By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: November 27, 2006
Monday, 27 November 2006
- Fake Steve: ‘Meg Whitman to Appear on TLC’s “What Not to Wear”’ ★
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Fake Steve:
I mean, if you’re gonna be a celebrity CEO, you gotta have a look. Like me. Black turtleneck and jeans. Easy. But classy. Also patented, so don’t even think about it.
- Kevin Smith’s Rejected iTunes Celebrity Playlist ★
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Rejected because he wrote a paragraph about each song, rather than just a sentence or two, and he didn’t want to edit his remarks. Any playlist with Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run” is a good playlist.
(Via Kottke.)
- CaminIcon 1.7 ★
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Icon and tab theme switcher for Camino. Does its thing by modifying the resources within the Camino.app bundle.
- Viral Learning Center ★
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Enroll now and learn how to take your viral video to the next level. (Via Veer.)
- Fall of the U.S. Dollar and Indie Software Pricing ★
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Rory Prior:
As someone outside the US who does most of his business in the dollar I’ve been increasingly concerned as the currency has continued to devalue over the past few years. We’ve almost reached the point where 1 dollar is barely worth £0.51 and I’ve decided that if it drops below £0.50 I’m going to have to switch over to selling in euros.
- David Galbraith: ‘I Just Saw a Zune, and Guess What? It’s a Piece of Shit’ ★
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Galbraith really nails it here:
Microsoft is a company that sells to the type of business that has cubicle offices. It has made bad design a virtue, by making it look economical. Soul crushing design is what Microsoft is about, but personal technology is changing that.
Microsoft’s one and only consumer success is the Xbox, where by “success” I mean a second-place platform which continues to lose money for the company.
I played with a demo Zune unit at Target last week. The screen is very nice, but as a unit the whole thing feels junky in your hands. The UI looks good, but it’s nowhere near as obvious as an iPod’s.
- Just a Little Reminder to Let Us Know That OmniFocus Is Still Vaporware ★
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This is why you shouldn’t pre-announce apps.
- Anil Dash: The Starting Line Is Not the Finish Line ★
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Anil Dash:
Launching something meaningful is about every day, every minute, that happens after that start. Honestly, it makes me feel a lot like when I was talking about getting married: “If you tell people you’re engaged, they start talking to you about that one day, and almost never about the other half century you’re signing up for.”
- Thanksgetting ★
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Best The Show, ever.
- Anil Dash: Pay by the Hour ★
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An oldie-but-goodie from Anil Dash on how to set your hourly rate if you’re a freelancer or consultant.
- Tragedii ★
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Cabel Sasser’s Wii was pretty much broken out of the box and so he’s sent it back for repairs — but yet he still managed to write the best review of it I’ve seen yet.
- Valleywag: Three Reasons Why Digg Gets Its Numbers Wrong ★
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Digg claims 20 million unique visitors a month; Nick Denton calls bullshit. (For one thing, they admit they’re counting RSS hits in those numbers, which is just silly.)
- Jeffrey Zeldman: Safari Better Than Firefox? ★
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Jeffrey Zeldman:
Unfortunately, as our screen shots have shown, common sense works against you here, because Firefox, although superior to other browsers in many ways, handles text like a drunken fry-cook.
What really annoys me about Gecko is the way it deals with hyphenated words — Gecko doesn’t treat the hyphens as line-wrapping break points.
- RCDefaultApp 2.0.1 ★
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Minor update to Rubicode’s excellent free utility for specifying the default application for URL schemes, file extensions, MIME types, and more.
- The Big Ideas Behind Nintendo’s Wii ★
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BusinessWeek interviews Nintendo resident genius Shigeru Miyamoto and designer Ken’ichiro Ashida, on the design of the Wii. I really love the idea that they’re competing against the raw processing firepower of the Xbox 360 and PS3 with cleverness.
Interesting, too, that Nintendo does not use focus groups.
- Designing a Better Nail ★
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When houses and other wooden buildings collapse in hurricanes and earthquakes, the most common point of failure isn’t the wood, but the nails. Ed Sutt has designed a better nail, which can withstand significantly greater stress than traditional nails, and which adds a mere $15 to the cost of a typical new home.
(Thanks to Chris Pepper.)
- The Rojas MP3 Player ★
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Jason Calacanis:
If anyone knows what a gadget should be, and where the market is going, it’s [Engadget editor Peter Rojas]. Dave Winer joked with me at dinner this past summer that Peter would make a better iPod than Steve Jobs — I think I agree.
A good critic isn’t necessarily a talented designer. Should Roger Ebert be directing films? Should Paul Krugman run for president? Perhaps, but probably not.
- VisualHub ★
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$23 video converter for Mac OS X; supports iPod video formats. (Via Playlist Magazine’s 2006 Plays of the Year.)
- Fortune: Apple in Talks With Beatles ★
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Tim Arango, reporting for Fortune:
As Fortune went to press, numerous deal points were still being hammered out. According to a music industry executive apprised of the talks, the parties were discussing how lengthy a window of exclusivity iTunes might get and how many tens of millions of dollars Jobs — who is said to be personally involved in the discussions —will commit to an advance for the band and marketing costs.
- Andy Ihnatko: Avoid the Loony Zune ★
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Andy Ihnatko utterly trashes the Zune:
The Zune is a complete, humiliating failure. Toshiba’s Gigabeat player, for example, is far more versatile, it has none of the Zune’s limitations, and Amazon sells the 30-gig model for 40 bucks less.
I’m not sure I’ve ever read a gadget review quite this vicious.
- ‘Pump-and-Dump’ Spam Surge Linked to Russian Bot Herders ★
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Possible explanation for the recent surge in email spam. I’ve been getting about double and some days even triple my previous level of spam for the past month or so — about 600-700 per day, up from around 300 per day for most of 2006.
(Via Simon Willison.)