James Kew: Linkblog

Netflix Community Blog: Todd Speaks: 1/2 Stars

2007-08-12T12:48:00.000-07:00

The tyranny of choice in action on Netflix: “when we make the ½ star options possible, we get fewer ratings. […] Our best guess is that the complexity of doubling the number of choices from 5 to 10 deters many people from rating, so they just give up.”

Scripting News: What to do?

2006-12-23T18:15:00.000-08:00

Three 3.5+ magnitude earthquakes in Berkeley in the last 3 days. We got a light rattling here, but Dave Winer’s on-the-spot description is a lot more evocative: “felt like a truck hitting the house […] quick but loud.” (But at the risk of sounding callous: if you hate quakes so much, why buy a house so close to the Hayward Fault?)

plasticbag.org: On the design of American State flags

2006-09-16T18:01:00.000-07:00

Tom Coates casts a quizzical eye on some of the state flags: “the flag for Arkansas reminds me of the label of a sardine can.” Bonus link from the comments: Snopes’ “no, I meant a pear” urban legend. Believe them? Check here.

Boing Boing: Amazon Unbox to customers: Eat shit and die

2006-09-16T15:54:00.000-07:00

Cory Doctorow dissects the Amazon Unbox user agreement: “Amazon Unbox takes away your privacy and every conceivable consumer right you have, and then tells you that the goods you buy from them don’t belong to you, and they can take them away from you at any time, or change the deal you get from them without any appeal by you.” Even filtered through Doctorow’s evangelically anti-DRM stance, this is strong stuff.

Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

2006-09-16T15:50:00.000-07:00

The abstract alone should scare the willies out of you; the full paper just gets scarier and scarier. Election-stealing voting machine viruses: glub.

SFGate.com: New Stamps Misspell 'Motorcycle'

2006-09-04T23:03:00.000-07:00

USPS finds a typo in a first-day cover postmark. Response: “[buyers] can still order the version with the incorrect postmark”. Very clever: most collectors will want both versions.

Guardian Unlimited Books: Hoax love letter fools Betjeman biographer

2006-08-27T20:44:00.000-07:00

Nicely done: fake letter contains coded insult to A.N. Wilson. (Update: warring biographers.)

Boing Boing: Animation historians blast SF Chron movie critic

2006-08-18T23:41:00.001-07:00

And on the subject of Monster House: the Chron's Mick LaSalle doesn’t understand animation; animators respond eloquently. (via Boing Boing)

By Ken Levine: Pirates of the Caribbean

2006-08-18T23:31:00.000-07:00

Ken on the what-the-hell-was-all-that Pirates sequel: “If only the movie was six minutes and the ride took two and a half hours.” (Monster House was a much better cartoon…)

Workbench: Finding Good Soundbites in Bad Podcasts

2006-08-18T23:22:00.000-07:00

Rogers neatly sums up why I dislike podcasts: “Content that sucks in two dimensions. A bad podcast suffers both in quality and in the amount of time required to find this out. I could’ve back-buttoned 60 bad blog entries in the time I listened to one Gillmor Gang.” The comments and correction also identify another problem: sometimes it's hard to tell who’s speaking...

SFGate.com: 'Hybrid' Creature Is Just a Dog

2006-08-17T21:29:00.000-07:00

Somehow this story strongly reminds me of The League Of Gentlemen: “Some form of monstrous basilisk, the like of which the world has never seen.” / “You haven’t seen a goat, a pig and a chimp anywhere?”

SFGate.com: RICE-A-REDUX / After a 7-year hiatus, it's billed once again as the San Francisco treat

2006-08-13T20:52:00.000-07:00

Rice-A-Roni was traditionally “The San Francisco Treat”: why? The Chronicle on the possible return of the slogan; and asks “when was Rice-A-Roni ever the civic pride of San Francisco?”

Bay Area Bites: It's It: The San Francisco Treat

2006-08-13T20:46:00.000-07:00

Bay Area Bites on the It’s It. Yes, it really is that good. (Andronico’s now sell the mint ones as well as the traditional vanilla; both very good.) (Google has custom It’s-Its.)

SFGate.com: Cougars rattle Rossmoor by going about their lives

2006-08-12T16:38:00.000-07:00

Old news, but I like the self-directed humor of one interviewee in this piece: “Half the people here can’t see, the other half can’t hear, the rest can’t think.” (Somewhat sobering: most of the results returned from a Chronicle search for “rossmoor” are obituaries.)

BBC NEWS: MP sorry for 'inbreeding' remarks

2006-08-12T16:27:00.000-07:00

Norfolk MP suggests constituents are inbred; an Alan Partridge moment?

SFGate.com: 1,000 pet rodents euthanized; rat lovers furious

2006-06-28T20:59:00.000-07:00

A sad story, redeemed somewhat by the bizarre final paragraph: “He’s an intelligent man to talk to, but he smells like rat urine.” Well, nobody’s perfect.

Instructables: Always have Correct Change in your wallet

2006-06-19T20:05:00.000-07:00

A vaguely appealing optimization, but surely pulling one of these out of your wallet would scream “NERD ALERT”? (via MAKE:Blog)

Tea Leaves: The Soul of A New Machine

2006-06-19T20:01:00.000-07:00

psu on The Soul of a New Machine. I agree entirely—it’s a great, great book, and as much about the personalities (and the burnouts) as the technology. (“I have gone to live on a commune in Vermont and will deal in no unit of time shorter than a season.”)

37signals: Does this company respect me? Try the sticker test.

2006-06-17T12:49:00.000-07:00

“If there’s a sticker on the product, and it peels off cleanly, then they’re a respectful company.” Which neatly confirms what the music industry thinks of us: those god-awful tags along the top edges of CDs never peel off cleanly. (via Coding Horror)

Washington Post: Behind the Scenes at Disney World

2006-06-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

The WP on Disney's behind-the-scenes tours. “Just remember, there are some hand gestures we don't do at Disney.” (via BoingBoing)

Guardian Unlimited Arts: 'It was complete, visceral excitement'

2006-06-17T12:37:00.000-07:00

The Guardian looks back on the Who's Live At Leeds: “the most explosive live album ever”.

rogerebert.com: Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties

2006-06-17T12:31:00.000-07:00

Is Ebert losing it? On his TV show he often seems to wander into trivial non-sequiturs; and now this review written entirely in Garfield’s voice? WTF, Roger? (Not that Roeper’s conservative misogyny is any better; does he inherit when Ebert checks out?)

A Whole Lotta Nothing: Myutterconfusionspace

2006-05-29T20:53:00.000-07:00

I also like Matthew Haughey’s “get the hell off my lawn you crazy kids!” bafflement at MySpace: “When you click from one [profile] to another to another, you are transported back to Geocities back before Yahoo bought it, flaming animated gifs and all. […] Apple has made the iPod the most popular music player on earth, but it’s clean as a whistle. How could the same people love their super sleek music player and also love the gaudy oversaturated flashing/pulsating monstrosity of their Myspace profile?”

Pete Ashton's Weblog: The Future of Music

2006-05-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

Pete on MySpace and music: “to understand its success you have to understand the appalling state of band websites. Invariably built in Flash they were impossible to navigate, obfuscated all the important information, were never updated and often made you register before you could hear any music. By contrast a MySpace music page has everything you need on one page—band members, influences, biography, tour dates and, most importantly, the actual music. You could cover it in shit and it would still be an improvement.”

Foolish Vanity: The Royal Wee

2006-05-28T12:58:00.000-07:00

On Windsor: “The castle looms over the town in a very regal way, and the rest of the town nestles around its feet like a brick and timber blanket.”