Yes, it's another time lapse video featuring lots of night skies and shining cities. But to my mind the way the images and the music¹ combine makes The Game Has Changed a couple of steps up from the average nighttime time lapse video.

[Via Bad Astronomy]

1. Daft Punk, from their soundtrack for TRON: Legacy. ↩

Prompted by a review of a couple of episodes of Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night at the AV Club, I found myself re-watching one of the best speeches Sorkin ever wrote, as delivered by William H Macy.

The context is that Macy's character, Sam Donovan, has recently joined the production team on 'Sports Night', the daily sports news show where the series is set. The three network executives Sam is talking to in this clip are unhappy that the show's current producer, Isaac Jaffe, has been ignoring the notes they've been sending him suggesting changes to the show's writing and presentation. After an unproductive meeting with Isaac which Sam also attended, the executives indicated to Sam that the job of producer was his if he wanted it. Following another unproductive meeting, this time with the show's production team and presenters, Sam wanders into the meeting room to resume the conversation with the suits…¹

You can argue that Sorkin only has a limited number of tools in his bag,² but the man knows how to use them. In the hands of the right actors, the results can be pretty damned satisfying.

[Via The A.V. Club]

1. If you want to get the full flavour of all this, there's a longer clip here that includes the parts I described as well as the speech as above. ↩
2. Don't we all? ↩

Best wedding party picture. Ever! (Courtesy of photographers Quinn Miller.)

[Via More Words, Deeper Hole]

A Twitter bug report pivots into a spooky little science fiction story:

Subject: Twitter API returning results that do not respect arrow of time.

This will take some explaining.

It started as an afternoon hacking project with your Twitter API. [...]

[Via nielsenhayden.com Sidelights]

Artist Patricia Piccinini has created a hot air balloon she's christened The Skywhale, in honour of the centenary of the founding of Canberra:

Artist Patricia Piccinini says her inspiration came from the wonder of nature.

"My question is what if evolution went a different way and instead of going back into the sea, from which they came originally, they went into the air and we evolved a nature that could fly instead of swim," she said. [...]

Me, I think it looks pretty great. It's partly that goofy grin it has, and partly the sheer incongruity of glancing up and seeing something this strange go by:

[Via MetaFilter]

Twenty Awesome Covers From The US Space Program. My favourite is the cover for the manual for the NASA/Grumman Apollo Lunar Module: nothing else looks like the LM.¹

[Via Extenuating Circumstances]

1. Who, reading the documentation these covers contained back in the 1960s and even the early 1970s, would have believed that forty years on manned space travel still wouldn't have ventured further out into the solar system than the Apollo missions did? Don't get me wrong, I know the human race has plenty of robots exploring various interesting corners of the solar system and peering out into the wider universe. That's all well and good and I love reading about the things they're finding, but let's cut to the chase: we're running way behind schedule if I'm to live out my retirement years in a modest little cottage with a view out over the Mare Crisium! ↩

Sometimes even Free Pie can't make things better.

From last night's Oscars, Jennifer Lawrence meeting Jack Nicholson for the first time:

Adorable.

[Amended video link as original video was removed from YouTube. Just in case that one disappears too, here's a screenshot of her reaction. JR 26 Feb 2013]

[Via feeling listless]

The Big Whobowski.

How could I not link to "The trailer for The Big Lebowski re-imagined shot-by-shot (more or less) in the world of Doctor Who."

[Via Waxy.org: Links Miniblog]

A group of former prep school friends take their game of 'tag' very seriously, having met up at a reunion and made a pact to spend the month of February each year resuming the game of 'tag' that they started back in school where it left off. The idea is that whoever is 'It' at the end of February remains tagged until the start of February the following year:

One year early on when Mike Konesky was "It," he got confirmation, after midnight, that people were home at the house where two other players lived. He pulled up to their place at around 2 a.m., sneaked into the garage and groped around in the dark for the house door. "It was open," he says. "I'm like, 'Oh, man, I could get arrested.'"

Mr. Konesky tiptoed toward Mr. Dennehy's bedroom, burst through the door and flipped on the light. A bleary-eyed Mr. Dennehy looked up as his now-wife yelled "Run, Brian!" Mr. Konesky recalls. "There was nowhere for Brian to run."

It's an odd, charming story. I'd imagine that even as I type this a few screenwriters are taking the core of the idea and running with it. The only question is, which type of story do they want to tell?

• A dark tale where the encounter described above ends with Mike Konesky shot dead because Brian Dennehy forgot it was February and assumed that his family was the target of a home invasion?
• A politically engaged story about tensions within the group because some members of the group are now senior executives who can have their office managers run interference for them every February and who can use some of their frequent-flier miles to drop in unexpectedly on a friend/target in another state, whilst other members are stuck in their home city or state due to their financial circumstances or work responsibilities?
• A comedy about how the partner of one of the friends has come to terms with the possibility that for one month a year she might find a strange man crouching in a bush surveilling her house?
• A farce about whoever is currently 'It' having their suspicious pattern of inter-state travel noted by Homeland Security and thus finding themselves being followed even as they track their target?

So many possibilities.

[Via kottke.org]

A lovely tale from tech support:

When I was nearing the end of my tenure, I had a particularly awkward customer. He wasn't being particularly rude, just extremely untrusting and uncooperative. His issue was maddeningly simple – his modem was in standby.

I should probably explain, his modem was an old Motorola model (An SB5100 if I recall correctly). The interesting quirk of this modem is that it has a standby button on it that, as you might guess, puts the modem in standby. What's even MORE interesting is if you put the modem in standby, it'll STAY in standby no matter how often you unplug the thing and plug it back in again. The REALLY REALLY interesting thing is that the modem was completely black and the standby button was also black. Most people didn't know it even existed and it was common for someone to accidentally hit it and suddenly have their connection stop working. Switching it off and on didn't fix it, those lights just wouldn't stay on. Anyway, we see this quite a lot and pushing the button fixes it within seconds – easy. However, this guy wasn't having it.

Despite actually having fixed the problem, he was adamant that his modem was broken. No matter how much I tried to explain that it's REALLY easy to accidentally hit that button ("I've done it myself a few times!"), he was determined. "Oh no, the modem isn't in a position where it could be knocked like that, it's BROKEN!". Bull. Shit. So after batting around for a bit, I had an idea. [...]

A fiendishly clever, utterly hilarious, moderately evil idea.

Craig Mod is excited by the possibilities of Subcompact Publishing:

In 1967 Honda unveiled the N360.

The N360 was a kei, or light style car; a subcompact.

I like to imagine the engineers at Honda huddled together, dumping the sum total of all car design and production technology on our worn, wooden table. Around they gathered and together they asked, "What's the simplest thing we can build with this?"

[...]

The N360 was something an American car company would never dream of producing. You can't blame them though: they had no incentive by which to dream such dreams. Unlike the American automotive industry, the Japanese automotive industry wasn't beholden to industry momentum or legacy. And when you're not beholden to legacy, you can be excessively brazen.

In the software industry we talk about MVPs, or Minimum Viable Products. The N360 was a Minimum Viable Car.

The N360 didn't make it to the States, but the followup – and near equally cute – N600 did. Next came the Honda Civic, then soon after, the oil crisis. We all know how the story goes from there.

[...]

Honda was a nobody in the car industry. But they gained foothold and marketshare by building a car that was more appropriate for many consumers. They had built a subcompact.

So I ask: where are our digital publishing subcompacts?

Mod spends a fair bit of time extolling the virtues of Marco Arment's The Magazine, which I wrote about back when it launched. I've maintained my subscription through the first four issues, but I have to admit that I'm wavering over whether to retain it. The application's virtues remain – it's a beautifully polished application, even if I'd like more control over the presentation of the content that it permits,¹ but the content isn't that interesting to me.

In principle, an article extolling the virtues of a wet shave, or the proper way to make a cup of tea could be engaging and fun to read, even to a hirsute guy like me who would quench his thirst with a Diet Coke rather than brew a cup of tea every time; in practice I haven't found them to be so. I'm finding that on average there's one article per issue that I find moderately engaging. It doesn't help that some of the writers, whose work I've read on their own weblogs, are covering very familiar ground. Marco did say early on that he hoped to expand the pool of writers after the first few issues, so I'll probably give it another couple of issues to see if things improve.

Having said all that (and to get back to the ostensible topic of this post), there's no doubt in my mind that the basic model of Subcompact Publishing could well develop in all sorts of interesting ways, freeing up writers to write instead of having to code an application and submit it to someone's app store. It's just a shame that whatever tools people come up with will most likely end up being tied to a specific operating system/hardware type/payment mechanism.

Isn't this a problem the web was supposed to have solved by now?

[Via Marco.org]

1. In particular, I like pagination in my reading apps, dammit! Marco has explained in one of his podcasts that flexible, high-quality pagination is really complicated to do well so for now he's going with a scrolling view. ↩

I think my favourite part of the newspaper report about a Pervert caught pleasuring himself in slurry for third time (From This is The West Country)…

A man found naked in a field amongst cow dung and mud had been sexually pleasuring himself, a court has heard.

It was the same farm he had returned to over a period of seven years.

[...]

When police officers arrived soon after, they found him covered in a large amount of slurry and mud, in a quagmire, surrounded by tissues.

This is the third time that he has appeared in court for this kind of behaviour. [...]

… is that the first comment on the article is from a reader objecting to the fact that the newspaper's web site filed this story under 'Devon'¹ when the incident took place in Cornwall and the offender was from Cornwall. After all:

Readers unfamiliar with the geography of Britain may inappropriately be led to believe that this sort of thing could possibly be allowed to happen in Devon.

[Via Blood & Treasure]

1. I don't currently have a cornwall tag on the site: I suppose in the circumstances I should create one. ↩

Ever since Apple introduced the Reader feature to Safari, I've been forced to engage in the same ritual after every update to Safari. The thing is, Reader does quite a good job of rendering a cluttered web page readable, but it insists on doing it using justified text, which looks hideous. The (not very user-friendly) way to fix this was to find the Reader.html file buried inside the Safari application package and add a simple text-align: left; to the CSS embedded in that file and save it. Problem solved, except that after each Safari update you'd almost certainly have to repeat the trick. Better still, in some updates Apple changed the location of the damned file so you'd have to figure out where it lived now before you could apply the fix.

After the update to Safari 6 I found the latest home of the Reader.html file and applied my customary edit, but for some reason Safari ignored the revised CSS and kept on rendering justified text in Reader. In searching for hints as to why this might be happening, I came across a much better answer: CustomReader:

With CustomReader, you can change pretty much any aspect of Safari Reader's appearance. CustomReader's settings panel has a graphical user interface that lets you edit a few basic settings, like body font and background color, with a few clicks. But the true power of CustomReader lies in the Advanced tab, where you can directly edit the custom stylesheet that the extension inserts into Safari Reader. By editing this stylesheet, you can override any of Safari Reader's built-in styles with one of your own.

CustomReader has another feature that may be of interest to some. If you find yourself frequently invoking Safari Reader on a certain kind of page at a specific site – for instance, articles on the New York Times website – you can have CustomReader automatically enter the reader whenever you open that kind of page.

It works!¹ And with any luck it'll keep working after the next Safari update.

1. I do have one small quibble. That 'invoke Reader automatically if you visit a specific site' option requires you to enter an escaped version of the site's address: not www.independent.co.uk/, but //www\.independent\.co\.uk/.+. I understand why it's doing that – using a regexp allows for more flexibility in choosing which subsections of a site should trigger Reader – but surely there could be a simple 'trigger-for-this-entire-domain' option that would do the job for 95% of prospective users. But then, probably 98% of Safari users either don't care about text justification badly enough to see this as a problem that needs resolving, or else wouldn't want to touch the CSS for Reader anyway. ↩

Marco Arment¹ has been teasing us on his last few podcasts about his new iOS app, which was revealed last week as The Magazine.

Basically, it's an iOS-only magazine that asks for US$1.99 a month and promises in return to give you four articles every fortnight written by geeks, for geeks, but not necessarily about technology.

The app looks good and reads nicely even on a small screen like that of my iPod Touch, as you'd expect from the man who created Instapaper.² Navigating between articles is slick and speedy, a huge contrast to a heavier, more blatantly commercial product like the iPhone/iPod Touch edition of the New Yorker. Limitations on tweaking the way the content looks notwithstanding, The Magazine is clearly a child of the web, and all the better for it.

As to the content, essentially it's longish, self-contained pieces from people who've been publishing similar material on their blogs over the years, but who now have a chance to stretch out a bit and get paid along the way.

It probably didn't help that the jumping-off point for the first article in the free trial issue was about one of my least favourite notions to have gone the rounds of the Mac blogosphere in the last few months: the proposition that John Gruber invented the Linked List style of blogging about six years ago. Getting over that hump, I enjoyed what I read, but there's a problem.

[Where's the quote? Where's the link?]

Because for now Marco isn't posting the content on the app's web site as it's published in The Magazine, I can't link to a piece I liked to persuade you to read it, let alone to get you to subscribe to The Magazine to read more like this.³

Obviously I understand that the idea is for people to subscribe to The Magazine rather than read the authors' work for free online, but I have a nasty feeling that'll work about as well as it did for The Times of London. If you publish behind a paywall, aren't you cutting yourself off from the conversation taking place across any number of blogs? If the content isn't trying to be particularly timely then this may not be a major issue, but it still makes it harder for customers to persuade others by word of blockquote. At the very least, I hope that work published through The Magazine is displayed in full on the magazine's web site a month after publishing, so that we don't have to go haring off to the various authors' personal sites to track all that content down again.

For all that, I'm still going to let the automatic In-App purchase go through and follow The Magazine for a few issues.

1. Who I hope will forgive me, a total stranger, from calling him by his first name throughout this piece. I've been reading his blog, using his software and listening to his podcast for long enough now that it seems weirdly appropriate to be on first name terms with someone who has no idea that I exist. ↩
2. I find the lack of flexibility in setting up display preferences like choice of font, line spacing and so on to be a bit odd given how good Instapaper is at letting users adjust their reading to suit their taste. I can only imagine that Marco is trying to establish a brand here so he wants the app to look recognisable. ↩
3. Authors retain the right to publish their work from The Magazine one month later on their own web sites, but that's not much help when I've just read the article and want to tell you about it now. ↩

For thousands of years the Borg cubes tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across – which happened to be the Earth – where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire Borg battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Misquoted from Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The real story is a tad less dramatic, and nobody needs to get assimilated. The cubes are actually amateur radio satellites deployed from the ISS:

NASA have released photographs of the amateur radio CubeSats TechEdSat, F-1 and FITSAT-1 taken by an Expedition 33 crew member on the International Space Station (ISS).

[...]

The small satellites were transported to the ISS in the HTV-3 (Kounotori 3) cargo vessel that blasted off on an H-IIB rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center on Saturday, July 21 at 0206 UT.

The cargo vessel arrived at the ISS on July 27 and the ISS Canadarm2 robotic arm was used to install the HTV-3 to its docking port on the Earth-facing side of the Harmony module at 1434 UT. The CubeSats were then unloaded by the Expedition 32 crew.

[Via Bad Astronomy]

Courtesy of Maureen Dowd: President Obama seeks post-debate tips from a master…

The lights from the presidential motorcade illuminate a New Hampshire farmhouse at night in the sprawling New England landscape. JED BARTLET steps out onto his porch as the motorcade slows to a stop.

[...]

BARTLET They told you to make sure you didn't seem condescending, right? They told you, "First, do no harm," and in your case that means don't appear condescending, and you bought it. 'Cause for the American right, condescension is the worst crime you can commit.

OBAMA What's your suggestion?

BARTLET Appear condescending. Now it comes naturally to me -

OBAMA I know.

BARTLET It's a gift, but I'm likable and you're likable enough. Thirty straight months of job growth – blown off. G.M. showing record profits – unmentioned. "Governor, would you still let Detroit go bankrupt as you urged us to do four years ago?" – unasked. [...]

BARTLET [... That] was quite a display of hard-nosed, fiscal conservatism when he slashed one one-hundredth of 1 percent from the federal budget by canceling "Sesame Street" and "Downton Abbey." I think we're halfway home. Mr. President, your prep for the next debate need not consist of anything more than learning to pronounce three words: "Governor, you're lying." Let's replay some of Wednesday night's more jaw-dropping visits to the Land Where Facts Go to Die. "I don't have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don't have a tax cut of a scale you're talking about."

OBAMA The Tax Policy Center analysis of your proposal for a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut in all federal income tax rates, eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax, the estate tax and other reductions, says it would be a $5 trillion tax cut.

BARTLET In other words …

OBAMA You're lying, Governor. [...]

[Via The Morning News]

Scrollbars Through the History.

Really?

Nine out of the eleven pictures are of scrollbars from Apple's MacOS and iOS or Microsoft Windows, with one of the other two from NeXTstep (a.k.a. MacOSX's eccentric uncle) and the other of the Xerox Star (a.k.a. the grandfather of every other GUI shown). No room for scrollbars from other interesting Graphical User Interfaces from the 1980s and early 1990s?¹ For shame…

Digital Research GEM	Commodore Amiga Workbench	Acorn RISC OS	Palm OS	Psion EPOC32	X Window

[Via Daring Fireball]

1. Yes, I know that X Window was – among other things – a platform for building a GUI on rather than a standard interface, but there were a lot of systems that did just that. ↩

Paris In Motion (Part I):

[Via feeling listless]

An especially inspired segment from this week's podcast of This American Life: