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Gifts of The Season

Out of all the online Advent Calendars this holiday season, two of them have been outstanding. I didn’t know what an Advent Calendar was when I stumbled onto the first site, and by then I had missed the first ten days or so of the offerings. Rest assured that next year I will be searching for them in early November, and post a list of the best ones I find Thanksgiving weekend, so we can all be ready come 1Dec2010.

The first is the AppVent Calendar, a project put together by Blacksmith Games. Starting on December 1st, each day they made one to three of their IPhone/IPod games available for free, and several of them were quite impressive. Most of the games offered for free for one day were also offered for dirt cheap ($.99 for a normally $3 piece of software, on average) for the remainder of Advent.

The other one that gave me useful presents was the WP Engineer’s amazing offering, where each day the tech-savvy team handed out another way for you to rebuild your WordPress driven web site into a true powerhouse. Each entry in this arsenal is a small bit of code, usually in the 5 to 25 lines category, but sometimes as simple as using the Custom Fields entry in the Query Post function to sort entries in a way that would normally take you some development time (as a single example).

I am pretty sure their goal was to offer a VAR (Value Added Resource) to their site in order to attract another one or three hundred potential customers. I am also pretty sure they added a lot more visitors to their web site than they were expecting, and even if most of the new additions do not end up being paying customers today, it will be a good thing for them in the long run. Congratulations to WP Engineers on creating my personal favorite holiday site this year!

Tweet Klingon, History Game, Dolls Do Stripes

There are some days when your native language just won’t express what you have to say in satisfactory manor. For those occasions, you can just Tweet in Klingon, and have the same sounds you get when you hear a Sysop yell at his/her server farm in Spoken *Nix (Ch’Mod! Mk’Dir!) echoing through your posted environment.

You might rather play a Toy Building Game over at the History Channel web site, or for a different kind of silliness, enjoy the Dresden Dolls doing this White Stripes cover (complete with the trangender costuming as a visual aid for those in the audience slow to pick up on the parody). Whatever you choose, I hope you have fun this holiday!

( translation, * = LInix, Unix)

Things to be thankful for: Forbidden Planet and Avatar

If you are in the US, happy Turkey Day to you! I thought this would be a good point to mention a few of the things that brought a smile to my face today (OK, technically yesterday, but also earlier today from my personal worldview).

The first one is that J. Michael Straczynski, the guy who created Babylon 5 on a room full of networked Amiga’s, is now putting together a new movie version of the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet! The original version was nominated for a number of academy awards, had an all-electronic soundtrack, and introduced Robby the Robot to the world. JMS says there will be more action in the new version than the original, but the core story (Shakespeare’s The Tempest plot, star sailors vying for the attention of the Girl while Dad looses it) will be retained, meaning a lot of the character development with the dialog required to support it will still be in there. Considering how incredibly well action and intellect were balanced in Babylon 5, I suspect he will do the original proud (official B5 site here).

Along with 1951’s two blockbusters, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and When Worlds Collide (still waiting for the remake by Spielberg on that one), Forbidden Planet changed the perceptions of the viewing public about science fiction, and made the general population realize for the first time that there was serious human drama and cutting social commentary to be had in these stories. JMS was the first TV/Movie producer to use the internet (starting in 1991, before the Web existed and when very few non-geeks knew there was an internet) to connect with the fans, and encourage them to contribute to the creation process. Tracing the history of the evolution of ideas is WAY above my pay grade or competency level, but there seems to be a certain symmetry there.

Like JMS, James Cameron has also been a serious pioneer of both computer technology and visually based storytelling. Which makes it appropriate that for his latest movie, Avatar, he came out with an App masquerading as a trailer. While lots of folks go on about how he is changing the technology of film making, we know that he is just making popular how some of the technology is applied. That doesn’t change the fact that I am more excited about Avatar hitting the big screen than any other movie in December; powerful story telling needs no technological crutch, and indeed brings techno-changes in on its coat tails. You can download and install the Interactive Avatar Preview, or go to the YouTube Channel to watch the non-interactive HD version on line.

Silly Saturday

This feels like a silly Saturday, so I figured a silly post to go with it. Today’s Silly Topic: The Theremin! This first Theremin was the property of the Hollywood Thereminist, Dr. Samuel Hoffman, and was the very instrument he played in a ton of Hollywood movies in the ’40s and ’50s, including The Day The Earth Stood Still. And what would the Earth look like if it had rings like Saturn?

This next guy wasn’t content to play a favorite tune on the Theremin… first he had to build his own instrument, out of parts from a Wii! Then to nail his geek title down he chose the Doctor Who Theme for his musical selection.

You can make your own Theremin from just about anything, and there are even kits with all the parts you need, as this MAKE demo shows…

Apple 64 Still Lives!

This one has gone back and forth a bunch, with the bottom line being that Apple is scared shitless that people will be able to write and run their own code for a hardware piece they bought and now own, but was built by Apple. OK, fine, they want to control everything Apple, But why are they trying to blackball/control a Commodore 64 emulator? Oh, yeah, the C64 included a built-in programming language (Commodore Basic, which supported Uni-Code). They have finally allowed the Commodore 64 to Live!, even if only as cripple-ware. Two of the best links are C64 iPhone, and the wait is over for the C64 iPhone interface…

Bottom line, a version of the 64 still lives; Observe: