BunkBlog

The foreshadowing at the beginning was a little too obvious, but the cold open had some great explodey bits and fabulous lines for Rory. But, once again, damn you, Steve Moffat! We’ve got to wait until September to get the second half of this two-parter? Holy frackin’ Sontarans!

Hey, Kindle users, I have a question for you. The Kindle has this cool feature where you can email things to it (either paid over 3G or free over WiFi). Do you use that feature much, if at all?

This is part of my continuing curiosity about all things ebook, and it seems that Amazon is the only one with an email address the user can shoot things to. With all the reviews for the new touch Nook this week, it just made me wonder if this is a feature that few people would even miss, or if it’s something really important.

Kobo announced the Kobo eReader Touch on Monday; Barnes & Noble announced the Nook Touch on Tuesday. Both use similar technologies, to the point I almost wonder if they’re basically the same device, except for the store each connects to.

Both weigh 200 grams, use a 6″ Pearl eInk screen, have one button on the bottom bezel, and use the nifty infrared touch screen technology that Sony introduced last year. If not for the four buttons on the Sony PRS-650, I’d wonder if both Kobo and B&N hadn’t just nicked Sony’s design. Well, that and the fact that Sony costs twice as much and doesn’t include wifi. The Kobo is $130 and the Nook is $140, while the Sony is $230.

So, this summer you’ll have four different 6″ Pearl eInk ereaders to choose from. Three are infrared touch-screens, and one has a keyboard and is a bit bigger than the other three. The Kindeal is $114 and has a great store integration. Kobo and Nook are in the ballpark and have their own stores as well as compatibility with ePub stores of old. Sony is odd man out, which is par for the course over the past fifteen years.

I can’t help but wonder what Amazon will do next in the ereader war.

And there goes another one! Mitch Daniels, who by all accounts is a reasonable human being with deep ties to the GOP establishment and no significant baggage to scare off independents, has declared he won’t run in 2012. This leaves Pawlenty as the only declared possible candidate in the GOP that won’t scare off either the base or independents. Of course, he’s also not very exciting and has to run away from his own record in order to throw red meat to the Tea Partiers, so it’s not a lock. Take all statements as if they include the caveat, “18 months before an election is just plain silly to be handicapping races.”

As an exercise, my coworker and I took a look at the history of the Democractic and Republican party primaries and eventual winners. Only once in the history of either party could we find an example of a candidate who lost the general and went on to win the general election years later – Richard Nixon. With that in mind, and realizing that the economy is no longer screaming downward like a fireball of doom, might the more “adult” and sane members of the GOP stay away from becoming the sacrificial lamb in 2012? Surely, any analyst came to the same conclusion we did from our comfy chairs – if you lose against Obama, give up on ever being President in the future. It seems plausible that Daniels and other reasonable people may be staying away just because they know that Obama is likely to win anyway, so they’re not going to go through the bother.

With that in mind, why not nominate the most entertaining person to the GOP candidacy, just so we can all have some fun next year? Come on, you know a Michele Bachmann/Barack Obama debate would be absolutely hilarious!

Once again, my imaginary friend Kenji has inspired yet another winning meal. If nothing else, he was able to produce a great recipe for the “Secret” sauce for a Big Mac. We only had larger sesame seed buns (there was no way I was going to glue hundreds of seeds to smaller buns), and thus we made 1/6 lb patties instead of 1/10 lb micropatties. Overall, a great success. Who knew that nuking onions on low for ten minutes made them mild? Yay Kenji!

What is up with Steven Moffat and his “arc-y” approach to the Doctor Who series? Although billed as the conclusion of a two-parter, “Day of the Moon” still managed to sneak in a giant hanging cliffhangery wobbly thing.

I love the Silents as the monsters, the whole Rory/Amy/Doctor triad, and the idea that Rory can sort of remember the previous reality where he was made of plastic. That’s about as far as I can go without giving away any major spoilers, but this is a great way to kick of the new season. Woohoo!

My Kindle is arriving this afternoon, but all the techie ereader blogs are talking about the updated Nook Color firmware/software. I particularly enjoy the idea that $250 is “cheap” in most of the writers’ minds. Sure, if you’re comparing the Nook Color to an iPad or Xoom, $250 is cheaper. But, if you’re comparing it to the new ad-supported Kindle ($114) which starts shipping this weekend, no – it’s not. It’s kind of cool to watch the development of new Android tablets and near-tablets, though. I leave you with this quote from a recent review of the updated Nook:

At $249, the Nook Color is almost an impulse buy. [ed: poor impulse control?]

This self-selected sample of self-described “PC People” and “Mac People” is amusing. Some of the answers tend to make me think the Mac people are deliberately messing with the poll, though. “Oh, I use a Mac and I prefer my lunch of bánh mì while sipping a gimlet.” I cry shenanigans! I’m convinced no plurality of any group drinks gimlets in the 21st Century. Either that, or the Mac people are pretentious twats.

Just wandering through a Google Image search today, I ran into a great example of where a protected web-only operating system can save you some trouble. Although a good anti-virus/anti-malware program would prevent infection if you’re even a little aware, the ChromeOS netbook prevents anything bad from happening at all. I was expecting to include a screen shot here, but the latest ChromeOS version apparently breaks the screenshot functionality entirely. Anyway, the screen shot would have shown you an imge that looks remarkably like Windows XP’s security center, with lots of flashing red warnings of impending doom from all the Win32.worm things. This is particularly amusing on a Linux-based device, of course.

I loved a man and his son playing the same character (especially because I love both of those actors). I love every scene with Alex Kingston in tight jeans. I love the mysterious new amnesia-inducing monsters from an Edvard Munch painting.

But, that cliffhanger! One week will crawl by, damn you Steven Moffat!

It’s always amusing to look at the Old School Monday posts on the Maximum PC site. They post scanned images of their magazine articles from 10-15 years ago to educate, elucidate, and envigorate (I ran out of E words) their audience. This week, it’s an interview from 1998 with one of the AMD executives. One of my favorite lines:

Is the $1700 PC a low-end PC? A K6 with a 3Dfx card, 64MB of memory, 4MB of frame buffer, and a 6GB hard drive is not a low-end part.

AMD has been fighting the “budget company” moniker for as long as they’ve been making chips, it seems. Besides that, though…look at those specs. Let’s assume that he’s including a monitor with that $1700 price, and compare with what we can get from a boutique builder for that price today.

Playing with the Cyberpower X58 Configurator (yes, they really do call it that), I was able to spec out a $1700 machine, which includes speakers, a BluRay player/DVD burner, the OS and a 24″ monitor, and here’s the quick spec line to mirror the article: An i7-960 with Geforce 570 card, 6GB of memory, 1.2GB of frame buffer, and a 2TB RAID 1 array is not a low-end part.  🙂

I know it’s a fake product (look at the URL), but I know at least a few people who would totally buy these anti-3D glasses to wear to headache-inducing films.

Customer: We need to remove about half of the files you built, based on internal variables.
Geek: No problem, the power of GREP pipes commands them!

I’m always amused and somewhat aghast at the random nature of the web filtering on-base. My personal homepage is accessible, but not my wife’s (both on the exact same server). I can get to Google Mail, but not Google Calendar. Facebook is accessible, which is obviously official use. And, of course, the messages on the Access Denied pages are of no help or just stupid. My personal favorite is when the “reason” line has something like “Blocked Because: Reference/Education.” We definitely want to discourage that sort of thing.

Although I can get to NPR’s website, I can’t get to my local NPR affiliate (Reason: News/Media). Of course, whenever I run into a nonsensical block, I always try to get to two of my favorite notorious crank sites: Rush Limbaugh and G Gordon Liddy. As always whenever I’ve tried this experiment, both of those sites loaded just fine on the military network (with no conceivable official use, as well as questionable value to human beings in general). Odd.

Listening to the KROQ 1991 playlist in the car this week, it occurred to me how many of the songs I was completely unfamiliar with. This is likely due to the fact that I spent the entirety of 1991 in the Republic of Korea. For those of you under 35 years old, let me explain why this was significant. Back in 1991, Korea did not have a blanket of high-speed internet as they do now. In fact, they barely had reliable telephones or television stations. 1991 was a time before the commercial internet, before DVD box sets (or even DVDs of any kind), way back in the dark ages of information technology. So, that year in Korea was a year where the only American pop culture I knew of was filtered by the Armed Forces Korea Network. Civilian readers, AFKN was like swaddling pop culture in a giant blanket of blandness. I could not understand, when I returned in 1992, why people were singing a song about logs being “better than bad.” I’m pretty sure the most cutting edge thing I heard on the radio that year was “Enter Sandman” by Metallica. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come in such a short time.

Twenty years later, I have a tiny device on my desk which looks like a miniature television set. This device is connected to my wireless router and streams Facebook updates, Gmail inbox listings, news feeds, silly games and LOLcats. Most importantly, it also streams KROQ (or KNDD, KDGE, 91X, etc.). I’m living in BFE Texas, where the best radio station around plays the same regurgitated pap that every post-Clear Channel era “best of the 80s 90s and today” channel is running. But, I am no longer beholden to the filtered geographically-dependent view of pop culture.

Alex just likes the robot clock.

Livin’ in the future, man!

February 24th, 2011 – Motorola Xoom available for sale, first Honeycomb tablet, technically more advanced than the iPad.

March 11th, 2011 – Apple iPad 2 available, proven track record, technically similar to the Xoom.

April 2nd, 2011 – Blackberry Playbook (possibly) available, new OS, technically similar to the iPad 2 and Xoom.

Sometime in the middle of the year – HP’s tablet available, new OS, technically similar to all the above.

Who’s going to get to be in second place, since first is already a lock?

Wanna see something geekycool?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14

That’s impressively geeky.

Shinmoedake Erupting and Struck by Lightning

Perhaps some parts of Japan should be avoided this week.

This will undoubtedly be the coolest-looking owl video you’ve seen all week, maybe longer.

Youtube Link for embedded-impaired
He gets all “I’m a big owl” when confronted by an owl slightly larger, but turns into a tree branch when mega owlzilla shows up. Nifty!

Part Batman, part Dark Angel, part every cop show ever made, and a little bit of Robocop, the new series “The Cape” began this week.  So far, it’s a bit of a cliche-filled mess with one-dimensional characters.  On the other hand, Summer Glau.  Maybe we’ll give it another week to see what they make of the show.

Legend:

Orwell = Lucius Fox (Batman)/Eyes Only (Dark Angel)
ARK = OCP (Robocop)
The Cape = Batman