- Fox Cites Non-Existent Part Of The Constitution To Hype Argument For Kagan Recusal | Media Matters for America – Look, my opinions these days skew liberal, but I think there's room for honest debate over the issues. I just wish fox news would be honest.
- NFL: The All-22 Football Footage the League Won’t Show You – This is crazy: The NFL records what's called "All-22" footage, which basically a zoomed-out view of the field that shows everyone at the same time. However, they will not release this footage because (the author speculates) it would make coaches and players look bad, and would make announcers seem even less intelligent.
- Thank You For Contacting Metafilter – Strange postings from the Contact Us form on Metafilter. For example: "hi I need helpe to see all magicods"
- Tea and Cats – Japan has cafes where you can hang out with cats. As someone who likes cats but doesn't want to take care of one, I approve.
- MOUSTAIR – "Where men meets moustaches meets hair meets moustaches meets hair meets MOUSTAIR."
- A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design – Hands can do more than slide pictures under glass.
Assuming that I’ve configured it correctly, my blog should now automatically update at midnight (Eastern time) every day with links that I’ve added at my new Pinboard account. It’ll just be a collection of whatever I might happen to find interesting when surfing the Internet. Maybe you’ll like it.
Today at work, I discovered that it is absurdly difficult to migrate email from Thunderbird to Outlook. Mozilla recommends these options:
- Install Netscape Navigator; import from Thunderbird to Netscape Navigator to Outlook Express to Outlook
- Install Eudora; import from Thunderbird to Eudora to Outlook (but this might not work and will lose any attachments)
- Use an import/export tools Thunderbird plugin to export the emails to .eml files which Outlook Express (but not Outlook!) can read. Import into Outlook Express and from there into Outlook.
- Re-send any email you’ve ever received in Thunderbird back to the server using an extension to keep the original headers
- Create an IMAP account (most likely this means Gmail); connect it to Thunderbird, upload all of your email to the IMAP server, and then connect Outlook to it and copy all the emails into your PST file.
This is stupid. Every one of these options is unnecessarily complex and time consuming. You have two programs designed to do the same job. One is super popular, and the other is free and open-source. This job could be fully automated. There ought to already be a program that takes a folder full of Thunderbird files and converts it into a PST file for plugging into Outlook.
Surely something like this exists already, right? The only product I’ve seen that even claims to do this is from some sketchy website that’s charging $130 for it. Anyone out there know of a reasonably priced converter program that will do this job?
If you are copying a file to a directory and there’s already a file with the same name in that directory, before prompting to overwrite or cancel, compare MD5 hashes of the files. If they’re the same, don’t both copying over the file or prompting.
I just discovered how to use punctuation with the voice recognition feature on the iPhone. If you say something like “comma” then it will put in the punctuation mark rather than the word. It’s also pretty smart about other phrases, like prices for example. So if I say “forty nine dollars and ninety five cents” it will type in $49.95.
Here is a fairly complete list of punctuation that you can use with Siri.
I got my new phone yesterday. And I love it.
Before, I had the iPhone 3G. It was getting very slow: Last week, I missed a call because the phone’s screen wouldn’t respond. There was always a delay in using the keyboard; sometimes I would type whole phrases before the screen would catch up. No longer: the 4S responds instantly.
I really like the new Siri voice control feature. It’s not perfect–I have to enunciate clearly, and even when it gets all the words right sometimes it doesn’t do the right things (for example, I told it “Resume Playback” and it gave me the location of 4 nearby résumé services, even though “Pause Playback” paused the podcast I was listening to).
But even with those caveats, Siri is the best voice recognition/control system I’ve ever used. It is really good at interpreting natural language commands. “Add almond milk to my shopping list” and “Remind me to get my car’s oil changed next week” both worked flawlessly. It’s super handy for when I’m driving or for setting timers while I’m cooking.
So far, I like everything about the new phone. The only thing Android has going for it over the iPhone 4S is the turn-by-turn directions, but I have a GPS for that. For everything else, the iPhone 4S has caught up to or exceeded Android’s capabilities.
As a bonus, here’s a neat trick: As mentioned in the Apple keynote, you can use the volume up button to take photos in the Camera app. What they didn’t mention was that this is also true of the volume control on the headphones, which means you can use the headphones as sort of a shutter release. Handy for low-light situations where the motion of pushing the button might screw up the picture.
Terra Nova » 2
Last night I watched the pilot for Terra Nova, in which our heroes escape a dystopian future by traveling back in time to a colony in dinosaur times.
Now, I’m a fan of science fiction, and this premise has some potential. But Terra Nova is nearly unwatchable.
Fair warning: This post is full of spoilers. Although, really, the show is predictable enough that the warning isn’t necessary. Also, I have not bothered to learn any of the characters names.
Let’s start with that premise: The opening shot is of the Earth, covered in a brown soup of an atmosphere. For the sake of the story, I will pretend that the green movement does not exist in this universe, or that some tremendous accident ruined the earth’s atmosphere. That’s fine.
The Dad comes into the family kitchen, taking off the mask he uses to filter the contaminated outside air. (It would have been clever to have everyone in the series be really, really pale, but alas.) He puts a bag on the table; Teenage Boy sees it and announces to the family “All right! Dad scored an orange!”
So, what do the citizens of Dystopia normally eat, anyways? The authors make a big deal about them having to get used to “real food” without ever answering that question.
As the family is about to enjoy their orange, there’s a knock at the door. The family stuffs the little girl (hereafter “Saccharine”) into an air vent and tell her “It’s time to play the hiding game.” They open the door: it’s “Population Control,” which consists of 3 police officers who demand to come in and search the house. (They should be wearing the heat vision glasses from later in the story, but they are not.) They ransack the house and discover Saccharine in her hidey hole. They yell at her to come out; the dad gets mad and punches the police officer, and it’s off to jail with him.
As is underlined by the “A Family is Four” propaganda hologram poster in a later scene, Dystopia has an overpopulation problem, and the government policy is 2 children, max. This is apparently enforced by a fine or jail time. Now, if I were the President of Dystopia, I think I would do things differently. Given the level of environmental damage we’re seeing, overpopulation is the number one problem facing Dystopia. It’s past time for emergency measures–a fine will not cut it. Alternate plans include:
- Neuter parents after they have produced two children.
- Alternately, at the age of 16 everyone has to get some kind of reversible birth control procedure done, and reverse it only temporarily and by permission of the state
- Introduce agents into the diet that slow down sperm production
- If a third child is produced, Population Control is ordered to shoot them.
Anyways, the family busts the dad out of jail and they escape to Dinosaur Town. They get there via this one-way time portal, discovered by chance some years ago. Lots of unanswered questions and unexplored territory here:
- How do they know where the portal goes? It’s a one-way trip. They did send a probe through through with a beacon on it, which was never discovered again in the future. They take this to be evidence that they’re going into a different time stream, so their actions in the past do not affect the future. I would take this to be evidence that the portal opens into deep space, over a volcano or a cliff, or any number of other explanations. Or maybe it was smashed by the giant asteroid that you know is coming.
- Perhaps communications can be sent back through the time portal, even if people/cargo cannot? If so, why didn’t Sullen Teenage Boy send messages back to his Dystopian Girlfriend?
- The colony is way too small, and there’s only two of them (Terra Nova and a splinter colony, the Sixers). The story tells us that to get into Dinosaur Town you have to either be well qualified (like Mom, the medical doctor) or win a lottery. This is silly: They have a massive overpopulation problem in one hand and a hole that sends people to an unpopulated planet on the other. In that position, the government of Dystopia should be shoving people through as fast as they can go.
Here’s an idea: Instead of Dad going to jail in Dystopia, he’s sent to a penal colony on Terra Nova. The rest of his family follows him and busts him out of New Australia to live in Dinosaur Town.
In fact, there should be lots of fighting and debate over how to use the time portal. Neighboring countries should either be preparing for war or attempting to create their own time portals. Instead, the Time Portal station looks as boring as an airport.
Much and more of this could be forgiven if the characters and the plot were interesting. Sadly, they are not: The characters are cardboard cutouts; my reactions run from indifference to active hatred. I really wanted Sullen Teenage Boy to be eaten by a dinosaur.
And the characters don’t act like real people would. Not one person uses the internet, takes a photo, reads a book, plays a sport, watches TV, prays to any god, makes a cell phone call, or misses any of their friends from Dystopia (except for Sullen Teenage Boy, who seems sad about leaving a girlfriend behind for about 30 seconds before meeting Adventuresome Teenage Girl).
Here in the real world, when Irish settlers went off to America, their friends would hold an “American Wake,” a send off party where they would say their last farewells before never seeing each other again. There ought have been some acknowledgement at least of what the Dinosaur Town settlers were giving up.
Also: Especially given the colonist’s recent experience with the Sixers (where all of the new people from the “Sixth Pilgrimage” stole a bunch of weapons and supplies to form their own splinter group), why are the colonists so welcoming and friendly? Have these authors never been to high school? Small, tight-knit groups are famous for ostracizing newcomers. And where there are factions, there is conflict, which you need for good stories.
And the plot was totally predictable. As my friend Kate put it, “they just give you everything.” There’s no mystery in this story, just lots of missed opportunities. The only mystery they had going was this set of geometric patterns carved into some rocks near a waterfall outside of camp–and they spoiled that at the end by explaining that they were scratched there by the colony commander’s son who was living out on his own for some reason.
Terra Nova feels like it’s trying very hard to copy the feel of Lost (a small group of people in a dangerous natural paradise with no contact with the outside world) without really understanding what made Lost interesting: the deep, well rounded characters and the mystery of the Island.
