Remember back in January when I ‘fixed’ the cover of INXS’s ‘Kick’ album cover?
Well, since then, people have been sending me feedback suggesting how I could have improved it further. Including, unbeknownst to me at the time, the actual album cover’s creator, Nick Egan. (His suggestion for improving it was not to have modified it at all, naturally.)
Today, however, I got another email followed by what is quite possibly the best suggestion of them all via voicemail. I share them with you now:
Subject: YOU’RE A PRIZE GINGER CUNT, DUDE.Who or what are you?
Opinions are a universal rite.
What you did deserves your balls kicking into your kidneys.
‘ I fixed it ‘ ? The most arrogant piece of shit I’ve ever read online in 16 years. Next time I’m over I’ll come for a chat about poetry and music so I don’t miss out on your wisdom. Saying shit like that with your phone number and address attached would get you bounced from here to FUCKING Spain where I’m from … Dude. Don’t get a life, give it up. Waste of food you cheeky prick.Hope you fail in everything you do. You FUCKING Ginger Minge Tit .
Normal link for when the embed doesn’t work.
Could somebody translate that for me? As an American, I can only pick out a few words…
What I did get out of it, however, is that I should keep my opinions to myself, rather than put them out on the Internet where people can plainly see that I was trying to be an idiot, as I do regularly. (Like all the times I solved global warming, the time I solved the inherent eruption of Mt. St. Helens, all the times I solved the fuel crisis, etc.)
It’s kind of scary getting a (surprisingly polite) threatening voicemail message, but that scariness doesn’t outweigh the irony of someone actually calling me to share his opinion regarding my not sharing my opinion.
Nick, it appears that my attempt to sound like a dumbass on the Internet has succeeded far better than I’d intended, which I truly regret. I really do hate that skateboard at the top, but that’s just my opinion. ‘Fixing’ your album cover is purely in jest, however, and clearly falls under fair use / parody. As I think it’s pretty clear by now that I’m just a dumbass and not intentionally trying to disrespect your or your work, I’d really appreciate it if you’d call off your goons. Thanks.
Google I/O was amazing, and I’d like to share the most important things I took away from it. Well, except for the free Motorola Droid and Sprint EVO 4G that I took away from it — I’m not sharing those. :)
The big news was Android 2.2, which in addition to amazing stuff like wirelessly streaming your iTunes library, also leverages a clever bit of behind the scenes magick that enables a 3x-5X speed increase on the same hardware running 2.1. They demoed this a few times with very dramatic results. It is way, way faster. This huge performance gain shatters one of the main reasons I’ve been maintaining that Flash on Android is simply not going to be usable; in fact, much to my chagrin, I have to report that Flash works very, very well on Android.
Speaking of Flash, there was a demo of what I believe to be the fabled “Flash killer” everyone has been hoping will come along to eventually put us out of our miseries. Many have tried (and failed) to come up with a Flash killer, but this time they have — in my opinion — actually done it. The surprising thing to me isn’t that someone has managed to do it, but, rather, that it’s Adobe themselves that are responsible. Adobe demoed the new integration between Illustrator and their new CSS-editing powerhouse version of Dreamweaver, effectively creating a very “Flash-like” experience of animating and interacting with elements using entirely open HTML5 and CSS based technology. In a couple minutes they created some remarkably interactive animated stuff with just a few clicks in Illustrator and Dreamweaver, outputting web content that will work in any modern browser without any annoying plugins/runtimes. Adobe has seen the benefit of making open tech take the place of proprietary black boxes, and are embracing it head on rather than fighting it off. Kudos, Adobe.
All that nerd stuff aside, the big exciting thing is GoogleTV. Many have tried to merge the web and television in the past, with downright comical results, so any additional attempts to achieve it are going to have to really ‘wow’ people. Google has now taken up the challenge, and I think they’re really onto something.
Without going into too much detail, here’s what they’ve done: searchable television. No more annoying guides showing you what’s on right now; with GoogleTV, you can search for stuff to watch just like you search the Internet. You get a search bar, you type something into it, and you get results. Those results could be things that are on right now, they could be things that your DVR recorded for you, they could be things that are on in the future (and clicking them will make your DVR record them for you) or they could be things that are available to stream right now via Netflix, Hulu, YouTube or any site that you can stream from in your computer’s desktop browser. Because GoogleTV is a browser, complete with the Flash plugin required to view most of that streaming content today. In addition to watching television content like this, GoogleTV has access to the Android Market, giving you access to the same thousands of applications you can run on your Android phone — on your TV.
There are a lot of other cool things that GoogleTV can do, but the main selling point is that you no longer have to care where your television comes from. It could be live TV, something from your DVR, something from Hulu — it really doesn’t matter, and you don’t have to think about it. You just know you want to watch 30 Rock, so you simply type “30 Rock” into your fancy GoogleTV remote and get a list of episodes to watch.
There were many other exciting things, but many of them may still be too nerdy to be interesting to most people, so I’m just hitting the points I think people will care about. Android is now really, really fast and can deliver a fantastic Flash experience (if that sort of thing is your bag), which could be a viable alternative for those who want an iPhone/iPad but complain that they can’t view Flash. GoogleTV may well change the way television is watched — and maybe down the road be able to help shake up the control cable/satellite providers have over bundling content we don’t want with the content we do.
The future is going to be awesome.
I’ve arrived safe and sound at the San Francisco Mariott Marquis, despite the city’s valiant efforts to prevent my arrival by way of shifting one-way streets that’ve learned a trick or two from the Weeping Angels about reconfiguring when you look away.
The San Francisco Mariott Marquis doesn’t have free Wi-Fi — but that’s only a minor inconvenience because Droid Does. Not sure how well Verizon is going to handle providing my only Internet access for a few days, but I guess we’ll find out. At least I’ll be over at I/O mos of the time, and there’s supposed to be real Wi-Fi there.
Once I’ve relaxified a bit more I’m going to head over to the Marscipone Center to get my Google I/O registration stuff all taken care of before the rush, and I’ll find out what the Wi-Fi situation will be.
I’m off to lovely San Francisco to take part in Google I/O. I was going to use the latest in technological innovations to embed a Google Wave here into which I could post live updates, but I couldn’t figure out how. Sorry.
The Google Wave team is sure going to hear from me at I/O…
UPDATE 2/11/2010: Updated the included unswindle to the latest version, fixes errors on unDRMed books.
UPDATE 2/27/2010: Added specification that users install the 32-bit version of python 2.6 for Windows, even on 64-bit systems.
UPDATE 4/30/2010: Added link to older version of Kindle for PC
People have been asking me if there’s a way to convert Kindle books downloaded with Amazon’s Kindle For PC application pretty much since the day it was released. Sadly, despite a lot of tinkering on my part, there was no elegant solution* until now.
A fantastic Kindle For PC conversion tool has been made. And it works really, really well. And it is significantly easier than the old “Kindle-only” method.
Here’s how it works:
0) Install Kindle for PC. The latest version of Kindle for PC has broken the scripts, so install this older version, and make sure you disable automatic updates in Kindle for PC’s settings.
1) Install 32-bit python 2.6 for Windows from here (even if your system is 64-bit you need the 32-bit version in order for this to work) : http://www.python.org/download/
2) Download unswindle.pyw and mobidedrm.py via this zip file and unzip it somewhere on your PC
3) Open the unzipped folder and double-click unswindle.pyw
Kindle For PC will now open.
4) Select the book you want to convert.
5) When the book loads, simply exit Kindle For PC
A ‘Save’ dialog will open asking you where you want to save your new decrypted .mobi file. And we’re done.
(As it uses mobidedrm, it still won’t work on Topaz/.tpz files, and the first one I tried happened to be one. Still, most books will work.)