Linked List: January 14, 2015

Wednesday, 14 January 2015

Remember Flag? It was a Kickstarter project I linked to a year ago, promising to deliver super-high-quality photo prints for free. How? By printing ads on the back of the prints. “Genius if they can pull it off”, I wrote.

Well, they’ve pulled it off, and are ready to start printing photos by the end of this month, and they’re now accepting bids for advertising at really attractive prices. If you have a cool product or service to advertise, you should check it out.

Google Plus Thread on My Siri Piece Yesterday ★

Chris Lacy, who started the thread, has valid complaints about some of Apple’s worst bugs in recent months. But I don’t think any of them refute my observation that it feels no longer true that “Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services”. Google is getting better at design — Material Design is the best thing that’s ever happened on Android design-wise. But it’s not that great. And I truly believe there’s a strong case to be made that Apple is getting better at web services at a pace equivalent to Google’s improvements in design.

Most of the commenters, though, seem to jump to the conclusion that I’m positing that Apple has caught up to Google in web services. I try not to roll my eyes at accusations that I’m an “Apple apologist”, but I read this thread, and re-read what I wrote yesterday, and it’s hard not to.

(And just to toss this out there: I’d say iCloud Drive is another sign that Apple is getting better at web services. It works great for me, and I don’t see many complaints about it. (Here’s one, though.) Would you have believed it if you were told two or three years ago that Apple would roll out a Dropbox-like cross-platform feature in iCloud and that it would pretty much “just work” right from the get-go?)

‘The Whisky Cabinet’ ★

I read and greatly enjoyed whisky connoisseur Mark Bylok’s new book, The Whisky Cabinet, over the holidays. Great photography, perfect typography, and it’s even printed on excellent paper. Most importantly, Bylok is a good writer who truly knows his shit about whiskies from around the world. Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys whisk(e)y of any sort — especially if you’re looking to expand your palate to new varieties.

Steven Soderbergh on ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ ★

Speaking of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Steven Soderbergh has released his own edit of the film (!):

maybe i was too scared to touch it until now, because not only does the film not need my — or anyone else’s — help, but if it’s not THE most impressively imagined and sustained piece of visual art created in the 20th century, then it’s tied for first. meaning IF i was finally going to touch it, i’d better have a bigger idea than just trimming or re-scoring.

I’ve only watched the first few minutes so far — and as a fan of both 2001 and Soderbergh, it’s no surprise I like what I see. It feels like a recut just for people who are intimately familiar with the original through repeated viewings over the decades — more dream-like than logical. I’m saving the rest for tonight, in the dark, on my Pioneer plasma TV. Speaking of which, Soderbergh writes:

by the way, i’ve seen every conceivable kind of film print of 2001, from 16mm flat to 35mm internegative to a cherry camera negative 70mm in the screening room at warner bros, and i’m telling you, none of them look as good as a bluray played on an pioneer elite plasma kuro monitor. and while you’re cleaning up your spit take over that sentence, let me also say i believe SK would have embraced the current crop of digital cameras, because from a visual standpoint, he was obsessed with two things: absolute fidelity to reality-based light sources, and image stabilization.

I know what he means about looking “good” from Bluray on a good plasma TV, but there’s nothing like the experience of seeing it big — really fucking big, in a packed movie theater — from a 70mm print. It’s a different experience.

5,200 Days in Space ★

Great piece by Charles Fishman for The Atlantic on the International Space Station:

It’s a little strange when you think about it: Just about every American ninth-grader has never lived a moment without astronauts soaring overhead, living in space. But chances are, most ninth-graders don’t know the name of a single active astronaut — many don’t even know that Americans are up there. We’ve got a permanent space colony, inaugurated a year before the setting of the iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a stunning achievement, and it’s completely ignored.

(Via Michele Seiler at Coudal.)