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Los Angeles actor, D.C. Douglas, says he was dropped from the upcoming GEICO "Shocking News" campaign after a group of Tea Party members harassed him and the insurance giant over a private voicemail the actor left for FreedomWorks. Matt Kibbe, President and CEO of FreedomWorks, posted Mr. Douglas' cell phone number in a blog post on biggovernment.com, instructing readers to "Feel free to contact (him)… call his employer too. Let them know that you…are now in the market for car insurance." The next day, GEICO held auditions to replace Mr. Douglas' voice on the campaign.
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Really great photography
Mike Cohen
links for 2010-04-16
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A 2d physics library that works with cocos2d on the iPhone
New MacBook Pro
I have been waiting for Apple to release a new MacBook Pro, since after using my iMac, my aluminum MacBook feels extremely slow. The small screen also makes it difficult to work with the iPad simulator since it can’t display a full 1024×768 iPad screen at 100% scale. As soon as Apple announced the new lineup today, I ordered a top of the line 15″ MacBook Pro to replace my MacBook.
Much as I love the 13″ form factor, lighter weight, and longer battery life, I decided to go for the 15″ for the faster processor and larger screen. The 8-9 hour battery life isn’t as good as the 13″ model’s 10 hour battery, but it’s better than my MacBook, which gives me less than 5 hours.
New site: mcohen.me
I’ve set up a new life streaming hub at mcohen.me using storytlr, an open source web application that lets you import & aggregate content from many of the sites you use. It’s based on plugins, so new sites can be added. For many sites that aren’t listed, you can simply use an RSS feed.
To run it on DreamHost, the newer version 0.9.3 works better than 0.9.2 since it eliminates the dependence on Tidy when importing RSS feeds and also adds several new plugins including Github.
There are few little things that aren’t really made clear in the instructions:
- It doesn’t update automatically. You need to create a cron job that looks for new items and updates the feeds. On Dreamhost, it should be something like:
/usr/local/php5/bin/php /home/username/sitename/protected/tools/update.php
- To import Flickr items, you must obtain an API key at http://www.flickr.com/services/api/ and enter it in protected/config/config.ini
- If you must run version 0.9.2 on DreamHost or any other web server that doesn’t support Tidy, comment out the following lines in both protected/applications/plugins/rss/models/RssModel.php and protected/applications/plugins/googlereader/models/GooglereaderModel.php:
$tidy = new tidy();
$tidy->parseString($content, $config, 'utf8'); $tidy->cleanRepair();
and change the following line:
$data['content'] = $tidy;
to:
$data['content'] = $content;
Eye-Fi Pro X2
I have been using Eye-Fi cards since they released the original version, although when I switched to a DSLR I had stopped using them due to their limited capacity. That changed with the Eye-Fi Pro card, which doubled the capacity to 4GB, which made it usable with my D90.
The 4GB capacity of the original Eye-Fi Pro card still seemed tight when shooting a lot of raw images & video, and it’s slower than most standard SD cards, which limited the number of shots you can take in burst mode. I found that limitation very frustrating when I was trying to shoot dance & martial arts demos at Youth Day when it stopped letting me shoot in burst mode for several seconds while it finished writing.
The new Eye-Fi Pro x2 solves both limitations by doubling the capacity again to 8GB and increasing the write speed to match Class 6 SDHC cards. It also adds 802.11n support and an “Endless Memory” feature which automatically deletes older photos that have been successfully transferred, so you never have to manually delete anything.
Like all Eye-Fi cards, setup is quick & easy. As soon as you insert the card, it will launch Eye-Fi Center and step you through the initial steps of adding a network and setting the upload destinations.
The Eye-Fi Pro X2 card is a perfect match for the D90. The 8GB capacity lets you shoot in raw mode and capture video without running out of space, and the enhanced speed lets you shoot in burst mode without overrunning it.
links for 2010-04-07
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Civilizations are ephemeral compared with species. Humans have lasted at least a million years, but there have been 30 civilizations in the past 5000 years. Humans are tough and will survive; civilizations are fragile.
Over the years these proposals have been in different forms; create a book, set of books, stone tablets, micro-etched metal disk, or a constantly updated wiki. I really like the idea of creating such a record, in fact the Rosetta Disk project was our first effort in this direction. These Doomsday Manuals are a positive step in the direction of making a softer landing for a collapse, and the people creating them (like ourselves) are certainly out to help people. It took millennia for the world to regain the technology and levels of societal organization attained by the Romans, so maybe a book like this would help that.
iPad hands-on video
iPad Hands-on from Mike Cohen on Vimeo.
How to get free books for iBooks
The iPad’s iBooks application supports the standard ePub format as well as books you purchase through the iBooks store. This means that you can use the huge library of free eBooks available from Project Gutenberg & Google Books. You can also read eBooks purchased through other sources such as The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Simply drag any ePub books you download to iTunes and after you sync your iPad, those books will appear in iBooks.
iPad unboxing & first impressions
After nervously refreshing the UPS package tracking page for most of the morning and wondering if my iPad would arrive today, it arrived just before noon.
It’s every bit as good as I expected and it really does live up to the hype. The screen is simply gorgeous, it feels fast & responsive, and is very comfortable to hold & use. Mail & Safari are as good as desktop applications and is by far the best mobile browser I’ve seen. Videos play smoothly and look gorgeous on the screen, even outdoors.
A few other notes:
- Non-native apps really look like crap. Pixel doubling looks awful and the 1x window within a window feels like running Classic under Mac OS X. Any developer who doesn’t think a native version of their app is necessary is just plain wrong.
- It really needs a screen protector. The screen attracts fingerprints and they’re very visible.
- It fits perfectly in UNIEA’s U-Sleaf.
- Battery life is excellent. After using it continuously for about 3 hours, the battery is still at about 80%.
See my full unboxing gallery here.
iPad Shipping Shenanigans
Like a lot of people, I’ve been obsessively refreshing the UPS package tracking page several times an hour today, only to see that my iPad is still in Guangzhou, China. A few days ago, UPS showed that it was at my local facility, but on Wednesday it suddenly appeared back in China.
Boy Genius Report explains what has been going on:
There are iPad shipments sitting in your local UPS location right now. Yes, they are there. Right now. The issue? Apple has hired an outside security agency to monitor all shipments from the regional distribution centers to the local hubs, and at the local hubs, the cages (where they hold the packages) are under 24/7 guard by the outside security agency. Apple did the same thing when they used FedEx for iPhone shipments, and they also had the same security company literally sleeping overnight at AT&T stores when they got iPhones the day before launch day.
Don’t worry if your tracking info still shows the package hasn’t left China, it’s probably only 10 miles from you, sitting comfortably under the watchful eyes of Top Flight security.
I hope he’s right and I’ll have an iPad in my hands by this time tomorrow.