. There's no place for me there... any more than there is for you. Malcolm... I'm a monster. What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it, but it must be done.
Let's Go Surfing
» Warner Brothers pushes back Green Lantern Movie to 6/17/11. Hooray, hopefully they keep pushing it back to the point where it never happens.
» Signs, a very cute short film
» OneRiot is a really nice RealTime search engine... let's you find links that are "happening" now.
» Cooler eReader $250 eInk device that can read many file fromats including jpeg and pdf from an SD card. Neat.
» MyLifeIsAverage.com It's like Twitter but with only the boring and mundane stuff.
If your decision tree only has two branches, you should water it more.
Random Non-Sequiters
» Downloaded a neat freeware Windows program for burning DVDs this weekend. DVD Flick. It will burn a DVD player playable dvd directly from FLV files (ie: Youtube videos). Useful.
» Still waiting for Summer to kick in and stick. I know it's only May but it'd be nice to get a few more late 60s early 70s days in. It's brisk out there today.
» This weekend, I Plugged my Eee PC directly into a 19 LCD monitor that I have in the living room. The monitor normally sits on a small stand next to the TV. I use the LCD to control my media box that is hooked to the TV for playing back internet videos etc. Anyway, I slid the monitor stand over near my comfy chair and plugged in the Eee PC. The Eee PC automatically switched to the native resolution of the 19" monitor and it worked exceddingly well for viewing digital comics. Makes me want to second 701 Eee PC just to use for that purpose.
» You know what works really well? Taking some Double Stuff Oreos and crunching them up in your hand and dropping them into some Breyers Vanilla Ice Cream. I had that yesterday with some hersheys syrup dripped over. Very tasty.
Let's Go Surfing
» Pac Man Fever. This is one of those things that makes me feel old. When alot of people think of video games they think of their Nintendos, Playstations and XBoxes, but I'm not sure I'll ever fully disassociate video games from arcades in my head.
Froggy's Lament - Riiiiibbbiiit.
» jstrip strips metadata and thumbnails etc, out of JPEG files. Makes them smaller without changing the pixels.
» CintaNotes is a very neat note taking/clipping program. It has a portable version also.
» Fold-up skateboard. Neat but doesn't look like it'd really save much room to me.
» Burger Kingon Videos Star Trek Parody videos starring the Burger King. Most odd.
» My Little Pony: The Action Movie
» bDule is a Twitter and Facebook Application, similiar to to Tweet Deck except it is not an Adobe Air app. It is a Microsoft .Net application.
Ray Palmer Thoughts
A couple days ago I watched a Chris Carlsson AtGoogleTalks video. Carlsson has written a book titled Newtopia. As you can imagine with a title like that, the author speaks a lot on topics of bicycling communities, community gardens, and a world where we all just help eachother and get along. etc. etc. Typical 60s Hippie stuff for a new era. I have no real problem with that. I don't disagree with the idealism, even if I do disagree with a lot of his enthusiasm from a strictly practical point of view.
I only bring up the above because he used a term in his talk that as a society "We are atomized”. Meaning, that we are a very individualized culture where many people travel from job to job, location to location and do not really know their coworkers or neighbors well, if at all.
“We are atomized.” It's a very neat term and I've found myself coming back to that term several times in the past few days and rolling it around in my head over and over again in the context of marketing and advertising.
“We are atomized.” Neat concept to think about.
Sometimes I like to spew a good rambling rant*
Amazon just did a little stage show in New York and announced the Kindle DX a 9.7” larger screen version of their Kindle e-reader. The price? $489. Seriously! This eInk technology is as frustrating as flying cars.
70% of the owners of the smaller $389 Kindle are over 40. Which makes sense because you need to have some disposable income and be old enough to like books to be likely to spend that much for a device that just reads books.
eInk is a revolutionary technology. (and a decade old as well) It is going to change the world. But it's being kept locked up as a niche invention, and it just pisses me off to no end.
Recently we had a scrappy noone's ever heard of them company, Asus, annoy the heck out of the computer industry by launching a netbook as an affordable concept. This is not something the industry wanted. Smaller is supposed to be more expensive in laptops and Asus turned that concept upsidedown. Asus stuck with it long enough to develop the market to the point that now we have netbooks in Best Buy, several models to choose from even. But Asus and every netbook maker is slowly creeping the size of these machines back up. 7” screens at first, then 9” then 10, now most of the manufacturers are announcing netbooks with almost 12” screens. That pisses me off too.
The computer industry wants to get the margins back up on the netbooks, and they want to get them close enough to the full size laptops to make you think twice about one of them, so they're doing that by slowly creeping back up screens to 12”.
We had 12” screens at one point, 13” in fact were part of the mainstream... but users wanted bigger screens on their laptops, not because they wanted laptops with bigger screens, but because they wanted something smaller than a desktop at home and they didn't want to buy a desktop and a laptop.
The majority of people that bought netbooks recently didn't want a netbook, what they wanted was a cheaper laptop. Netbook makers figured that out and they are trying to find the ceiling on what people will stand for a cheap laptop again. It took the netbooks to at least break the cycle that manufacturers could convince consumers that they needed the newest OS and the fastest processor.
Netbooks need to trend down to $99. At $99 they will be impulse purchases, and as prolific as Nintendo DS, everyone will have one. That's when the game changes... that's when they will hit the next disruptive plateau.
eInk readers need to get down to $99 even more than netbooks do to be disruptive. The frustrating thing is, eReaders could be that cheap. They are screens that can run on the guts of photo frame hardware for godsake and that's what keeps pissing me off. A cheap eReader should be even easier to do than a netbook.
The companies involved with this stuff are just too anti-any-sub-$250 price point to make any off this happen. Where's the scrappy company that's going to take these things to the next level? Cause our current crop of corps isn't going to do it, and that pisses me off.
*Who am I kidding I ALWAYS love a good rant
Random Non-Sequiters
Wolverine leaked out on the internet a full month before the premiere. Everyone that saw the leaked copy gave negative reviews to the movie. Yet the movie still make 87 million in it's opening weekend.
Marketing that reinforces people's existing beliefs works, people believe what they want to believe despite what they hear, and as long as you give people their special effect action movies on the big screen one at a time without crowding them together-- people will go see anything.
Let's Go Surfing
» Funny.
» Carosel Cops and Evil Clowns. Cool.
» Why Minds are not like computers Lengthy article. Good.
» Scriblink Nice collaborative whiteboard.
» Yahoo Media player is an incredibly slick way to play mp3s on your webpage.
