April 2009
45 posts
More great free Criterion content →
Criterion love movies. Good movies. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that they love good film making. And I love Criterion. They’ve been restoring and publishing high quality releases of great classic and contemporary movies since the days of Laser Disc, and I for one am grateful. As The Auteurs, they’re now online in the US.
This time they’re putting up some great...
WatchBastard jerk jammy git friend of mine (also doctor, man about town, and meme artist), Dr. R actually went to the Leonard Cohen concert at the O2 arena! Bastardjerksonofabitch… But still, I’m glad he got to go.
rufus:
Leonard Cohen live in London. This is a strong contender for the best gig I ever attended. Not because of musical greatness, and certainly in spite of the terrible...
WatchReasonably nicely done porno parodies (SFW people thinking you’re watching porn when you’re actually not is a problem). I guess it helps that they co-star actual porn stars and they’re done by a non-porn maker, James Gunn. I suppose it goes to show that if you’re trying to reproduce a look and feel, the best way is to use the original.
Helpful Bus is perhaps my favourite,...
Hulu - Cosmos →
As reported by Kottke somewhere in the 138 posts of his I’ve got to catch up on, Cosmos is available on Hulu. Shame I bought the whole series years ago on DVD for some outlandish (at the time) price.
But watching the first 3 minutes, and trying not to balk at the absolute camp theatre of it all, I’m struck by how Carl Sagan looks just like Dwight Shrute. I’m told this...
“Single-tap jump back for podcasts. Tap a single icon to rewind podcast playback...”
– iPhone 3.0 Beta… New Features
No, if you don’t have an Apple Developer Pass, you can’t get these new features yet, but this one in particular is one I’ve been hankering for since I started listening to podcasts on my iPhone. Bravo! Or, if you’re an angry nerd: About...
“Bolivia’s President Evo Morales says three foreigners have been killed...”
– BBC NEWS | Police ‘stop attempt on Morales’
Another really questionable bit of BBC News reporting. Or else a comically revealing example of Bolivian behaviour.
Should the Police not stop such a thing without being told to by the President? Do they want him dead?
“There are now in the Santa Fe penitentiary serving sentences for robbery of the...”
– GhostCowboy.com: Bandit’s head jerked off by Hangman’s rope
A full year and a half after Ghost Cowboy passed on the mantle to Shorpy, I still rue its demise.
Thankfully, the archives are still up for perusal, and I heartily recommend them.
“Cuba’s President Raul Castro has said he is prepared to negotiate with the...”
– Obama ‘to lift Cuba restrictions’
That’s a bit rich, isn’t it, using a precondition to insist on no preconditions?
But more importantly, when will I be able to get hold of some cigars?
“Stoner streaks to pole in Qatar”
– BBC News
I totally misunderstood that headline when I read it.
“I wrapped a movie called ‘Zombieland,’ in which I was constantly under assault...”
– Woody Harrelson claims he mistook photographer for zombie - CNN.com (via phronk)
Hmmm. There are too many zombie-related things going on this week. Should I be afraid? At least that other zombie then went and stood by a police-car waiting to be arrested.
For the record, my brains are next to...
WatchJust in case there are readers here who are not followers of mine on Twitter, or Facebook, I want to post for you a YouTube playlist of a radio series created and performed by Chris Morris and Peter Cook in the latter’s later days. The Christ episode is most relevant for easter.
Peter Cook is a hero of mine. And he created a character named Sir Arthur Streeb Greebling. A shameless...
Apple iTunes Remote for Mac OS X
It’s there for the iPhone. Where is it for the Mac? Er. Is the easiest solution for me to control iTunes from away from my Mac Mini/TV to pull out my phone and fire up a mobile app? Even if I’m sitting at my laptop?
Plex » Netflix has never looked this good →
When I lived in London, I was able to make use of XBox Media Center care of generous friends.
XBox Media Center (XBMC) is a tribute to good and open programming. With its own decoding engines optimised for the XBox, things worked very well indeed. It could play videos that my PC stuttered on. It organised well, scanned well, integrated with IMDB and so forth to get images and plot summaries....
Instapaper & Google Reader →
For me one of the most useful tools around is also one of the simplest. I know that should it ever go under, I’ll be writing and hosting my own personal version. That tool is Instapaper, and it’s filled the gap that I’ve needed for a while in my online reading. An RSS reader (I use Google Reader) is fine, but often I just don’t have time to clear through my RSS feeds *and*...
“Wanna stick it to the Girl Scouts? Make their cookies at home”
– Kottke
They have been getting a bit expensive, and frankly what have the Girl Scouts done for me lately?
“It’s all gone Pete Tong in Kim Jong Taepodong ding-dong”
– Great headline. Or greatest headline? (via rufus)
Definitely the greatest. Oh how I miss being back home some days….
(via aaronindenver)
WatchThis video is much like the Creature Comforts shorts that Aardman did a while back (and are probably still doing). Vox Pops made more appealing and less incriminating by applying different non-human but anthropomorphised visual actors to the dialogue.
Personally, I’m tired of the Creature Comforts things (which themselves were derived, I think, from some early Aardman British Gas...
Questions in Tumblr?
And did you know that if the Title or Post ends in a question mark, you get a little checkbox on the Tumblr Dashboard that says “Let people answer this”?
I didn’t. Not until just now. Well I never.
Random typo URLs
Did you know that, very NSFWly, facbeook.com redirects straight to XXXTube?
“Ann Coulter Falls For Fake April Fool’s Story”
– From the Huffington Puffington Blowyourhousedownington Post.
Now, I’ve only read two articles in the HP, and they’ve been moronic. If this is what the future of news reporting/blog aggregation is going to be, I want out.
That’s right. It’s so shit I’m not even going...
“A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the...”
– Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink
Thanks be to Pete.