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Fun with Percolator

I recently found out about this fascinating, albeit somewhat pointless, iPhone app called Percolator. Basically, it's an adjustable filter for photos that turns them into beautiful dots of color. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I'm guessing it has something to do with pixels.

I made a few Percolator images that I'm using as iPhone wallpaper, and I thought I'd share them here; I think they're pretty neat. See if you can guess what the original picture was!

 

 

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Wherein I Am Victorious Over the DirectTV Installers

Today I got DirectTV. Our high-rise building is switching en masse, and I'm actually pretty excited about it, mostly because it will bring me HBO Go and Adult Swim Gold.

All went smoothly except for one thing: the installer took one look at my Airport Time Capsule and told me I might have to get a new router, or at the very least call Apple, which could take a few hours. Another installer seconded the opinion, saying that the Apple AirPorts didn't work well with DirectTV. I wanted to ask sardonically if DirectTV supplied their own special version of the Internet that was somehow unlike the regular internet and thus confusing to lowly ethernet ports, but instead I told him I wasn't worried about it. Besides, they'd already mentioned that plugging an ethernet cable directly into their box from a computer would work. But I digress. Now for the good part.

Actual time to solve internet on problem on my own? Approx. 7 minutes. I'm sending this post to you wirelessly through my Apple Time Capsule right now. Since I was prepared for a hassle, it was no big deal: I restarted everything, ran the simple diagnostics on my Macs, and Sweet Victory was, and is, mine. And you'd better believe I went out in the hall and told him that I got it to work. I was humble about it. I even explained how I did it, and mentioned that I didn't really think it was his job to know how to deal with the Apple stuff. Which is true. But the ironic thing is, the Apple stuff is probably WAY easier to understand than any of the other technology these guys have to deal with on a daily basis. 

At any rate, it's nice to know my five years as an Apple employee weren't wasted. :)

The Evolution of Aww: An Auto-correct Progression

Auto-correct on the iPhone is actually pretty great. It's based on what letters are near the letter you (in error, perhaps) actually typed, and it's a nice time saver. Except when it's wrong. Like, say you're trying to express the extreme cuteness of something you've read on twitter. And you really want to make a statement.

Observe:

Awwwwwww. Sweetest.

What gems are you wasting on Twitter?

I like Twitter a lot. It's not love, but it's a good thing we've got going, and I think we understand each other. But sometimes I wonder if Twitter is taking advantage of me.

I don't mean the company, Twitter, or even the application (I use Tweetie, which works very well for my multiple accounts, though the iPhone version is far superior to the desktop app). But my use of Twitter has changed my brain a bit. When I have a good idea, or an interesting thought, I tend to sum it up to myself in a Twitter-appropriate sentence or two. This is especially odd since I use the medium for mostly social purposes; who am I trying to impress?

The answer, I guess, is Posterity. And Myself.

A great tweet is a thing of beauty, I'll admit. When a 139-character movie review of mine was published in the Red Eye last month, I was especially proud of how much more insightful and efficient it was than the rest of those printed. The eloquence! The concision! It was a proud moment. Maybe a little too proud.

If I comb through these little messages, I find a lot of thoughts that might have warranted a few more than 140 characters. Here on my blog (or on one of my other blogs!) I have the room to do that, and I really enjoy doing so. But once a thought has turned into a tweet, I typically consider it "published." Out there in the ether. Finished.

This spring, I'm going to try and rework my deal with Twitter. Instead of working against me, those tweets can be like a little notebook of story stubs to pore over and elaborate here on the blog. It will be like a second honeymoon for Twitter and me.

I promise not to let things get too mushy.

Oscar talk on CPX

I've been posting up a storm today on the topic of Oscars 2010, over at my movie blog Cineplexus. I've got links to all the movies I've reviewed over the past year that are nominated for Oscars. If you want a list of nominees, check out Oscars.com. If you want a list of my thoughts on the nominated movies that I happen to have seen, there's nowhere to look but Cineplexus. :)

As a side note, I am especially bummed about one movie that missed the Oscar nom cut: 500 Days of Summer. At the very least, I feel it deserved a nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Sigh. At least the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (responsible for Golden Globe noms) saw things my way. Sort of.

Axe Cop Rocks

As if the mind of a five-year-old weren't amazing enough on its own, five-year-old Malachai Nicolle's mind has been distilled by his amazing, much-older, comic-book-artist brother's talents. The result is Axe Cop, a gorgeous, periodic web comic that makes me laugh so hard I feel like I'm exercising.

Axe Cop has it all: a cop that finds an axe, a shape-shifting (possibly radioactive) soldier sidekick, a uni-baby (a baby with a unicorn horn)…if you're not already convinced that this is great stuff, I am not sure I want you reading this blog.

No, wait. Come back. I do want you to read my blog! I just also want you to check out Axe Cop. But not from you iPhone, because it's Flash-based. Ugh.

Happy reading!

Daily Drop Cap is for Prettiness

 

I just found out about dailydropcap.com and I am in love. I have a feeling several of these fancy letters, made by typographer Jessica Hische, are going to be featured frequently in my PopSent posts. Fair warning.

New Mexican panoramas

I just purchased and downloaded a new app for my iPhone, Pano. The app allows you to take several images, using the edge of the previous image as a guide for the next, and then stitches them together. It was $1.99, and I couldn't have come across it at a better time. I'm in New Mexico for post-Christmas celebrations with the family I couldn't see during actual Christmas (my parents are both from Albuquerque). It's a pretty good place for panoramas.

I tested the app several times today and came up with some pretty great stuff. I consider myself an above-average iPhone photographer, but this cracks the realm of possibilities wide open.

 Tim, Erin, and Corrie at Hannah & Nate's in Corrales, NM. This one was three portrait-shots stitched together. I love the light from both windows! This shot would have been impossible without the app, because of how close we were to the west wall of the building.

 A somewhat experimental shot by my cousin Tim. Me, three Aunt Lindas, Dad, and Uncle Chuck. I think it looks like the Last Supper. 

 
Albuquerque lies at the foot of the Sandia Mountains, but the view is even more dramatic from some parts of the farther-west Corrales, where my aunt and uncle have a newish house. Trust me when I say that even these images don't do it justice.

Here's one more, from a little higher up and father back:

 
 

More to come…if you're interested, check Pano out on the Apple Store. Better yet, check out New Mexico. :)

 

Trending Topics: Another Fishy Statistic

Trending Topics. Fun but fishy. But first, some background:

When people ask me what I majored in in college, I always say "Cinema and Media Studies," or "Film Studies," depending on how loud the room is. What I almost never say is "I also came really close to double-majoring in film and psychology, but I decided in my last semester that I didn't care about completing the second major." I don't say that, but it is a fact. I took a LOT of psychology courses in college. 

Even though my psych studies aren't a part of my one-paragraph bio anymore, I'm glad I took those courses. One of the most valuable things I learned in my studies was about statistics. Namely, that they are dubious. Professional articles detail the studies that create statistics, and these articles are, at best, verbose about sample sizes, statistical significance, etc. But the statistics that trickle down into political talking points and newspaper headlines are often uncited, biased, or just plain confounding (sorry, statistics pun).

So, now to Twitter. On the sidebar of everyone's twitter homepage, there is a lovely list of things that are being most frequently uttered on the service. It's automatically generated, and is fun to take a glance at. Should you ever click on one of these words or phrases, you'll see the most recent tweets that contain them. And you'll likely see a problem with the whole Trending Topics enterprise. 

Some users are simply obsessed with Trending Topics. So while millions of people are tweeting about their excitement over the New Moon soundtrack's early release, a million more (give or take) are tweeting about how psyched they are that "New Moon" is trending. There are users at this very moment having a ball by combining as many Trending Topics into one post as they can. Why? I can't begin to fathom.

 At the time of this writing, "Remotely start your" is trending because of a highly re-tweeted Mashable article called "Want to remotely start your car...there's an app for that". Tons of Trending-Topic junkies saw the phrase, and are riffing on it by tweeting "remotely start your life," or "remotely start your Christmas Shopping." That latter example was tweeted by WithLoveGifts, an online store selling gifts (like "an acre of land on the moon") to people in the UK. Trending Topics as marketing strategy? Clever indeed. 

Clever and fishy.

Beck's Latest Genius: Record Club

If you know me well, you probably know that my musical tastes are many and varied, and that I love Beck. For a long time, I prided myself on having every Beck album it was possible to have, but then Guero and the internet came along and complicated that process by generating a frenzied proliferation of remixes and new versions…let's just say I can no longer claim ownership of the "complete" Beck collection.

That said, I am thrilled that Wired magazine provided me with the hot tip on Beck's latest project, in which he and various musical friends get together and record covers of every song from a classic or ubiquitous album. It's called Record Club, and you can listen to/watch videos of all of the tracks from the first edition online for free on Beck.com or vimeo. The album they chose for the first round? The Velvet Underground and Nico, the Velvet Underground's iconic, Warhol-bananaed first record. How perfect is that? Like everyone else on the planet, I was officially introduced to this classic album during my freshman year of college (thanks, Alec!), and the playfully bizarre tracklist seems perfectly suited to Beck's always-evolving musical ethos and natural weirdness. 

Check out my favorite track from the original album, Beck-ified:

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico "Venus In Furs" from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.