the institute of hybernautics

lovely cover of a song from an album that changed my life.

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:32:34 -0500

lovely cover of a song from an album that changed my life.

Thom Yorke - Follow Me Around - Live at Latitude 2009

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:35:53 -0500

Thom Yorke - Follow Me Around - Live at Latitude 2009

(via gdgt live)

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:55:27 -0500

(via gdgt live)

“The Soul of New Orleans is in a city reborn, and a...

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 12:01:45 -0500

“The Soul of New Orleans is in a city reborn, and a football team and the people who love it.” (via @brianoberkirch)

Probably the best Ghillie-suited marching band video...

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:50:02 -0500

Probably the best Ghillie-suited marching band video you’ll see this week: OK Go - This Too Shall Pass on Vimeo

Dream-Captcha (via reddit)

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 21:09:53 -0500

Dream-Captcha (via reddit)

Photo

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:04:51 -0500

Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’...

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:53:37 -0500

Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization (via @aaronwhite)

Parrot AR.Drone : Flight Demo (HD version) Too bad they...

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:05:10 -0500

Parrot AR.Drone : Flight Demo (HD version) Too bad they don’t show much of the iphone UI.

Big surf on Peahi (via @russhans)

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:50:56 -0500

Big surf on Peahi (via @russhans)

Modern Warfare 2 Mythbusters: Episode 1 - fun with bouncing...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:37:55 -0500

Modern Warfare 2 Mythbusters: Episode 1 - fun with bouncing knives

Exploiting MW2's 'Javelin Glitch' Will Get You Banned, Says XBL - Kotaku

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:25:43 -0500

Exploiting MW2's 'Javelin Glitch' Will Get You Banned, Says XBL - Kotaku:

It’s just annoying in Team Deathmatch, but it can destroy objective games like Domination and HQ.

“I’m at the stage now where you get homesick, so you...

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:47:55 -0500

“I’m at the stage now where you get homesick, so you go out into the desert and sort of…stare at nothing. It’s intense.”

“Microsoft Store Breaks Out into Song” is the new...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:59:23 -0500

“Microsoft Store Breaks Out into Song” is the new “Windows 7 Launch Party” (via @daringfireball)

brit: This is freaking amazing. mdfsmash: An open letter to...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:20:06 -0500

brit:

This is freaking amazing.

mdfsmash:

An open letter to Stephen Colbert from Miracle Whip, as seen in this morning’s amNewYork:

Dear Mr. Colbert,

Recently on your show, you tapped into a sore spot in our nation’s psyche: the eternal struggle between mayonnaise and Miracle Whip. And surprisingly, for a man of your impeccable intellect, you’ve chosen the wrong side. A side doomed to a painful, drawn-out, utter and complete defeat. Like the Plantagenets in the Hundred Years’ War. Or whichever one was the cat in “Tom and Jerry.”

Mr. Colbert, we found your attacks a little harsh, occasionally funny, and at times, wholly inaccurate (for the record, our target is 18-35, not 34). But unlike most advertisers who are so mayo, who would back down at the slightest whiff of controversy, and pull their advertising from not just your show but from your entire network and all its sister entities – we intend to do the opposite.

On Thursday, November 12, we will dominate the airspace on your show. With every commercial break, your viewers will be exposed to hardcore Miracle Whip attitude and revelry. You will see our legion of (as you call them) “mayonay-sayers” snarfing sandwiches topped with our one-of-a-kind flavor in a very cool and totally hip way. They will be in your face and massively dope. It goes without saying, they WILL NOT TONE IT DOWN. And you will begin to see the soft, bland white walls of the mayo empire begin to collapse under the weight of its own whipped-egg pretentiousness.

Think about it, Mr. Colbert. In a sense, we will own you.

We’re on a mission. We’re taking no prisoners.

We’re raising Hell, man.

THE BOLD MARKETING TEAM AT MIRACLE WHIP

Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany (BBC documentary)

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:17:21 -0500

Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany (BBC documentary)

Chorus iPhone app: bloaty, useless, and socially awkward

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:24:00 -0500

I gave Chorus a try…so you don’t have to.

Chorus seemed like a good idea when I read about it: iPhone app discovery based on what your friends are using. With 100K apps in the store, it’s tough to sort out the great ones, and I would love to know what my friends are using. But I don’t want to explicitly ask for recommendations, or require anyone to do any extra typing. This information could be passively shared and aggregated in the way Last.fm did for music. Something like I Use This that was wired to my iPhone and my social network.

This is not what Chorus does.

Chorus started out by using my Twitter credentials not to populate my friend list, but to autotweet the following without my explicit confirmation:

And then they filled my empty friends list with so-called Mavens, complete strangers whose opinions are exactly as useful to me as App Store ratings.

Chorus then showed me 3 pages worth of app icons, asking if I liked any of them. I recognized a few, but it was clear that this was not the list of apps on my phone, but some Netflix-like list of known apps. I had only used one out of the complete list, so…pretty useless.

I assume that it’s not physically possible for one app to see the other apps on an iPhone—a pretty serious technical hurdle that Apple threw in Chorus’ path to success. As an alternative, they have something like the Last.fm “scrobbler” program to run on your desktop. Where the Last.fm scrobbler is a tiny daemon that watches your iTunes “now playing” status and posts that info to Last.fm’s web service, the Chorus “Content Gobbler” is a bloated piece of AIR crapware which, after the tedious yak-shaving of a lengthy install process and AIR software update, consumed as much memory and swap space as it possibly could, then crashed.

Giving up on the Memory Gobbler, I went back to the Chorus app itself, looking for the simple way to rate the apps that I use. No such luck. If you happen to come across an app that you want to rate in the “Activity Stream” of the people who only 10 minutes ago were random strangers, you can review it. But it takes 7 actions to reach the same 5-star rating that you know from the App Store interface. Huh? I can only assume that my opinion must not be very useful to Chorus, or they might have made it a bit easier to collect. Oh, and when you rate an app in Chorus, it auto-tweets twice.

And then you disable Twitter in Chorus altogether.

I did buy one app that I stumbled across via Chorus, so they made a few dimes off me. And despite the 5-star rating from a complete stranger, that app kind of sucked, too.

Mobile Home Liquidator Commercial (via @twwalsh)

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:40:21 -0500

Mobile Home Liquidator Commercial (via @twwalsh)

Offside!

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:02:15 -0500

Offside!

Radiohead - These Are My Twisted Words - Prague, Czech Republic...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:55:47 -0500

Radiohead - These Are My Twisted Words - Prague, Czech Republic - August 23, 2009 (HD multicam)