Interesting links and notes on updates to my main website.



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bg 2.7

I liked it.
It looks awesome played from my computer over VGA to the W2600.
Even though the W2600 does have some display issues (vertical banding) even in computer display mode. The greens are amazing. You can really get the "filmed in BC" feel.

As a side note, I haven't been liking these hail of bullets gunbattles recently.

The Chief etc. on Kobol was good, people died, realistic.

But the battle on Caprica between Starbuck and the pyramid people before they knew who they were, and some other human-cylon gunfights have been dumb.

When you have slow handguns or muskets, you can do this "I'll lean out and shoot, then you lean out and shoot" thing. Ever since machineguns, this hasn't made any sense. With machineguns, it would go like this: "I'll lean out and aaaaaaaaugh".

According to tv.com (formerly tvtome?) season 2 episode list we are now on a gap until September 9.

Labels: battlestar galactica

posted by Richard at 20:44 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

rants to the editor

I'm in the Globe Letters to the Editor today. Here's as much as you can see for free online:

This Just In?

Ottawa -- I was greatly relieved to unfold The Globe and Mail and see Diana, Princess of Wales on the front page (Conspiracy Theory Deflated In Death Of Faded Idol Diana -- Aug. 26). Clearly, all important problems of world violence, poverty and hunger must have been solved if a report about a 1997 car accident is a leading story in Canada's national newspaper.

The printed version continues:

I can only hope that in future you will find some way to mention both Diana and Karla H0m01ka in a news story, thereby combining the ultimate in pointless celebrity obsession and horror.

Here's the original email I sent them, the subject was "all the news that's fit to print":

I was greatly relieved to unfold the Globe today and see Diana, Princess of Wales on the front page. Clearly all important problems of world violence, poverty and hunger must have been solved yesterday, if a report about a 1997 car accident is the lead story in Canada's national newspaper.

I can only hope that in future you will find some way to mention both Diana and Karla in a news story, thereby combining the ultimate in pointless celebrity obsession and horror.

Yours faithfully,

posted by Richard at 08:50 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

blogger adds layer of comment protection

Blogger has added a word verification option to try to make it harder to do automated spamming of comments. posted by Richard at 13:27 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

Canon announces PowerShot S80, switches to SD/MMC

Read about the new Canon announcements on Macintouch. Hopped over to DPreview for more info.

DPreview Canon launches the new look 8.0 Megapixel PowerShot S80

I didn't notice it in the DPreview report (although it is there), but when I ran a comparison on PowerShot.com I found that the S80 uses the smaller SD/MMC memory cards rather than the Compact Flash used on the S70 and in previous Canon cameras (like my S20).

So if you have a bunch of CF cards, you may want to get an S70 over an S80,
of course nowadays a gig of SD is cheap anyway (between $130 and $180 at FutureShop). posted by Richard at 15:35 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

what countries show up in the news

I have to express my perpetual amazement that Israel shows up in the news every single day. That is one teeny tiny country. Even better, the news is about the Gaza Strip and such. Do you know how big the Gaza Strip is? It's like 4 km wide. Seriously. A hijillion billion news stories about a few thousand Israelis (and over a million Palestinians) in a space smaller than some North American / Australian back yards.

Anyway, this rant to get me to a couple of visual displays of world attention to countries, as measured by news reporting:

Vanishing Point
Global Attention Profiles

Vanishing Point via WorldChanging (indirectly).

UPDATE 2005-08-22: Buzztracker is another news visualization thing. They also provide a Dashboard widget. (Isn't it great that both Dashboard and Konfab use "widget", so we can't tell what software is for what platform?) posted by Richard at 20:38 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)