Philip Greenspun:
Our literary culture is impoverished when every idea is stretched or amputated to fit the Procrustean bed made up by magazine and book publishers. When an author runs out of relevant stuff to say after 20 or 30 pages, that’s how long the essay should be.
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I’ve been thinking about Google Wave since it was announced earlier in the week at Google I/O. It looks brilliant and impressive as technical accomplishment. But I don’t understand what it is. It seems not just technically complex but also conceptually complex.
Communication systems that succeed are usually conceptually simple: the telegraph, the telephone, fax, email, [...]
High marks for the display and WebOS. Low marks for the keyboard. No benchmarks for battery life or performance. Interesting that BGR got a unit to review so far in advance of release.
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In its 5-star (out of 5) review, Stuff.tv calls Apple TV a “hot buy.” “The whole interface is stunningly slick and pretty,” and Stuff.tv found “loads of movies to buy and rent.” You can start watching the “brilliant on-demand content” almost immediately, and the HD movies “look superb” and offer “excellent” sound quality “with near-CD [...]
It zooms around the course at speeds up to 160mph, goes from 0 to 60 in less than 4 seconds, and looks just like other Formula 3 race cars on the track. But WorldFirstF3 is fundamentally unlike other race cars. Environmentally friendly, it’s fueled by chocolate and includes plant-based components, such as a steering wheel [...]
Opening in US theaters on June 5, My Life in Ruins stars Nia Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding), Richard Dreyfuss, Harland Williams, and Rachel Dratch. In the film directed by Donald Petrie, Vardalos plays Georgia, a Greek American tour guide. While leading a group around Greece, Georgia begins to see things in new ways, [...]
My thanks to The Little App Factory for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Evom, their brand-new Mac app for video format conversion. I’ve used it Evom several times this week and it’s exactly the app I’ve wanted. I like HandBrake, and I used to use VisualHub before its developer pulled the plug [...]
I think he’s got it: the Pre is masquerading as an iPod over USB. Johansen expects Apple to block this in a future update to iTunes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did, but I’m not so sure.
Also, answering my questions from yesterday, Pre iTunes syncing works on Windows, too, and because it’s masquerading as [...]
Monday May 11
Examined a new e-book reader that hooks up to Project Gutenberg as a content source. Doesn’t ship with any content, but has default suggestions for “classics” from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jules Verne. Nothing dirty, though. Spent a few minutes searching and found The Kama Sutra, which is supposed to be dirty. Closed [...]
