Linked List: November 1, 2015

Sunday, 1 November 2015

Makerbase 

My thanks to Makerbase for sponsoring last week’s DF RSS feed. Makerbase is like an IMDB for people who make apps, websites, and podcasts. New features include the ability to get notified — optionally! — when your friends make a new project, or when someone says you inspire them.

Makerbase is one of those things that in hindsight seems like a really obvious idea, but somehow no one made it until now. (The entry for me makes me think I ought to be creating more new things.)

Roger Moore’s Recipe for a Perfect Dry Martini 

Roger Moore, writing for The Guardian:

The sad fact is that I know exactly how to make a dry martini but I can’t drink them because, two years ago, I discovered I was diabetic. I prefer one with gin, but James Bond liked a vodka martini, “shaken not stirred” — which I never said, by the way. That was Sean Connery, remember him?

The worst martini I’ve ever had was in a club in New Zealand, where the barman poured juice from a bottle of olives into the vodka. That’s called a dirty martini and it is a dirty, filthy, rotten martini, and should not be drunk by anybody except condemned prisoners.

My dry martinis taste amazing and the day they tell me I’ve got 24 hours to live I am going to have six. Here’s how I make them.

Moore’s recipe should please you gin aficionados who always email me to complain when I link to Jim Coudal’s recipe. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend Moore’s recipe — you need significant stirring, and there’s no need to put the cocktail shaker in the freezer. But I found Moore’s affection for martinis, and the poignancy of his inability now to drink them, irresistible.

How Bond Got Stuck With a Sony Xperia Phone 

I missed this from back in April:

Sony offered James Bond star Daniel Craig a $5 million fee to put the forthcoming Sony Xperia Z4 smartphone in the forthcoming film Spectre, but Craig and Spectre director Sam Mendes resisted because “James Bond only uses the ‘best.’”

Craig and Mendes had concerns other than cash, it seems from that second email.

“BEYOND the $$ factor, there is, as you may know, a CREATIVE factor whereby Sam and Daniel don’t like the Sony phone for the film (the thinking, subjectively/objectively is that James Bond only uses the ‘best,’ and in their minds, the Sony phone is not the ‘best’),” wrote Andrew Gumpert, President of Worldwide Business Affairs and Operations for Columbia Pictures.

Seems pretty obvious which phone Bond ought to be using.

(Via Henry Mance, writing for The Financial Times.)