Why in the hell is video so freakin’ difficult when it comes to PC’s, Game Consoles, and portable devices?
Why is it that I have to have three different formats? Different sizes I could live with seeing as not all of my devices have the same size screens… but formats? Since when are there different variations of MP4?! Better question is why are there different formats of MP4? Sure there’s a couple of hoops I can jump through to share the files across PC and Console, possibly – meaning that you can’t allow it outright; there needs to be a trick and a hack or two – but there will always need to be an extra copy for the iPod or PSP. Yes, or – one size does not fit all, even in portable media devices.
TUAW: As I was using my one month old PowerBook yesterday, I was alarmed to see the charging light on the power adapter randomly shift between orange and green. […] then decided to look up Apple’s support document detailing the procedure for resetting a PowerBook’s PMU (Power Management Unit) […] Unfortunately, a PMU reset still didn’t solve my dilemma. […] PowerBook and iBook adapters, if left plugged into a wall for too long, might need to actually be reset. This can easily be done by unplugging both of an adapter’s ends for at least 60 seconds.
My. What an intuitive solution. After all, we’re all had AC adapters for electronics for over thirty years and *gasp* – they need to be rebooted? Continue reading Oh Dear God.→
I swear that there are days that I want to leave a flaming bag of dog shit in front Scoble’s office door, before knocking and running away. I’ve had a string of these days in a row now… ever since this whole “MSN Spaces pulled a Chinese blogger due to censorship” thing started.
Disorder.org: What happens when a bunch of non-mechanically inclined nerds, with no knack for design, decide it would be a good idea to build a MAME (arcade) cabinet? Lots of really ugly shit happens. That’s what. There are some truths in life that some people are not willing to accept; All babies are not cute, all old ladies are not sweet, not every man’s wife is beautiful, and YOUR MAME CABINET PROBABLY SUCKS.
I dunno just how ironic it is that one Geek is taunting other Geeks for the poor arcade-cabinet making skills, but the running commentary on each piece has made me laugh – quite loudly at that.
I was tooling around the TypePad control panel the other day and was sorta irked that I can’t get stats on the RSS pages… not that my stats matter much: I just put stuff out there and tend to forget people might read it. One of the things that I did notice was an increase of traffic caused by a review of SharpKeys on an Italian website. At least it increased traffic on the home page. And then I started thinking about it: why was I only seeing hits on the main page and the archive pages? What about individual posts?
Seems that my Individual Posts template lost its entry for the JavaScript stats include, so I added it back, and well, holy crap! Continue reading How Many?→
FurryGoat via Yahoo!: Skirt-chasing playboy Daniel Anceneaux spent weeks talking with a sensual woman on the Internet before arranging a romantic rendezvous at a remote beach — and discovering that his on-line sweetie of six months was his own mother!
“You mean you got a 360? You bastard!” I’ve had this comment shot in my direction at least once every day over the last three… meetings, office visits, lunch, dinner – even at bars. On November 22nd, I had it at least a dozen different conversations that started with this comment. Know what’s funny? It’s usually from a fellow Microsoft employee, who didn’t think to pre-order – or worse – didn’t pre-order until September or October… I pre-order the weekend after I read about the 360 release date in IGN and saw that ebGames was selling out of pre-orders.
To those of you in gaming press that think that employees were given special consideration for consoles or that we’re miniacly twirling our mustaches while there’s a holiday shortage, re-consider it and call it bunk: there’s a whole bunch of people on the Redmond campus that are in the same boat as the rest of retail America.
And we make the freakin thing and yet a lot of people have no choice but to watch sites like Xbox 360 Tracker – go figure.
I didn’t think it was as good as the third, in all honesty. At least from a movie point of view. The first two were rather stiff and felt like a movie adaptation of the books. Three felt like a movie that had a screenplay that was based on the book. Four is still a movie, but without having read the book, I think would have been thoroughly lost.
Just got an email from Amazon, about the 50″ Plasma TV that I ordered from Tiger Direct… wait, I didn’t order a Plasma TV from Amazon. Or from Tiger Direct. Whew! It knows it might not be me:
If you are not aware of this item being bought on your Amazon.com account, Please visit the link below and
reactivate your account status:
It’s a phishing scam, obviously, but it’s an impressive one. Since most people have caught onto the “Your account has been suspended – log on to fix it!” scam, they’re one upped themselves… this one uses a lie within a lie to get you to click through to the mocked up Amazon login page.
Neopoleon.com: I never expected Microsoft to make it possible to play original Xbox games on the Xbox 360, and I am thankful. Even though the list of supported titles is rather short right now, it?s still better than nothing. […] The very first Slashdot comment from this story: “i’m currently playing far cry and battlefront 2 on my xbox, i guess i’ll have to keep it for a little while longer… damn you microsoft, damn you to hell, if apple devs can bust out with universal binarys why cant you.” This man is a cock.
I would retort to the /. comment, but the truth is that Rory has already said it all better than I could…
Creating Passionate Users: Forgiveness is relative. We diss Windows with impunity, but when our Mac does the same thing, well, geeez nobody’s perfect. When Clinton lied, US conservatives were morally outraged. When one of their own lies, “This is just a partisan stunt… perjury is a technicality.” When Office crashes, I swear at it. When InDesign crashes, I empathize with it.
Kathy nails it. Honest. It also supports the same argument I have over the OS itself: if Apple can include an IM client and a Media Player, why can’t Microsoft? Or Linux, for that matter… Meh.