Welcome to my new home
So, over the years I had a few domain names that I called home, but none of them really felt like home. I think I got more excited that I found a domain that wasn’t squatted and tried to shoehorn my home into it, but instead I felt that the name didn’t fit and tried to move on.
For two years I tried to find the right domain name. Some of you know how hard it was when I said “ooh, I got it”, only to find the domain was taken 10 years ago, or in one case, three days earlier.
Then came the time when I was desperate. I spent two weeks on and off trying everything I could. Yes, people have said that the name doesn’t matter, the content is what’s important. The problem I had with that is it almost felt like I had to register sdlkfjsldfjdl.com just to have SOMETHING unique.
While going through the list of domains that fell back into the internet gene pool the day before, the suffix “istry” caught my eye. It wasn’t geekistry itself, it was some other domain, but I checked on geekistry and lo and behold, it was available. I had bought something like six domains that week just to have another home I can shoehorn into, but geekistry seemed to fit much more than other domains I bought. I wanted the site to be memorable, and if things go well, be a place where readers (and viewers?) could come and find things that interest them. I liked the name more and more so I just registered it to be sure I had it, let it sit in my head for a day or so, and fell in love with it.
What will this site have? I can’t tell you everything 
. I have a bunch of ideas floating around in my head, but hopefully everything that I’ve envisioned will show up here. We’ll see.
Twitter just lobotomized itself
One of the strengths of Twitter was the ability to see people that your friends replied to. For example: I follow Seth. Seth follows Brad. However, I don’t follow Brad. I could turn on an option that saw Seth’s replies to Brad. I like what they’re talking about so I follow Brad. There was a setting in Twitter that allowed you to see the people your friends replied to. I loved it. I found new friends that way like @samtaters because she was talking with @tapps about #actb. Had this feature not been available, I never would have become friends with Samantha.
Now Twitter calls this feature ‘confusing’ and removed it. REMOVED IT. Twitter, are you f’n STUPID? The whole POINT of your service is to find others with like interests to connect with. Now you’ve removed that feature and all of a sudden, I don’t have any more Samathas or Brads to find in my stream. This makes Twitter about half as useful as it used to be.
Not only that, but Twitter hasn’t gotten a true business model yet, and already you’re pissing off the users. A stupid financial move if you ask me.
If anyone from Twitter is out there reading this, you made a horrible move. Put that feature back, or make it ‘advanced’ if you think people are too ‘confused’ by it.
Either way, FIX IT.
You can read their logic behind this here: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/small-settings-update.html
Warp Speed
Star Trek needed this.
It’s unfortunate that the path of events in the past led to what could have been Star Trek’s demise, but the planets aligned properly and the franchise found its way into the hands of JJ Abrams and his crew to do what seemed to be impossible. This is the same team that put together Alias and Lost, and they were given the task of bringing Star Trek back to the big screen. This was not trivial, lots of care had to be taken to ensure that it appealed to many people, and didn’t piss off the old school fans. Did they do it? Read on.
I’ve been a Trek fan practically since I was born. It became a part of my life in such strange ways. It sparked my interest in astronomy, the Star Trek Technical Manual, while fictional (and I knew it), made me curious about technology. Seeing the list of ships in Starfleet gave a sense of scope to a show that, had it not had as good of a creative team behind it, could have fallen into obscurity. Over the years we saw Star Trek brought to life on the big screen, brought back to the small screen, and unfortunately had been put on life support. Bones couldn’t save it.
With time came the inability for the original cast to reprise their roles. Unfortunately, Deforest Kelly (McCoy) and James Doohan (Scotty) had passed away, Kirk’s character was killed in Generations, and so the chances of seeing the original crew with the original cast had become impossible. There was only one way to solve this problem which was to recast the characters.
It was a shame that Trek faded the way it did. It’s a show that had the elements of perfection inside it, but the ingredients alone can’t make it awesome, you need someone to take them and put them together properly. JJ’s team did just that.
Star Trek’s premise is one that isn’t new to fans: vengeance and time travel. I was very dubious about this since to me, every time travel movie or episode can always be fixed by simply going back even further, and preventing what caused the changes in the timeline to occur. It was very difficult for me to finally come to terms with enjoying First Contact for that very reason since the Borg didn’t have to go to Earth to go back in time. Still, I was able to shove that logical part of my brain into the closet for a while and enjoy the film for what it was.
The writing team did a wonderful job of not screwing up the ‘canon’ of Star Trek by making this timeline their own. Star Trek, from now on, lives in this timeline. And yet, the timeline itself seems to bow to destiny as the bridge crew finds their way together again. This comes at great expense; the ripples of which will not be known unless the writing team decides to tell us how this affects the Federation in future installments.
The bottom line is that the movie is damn fun. There are so many familiarities to the original show, and it’s still written so that people watching the movie who have never seen a single episode will still enjoy these characters. Chris Pine does a great job as Kirk, but he’s not our Kirk, nor should he be. Pine takes the essence of the character and makes Kirk his own. Zachary Quinto does a phenomenal job as Spock. It was almost as if Quinto was destined to do this role. Karl Urban’s portrayal of McCoy is lovely. DeForest Kelly was so damn good as McCoy in the original show, you’d think that nobody could ever equal him, but Urban hits a bullseye in bringing the anxiety of McCoy’s character to life.
I was very happy with the rest of the supporting cast as well. Zoë Saldana finally takes Uhura’s character, who’s been mostly neglected over the years, and breathes life into her. Simon Pegg does a brilliant job as Scotty. He nails it as much as Urban nailed McCoy’s character.
Leonard Nimoy, the man who brought the original Spock to life, plays a big part in this film. He’s the glue between the original timeline and the new one. It was such a treat to see him on screen for what may be one last time. You never know if characters will ever come back in sequels. His character is a victim of bad timing, but he handles it with logic and finesse. His character comes full circle in this film.
The movie’s action is about on par with Star Trek II where most of the film focuses on character development. The opening to the film, showing the attack on the U.S.S. Kelvin was just beautifully done. Later, the film does a decent job of showing how Kirk and Spock deal with issues growing up, and eventually meet at Starfleet. Kirk’s decision to join Starfleet overnight seemed a little fast, as does his promotion later in the film. In fact, there are just a few too many things that are convenient. I’m one of those people that like an airtight script, and certain things can pull me out of a film fast since I’m paying close attention to it. Another thing that pulled me out of the film were the product placements which seemed out of place for a world 250 years into the future.
I was a bit upset that there was no special fanfare when they showed the Enterprise in spacedock the first time. We didn’t need a four-minute intro to it like in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but in this movie it was more like “there’s the Enterprise. Cool, huh?” Cut. Whoa, wait, this is the Enterprise! You have to give the old girl more respect than that.
Other minor gripes with the film were the constant and overdone lens flares in the shots. Even JJ said it was overdone, and it became distracting at times. I also had a hard time with the look of the engine room of the Enterprise. The engine room of the Enterprise from Star Trek: TMP and on seemed quite logical: a large plasma magnetic field conduit to which the warp engines were fed. This Titanic-type look really pulled me out of the movie because I couldn’t see how so many damn pipes could have worked in a ship that ran on matter/anti-matter.
Overall, I loved the movie. I think that the franchise is finally back on track. The movie killed at the box office opening weekend, showing that not only did it appeal to the hardcore fans, but brought in other people to see it. It’s a shame that we’ll have to wait two or three years for the next installment. In fact, it would be sweet to see Trek back on TV with this crew. The stigma of going to the big screen first is that now they have big screen salaries to pay everyone. Still, I hope the team learns from the mistakes of the past and doesn’t kill the franchise again.
Newbie guide to Star Trek
I’ve watched Star Trek as far back as I can remember. Early memories of it are watching it with my dad when it was still on NBC, and watching it every day at 6pm on WPIX in NY. It was rare that any syndicated show would be on seven days a week, but Star Trek was one of those rare shows that had such a following, WPIX felt it was a strong enough show to run it daily.
Star Trek lost its way over the years, and now JJ Abrams and his crew are re-energizing the franchise for audiences both old and new.
If you’ve never seen an episode of Star Trek, or feel the need to brush up on your history, here’s a list of episodes I think would be useful.
“The Cage” / “The Menagerie” – “The Cage” was Star Trek’s original pilot which was deemed “too intellectual” by NBC. It is, in fact a decent story but has several dull spots. Spock behaves nothing like he does in later episodes. Pike is an OK captain, but lacks the swagger that James Kirk had. There’s no McCoy, no Scotty. The sets are rather dull compared to the rest of the series and the dialog is flat. “The Menagerie” is a two-part episode which takes footage from “The Cage” and uses them as historical flashbacks during a trial in which Spock is accused of mutiny when he hijack the Enterprise to take his former captain Pike, who is now critically injured, back to Talos which is currently under Federation quarrantine.
“Amok Time” – So far, we’ve known Vulcans to be “walking calculators”. What we don’t know is that every seven years they need to return to Vulcan to mate. Like salmon. It’s a great episode displaying the friendship between Kirk and Spock, and gives a lot of Spock’s personal backstory.
“Journey to Babel” – the Enterprise is transporting ambassadors from several systems to Babel to decide if Coridan should be admitted to the Federation. What we find out is that the Vulcan ambassador is Spock’s father Sarek who brought his wife Amanda with him on the trip. Another great Spock episode which would give some insight to Spock’s family for the upcoming movie.
“Space Seed” – the Enterprise comes across a DY-100 transport ship in the middle of nowhere, filled with exiled generically engineered “supermen” from Earth’s 1990′s. Their leader is Khan, played by Ricardo Montalban. This episode was the forebearer to “Star Trek II”, arguably the best Star Trek movie made, and one of the best science fiction movies.
“The Counter-Clock Incident” (animated) – Similar in plot to “Journey to Babel”, this episode shows that Robert April was the first captain of the Enterprise. Not required viewing, but interesting.
Other episodes worth viewing, but have little or no relevance to the movie itself:
“Where No Man Has Gone Before” (only tie-in to the film is a reference to Delta Vega)
“The Corbomite Maneuver”
“The City on the Edge of Forever”
“The Doomsday Machine”
“Balance of Terror”
“Mirror, Mirror”
“The Trouble with Tribbles”
“The Ultimate Computer”
“The Enterprise Incident”
“For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched The Sky” (good McCoy episode)
Movies
Star Trek II, III, and IV work as a trilogy, so it’s best to watch them together.
Star Trek web sites
Chaotic Nerdy #1 – "Bunny Suit"
(special thanks to Renata for suggesting a fix for the Bunny Dwarf)
The first thing I can remember wanting to do growing up was draw. I guess every kid did, we all had our box of crayons, but I was different. I didn’t have a box of 8, I had a box of 64 with a built-in sharpener. I knew all the colors: burnt sienna, raw umber, cornflower, midnight blue. I knew all of them, and constantly went through them fast. I had my own box of leftover crayons and oddly enough, I knew where each color was.
The first art book I got was “Ed Emberly’s Drawing Book of Animals” in 1970. I don’t remember why I got it, but it was given to me by my then-new next door neighbor who was, and still is one of the nicest women on the planet. It’s not a book on how to draw in the conventional term, Ed uses shapes to build animals up. It was an awesome book, surpassed only by “Ed Emberly’s Make A World” in 1972. I still own them both, and they have a spot on my bookshelf next to all the other art books I have.
My grandmother was a local NJ artist. I don’t know how well known she was, but she had shows at art galleries all around. She used to teach me about so many things, constantly sketching on notebook, napkins, whatever was around. Before she died, she bought be a hardcover copy of Stan Lee’s “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way”, which is still in print to this day. Yes, the book is that good. The problem I had with it was I couldn’t draw people. At all. I could draw things, but not people. There was something I couldn’t wrap my brain around with drawing faces. I could draw a badass X-Wing, but not even a cartoon face.
In junior high my friend Joe and I were going to start our own comic strip. I don’t remember the details of it, but it was definitely sci-fi based, but we ran into problems like how to publish it and having no money. It was a neat idea, but never got realized except for some sketches I may still have up in the attic.
I kept up with drawing through high school. My first local exposure (if you want to even call it that) was when I sent in my art to a local TV show called “The Uncle Floyd Show“. Every day he’d put pictures up on his wall from fans that sent them in. To be fair, my stuff would be up there with crayon drawings of sailboats and flowers, but just seeing my work on TV was enough to keep me motivated. I did that for perhaps three years until I graduated from high school.
When college came, I stopped drawing. I drew some art for a student-made publication, but that was more or less it. I was far more into computers and other college activities. I took an art class which I hated because it didn’t teach my anything I didn’t already know. It was until after college that I tried art again, but in painting models. That was huge for me, it would take weeks to build, paint and in some cases put in my own homemade fiber optic system into these things. Once I built everything I wanted to, my interest in that died off. To be honest, videogames took up a lot of my time starting around 1995, and really took off when Final Fantasy VII was released in 1997.
Around 2004 I got the itch again. I don’t remember why. I started working on icons and wallpapers in Photoshop for customizing Windows, but I wanted to start drawing again. I had lost my interest in anime which was a hobby that had become frustrating and expensive ($90 for a laserdisc!), but I loved the artwork. I wanted to start learning how to do that on my own, but had nowhere to start. Anime/manga classes aren’t something that are popular in New Jersey, so I bought a few books and started from there.
It was rough at first, and very frustrating. I hadn’t picked up a pencil in years, I couldn’t draw a circle properly, and I had to learn something completely new. I took a sketchbook with me all the time, practicing as often as I could. My first attempt was horrid. Everything was way out of proportion and just wrong. As time went on, I found that the books I bought assumed that you knew how to draw already, and some books were better than others at actually teaching you how to draw properly. Reading those books helped tremendously and I finally got better at one thing at a time. I think it was eyes first because I have pages and pages of them. I don’t know what was next, but I had a tough time with hair.
I bought Painter IX, I bought Copic markers. I took this damn seriously.
Fast forward to now and I have pages and pages of sketches. Some are good, some actually say “WTF was I thinking?” on them. Some I look at now and go “whoa, I did THAT??”. My biggest problem came when I stopped practicing for weeks at a time, and I’d have to relearn things all over again. It’s been a tough process because I’d constantly push it aside for other things and then go back to it, only to get frustrated again.
So the above is a culmination of work that runs from 1970 to today. I realize it doesn’t look like the work of someone who’s been at it for almost 40 years, and I know that. It’s not colored, it needs work, it had a lot of problems. The reason why I posted it is because I decided to publicly show my progression, if any. I still have a ton of practice with the pencil, and even more with the Wacom. I almost posted this as just a pencil sketch but decided to see how well I could handle the Wacom after putting it away for a few months. I attempted coloring it, but decided that I’ll keep it black and white for now.
So we’ll see how it goes. I wrote this so that everyone can understand the long road that took me here. Hopefully, there’s a long road ahead.
Twitter Trifecta
Ever since Twitter’s popularity grew, developers have been doing interesting things with the tweets that come in from it. Sorting, groups, threading, replies without having to type in the person’s username, and so many more have found their way to our desktop.
Somewhere along the line, I found myself lost in a sea of tweets. I wanted to follow person A, but their tweets were taking over my timeline, and I couldn’t focus on people B, C, and D whose tweets are much more interesting. There needed to be a way to organize this twomit into little bite-sized chunks so that I didn’t have to do all the manual labor. I also had multiple accounts, so managing them on top of my main account turned into an acrobatic act.
Originally I was using Twhirl before Seesmic bought it. It was, and still is, a wonderful application. If you have more than one account, it’s invaluable. It breaks your accounts into their own separate windows so that you can easily manage your incoming tweets. It had one feature which I absolutely loved and that’s the ability to notify you when you get a reply or a DM with a sound that makes me think of a doorbell on steroids. It also put these unobtrusive little popups in the lower right hand corner of your screen to tell you where your tweets came from. I loved the app, but dealing with several hundred friends forced me to look somewhere else.
Several Twitter friends suggested Tweetdeck. Its biggest draw for me was the ability to create groups of people and have all your tweets funneled into specific columns. I loved it. *BING* But there was *BING* one serious *BING* problem with it. *BING*: it wouldn’t shut up. As great as the groups feature was, it had one major flaw which was the inability to notify you only when you got a reply or a DM. Unlike Twhirl which gently tapped you on the shoulder to say “your buddy sent you a DM”, Tweetdeck was in your face. If you didn’t like hearing *BING* all the time, you could turn audio notifications off. All of them. Your choice was all or nothing. Manually checking Tweetdeck all the time annoyed me so much that I was willing to give up the groups feature for the specific notifications. I asked the developer when this feature would be in. He said “next release”. That was a year ago. As a software engineer myself, I couldn’t figure out why such a simple feature hadn’t been added. It was a *BING* dealbreaker for me.
I happily used Twhirl since then. I found a way to manage my friends list by using visual searches such as people’s avatars and tweet habits. I got pretty good at it. I kept going back to Tweetdeck to see if there was a checkbox that said “only notify me on replies and DMs”. No such luck, even for Christmas. It was on my list.
Last night, Loic LeMeur, the founder of Seesmic, unveiled Twhirl on steroids called “Seesmic Desktop”. It’s a direct competitor to Tweetdeck and much prettier to look at. Knowing that Loic would try to put out an application that at the very least works like Twhirl, I gave it a spin. Not only does it allow you to create groups like Tweetdeck does, it has notifications only for replies and DMs.
Heaven.
Tweetdeck, Twhirl, and Seesmic Desktop are built on the Adobe Air platform which allows you to build one application that runs on both Macintosh and Windows. Some apps can work on Linux if coaxed properly. If you’re trying to reach the vast majority of users with one application without having to spend time and resources to build two apps in parallel, Air is an excellent way to do it. It’s not perfect, but gets the job done.
For fairness, I decided to try the Nambu Macintosh client. People have been praising it, saying it’s better than both Seesmic and Tweetdeck. I took it for a spin, and this is where the comparisons between the apps begin.
Nambu
Nambu is a native Macintosh application which means that it only runs on the Mac, and does not work on Windows. If the author wanted to build a Windows version, he’d have to build it from scratch which could take time and resources he may not have. At first glance it’s a nice looking app, reminiscent of Apple’s Mail application which makes the UI very familiar. It allows you to use multiple accounts like Seesmic does which has been one of its major selling points. Unfortunately, managing these accounts isn’t so easy.
I found that the application has one major flaw. If you’re using multiple accounts and want to reply to someone from account A, it’s very easy to accidentally write a tweet from account B. The reason why is that the combo box with your accounts in it doesn’t change for you unless you click on a tweet in the column you want to respond from. There’s a gear icon that drops down a menu with “Reply” in it, but if the tweet is in account A’s column, and you have a highlighted tweet in account B’s column, when you click on the gear of the tweet from account A, the tweet will be written from account B. This is my dealbreaker with this application, I have to trust the application to do the right thing and reply from the account the tweet came from instead of the account a tweet is highlighted from.
Other things that bothered me about Nambu were the lack of audible notifications, creating columns took way too long for a Mac application, I couldn’t swap columns or find a way to shift them around, the Twitpic and shorten URL icons were far away from the rest of the pack, some of the icons were a tad misleading, a two-step process for composing tweets (click “Compose” icon first, then write), the preferences window got lost behind the main one, and you can’t click on someone’s name and bring up their Twitter history.
Considering that I work on a Windows machine at work and a Mac at home, coupled with the annoyances listed above, I’m going to skip on using Nambu.
Tweetdeck
As I stated above, I had a dealbreaking problem with Tweetdeck’s inability to notify me only when I had a reply or a DM. That aside, I decided to be fair and take a good look at the app to see if it’s improved since I last used it.
Just like the other apps, Tweetdeck puts your tweets into columns so that you can separate them easier. When you first start the application, you get columns for people you follow, replies, and DMs. From there you can add column for searches, Facebook, 12seconds, and Twitscoop. The searches function is a great way to see what people are saying about a particular topic (eg: “Smallville”). Like Nambu, writing a tweet is a two-step process when the app first starts, you need to click on the “Tweet” button for the edit box to come up.
Tweetdeck comes with multiple language support which is a major feature for a service that works around the world. I only have rudimentary understanding of French and Japanese so I can’t write about how good or bad it is, but I have to give props to the application for supporting multiple languages.
One of the biggest features that Tweetdeck has is Facebook support. You can get updates from people you’re friends with on Facebook, but you can’t reply to them for some reason. I don’t know if it’s a limitation of the Facebook API, but I find that a one-way feed is an unpleasant way to read a stream when you have to wind up going into the web site to reply anyway.
Tweetdeck has some great features, and I know it has a large following, but I can’t find myself using it until my personal annoyances with it are taken care of.
Seesmic Desktop
I’ve only been using Seesmic Desktop for 24 hours, but I’ve fallen in love with it. It’s not perfect, but it does what I need it to do, and does it well.
On startup, its colors are pleasing to the eye unlike the black and white of Tweetdeck. What I like about the interface is that the left hand side has different categories to click on, and the first column reflects what you selected. If you have multiple accounts, your Home selection will show all the tweets from all your accounts funneled into one column with the banner “received as <account name>” so you know which account it came in from.
Similar to Tweetdeck, you can make multiple columns with Seesmic, but Seesmic has an unlimited number of columns where Tweetdeck only allows 10. Seesmic doesn’t offer the ability to read in streams from other accounts yet such as Seesmic’s video service, Friendfeed, or Facebook, but Loic assures us that they’re coming soon.
Like the other apps, Seesmic allows the ability to tweet pictures using Twitpic, and shortening URLs. If you have multiple accounts, replies are properly sent from the account in which the tweet came into.
Everything is clickable in Seesmic. The account name from which the tweet came which gives a full account profile as well as a short Twitter history from the user, if the tweet was a reply there’s a link to the original, and even links to the home page of the app that sent the tweet.
Making userlists (groups) is not that intuitive. After you create the userlist, you add people by clicking the gear in their icon and selecting “Add to group”. If a user you want isn’t in your list, you can’t add them unless you do a search for their name. I found this cumbersome since it would be better to have a way to manually type in the name of the user, or show you the list of people you’re following like Tweetdeck does. Even after I created my list, I didn’t realize until I poked around the app for a while that there’s a “Users” button at the bottom of the column which was active. That was why I didn’t see the tweets, the column was set to show the list of users only. Clicking that button again showed the tweets from the people I added to the list.
Seesmic crashed on me once while using it on my Mac, and it asked me for my Twitter passwords on its first restart, but after that it didn’t ask me for anything again, and kept my settings.
Final thoughts
The memory footprint of the apps are shown below. Nambu took up the least amount of physical RAM which I expected for a native application. TweetDeck and Seesmic are Air apps so I expected a bit of bloat from them, but didn’t think they’d take up so little physical RAM as they did. For some reason I was expecting more. Seesmic took up the most amount of physical RAM which I hope they’ll address in the future because I can’t see what the app is doing that it needs all that memory.
For all these apps, it would be nice if there was a way to save your settings to a host, or have a user-friendly mechanism for saying “this is where your prefs live” so you can manually copy them to a USB key, Dropbox, or .Mac file system so you don’t have to rebuild everything on another machine such as a work or home computer, or a laptop. In fact, it would be nice to see these apps read each others preferences so that you don’t have to rebuild groups if you decide to switch apps.
This is definitely going to be an interesting space to watch. There’s only so much the Twitter API allows, so it’ll be up to the application developers to come up with unique and interesting ways to attract you to their applications.
Skype comes to the iPhone, but does AT&T care…yet?
At the crack of midnight, iPhone geeks on the east coast of the United States got their first crack at Skype’s official app for the iPhone. If you don’t know, Skype allows voice calls over the internet without having to use an actual telephone, the audio is transferred over the internet (voice over IP, or VOIP). Skype had been out for the PSP for some time now, but very few people I know actually used it. Last night, as the clock crept past midnight, my list of logged in friends on Skype kept getting bigger and bigger as people were trying it out on their iPhones.
It was late, so I only tried it with two friends briefly. One friend was in Florida, the other in California. In both cases, the audio quality was very, very good. You could tell it was a tad more compressed than a regular phone call, but the audio was still very clear and easy to understand. Both friends were also on Skype for the iPhone.
As great as this is, I don’t think AT&T has anything to worry about in the short term. Skype won’t work over Edge or 3G, so the only way you’re going to use this is over WiFi. Not many people have portable WiFi hotspots on them and bouncing between public, open spots while traveling, if they exist, won’t make for a good experience.
So really, the only place this will work for you is in an area with good WiFi, and this has to be the only application you have running on your iPhone/iPod Touch if you want people to spontaneously call you. Since Apple’s push technology won’t be in the iPhone OS until 3.0 in June, there’s no way for the iPhone to tell you that there’s a call coming in if Skype isn’t running all the time. If it is, this will drain your battery unless you keep your iPhone plugged in. Until then, you’ll have to rely on setting up calls manually.
I think this is a step in the right direction for VOIP calls, we just need a better infrastructure here in the U.S. for this to be a practical mobile solution. When that happens, I’m sure Skype will be there.
So say we all pt. 2
So it’s over. The best six years of television is over, and it ended damn well. It’s going to take some time to process the show as a whole, but they tied up almost every loose end, and left some things to what you believe.
I won’t say anything more than it was a beautiful ending, and Ron Moore did the entire lore justice, even as far back as 1978.
So say we all
Tonight marks the end of Ron Moore’s reimaging of “Battlestar Galactica”. I’m not going to sugar-coat this, I’m very worried about this finale. I could be patient and wait until after the show is over before writing a whole blog post about it, but something in my gut tells me that not everything is going to be wrapped up nice and neat by the time 11pm rolls around on the east coast.
Originally I didn’t like BSG. I was such a fan of the original that I couldn’t think of Starbuck as a woman, or that humans created the Cylons. However, it was the writing that won me over and I changed my views on the show. Now I’m one of its biggest fans, but I’m starting to wonder if I invested too much in a show that could possibly disappoint in the end.
The original 1978 BSG was one of the first shows I remember that had an actual story arc, and didn’t use its main premise as a vehicle to keep the show running ad nauseum like Space: 1999 did. Back in those days, shows ended abruptly, so you couldn’t write ahead for fear of being cancelled as late as July before the next season. BSG tried to finish the arc with “Galactica 1980″ which fell flat on its face, despite two actually decent shows. What fans like me wanted was a proper ending to a decent story, and tonight we might get it. Will it be the ending that saves the show? I sincerely hope so. There are three important things I need to see resolved:
Who/what is Starbuck?
Does the Human race find a home and end this circle of conflict?
Is there some connection between Cylons and Humans? It’s been alluded to, but something tells me there’s more to it.
I’m really hoping that when the finale ends tonight, you look back at the last six years of the show and all the struggles that these people went through and you say “well that was damn good”.
So say we all.
Twingbats
Remember Dingbats? I don’t remember if I had it on the Atari ST or not, but I know that I used it a lot when I got my first Mac Plus. It was a font of nothing but pictures like stars ★ and chess pieces ♚ and music ♬. I don’t know the history behind the font, but the symbols are now implemented inside fonts that support Unicode.
The problem is that typing these glyphs isn’t easy. If you know how to type the codes into Windows, or use the Special Characters menu on Mac OS X, it’s easy for you. However, not many people know how to use these tools or can remember the Unicode number. After spending so much time on Windows, I decided a few years ago to make a little Wordpad “cheat sheet” with the Unicode characters I needed, and their codes if I need to tell someone how to type them in. This got cumbersome after a while, and with everything moving to The Cloud, I started working on a web-based solution that I could bookmark.
Currently, the best reference I found for Unicode characters is here. However, there’s way too much there to sort through and I just wanted the core characters I’d need. I don’t need all the math symbols or characters from languages I don’t speak, just the fun ones for email and Twitter.
I wrote Twingbats to be very simple: the Unicode characters are organized in groups. If you click/roll over the character to highlight it, you can then copy it to your clipboard and paste it where you need it. If you simply hover over it, a tooltip will display showing the decimal and hexadecimal numbers needed to display that character using HTML. If you click the character, it links to fileformat.info which gives you all the information you need on that character.
To use Twingbats, simply click the link below. If you want to save it permanently, you need to drag it to your toolbar. If you bookmark the URL after it’s been displayed, you’ll save the page without the proper format of the miniwindow.
Twingbats is not exclusive to Twitter, you can use it on any app that supports Unicode characters.
I have some ideas for improvements to Twingbats. Rob Blatt gave me one which I’m going to try and implement after SXSW. Even though I’ve been working on this on and off for months, I rushed to finish it before I left for SXSW.
References:
The Javascript link code is from Clipmarks.
Window sizing code is from boutell.com.
Mac users may want to learn how to use the Special Characters menu.
