Linked List: October 1, 2007

Monday, 1 October 2007

Rainer Brockerhoff has, by far, the best technical explanation I’ve seen regarding why SIM-unlocked iPhones might be rendered inoperable by the iPhone 1.1.1 update, without assuming any sort of spiteful malfeasance on Apple’s part.

Insomnia Film Festival Tips ★

Good suggestions from John August for any aspiring filmmakers considering Apple’s upcoming Insomnia Film Festival contest:

Go funny. While there will no doubt be one or two dramatic shorts in the finals, the winner will be funny.

David Foster Wallace’s Introduction to ‘The Best American Essays 2007’ ★

Speaking of “The Best American” anthologies, David Foster Wallace edited the 2007 edition, and his introduction is, unsurprisingly, killer — an examination regarding just what the title of the book, The Best American Essays 2007, actually means, including wondering what exactly an “essay” is:

And yet Beard’s and Orozco’s pieces are so arresting and alive and good that they end up being salient even if one is working as a guest essay editor and sitting there reading a dozen Xeroxed pieces in a row before them and then another dozen in a row after them — essays on everything from memory and surfing and Esperanto to childhood and mortality and Wikipedia, on depression and translation and emptiness and James Brown, Mozart, prison, poker, trees, anorgasmia, color, homelessness, stalking, fellatio, ferns, fathers, grandmothers, falconry, grief, film comedy — a rate of consumption which tends to level everything out into an undifferentiated mass of high-quality description and trenchant reflection that becomes both numbing and euphoric, a kind of Total Noise that’s also the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value.

That’s probably the best sentence I’ve read all year.

What Ails the Short Story ★

Stephen King, editor of The Best American Short Stories 2007, on the state of short fiction:

I want the ancient pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes the eject button in his F-111. I certainly don’t want some fraidy-cat’s writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness about what Bob Dylan once called “the true meaning of a pear.”

eBay’s $4 Billion Lesson in the Value of Hype ★

Saul Hansell:

Here’s a suggestion to every Internet executive: take a Post-It note, write “EBay wasted $3 billion on Skype” and stick it to your monitor.

Wall-E Update ★

Kottke on the new trailer for Pixar’s upcoming Wall-E:

Does it make sense even if you don’t speak French? Yes, because the movie isn’t going to have any dialogue. Says director Andrew Stanton: “I’m basically making R2-D2: The Movie”.

I think it was Steven Spielberg who described R2-D2 as the most purely-cinematic character in movie history — everything we know about him comes through his beeps and minimal range of motion, and the other characters’ reactions.

Nokia Buys Navteq for $8.1 Billion ★

Kevin J. O’Brien, reporting for The New York Times:

Nokia, the world’s biggest cellphone maker, said today that it had agreed to pay $8.1 billion for Navteq, the maker of digital mapping and navigational software based in Chicago, as it seeks to migrate satellite-based location services onto its range of phones.

The Bygone Bureau: ‘Rainbows’ Reveals a Brighter Tomorrow ★

Interesting, if somewhat hyperbolic, piece by Nick Martens regarding Radiohead’s “pay what you think you should pay” online release of their new album.

iPhone: Context Over Consistency ★

Jason Fried on the location of the new iTunes icon on the iPhone home screen.

‘Build Your Wings on the Way Down’ ★

Annie Dillard: “If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be too cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

Update: Seems like this quote might be from Ray Bradbury, not Annie Dillard. Can anyone find a precise citation for this?

Update 2: More sources pointing to Bradbury, including an interview with the Brown Daily Herald in 1995, but most aren’t in the exact same form as the above.

Pilot G-2 0.38mm Pens in Stock at Staples.com ★

Those ultra-fine Pilot G-2 gel pens I adore from JetPens.com? They’re now stocked at Staples.com, just $15 for a dozen.

Grid Layout JS ★

JavaScript bookmarklet that toggles background guides on and off for use in developing grid-based web page layouts. Based on an idea by Jon Hicks.

Programming Nu ★

Tim Burks’s new web site for Nu, his new programming language designed from the ground-up specifically for use as an Objective-C scripting language. (See my write-up regarding Burks’s excellent presentation about Nu at C4[1] a few weeks ago.)

DrawIt 3.0 ★

New version of Pieter Omvlee’s $49 drawing/illustration app. Looks interesting — the UI emphasis is on keeping everything in a single window. There’s a strong flavor of iWork-ness to the new version.

An Aperture User Looks at Adobe Lightroom ★

Fraser Speirs:

For those who don’t care to read the minutiae, I’ll get to the point: In my opinion, Aperture vs. Lightroom is the same discussion as Canon vs. Nikon. Each has strengths and weaknesses, but it’s not a no-brainer decision either way.