"Dick White, an ex-Vietnam helicopter flying ace and daredevil, supervised the air sequences. “This movie has everything but real bullets,” he says. “With my helicopters, the boats and the high morale of the well-trained extras we had, there were three or four countries in the world we could have taken easily.”"

"[The power of Bruce Springsteen] is that, whenever I see Bruce Springsteen do anything, he empties the tank. Every time."

Kottke-made webapp about faves. One to watch.

"From a utility point of view, charging more for the Kindle version seems quite reasonable considering that Kindle books are delivered instantly and for free, that they take up no additional space or weight, that they can be read on any computer, and that they come with handy bookmarks and highlights of what other readers find interesting."

MIND-blowing. I've been an irrational "GREEDY PUBLISHERS! BOO!" guy for as long as I can remember, but if you spin it around, you're getting all of these advantages over physical books for roughly the same price.

I am in love with this site.

By Dan Benjamin

"COLOURlovers is a creative community where people from around the world create
and share colors, palettes and patterns."

Filed away for when I need it.

Murray scratches his thinning hair. ”Damn,” he mutters darkly. ”Just when you finally figure out what you’re doing in the world, you have to start worrying about what you’ve done.”

"In the Navy, they teach us to wash our hands."

"In the Marines, they teach us not to piss on our hands."

It's #4a525a.

The Wilhelm scream is a frequently-used film and television stock sound effect first used in 1951 for the film Distant Drums.[1] The effect gained new popularity (its use often becoming an in-joke) after it was used in Star Wars and many other blockbuster films as well as television programs and video games.[2] The scream is often used when someone is shot, falls from a great height, or is thrown from an explosion.

"
One recent town-square meeting, in fact, was devoted to the aesthetic virtues of the Golden Gate Bridge. “We’re the only payments company in the world that’s concerned with design,” the Prada-clad Dorsey begins. He shows a dramatic photo of the bridge taken from atop one of its towers. “This is what I want to build. This is classy. This is inspiring. This is limitless. Every single aspect of this is gorgeous. . . . So your homework this weekend is to cross this bridge, think about that, and also think about how we take those lessons into doing what we do, which is carry every single transaction in the world.”
"

"The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games such as chess."

Over time, Theseus replaces parts of his ship. Eventually, he has replaced all of the parts. Is it still Thesus's ship?

In addition, what if you gathered the discarded parts from Theseus's ship and eventually used them to build a second ship? Would _that_ be Theseus's ship?

Great example for thesis. 68 likes, 34 dislikes. Do you "Like" a video of someone getting beaten?

"When I first got it, I thought that it was a neat idea but something I likely would never use. Wrong! I use it all the time."

I'm constantly forgetting how to set this up for my private projects.

How to draw AppKit classes onto a CALayer.

"Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the redness of an evening sky."

"NSCollectionView is a grid-like structure which contains views. It's similar to NSMatrix, but for NSView objects rather than NSCell objects. Compatible with Leopard (10.5) onwards. It's possibly used by iPhoto for displaying photo thumbnails."

Perfect for Instagallery.

"I have my own style. I adjust some levels in Photogene, crop the image, run it through one of a handful of CameraBag or Lo-Mob filters, then use TiltShiftGen not to make a tilt-shift image but because a little bit of blur goes a long way, and because TiltShiftGen has a killer vignetting tool. But this is a farce. It’s like saying I’m a cook because I mix and match TV dinners."

"A four-hour work week is incredibly appealing if you view work as an obligation, as I used to, but it becomes less appealing when you find your work significant and satisfying."

Access video and audio available only to US residents from anywhere in the word

FMDB, an easy Cocoa wrapper around SQLite.

"NoteTote is one of those ‘How did I get by without this‽’ apps, bridging the gap between your desktop and mobile device."

"I can’t tell you enough; go buy this app."

"Here’s how I like to think about it: Every object emits a habit field. When we sit down at the desk in our office to work, we shape its habit field into a productive one. When we sit down in a lounge chair to watch our favorite TV program, we nudge the chair’s habit field toward relaxation and consumption. The more we repeat the same activity around an object, the stronger its habit field gets. And the stronger its habit field gets, the easier it is for us to effortlessly fall into that mode of behavior the next time we’re around the object."

And computers have a fuzzy habit field because we do so much with them. It's easy to only use a book for reading or a notebook for writing, because that's all you can do with them. Computers make it hard to focus on work when we do stuff other than work on them.

"George Lucas has acknowledged the key influence of The Hidden Fortress on Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. This influence remains particularly evident in the technique of telling the story from the points of view of the film's lowliest characters, C-3PO and R2-D2. Kurosawa's use of frame wipes (sometimes cleverly hidden by motion within the frame) as a transition device also influenced Star Wars."

Archived in case I need it later.

Might be picking one of these up soon.

"A skeuomorph is a derivative object which retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original."

Indirectly via Gruber (http://daringfireball.net/2011/02/push_pop_press):

"I think Apple went with the wrong type of show-offy-ness with iBooks. Apple went in the direction of skeuomorphically aping the paper book — a spine, the outline of paper pages rendered on screen, animation that mimics paper page turning."

"The future isn't going to feel futuristic.

It's simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong."

Nice overview of McLuhan's life.

"Usually McLuhan used hot to describe media that are rich in information and require little participation on the part of the user. Radio is hot because the sound of the human voice is magnified and human speech is standardized and clarified, reducing the amount of interpretation required to understand it. The recipient of the radio broadcast receives a rich information stream that passes through the ears to the brain.

In contrast, the television watcher is highly involved, because the low-resolution TV monitor, with its mosaic screen, requires greater mental participation. TV encourages ironic commentary from viewers, who are constantly being challenged to pull the picture together in their mind's eye. Television produced the remote control and channel surfing, which make this sort of participation obvious. Few listeners use remote controls with radios, and channel surfing on the radio is associated only with the most low-fi radio environment - the automobile.

Hot media deliver more information because they have taken a single sense, such as sight, and magnified and abstracted it to a state of optimum efficiency. Printed books are hotter than illuminated manuscripts because printed books are uniform and repeatable; once a person has mastered the code and become an experienced reader, there is nothing in the book to distract from the direct and rapid transfer of data. In an illuminated manuscript, the text is presented in unique visual style which the reader must attentively contemplate."

- Fit is paramount.
- Access trumps ownership.
- Matter matters. If things take a physical form, it must fill a need.
- If there’s a choice, tend toward beauty, both in aesthetics and utility. If it’s one or the other, tend toward utility.
- Optimize for steadfastness.

History of QuickTime (via Adam's Delicious)

From Macworld 2011.

"If you meet a person who cares about the same obscure things you do, hold on to them for dear life. Sympathy is medicine. Scissors are good, music is better, and mixed drinks with friends are best. Start brave and brash: you can always make things more conservative, but it’s hard to make things more radical."

"way back when, when Netscape released version 4.0 of its browser, we had a release party. Naturally, there had been a big push to try and fix every known bug before the release. Naturally, that hadn't actually happened. At the release party, T-shirts were handed out that said something like "Netscape 4.0: Zarro Boogs"."

Elmo is Love.

Similarly:

Grover is Bravery
Ernie and Bert are Friendship
Big Bird is Innocence
Oscar the Grouch is Independence
Fozzie is Fortitude
Gonzo is Joy
Kermit is Responsibility
Miss Piggy is Determination
Rowlf is Wisdom

and of course the Count is Counting.

"They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It’s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that’s not the best thing for making quality films.”

Text editor that takes cues from Chrome.

Apparently, I'm a "lifehack."

"Embrace, extend and extinguish," also known as "Embrace, extend and exterminate," is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors.

Quiet launches are hard in 2011.

Craig Mod talks about applying book design to e-readers and introduces Bibliotype

Matt Gemmell at NSConference 2010.

The less you know, the less sources of inspiration you have, the more likely your work will be an imitation rather than be subtly inspired by other work.

How to add to the list of Login Items

"When people say 'social media,' they usually mean things experienced on computers, specifically blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This stands in contrast to all the other media that is presumably not social, like TV, radio, and print. But here’s the thing: all media is social. The new stuff just moves faster.

Let’s put aside the fact that media is, in actuality, lifeless and cannot be truly social. Humans are social, the stuff we make is a byproduct of that activity."

The Menger sponge is a fractal that "simultaneously exhibits an infinite surface area and encloses zero volume."

"The Holocron is divided into 5 levels (in order of precedence): G-canon, T-canon, C-canon, S-canon, and N-canon."

By far the most comprehensive collection of inconsistencies in Jurassic Park that I've ever seen.

"When we said that Cocoa does nearly all of the work for you, we weren't kidding. Simply put the information in the right spots and it all works."

Detailed study of how Pac-Man works. History, technical documents, game logic, etc.

"[The ampersand] is a ligature (a binding of two or more letters into one) of the “e” and “t” in the latin word “et” (“and”)."

The @ sign called is an asperand.

Magic for MacVim.

A Python library that provides USB access

behavioral economists asked people to fold origami and then bid on their own creations. As expected, the subjects were consistently willing to pay more for their own folded paper creations. In fact, they were so enamored of their amateurish designs that they valued them as highly as origami made by experts.