Great breakthroughs in science

I haven't posted anything here recently, and there's plenty to discuss and lots of things that seem blogworthy, but man, nothing could have stopped me from passing along the fantastic news that researchers have come up with a way to create a caffeinated donut.

Hold the Coffee! Caffeinated Donuts and Bagels Could Provide That Morning Buzz!

iPhone not so widescreen

As usual, I was right there during the Steve Jobs keynote, letting his patented Reality Distortion Field warp my sensibilities. For a while I thought, hey, $600 for a 8 GB iPod with a phone in it isn't a bad deal at all.

Since then, however, a number of things have taken the gloss off Steve's new pet project. Things like Apple-only applications running on the phone (i.e. no cool third-party apps or hacks), no buying songs and putting them right on the iPhone, and even the possibility that you won't be able to use your own purchased songs as a ringtone (gotta protect Cingular-AT&T's ringtone revenues, of course).

But now this news from Engadget that the iPhone "widescreen" aspect ratio isn't really 16:9 widescreen, but is some funny ratio inbetween 4:3 and 16:9. Of course with a blog called Aspect Ratio, I would be remiss if I did not help spread this word far and wide. Well, you know, as far and wide as this thing goes, which is neither far nor wide. Anyhow, just read the link, OK?

The widescreen iPhone: not so widescreen

Apple Computer is gone

And in its place is simply Apple, Inc.

I guess Steve Jobs has finally achieved his goal of making a computer like a toaster. There are scaled-down computers in all of the non-computer devices his company sells, certainly, and even a version of OS X running on the wildly-talked-about new iPhone. But his point is a valid one: people don't care about the computer in the iPod or iPhone or Apple TV, they just care about the device itself--the toaster, if you will. So, de-emphasize the computer part of the company. Makes sense, I guess.

Nevertheless, it's too bad, since it was after all a Macworld Expo keynote he gave, and discussion of new eight-core Mac Pros, or new displays, or new iLife or iWork, or even the new version of OS X due soon, was entirely missing.

Instead, the vast majority of the keynote discussed the iPhone, which certainly looked nice while Steve spun his reality-distortion field. However, things are gradually coming out which are taking the blinding luster off the gizmo. Things like the apparent inability to sync the phone via Bluetooth, limitations of the Cingular carrier, but particularly the inability to run third-party apps on it, which is particularly disappointing since Steve made much of the iPhone running some subset of OS X.

Oh well, who am I kidding? AAPL is almost at $100 a share, people would give their left gonad for one, and I will probably want one too eventually.

Elvis Costello on SNL 19 years ago

I didn't have much to watch on the treadmill this morning, so I put in Rhino's DVD The Right Spectacle, which is a compilation of many of Elvis Costello's music videos, along with brief commentary from Declan himself. This reminded me of the famous appearance of Elvis Costello on Saturday Night Live lo these four thousand years ago, when he started off with one song, then abruptly stops and starts up "Radio Radio." Which reminded me to look for that clip on YouTube, which thankfully has it and hasn't been taken down yet by NBC.

Achievement ho

Here's an article I saw posted on Major Nelson's blog about how achievements have become very popular for players on the 360 and Xbox Live. I have to confess that I have fallen prey to them as well, so much so that I will do stupid things like start 100 timed games of Hexic, or make 10 worthless PGR3 courses, just to get a few more achievements and gamer points. Hey, I have limited gaming time, I have to get the points when I can and however I can. I guess that makes me an... well, you get the picture.

Microsoft's Achievement Points Yield 'Nerd Cred'

Ubuntu in NYC thanks to network-manager

Our family recently went to New York City for a brief vacation. We had reservations at a hotel that was inexpensive as NYC goes. Very inexpensive. Suspiciously inexpensive.

So I was hesitant to bring the MacBook Pro up with me just to get it ripped off. What to do, what to do? Ubuntu to the rescue, of course!

I charged up my 6-year-old iBook, installed Ubuntu 6.10 PPC version on it, and the machine was off and running... well, make that strolling. Firefox is a hog and the iBook is no speed demon.

The biggest problem, as always, was getting wireless networking to work. With the standard install I could get on unprotected networks, but connecting to my WPA-encrypted network at home was a non-starter. Plus, there seemed to be nothing that allowed you to scan for and connect to new wireless networks like any other OS provides.

Did some Googling around and viola, came across network-manager:

http://www.gnome.org/projects/NetworkManager/

I installed it and the gnome frontend, rebooted, and... it didn't work. Googled some more. Turns out you have to edit /etc/network/interfaces to remove or comment out any network interfaces other than loopback. I of course didn't bookmark the page that discusses this, but it basically said "your file should look like this" so I made my file look like that.

(Here's a blog entry that has a good discussion about it...)

They said a logout/login should get things working. I did, but it didn't. So I rebooted and... YES! network-manager was up there in the menu bar in all its glory, working, letting me connect to unprotected AND WPA networks with no problems, listing all the SSIDs it could see.

Got to our NYC hotel, and although it was by no means the Ritz, it wasn't vermin-infested, and to my surprise... wireless internet access in the hotel! I was able to use my iBook and keep up to date on the world while in the room. Now all I have to do is fix the iBook's Y key...

Superballs over San Francisco

I can just imagine this director's pitch to Sony for doing a commercial for their BRAVIA line of TVs... "Why don't we take a quarter-million superballs and let them go on a San Francisco street and film it?" Damn, this commercial is awesome. Just the coordination for filming from the various angles is impressive, let alone the visuals that result. The soundtrack is perfect too.

I saw this posted on digg originally, and the embedded video above is at least the right aspect ratio. The link below is to the Sony BRAVIA site, which has the extended version. It's larger but MUCH better quality version. You really need to see the HD version of this commercial to appreciate it fully.

Bouncy Balls: The BRAVIA advert

Stay on the scene, JB

I know this post is no longer timely, but I did have to note the passing of the Godfather of Soul, the hardest working man in show business, Mr. James Brown. I think I posted somewhere a while back about The CD of JB, which is a quick way of getting up to speed with his music other than the usual songs from the Good Morning Vietnam soundtrack. Heck, I remember listening to "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)" on KPRS in Kansas City way back in the day, and one of my sisters had a "Live at the Apollo" album I used to listen to all the time. He was an incredible musician and bandleader. He will truly be missed.