Gadgetopia

Barack Obama added you as a friend on Facebook. This is hilarious, no matter what party you call home.

Despite common assumptions that President-elect Barack Obama’s Cabinet nominees are told of their selection via personal phone calls, the Los Angeles Times has learned that the famously tech-friendly Mr. Obama is actually notifying his picks by “friending” them on the social networking site Facebook. Requests to Mr. Obama for comment on the following transcript have gone unanswered, though he did “poke” us just as this went to press.

The transcript that follows… I won’t spoil it; just click the link and read it!

Sean Penn Demands To Know What Asshole Took SeanPenn@ gmail.com:

In an impassioned 1,900-word open letter published in Monday’s Washington Post, actor-director Sean Penn urged the unknown person who registered the e-mail address SeanPenn@gmail.com to “come forward immediately, rather than wallowing in the shame and ignominy of fraud.”

Years ago, I went to get my first Hotmail account. I signed up for my name at Hotmail. It was taken. I was like, “Oh well…,” then “Hey, wait a minute…” After all, my name isn’t that common, I thought.

So I emailed the guy, and he responded. Very nice guy. He was a race car fabricator in California, and we had a great conversation about The Pass at Laguna Seca (at 1:01 or so) among other things. We had a lot in common it turned out.

Satellite Radio Still Reaches for the Payday: This is good article that reveals the current troubles with satellite radio. Sirius paid a lot for Howard Stern. Perhaps too much.

Although Mr. Stern brought listeners and prominence to Sirius, the move had a steep cost. His blockbuster, $500 million, five-year deal fueled a high-stakes competition between the two services that contributed to Sirius XM’s current bind.

Stern is talking of retiring in two years. If he stayed on, he wouldn’t get the crazy deal he got three years ago because of the economy, the condition of the company, and the fact that the move to Sirius kind of took him out of the mainstream. The article points out that you just don’t hear much out of Howard Stern anymore. He’s been…neutered.

Additionally, it’s up in the air as to how much competition Internet radio will provide. All you need is some cities to provide a Wimax network, and you could have a lot of people switch to some in-car Internet broadcast. Sure, they couldn’t listen to the same thing coast-to-coast, but that’s a theoretical benefit of Sirius that few people are actually in a position to use.

Sirius has a lot of debt that’s coming due that has to be refinanced, and that’s tough in the current economy, so no one can tell what’s going to happen with it.

I really did like this bit though, towards the end of the article.

MR. KARMAZIN [the CEO] is one of the few executives who can say his business really is rocket science. Next year Sirius XM will send another satellite into orbit, at a cost of $250 million to $300 million.

Three rocket scientists report to Mr. Karmazin. Whenever he receives e-mail from the person in charge of the satellite — even if it’s just a birthday wish or a thank-you note — the first words of the message have to be “the satellites are fine.”

For those of you who just can’t get enough of me, I’ve re-started my long-dormant personal blog: deanebarker.net. It’s low-volume, and full of stuff that I won’t post here — stuff that has nothing to do geekdom.

Come visit, and find a whole new set of reasons to dislike me.

A list of 2,070 Scientology cult domain names registered to domains@scientology.net: You can’t say the CoS hasn’t planned ahead…

The file contains 2,070 domain names registered to “domains@scientology.net”. Although not exactly a leak, the information is not freely available to the public, having being purchased at a cost of $521.00 from DomainTools.com

Time to Reboot America: Thomas Friedman goes on a rant about how the US has lost its edge in technology engineering compared to other countries.. It’s worth reading. Technologically speaking, is the US the first world anymore?

To top it off, we’ve fallen into a trend of diverting and rewarding the best of our collective I.Q. to people doing financial engineering rather than real engineering. These rocket scientists and engineers were designing complex financial instruments to make money out of money — rather than designing cars, phones, computers, teaching tools, Internet programs and medical equipment that could improve the lives and productivity of millions.

For all these reasons, our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors — as a result of our national drift. Look in the mirror: G.M. is us.

Restaurant Music: This is a borderline brilliant idea.

As my friends at Casa Mia know well, I’ve got strong opinions about music played in restaurants. Admittedly it’s a hard thing to get right: too much Perry Como and you risk losing the young rockers, too much Bedouin Soundclash and you loose the suits. Personally I would be a happy man if I never had to listen to Andrea Bocelli again for as long as I live.

So here’s my proposed solution: each restaurant should have its own last.fm group and invite customers to become members of the group (here’s a group I’ve created for Casa Mia as an experiment; feel free to join it).

The Shorty Awards - The best producers of short content on Twitter in 2008: Twitter comedians, your day has come.

The best producers of short* content in 2008 […] *140 characters or less, on Twitter

The Shorty Awards honor the world’s top Twitterers. You can nominate as many people for as many categories as you’d like until midnight December 31st.

Bought a book today on Amazon. After checkout, I was prompted with the above — for another $9.99, I could get electronic access to my book right away. Additionally, I could do the same for seven other books I had purchased in the past.

(And, yes, I have read “Code Complete” before, and discussed it here a couple times. But I needed seven more copies, because all Blend developers are going to study the book together throughout 2009. I’m totally excited about it.)

Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing: A 40th Anniversary Celebration: Forty years ago today, the world of personal computing changed with a demo at PARC.

[…] for the first time, the public saw a computer mouse, which controlled a networked computer system to demonstrate hypertext linking, real-time text editing, multiple windows with flexible view control, cathode display tubes, and shared-screen teleconferencing.

They’re having a reunion of sorts, so if you’re in the area, drop by and take a picture.

If you’re interesting in the history of PARC, I recommend a great book called Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. Great book.

Programming books are often too afraid to assume anything. You see huge tomes about ASp.net and PHP/MySQL development that start from the absolutely beginning, to the point of including chapters about what a database is and how it works.

This often drives me nuts. What about people who have come really far with a language already? We’re not looking for a recap — we’re looking for the secret sauce that’s going to take us to next level…and we’re already on level 50 or so.

Put another way, I’m already riding a purple dragon that spits nerve gas and farts nuclear waste. Don’t talk to me about magic short swords.

I encountered this for the first time with Eric Meyer on CSS four years ago. I said this:

In the end, the book wasn’t for me. If you’re a CSS hacker of some repute, you’re probably not going to get a lot out of this book. […] I was really looking for some wicked tips and theories to earn myself entrance to CSS Nirvana.

As you get more and more skilled, it becomes a problem finding books that start where your knowledge ends and go further. That’s not to say you know everything, but you often find yourself skimming through a 1,000 page reference to find maybe one or two tips to add to your arsenal. How many times have you bought a book for a single chapter?

I was prompted to write this post because I was in Barnes and Noble this afternoon and stumbled on More Effective C#, which exactly the kind of book I can rarely find. I started paging through it, and I can safely say my mind was thoroughly blown by about page 20. This is a book that assumes you have Neo-like C# skillz and goes from there. I wish there were more of these.

I think that at a certain point, we’ll see more and more ebooks that cater to the non-beginner. I’m reminded of the two ebooks by Chris Love that I discussed in this post. These are two titles with assume a lot of knowledge and build upon that, without any room for recapping the basics.

If anyone has titles of books that assume a lot of knowledge about a platform and build on that, please comment. I’m curious in finding out what they have in common, who is publishing them, and how they approach and warn the potential buyer of the fact that they’re leaving Kansas by the end of the preface.

It’s been two weeks since I hooked up my son’s X-Box to Netflix. Some thoughts on how it’s going:

• The biggest problem is movie selection. They have 12,000 movies to watch instantly, but it’s still a trick sometimes to find something you want to watch. On the other hand, this encourages you to watch films you might not otherwise bother with, which can be good.

  “Then She Found Me” is a perfect example. I never would have watched it had it been outshone but the latest Hollywood blockbusters. Annie and I loved it.

  I would pay extra for better movie selection (are you listening, Netflix?).

• The documentaries are great. I’ve watched “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” “Mondovino,” “Word Wars” (this was so good), and “Helvetica.” These are movies I don’t see on the shelves at Blockbuster.

• I can’t decide if the on-screen controls are great or crap. When you fast-forward or rewind, it goes 10 seconds at a time, and shows you a still of that moment in time. What’s nice is that the stills are in a line, so you can be looking two stills down to see what you’re coming up on. The bad part is that it has to re-buffer the stream when you want to start watching again.

• A couple times, my movie has stopped saying, “Your Internet connection has slowed…” and explaining that they were modifying the quality to compensate. At least once, when the movie came back, it was with considerably less quality.

• Some movies aren’t available on the X-Box for no discernible reason. Annie and I wanted to watch “Superbad.” We added it to our Instant Queue, but it wouldn’t come up on the X-Box. Later, we found a note next to the movie listing in the queue that it “wasn’t available on X-Box.”

• The X-Box saves your place in the stream, and the interface shows you how much of the film you’ve completed in percent. What’s neat is that this transfers back to your Netflix account, so if you start the movie again on your computer, you start in the same place as you left on the X-Box. You can also rate the movies right from the X-Box account, and those transfer back to Netflix. In short, the whole thing is two-way — everything you do on X-Box gets back to Netflix, and vice-versa.

• Watching movies on the computer isn’t bad either. I watched the Enron documentary sitting in my recliner in my room with my laptop.

• One time, the X-Box couldn’t start my movie. It just gave an error message.

Other than that, it’s been good. Good enough that we’re going to go beyond the free-trial and start paying for it. I’m doing this in the hope that movie selection will gradually improve.

On top of the online movies, I got three DVDs in the mail through the traditional Netflix by-mail system.

One thing this has brought to my attention, however, is that bandwidth into the house could become a problem. The quality of playback depends on what is happening on the computer. If my son is streaming something over Hulu, you can tell in the picture quality. There may be a point when we have to figure out how to do better than cable Internet.

What’s the next step for Gadgetopia? To date, it’s been a blog, and a pretty successful one, I think. But, growth is more or less flat, and I’m trying to figure out where to go with it next.

So, dear reader, I come to you. What could Gadgetopia do that would add value to you?

We’ve toyed with the idea of expanding to a “community,” which would, in the short-term, involve adding a forum so all you long time readers can have some two-way conversations with people you’ve known from comment threads. I think the group of readers we have is great, and I know I’d like a more informal space in which to bounce questions off of some of you.

Let me know your thoughts on it. Is there something about Gadgetopia that we could change or expand to makes things more interesting around here?

Or should I just shut up and keep posting?

I’ve done something brutal to my lower back. Sitting is painful. Standing is painful. My only option is to lie down, a position my chiropractor encourages because it causes the swelling of the offending disk to go down. And he’s right — after laying down flat for a couple hours, I’m pretty functional for a couple more.

But, how can I work prone? I can read, I can watch TV, but how can I…code? Does anyone have any experience or good ideas here?

Green Any Site: Here’s a brilliant little idea from long-time Gadgetopia reader Tal Ater.

He’s created a series of affiliate accounts with various online merchants. He donates 100% of the proceeds paid to those affiliates to environmental causes.

So, how does he get people to buy under the affiliate accounts? This is from an email he sent me:

The “green this purchase” link is actually an affiliate link, created in real-time based on where you clicked the bookmarklet from, and leading right back to where you were shopping… So when you click the bookmarklet, you’re basically telling the site that GreenAnySite sent you, and they pay us a commission for referring you… We then donate 100% of the affiliate fees we get to environmental organizations (chosen and voted on by GAS users).

So, if this takes off, Tal has essentially forced retailers to give 10% (or whatever) of their proceeds to the environment, whether they like it or not.

The only danger I can see is that the retailers would figure it out, realize he wasn’t actually driving new traffic, and close his affiliate accounts. But, if enough word gets out about it, perhaps that would be detrimental from a PR perspective?

Regardless, great little idea.