Posts tagged: FUN

As seen recently on the Generator Blog (watch out for annoying popup ads) and Metafilter: ungreek.toolbot.com.

For years, designers have been using fake Latin gibberish known as greeking (or sometimes lorem ipsum, after the customary initial words) as a text placekeeper. It conveys the shape and “color” of text without the distraction of actual content.

Source options include the Esperantists’ Manifesto, Jane Eyre, the Tao Te Ching, the GNU Public License (in Swedish), Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida,” Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” Internet RFC 1630 by Tim Berners-Lee, and good old Lorem Ipsum.

Apple customers have a long tradition of griping about Apple’s silly naming policies. But I take it all back after going over this Kaypro timeline from the ’80s. Let’s see, in chronological order starting in 1982 we have:

• Kaypro II (the first model, so naturally we call it “II”)
• Kaypro IV
• Kaypro 10
• Kaypro 4 (totally different from the “IV” of course!)
• Kaypro 2 (totally… never mind)

This madness continued through several more models until the Kaypro 1 was released in 1986, at which point the company completely imploded, possibly due to a logic vacuum deep in its core or a breach in the space-time continuum.

Hitachi really made a splash with their “Hard Drive is the New Bling” promotion, or contest, or campaign, or practical joke, or whatever it is. We all had a good laugh and the writers of Engadget swore off the word “bling” forevermore. But the tin-eared marketing pales next to the sheer wrongness underneath.

The pitch wasn’t really about bling at all, or even geek bling. I imagine what it said before Cory Coolhunter in Marketing got hold of it was, “We should tell everybody that the best portable electronic devices use Hitachi microdrives.” I think in the end that will prove to have been briefly true. But microdrives are on the way out. They have no inherent advantages over flash (that I know of), so they only exist at a particular size tier as long as flash memory at that tier is significantly more expensive. This is surely obvious to everyone, except maybe to Hitachi – who don’t seem to make flash memory devices.

I’ve really started to get fed up with link farms, spam blogs, and other wastes of cyberspace that merely exist to trick naive users into a few AdSense clicks. Luckily, many of these sites are not very well constructed and so it’s possible to have some fun at their expense.

At some point I’d like to organize a competition where people submit screenshots and URLs from dopey sites that can be made to embarrass themselves. Here’s my submission (via my link redirector, to prevent any transfer of Google juice).

I got my hands on one of the new OWC Mercury Elite cases last week – the big one that looks most like a mini-G5 tower. I think it would make a fantastic casemod project for the Mini-ITX crowd (with a nano-ITX board, I’d guess). Imagine a little card-reader slot right where the CD/DVD drive is on the real PowerMac. Dare I say it would be cute?

The irony is that, if somebody builds such a thing, it will likely be Windows/Linux only – unless they do it by stuffing the guts of a Mini inside.

In the interest of perpetuating (or reviving) pointless flame wars, I offer this simple badge (now featured near the bottom of this page as well):

If you decide to have it tattooed on your bicep, send me a photo.

You can be FPS-illiterate like I am and still be fascinated by This Spartan Life, a talk show staged inside the Halo multiplayer game world. Guest and host (and “camerapeople”) attempt to have a cogent conversation while running around trying not to get shot by interlopers. Right now there’s one episode posted, divided into six segments, including interviews with filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh and multimedia innovator Bob Stein. The Stein segment is my favorite for its combination of substance, humor, and visual antics.