I finally saw District 9, courtesy of Netflix’s awesome live streaming feature. Many of my friends had talked a lot about when it first came out, so I already knew that it was a pretty obvious allegory for apartheid. heck, it’s even set in South Africa! Now first of all, real South African apartheid was [...]
I saw The Book of Eli the other day and thought it was pretty good. I’ll admit right off the bat that what attracted me to it was the trailers that showed it to be about Denzel Washington kicking ass in a Fallout-style post-apocalyptia, and on that count I was not disappointed. There’s plenty of [...]
I’m really digging Boxee, a free, open-source media center program. Basically, it’s a piece of software that turns your computer into a TV by aggregating online videos and such from places like YouTube, the Onion Online (which is hilarious, by the way), ComedyCentral.com, and other places that have lots of awesome free content. It also [...]
I finally got around to firing my shotgun for the first time over the weekend. It’s pretty embarrassing, but for about four months I owned it, the thing had just been sitting in my closet. For all I knew it wouldn’t even fire! The story of why involves a legal interlude. Skip the next section [...]
I think we’re still in the dark age of scanning. You line up your document, do a butt-slow preview scan at low resolution, see if it’s lined up, re-align until it’s not, and repeat until you either get the piece of paper where you want it or else set your hair on fire out of [...]
I just started using ExpanDrive and it has changed my life. A goodly portion of my job involved SSHing into remote servers and editing text files. This limits me to command-line tools and doesn’t allow me to take advantage of any of the GUI workflow enhancements and productivity boosters I’ve built up over the years, [...]
How’s this for a blast from the past: Rebel Assault II! Did anyone else play this game as a kid? I know I did, and I remember hours and hours of fun. I don’t know what reminded me of it, but the other day I felt the need to reinstall it and play it again, [...]
I wanted to love Far cry 2. On paper, it had all the trappings of greatness for a shooter: an immersive world, realistic physics and fire, a compelling plot, challenging and realistic combat, and a breathtaking rendering of Africa — a place where I’ve lived several months of my life. The opening sequence filled me with [...]
I just got finished with Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes, and it was a fascinating read. The premise is really quite simple: photograph armed American families of all types in their homes with their firearms. Making up these families are were white people, black people, Asians, Jews, women, children, lesbians, soldiers, [...]
So I’ve spent a lot of time with the latest version of Firefox. I’ve used it as my primary browser, my secondary browser, and tried running with both it and Safari at once to highlight differences. I’ve reeeeeeeeeeally wanted to like Firefox 3, but in the end, I just keep going back to Safari. Why? [...]