This is one of the many reasons that YouTube is awesome. How else could I have seen this?
Share and enjoy.
Last night a DJ stole my life
Well, when I stole, I mean borrowed, when I say night, I mean afternoon, when I say DJ I mean colleague, and when I say life, I mean ability to interact with my digital world; by which I mean laptop. Without my customisations, configurations etc, I was without:
- passwords (no big deal, but a bit annoying)
FF toolbar folder (very frustrating – my favourite web ‘apps’ on there!)
all those Windows tweaks you just do (took some fiddling!)
No Windows favourites (slightly annoying)
No customised keyboard shortcuts for Office (grr)
And so on. Although it is probably possible to reconfigure the way Windows logs us on so all this stuff is stored on the server, this would almost certainly drive our server requirements up quite significantly and potentially be quite inconvenient for remote use. Not sure.
But the point I wanted to make (I’m a fan of the thin client world) was that if I could just log on to Firefox remotely when I fired it up, half my customisations would be in place, which would be great. Although I appreciate it’s a massive security risk. And if I could save my Windows preferences somewhere and temporarily apply them to a system that I have to use on occasion, that would also rock. Although, again, probably a security risk.
All the good things are security risks. The world would be better without malicious hackers, criminal masterminds and Noel Edmonds (I’m just kidding, I used to love his show).
What are the top 5 things you miss when you have to use someone else’s PC? Chris? Tom?
The Prestige
Saw this movie last night: starring Wolverine, Batman, Alfred, Ziggy Stardust and Scarlett Johansson (who gets to keep her real name), this is an awesome film. I don’t want to say too much — for those who don’t know its basically a Marvel/DC crossover with Wolverine and Batman feuding for the title of ‘greatest magician ever’ — but suffice it to say that Wolverine does get his claws out and Bats does at one stage sport a utility belt of sorts.
Awesome.
C:\> is dead. Long live search
I remember one incident in 1994 very clearly. I was doing work experience at a development lab in Malaysia, and one of the programmers who was coaching me handed me a copy of the Win95 beta surreptiously. Scrawled in faint pencil on the cover of the CD-Rom was the following text:
C:\> is dead. Long live the start menu!
It was all a bit odd. But to my point.
Scoble asks why Google would need an OS: various people have already commented on ‘web OS’ versus ‘desktop OS’… which I think is perhaps a layer of abstraction too far.
The reality is… Google Search itself is an OS. Think about it; you know the command line interface: how to search for things such that you’ll find them again. How upset are you when you repeat a search and, for whatever reason, the result you were thinking of doesn’t come up on the first page? Ok, maybe not literally upset, but it can cause some frustration.
Search is your gateway to every application you use on the interweb — in fact, you may not use bookmarks anymore, or a spelling checker, or anything… Just fire up Yahoo!, or Google, or whatever, and you’re away. It’s why (I suspect) people show so much brand loyalty to their search provider — when you’ve learned the syntax of one, why would you switch? It’s the same reason many PC users who might otherwise be swayed by the slick appeal of Apple stay put (not me, I have lots of reasons for not swaying from the good ‘ol PC platform).
And it’s why many search engines, at their most basic level, are homogenizing: the neutral, clean look of Live.com etc. mimics the success of Google in (what’s probably the hope!) that people won’t notice they’re not actually using Google when they fire up their browser of choice.
Everyone wants to be the new C:\> (the start menu really isn’t iconic enough for this).
Fast broadband
So, it’s been 6 months since I placed the order but I’m finally up to 16 meg broadband. Can’t say I’ve noticed any difference so far, but am anticipating that I won’t have to wait for HD trailers to load off Apple.com anymore. W00t!
Who will come watch the D movie with me?
I don’t know how I missed that the Tenacious D movie opens this week. And I don’t know why it is that I can’t think of a single person who would pay money to come and see it with me. Which saddens me; as it either means that it is going to be a bad film, or that none of my friends have a sense of humour. I’m going with the latter for the moment, but if anyone does want to come see it with me, let me know.
There’s too many movies I want to see on. The Prestige, Casino Royale, and the D… can I do them all in one week?
iTunes 7.0.2 – not totally sucky
Ok, the latest release of iTunes seems to have fixed some of the performance issues with v7 I blogged about recently. Skipping is greatly reduced, but the whole app still seems bloated and memory dependent. Maybe they should take a leaf out of Nullsoft‘s book and release ‘lite’ versions of the player…
If you haven’t let iTunes auto-update, I recommend you do so. Unless you’re using version 6, in which case, stick with that for the moment…!
Will it blend?
The immortal question, answered by a company that specialises in making awesome looking blenders. I don’t need a blender but I kind of want one of these now.
Great marketing stunt and very entertaining videos.
Via: Scobleizer.
Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny (CD)
My CD arrived.
Whoa.
It is a thing of awesome beauty and power.
On first listening, I wasn’t sure if they’d tried too hard with the whole comedy thing. I mean, there are some kickass funny tunes on there. But I was looking for music that rocked so hard that it would literally blow my mind. And a few listens in, I’ve realised that this is it. From the tuneful lyrical genius of ‘Dude I totally miss you’ to the adrenaline fuelled ‘Storm the gates’ to the final battle with Satan in ‘Beazleboss’… It’s all awesome. And there’s everything good about the eponymous track, too (video below).
This is truly the greatest rock band in all of human history. Jables is on my list of people I want to be like (alongside Neil Gaiman, Douglas Adams, Kevin Smith, Carl Sagan and John Cusack).
Family blogging
My cousin Ashvina has started blogging – check it out if you’re related to me, are interested in the Malaysian music scene, or know Ash ;).
Enjoy Ash – and welcome! Any other family members blogging that I should know about? Baboo?