Dali Clock 2.35
Dali Clock 2.35 is out now, and in the app store.
It now takes advantage of the iPhone 4's higher resolution screen. I also fixed some rotation glitches on the iPad, and the font-images have been regenerated on all platforms to remove some animation artifacts that probably nobody but me has ever noticed.
Tags: computers, daliclock, firstperson, mac, phones
iPhone SMS logs moved
They changed the file names. If you've been using my sms-backup-iphone.pl script from cron, it hasn't been working since you upgraded your phone to iOS 4.x. Get the new version. (Update: Actually, maybe the file names changed with a recent version of iTunes, not the phone's OS. Not sure which. Same result.)
Tags: computers, firstperson, mac, phones
Casting Call: One-legged woman who wants machine gun replacement
Eyeborg Project - CASTING CALL: "One-legged woman who wants machine gun replacement" wanted...I am close to getting film funding for my Eyeborg doc and one of the documentary subjects I need on board is some one, like me, who wants to Pimp Their Gimp.
(1) You can be from anywhere but preferably close to Toronto where I am from. If you truly kick ass though it doesnʼt matter. I will find a way.
(2) We are going to help build you a paint ball machine gun leg and video document the process.
(3) When it"s all over you are going to take out dozens of dudes in a paintball gun match shot Robert Rodriguez style.
(4) Your missing leg should be machine gun appropriate.
(I know I have an appropriate "previously" for this but I can't find it...)
DNA Lounge: Wherein we learn How Not to Run a Club.
I just read Peter Hook's book, The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club, and it's hilarious. (Surely "How Not to Run a Club" could have been the title of this ten-year-old blog, as well, right?) It starts like this:
"Right," I storm back in to see Suzanne, who runs the kitchen. "Your bucket's over there," she says.This is one of the perks of management: because we didn't put in enough toilets when we built the bloody place, you can never get a piss. Plus I always get hassle in the bogs anyway. So I'm the proud user of a Hellmann's mayonnaise bucket with my name on it, which stays in the kitchen. It's a source of great hilarity to everyone (until they want a piss too). Suzanne actually has a great trick of getting people to hold it for a while. Then when they ask "What's this for?" she tells them. Ah well, little things please little minds.
However: "No, I don't want a piss, love," I tell her. "Just a breather."
Refreshed, I come out and spot a line of bouncers weilding baseball bats, all of them headed for the back corner. They go in and beat the shit out of some gangsters.
And it pretty much goes downhill from there.
Much of this book is very, very familiar. Depressingly familiar. Obviously the stories I'd heard about the Haçienda were an inspiration, but... wow.
Tags: dnalounge
Current Music: This Mortal Coil -- The Horizon Bleeds and Sucks Its Thumb ♬
Retrocomputing: Clay Tablets.
Literary Magazine to Print on Dead Media -- Clay TabletsFaced with steep printing costs and the bulk of their readership downloading the online PDF of the magazine, the editors of Space Squid made the decision to return to clay tablets. Space Squid communications editor Matthew Bey says, “Given the choice between printing 2000 paper copies that won’t last ten years, or thirty copies that can last six thousand years, it’s an easy choice to make.”
The clay tablets are unfired as was common practice in Sumeria. Like their historical antecedents they are dried in the sun, giving them a startling durability. “Practically speaking, these tablets could last until the end of the world itself,” says Chang. “Unless someone drops them.”
The Space Squid clay tablet is the first major cultural application of clay tablets since the collapse of Egyptian colonialism in the first century A.D. The tablets are printed using a unique technology that allows multiple impressions of the same text, despite recording on a medium that pre-dates Gutenberg by thousands of years.
Says Bey, “If the Sumerians had been as clever as Space Squid and developed a similar clay-printing technology, they would have sparked the enlightenment era a thousand years before the birth of Christ.”
The clay tablet issue contains most of the content familiar to readers of the paper version of Space Squid. Side one has a seal-imprint with the image of a squid and the name “Space Squid” in phonetic cuneiform. The rest of the front-face features a short story by Kevin Brown titled “Hunting Bigfoot,” hand-lettered in the English alphabet using a wedged stylus in the same manner as the Sumerian scribes. The back side contains an off-color joke and advertisements for the Drabblecast podcast, the movie Bikini Bloodbath, illustrator David Johnston, Krakatoa Shirts, and a live performance of the graphic novel Intergalactic Nemesis.
DNA Lounge: Wherein the Infoline Robot gets an upgrade.
Hey, give our infoline number a call -- 415-626-1409.
In this modern world, I'm not really sure whether it's worth even having such a thing, but that's our oldest phone number -- I've seen it on flyers from 1986!
Until now, I had no idea how many people ever called that number or whether they listened to the message at all, because the phone company refuses to give us those statistics. Yes, that's ridiculous. No, we couldn't get it out of them after many, many phone calls. We also couldn't get them to give us a number that both A) let us leave a multi-minute outgoing message and B) had voicemail turned off so that people couldn't leave messages on it. Such service from those guys.
Anyway, I've just switched it to use Twilio, which is pretty cool. So now not only will we actually get logs, but we can get the recording up there automatically, instead of having to update it manually by either reading it out loud, or holding the phone up to a computer reading it. Twilio has a pretty neat system. Their end handles the phone network and speech synthesis, and they pull an XML URL off of my server where the behavior is defined -- e.g., they do a POST to my URL when you press a keypad key, and I return a new XML document.
It can also do SMS responses, but I haven't gotten that working yet. I'm not sure how useful that will be, but it might be nice to be able to SMS something to 626-1409 and get back a text saying what's going on here in the next few days.
There are lot of systems out there where you can sign up for SMS notifications. It would be pretty easy to build something like that, but since I can't personally imagine ever wanting that, I'm not sure what I'd do with it. They exist, though, so other people must use them?
"Making a note here: huge ambient success."
Still Alive from Portal, slowed down 800%
(And the less funny one that is also making the rounds, posted only so that 30 of you don't post it as a comment.)
