engadget: Consumer-focused tech gear reviews and related stories, with trying-too-hard-to-be-hip writing and just enough typos to make you wince. Every story features a stupidly gigantic image that rarely adds anything but takes up lots of screen real estate.
Ars Technica: Sort of a grown-up version of engadget, with more substantive stories and fewer typos. Some of their writers look too young to drive.
AnandTech: Anand himself left to join Apple but his site lives on, offering exhaustively detailed reviews of products that includes pages and pages of benchmarks that are probably appreciated by robots or benchmark fan clubs. The layout and design is something a computer might love.
Google announced the second version of its OnHub router today and it kind of looks like a miniature version of a nuclear power plant cooling tower. I mean, it even has a radioactive glow at the bottom:
While nuclear power is not exactly hot (ho ho) after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the subtle shape may not trigger alarm bells for those not exposed (!) to the iconic look of a cooling tower. And it could have been worse. Google could have made it look like a fire hydrant or erect penis. An erect penis with a radioactive glow.
If you happen to buy an HP PC you may find a slip of paper inside the keyboard box with a warning about the keyboard. You may think it’s the usual warning about carpal tunnel or something but no, it’s a warning about breaking the keyboard.
Keep your dirty alien hands off our keyboards
The two handy tips, summarized:
To prevent breakage, don’t bend the stand legs back until they break. Also, to avoid car accidents, don’t crash your car.
Apply light pressure when using the keyboard. This implies that it’s possible to type with enough force to break the keyboard. Either these are very flimsy keyboards or HP imagines anyone using them will pound the keys like an angry villain with super strength*.
The best part, though, is the hands. Those splayed out appendages are like a Rorschach test. One glance and they look like pine air fresheners you’d hang on the rearview mirror, another glance and maybe they are tree trunks or deformed octopi or alien claws.
Since it is impossible to type without putting some kind of downward pressure on the keys, the illustration can be interpreted as telling you to not use the keyboard for typing. This would certainly keep it the legs from breaking. A good warning, then.
* based on my experience using keyboards in public–with many a broken leg, missing, stuck or wobbly keys–I think there may in fact be a lot of villains with super strength out there typing away
If the multiverse exists, I wonder if another version of me in some parallel dimension is also fumbling to come up with something to post to his blog. I hope so, because I hate to suffer alone.
And now, a haiku dedicated to all the possible universes:
I am here and there
Across the universes
Me, myself and I
Again I find myself unable to think of anything witty, relevant or interesting to post and the more I try to think of something the greater the blank space where that something would be becomes.
But I’m not going to post another cat image. I’m tempted. Oh, so tempted.
Instead, I will recall that I had dimly remember two dreams last night. One was being part of a crew setting up some kind of Mars research facility. This was a space station/habitat sort of thing that was going to either be on Mars or in orbit around the red planet. I remember the facility being large, clean and very empty. I don’t remember what I actually did but I like to imagine it was very important. Perhaps I met Matt Damon. I’m pretty sure publicity for The Martian is what prompted the dream.
The other dream involved me watching a passenger jet coming in for a landing at YVR, as passenger jets will do at the airport. I was watching from near 41st Avenue and Cambie and the plane was coming in north to south rather than east to west, which is silly, but that’s dreams for you. I marveled at how close to the ground the planes get when coming in, except this one actually started scraping its tail along Cambie Street. The pilot wisely pulled up, presumably to try again with less scraping. Instead of just looping around he did this strange series of climbs and descents, which I interpreted as him trying to gain momentum or height or something. I don’t know, I’m not an airplanist. The jet moved off to the west, somewhere further down 41st Avenue and did another climb but this time when it came back down it started twirling and then disappeared out of my sight, presumably crashing as out of my sight would be where the ground was. I woke up and was bummed out until I remembered the earlier Mars dream. The airplane crash dream was inspired by me watching a YouTube video of plane crashes that was a “related” video to something I watched that had nothing to do with planes, crashes or plane crashes. Probably a Boston video. Watching it was not one of my better ideas.
Tonight I’m going to watch kitten videos before going to bed. If I dream of being chased and eaten by lions I am going to be very cross with my brain.
I am having brain freeze tonight, unable to decide what to write. I’ve done all the easy stuff on the blog lately:
written a haiku
made up dumb writing prompts
scanned in random photos from way back
made multiple lists
It’s time to wing it.
Today is Labour Day, one of those self-ironic holidays (“Celebrate labour with a day off”) and I’m tending to a mild cold, feeling a bit down about things beyond my control, lamenting the sudden demise of summer after the big windstorm (seriously, it’s like someone flipped a switch. We’ve had nice days since, including today, but it feels all different, like fall jumped in a month ahead of schedule the same way summer did. It’s all this new-fangled climate change, I’m sure, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about it) and generally feeling blah and writing run-on sentences as a result.
My neck is itchy. I shaved my head today (I do this every two to three weeks, not because I’ve suddenly joined a cult) and touched up my neck, to keep the neckbeard thing at bay, but I apparently did it all wrong because the neck, as I said, is itchy. I can’t blame this on climate change but at least I started a new paragraph to whine about it.
Here’s a picture from either 1974 or 1975 of mom and a goat at Knott’s Berry Farm, I think. Farms often have goats so that seems right. Mom is clearly not impressed by the goat’s attempt at self-emasculation. This is really one of those “Write your own caption” things, so go ahead, write your own!
I am looking at a Canadian Tire email flyer titled “Find everything you need for comfortable dorm living.” The items highlighted include:
Mastercraft Metal Sawhorse
MAXIMUM Impact Wrench
Cuisinart Forged Knife Set
Mastercraft 8 Gallon Compressor
This sounds like Saw Goes to College. Or maybe that fresh-faced college student is really into renovating his tiny dorm room. And then knives, somewhere.
I’m just kidding, Canadian Tire. I love your store and your fake money, too. I still have a giant stack of it somewhere I’m saving to cash in on a ratchet set or something.
The CBC News website ran a story on how to survive a black bear encounter (not to be confused with an encounter with Bear) due to a number of unusual bear goings-on of late. They included an infographic that I find strangely adorable and am reproducing here:
I like the idea of singing, clapping and whistling while hiking, to both ward off bears and convince other hikers that you are a lunatic. Also, the last image suggests using karate on the bear, which would be pretty cool.
[spoiler title=”And now the absolute best cover of Bear: The Novel” icon=”plus-square-1″][/spoiler]
For what it is worth, 2013 is also the ugliest version of Office ever. It looks like a web page where the style sheet failed to load.
This is an amusing and clever way of describing the whiteout approach Microsoft has used in the user interface for Office 2013. Rumour has it that we may see changes in the next version (for PC this will probably not be out for another year or more, though). I’m going to offer some of my own thoughts on UI design in iOS 7, Mac OS X, Windows 8 and a few miscellaneous others soon. In the meantime, have a look at the Ars Technica feature The software design trends that we love to hate. And you thought faux leather stitching was bad.
I’d like to apologize to the spambots and others who accidentally visit the site and found the April posts to be almost exclusively about jogging, a subject which is not the easiest to make entertaining without the inclusion of runaway trains, circus animals or other fictional inventions. Note that I am not saying runaway trains and circus animals are fictitious, just that they remain make-believe during my jogs, which is really for the best. A pair of train tracks parallels part of the trail at Burnaby Lake, so a runaway train could be a real nuisance on a run.
For May I promise one non-running post for every running post. If I stick to my jogging schedule this means there will be at least twelve tantalizing, non-running updates.
