May 2012
4 posts
2 tags
It is known
Context: Game of Thrones, Dothraki expression. e.g. “Dragons are extinct. It is known.”
It has a nice ironic resonance. The use of the passive voice is quaintly overconfident, a sly tactical evasion of responsibility for whatever is claimed: it’s not *me* that knows, it is … other people, everyone. Ask anyone! It’s the same as “everyone knows that!” but more emphatic and clever: it IS...
5 tags
The rest of the internet is full of it!
Cranky critics of SaveYourself.ca often say I’m “close minded” because I don’t present “all views.” As if I’m ethically obliged to defend theirs! (That’s a tired, simplistic application of the notion of journalistic balance. Like I’m a news anchor or something.)
Accusing anyone who disagrees with you of being close-minded: now that is a closed mind!
My job is to write about science-based...
4 tags
Libel reform well underway in England
Fantastic news! England is finally starting to fix its awful libel laws, and it’s the best news I’ve heard in years. Sometimes the world actually gets saner. I have had personal experience with some legal bullying, and so this dry legal news feels quite juicy and personal to me.
What’s the difference between legitimate criticism and libel? It doesn’t matter — it costs critics too much to make...
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Bluetooth pairing on Mac: always a hassle
Bluetooth pairing (of wireless keyboards, mice, trackpads) in OS X is just a mess: unreliable, unclear, hassle-y. Thought I was going to have to switch to wired keyboard to post this gripe!
I paired my keyboard to my iPad at a coffee shop, and when I came home it was the usual pain in the arse to get it to talk to my Mac again. First the Mac can’t “find” the keyboard, even though it’s clearly...
April 2012
17 posts
6 tags
The Station Agent ★★★★★ Peter Dinklage (long)...
Do you ❤ Peter Dinklage in Game Of Thrones? See him in this excellent, quirky, mellow 2003 film, The Station Agent.
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Googling Your Own Brain: How (and why) to build... →
This very geeky article for productivity nuts, writers, researchers etc has been more popular than I expected. So I’ve just given it a good editing. It is a somewhat bigger and funnier than before, and integrates some of the lessons I’ve learned over the last couple years of intensive file system management.
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Tor does the smart, right thing: DRM-free, baby →
DRM-free SF&F from a great publisher! This must be encouraged! Go: buy a book published by Tor! So great!
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Everything Must Go ★★★★☆ Pleasingly simple,...
Will Ferrell pulls off earnest drama in a pleasingly simple, engaging character-study. Respectable use of comic skills in dramatic context.
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“These aren’t the conclusions you’re looking for.”
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A Bond To Last A Lifetime, One Year Later →
Read/see this: almost anything you’re feeling bad about will feel at least a little bit better.
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iPod Nano ★★★★★ Brilliant!
Best iPod shape yet: the nano is tiny enough for extreme portability, yet the screen is surprisingly adequate and the user interface is easy and efficient. Very mature product.
8 tags
Ghost Protocol ★★★☆☆ Over-rated!
I’d give it a 2.5 stars, but I don’t have a half star. Pegg and Renner are fun. But daft, trite plotting, going through the spy movie motions. Or maybe not even that, because what’s a spy movie without a good villain? And this one had quite possibly the blandest, most forgettable villain ever.
2 tags
Astronomy hobby rebooted!
I’ve lived in downtown Vancouver for a decade now, and the light pollution has mostly killed my favourite hobby: I used to be an amateur astronomer. I was pretty into it. I had an 8” reflector on a great, simple Dobsonian mount. I put in enough time with that thing back in the day that, even now, I could probably still star hop my way to some cool deep sky objects on trails of 8th magnitude...
Thank you, scientists! →
“Just a friendly reminder of who’s doing all the damn work.”
Life is rough
I have the “curse” of making money doing very creative work that is almost like what I really want to do … so close that it’s easy to settle for it.
Tough one.
5 tags
Plan B: Exercise and eat right forever
Last week I posted a sassy article about a weight loss victory, with the pure-gold title, “How I lost 25 lbs and why I couldn’t have done it without beer.” I really, truly meant it: I really did rely on beer as a key part of my weight loss plan in a totally real and not-actually-joking way.
BUT!
That was not the end of my journey. Oh no. Not even close. Here’s an important follow-up public...
4 tags
No on-device data plan activation on the 4G iPad
The new iPad (3rd generation, with 4G cellular data) suffered a peculiar downgrade: it is no longer possible to sign up for a cellular data plan on the device. (In Canada at least.) Instead, one must go through a tortuous process on a carrier website, copying and triple-checking long numbers and so on. Jim Dalyrmple describes a fucked-up data plan sign-up with Rogers. And it took me — seriously...
4 tags
How I lost 25 lbs and why I couldn’t have done it...
As middle age appeared on the horizon, I was still lean and fit and had no fear of fat. But soon after thinking I might be one of the lucky ones, the first signs of a belly appeared. It was about 2006.
Fat on a short skeleton is bad news. At only 5’3”, it doesn’t take much pudge to throw off my proportions. I ignored the problem for at least a year because it was just too awful to...
March 2012
22 posts
7 tags
iPad 3 ★★★★☆
The iPad has always been “a screen you hold” — that’s the soul of the thing. Doubling the resolution of that screen — and it is exactly double, to the pixel — is certainly not a trivial upgrade, as so many people seem to think. Such leaps are unusual in technology. Gadgetry improves quickly, of course, but in the last few decades we’ve rarely seen single generation jumps of this magnitude, and...
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F.lux ★★★★★ A perfect little thing
Keeps your screen from glaring at you at night. So handy. Doubleplusgood for insomniac workaholics.
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The deep cosmos at 264 pixels per inch: a monster...
Last week astronomy Phil Plait blogged about an an ultradeep image that’s full of galaxies — a monster 17,000×11,000 pixel picture crammed with points and patches of light, all but a handful of which are entire galaxies — more than 200,000 of them. It’s “the single deepest infrared picture of the sky ever taken with this field of view.” It’s a .0004% slice of sky, just 1.2×1.5˚. Yow. (Here’s the...
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Talhotblond ★★★☆☆ A better story than documentary
A better story than documentary, perhaps, but worth seeing regardless. This is a film about a lethal online love triangle, with an amazing stranger-than-fiction twist — beware of spoilers! You want to get this nasty, surreal surprise.
I saw Talhotblond at Vancouver’s Pacific Cinémathèque last night. There was a great public talk with Dr. Rob Tarzwell after, with quite a memorable “psychopathy...
7 tags
The Way Back ★★★☆☆ A really long walk makes for...
Amazing true story, told well by one of my favourite directors (Weir) … but a really long walk makes for sparse drama. I’m surprised Weir picked this project, actually.
7 tags
No more skimping on web image quality
For almost 20 years I’ve been building websites with the assumption that photos and diagrams didn’t need to be “print quality.” In fact, it’s a normal part of my day to make web images as crappy as I can get away with — to optimize download speed.
That’s all over now.
John Gruber: “The [new] iPad display is so good that it shows, like no device before it, just how crummy most images on the web...
6 tags
iOS iPhoto ★★☆☆☆ Cryptic, balky, unsynced
Meh. Clever but cryptic, balky even on a 4S… & what’s the point without syncing? Do not want yet another unsynced database. I’ve been ditching those whenever possible for years.
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“I quit bullshit, but the second-hand BS is the real killer.”
– me
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Ponyo ★★★☆☆ “Well, the city is drowned. So who...
Creative and beautiful, yes yes yes, but I just couldn’t stop mocking their obliviousness to the catastrophe.
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The Sea Inside ★★★★★ Great, but sooo %#!@&...
Javier Bardem is a freaky shape changer of an actor —is that truly the same man we saw in No Country for Old Men? Incredible.
1 tag
11 common wrong ways (at least!) to refer to... →
Mmm, liiiink baaaaait. Nom nom nom.
Skeptics! Make the web more skeptical! Google ranks my bogus citations guide much too low. Link to it!
E.g. bogus citation No. 9: “The backfire! Science that actually undermines your point, instead of supporting it.”
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The pain of its/it’s
I have understood the its/it’s difference perfectly for about 30 years now. That hasn’t kept me from mis-typing it a few times a day that entire time! “Its” maddening. “Its” like my keyboard has a (stupid?) mind of “it’s” own.
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A 50-soak read: grammar book read exclusively in...
My parents gave me a writerly book on English usage for my birthday, two and a half years ago: That or Which, and Why, by Evan Jenkins. Highly recommended, by the way.
This book was one of my last dead-tree book acquisitions. I was just getting serious about e-books on my iPhone, and the iPad was just around the corner. I was losing interest in paper books fast, and looking to clean out and...
5 tags
I win! Total victory over stubborn iPhone 4S...
I win. My iPhone 4S is all better now. I have had a rare unqualified tech troubleshooting victory. This is especially surprising considering that a full wipe and restore had already failed.
The ugly before: shockingly poor battery life (much as many others have complained about), but also a disturbing inability to get through an hour without something very uniPhoneish happening. It was...
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The making of a footnote →
Many hours of science wrangling to create one small footnote (about hot kneecaps). Yes, this really is how I make an actual living — a bit of a marvel, which is why I’m sharing it.
6 tags
Game of Thrones, Season 1 ★★★★☆
A tricky but faithful adaptation of a huge and complex novel into a tightly scripted, gorgeous TV show with solid acting and eerily good casting — most of which cannot be appreciated without reading the book, but it’s sure entertaining for fans.
There are three glaring flaws that dulled its edge: (1) a puzzling lack of wolves, (2) several overly earnest monologues that there’s just no room for...
5 tags
xScope [software] ★★★★★
xScope is “eight tools in one that will help any designer or developer do their job faster and produce more accurate results.”
After a happy couple hours messing about with xScope, I’m hooked, world rocked, mind blown. A beautiful, seriously useful tool for any kind of designer/developer that solves countless problems and annoyances. If I could have had xScope when I started digital publishing...
4 tags
“Welcome to the mutually incompatible, silo-based, platform-dependent and...”
– Mathew Ingram, How the e-book landscape is becoming a walled garden (link via John Gruber of DaringFireball.net)
Amen. It’s grim.
February 2012
14 posts
1 tag
“It is eerie to see my work grossly misrepresented & vilified in public. The...”
3 tags
“Every act of birth is an act of pain. Our very lives are sustained by the...”
– Chuck Lorre, vanity card for Big Bang Theory, #206
5 tags
School + work = oomph
I’m a bit of a time management weirdo, so I actually had a pretty accurate log of the time I spent on my history of science course. It took me about 100 hours, and that seemed like a LOT as I was doing it — hard to fit into life, hard to fit around the edges of running a business. Imagine adding about an hour to every 10-hour work day for four months. I mean, who’s got time for that?...
2 tags
Take Shelter ★★★★★ Easiest film to spoil ever →
It is really not possible to say why Take Shelter is so good without spoiling it. Do not watch a trailer. Do not read a synposis, or read a review. Just watch it.
5 tags
My NY Times Subscription decision
After trying it for a couple months, I’m confident that the $20/month New York Times iPad subscription is a really crappy price and just makes no sense. They’re just giving away too much free content! They have a system that allows all visitors to read quite a few articles in a given time period before hitting the paywall — and it’s about as much as I have time to read. With the subscription, I...
Conan the Barbarian ★★ Tedious →
It could have been worse, but not much! Jason Momoa is an airhead; Stephen Lang as the bad man is competent (as usual), but stuck in a lifeless film.
It’s interesting to imagine an alternate future where a Conan remake was actually good, like rebooted-Battlestar-Galactica good.
7 tags
The Ides of March ★★★ A skillful film, but grim,... →
Just when you thought you couldn’t get any more cynical about politics! Some of my favourite actors are in this film, especially Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti. There’s scarcely anything wrong with this film as a film, but I can’t love it: it’s just too bleak.