ExpanDrive

Robokill
Anyone else love flash games like I do? This gem is reminiscent of Smash TV. It’s very addictive, but short enough that it can’t take over your life for long.

How we read online
“To really get your attention, I should write like this:
+ Bulleted list
+ Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming
+ Short sentence fragments
+ Explanatory subheads
+ No puns
+ Did I mention lists?”

How to nap
The magnetic office was recently outfitted with a couch.

Sierpinski Cookies
“A few months ago we showed you how to make beautiful fractals in polymer clay. Take that idea, run with it, and where do you end up? In the kitchen, making Sierpinski cookies! These cookies, made from contrasting colors of butter cookie dough, are a tasty realization of the Sierpinski carpet, producing lovely, edible fractals.”

“Cheap gas causes minor traffic jam”
I’m always amazed at what people will do for a couple dollars of marginal savings when it comes to gas.

Magnetic Ring Electric Lock Attack
Scenario 1: An electronic motor is nothing more then a metal part on an axe that turns because of a changing magnetic field. Turning electro magnets on and off will generate a pulling force on the metal part, making it rotate. The ring does the same thing. By turning the ring, the metal part in the electro motor starts turning, opening the lock. As Rop suggested in the comments of the previous posting, a bunch of bigger magnets and maybe a high-speed drill can amplify this effect some more.

Shell Script Mistakes
“While there are lots of shell programming pitfalls, at least the interpreter will tell you immediately about them. The mistakes I describe below, generally mean that your script will run fine now, but if the data changes or you move your script to another system, then you may have problems.”

Robert Muraine Audition – SYTYCD 4
Robert Muraine is now my second favorite dancer in the universe, behind Michael Jackson (obviously).

“Chasing José”
“Over the last few years, Rob has negotiated prospective deals for Jose worth almost $2 million. Rob got Taco Bell to ante up $25,000, plus residuals, for Jose to star in a TV commercial in which Jose would hold up a huge burrito and say, ‘This thing’s gotta be on something.’ Jose demanded $50,000 instead and Taco Bell walked. Rob also got Jose an offer of $100,000 from GoldenPalace.com, which would require Jose simply to wear that company’s t-shirt and cap whenever he was on TV. Jose demanded $200,000 and Golden Palace walked. Then, Rob got Jose an offer of $75,000 from a reality TV show that wanted to film Jose in a wheelchair for thirty days. Jose demanded more, and the TV show vanished. Finally, Rob got Jose an offer of $500,000 for a movie based on his life, but Jose demanded $1.5 million and the offer vanished.”

Twitter bucks
I wonder if they’ll let you buy twitterbucks with flooz. John Gruber suggests a more realistic business model for twitter.

On Language: Emoticons
“The trouble is that the stylized drawings of iconography (rooted in the Greek eikenai, ‘to seem like,’ and graphein, ‘to write’) are threatening to take over the precise communication of words.”

Hoax: 13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers
We don’t issue retractions here at Magnanimous. We silently delete misguided posts, and then link to their expose as if we never fell for it in the first place.

“Dear American Airlines”
“‘Dear American Airlines,’ the 180-page letter begins. ‘My name is Benjamin R. Ford and I am writing to request a refund in the amount of $392.68.’ But ‘request,’ he decides, is a word ‘too mincy & polite, I think, too officious & Britishy.’ He demands a refund.”

Points for anyone who knows how I can reclaim control-a from WordPress.

“Pictures of TV”
Sometimes, while walking around town, I’ll see ridiculous ad copy on canopy signs or store fronts, and I’ll read them out loud in my radio announcer voice: “Natural Natural Natural Natural Food Snacks Groceries”. I think I’m going to start doing that with TV too.

“RISC vs. CISC in the mobile era”
“Unlike 1998, though, RISC vs. CISC actually matters, now. A close look at the design of Intel’s newest mobile architecture, officially named Atom, will show why the decades-old “RISC vs. CISC” debate is suddenly interesting again, and in some entirely new ways. In this article, I’ll talk about the penalty that Intel’s new Atom ultramobile processor pays for its CISC legacy, and how Intel plans to reduce the impact of that penalty with simultaneous multithreading.”

Wedding Pictures from the Sichuan Earthquake
Moving pictures from the earthquake in progress. Makes rain-on-your-wedding day, which isn’t at all “ironic”, also seem not very bad.

Zero Punctuation: Painkiller
I hate posting something on the same day as Gruber, but he’s out of date on this one, having linked to a review from two weeks ago, and I’m not going to abandon my pre-existing idea just because he gets to post one link at a time while I’ve got to type up like a dozen. Yesterday Zero Punctuation reviewed Painkiller, one of Matt’s favorite games: “Right in the beginning you get a gun that shoot giant wooden stakes, and when you hit the bad guys with it they’ll fly like 40 feet and get pinned to the wall… The physics engine is what makes the game fun.”

R. Kelly: Jury selection and the trial itself
“As R. Kelly’s child pornography trial is about to start, the judge’s media liaison gathers all of the reporters together to announce that we’ll be watching a sex tape in open court. He then delivers stern advice about doodling. ‘I am here to warn you,’ says Terry Sullivan, ‘that anyone who draws a depiction or a simulation can be committing the act of child pornography. … You don’t want to be doing that.’

Monopoles is out, once again, earlier than other weekly link blogs.

Dino Run
“I can say without hesitation that the Big Black Wall of Doom is among the most harrowing presences I’ve ever encountered in video games” on Metafilter. For the record, the “Wall of Doom” is the only thing in the game that hurts you, and is properly called a pyroclastic flow.

Chronotron
The tutorial explains it better than words can, but you basically use time travel to cooperate with your past selves in completing the levels. It gets a little tedious when waiting around for you slow-assed past selves to finish up what they’re doing. Also, kongregate does that weird cross-site time-warp with Facebook, so watch out if you don’t want your friends to know you play flash games on the internet. Finally, as always, watch out for paradoxes.

Custom File Formats in Cocoa
For the nth time Matt Long posts a spectacular, time-saving, hand-holding, super-insightful Cocoa tutorial about a month after I figured it out myself, the hard way.

“Iron Man”
“Hollywood will think that the public loves Iron Man because it is a superhero movie, a fantasy in which an ordinary person finds himself endowed with supernatural abilities. In fact, the public loves Iron Man because it is a rich-guy movie–a type of movie that offers the same kind of fantasy fulfillment without the supernatural nonsense.”

Biggest Apple Store Ever Opens Today
And not but 3 blocks from my house.

“Architecture astronauts take over”
We’re not going to name names, but a lot of famous bloggers named Gruber and 37signals (for example) linked non-ironically (sometimes called “sincerely”) to this Joel on Software post. The first 900 words are just stupid; it’s the last paragraph where he really goes off the deep end. Joel can’t find talent because MS and Google pay so much that it’s “unethical”. Maybe the problem is that MS and Google have projects that are more exciting than web based bug tracking and home brewed forks of VBScript.

Headline of the Week

“Visible Borders in Designs”
There’s an internal dispute at Magnetk right now concerning the remodeling of our web presence. Some at the company, a self described “modernist”, is a big fan of the page-within-a-page. Someone else, a minimalist, thinks it’s a stupid metaphor. Look for the resolution to this dispute in days to come, right here, in the the margins of Magnanimous. (ps: if you’re a design professional with good arguments against page-in-a-page, email them to jonshea at this domain.)

Photos of the Chaiten Eruption in Chile
Click through the first few photos to get to the real Mordor / Mt. Doom stuff.

“On (not) Seeing Red”
I’m “colorblind”. I use quotation marks because people with anomalous trichromacy, like myself, have a different, but not necessarily inferior (and certainly not “blind”) color perception than most people. Props to Dean, though, for looking out for us.

Free Gas: Colbert takes on Gas Tax Breaks
With a “glowing review” from my favorite economist.

“Mail 2.0-style split views”
A free Cocoa NSSplitView subclass by Kayembi London which lets you achieve the Mail.app 2.0 style split view, complete with a single-pixel separator and a draggable thumb.

“Priest Vanishes on Balloon Flight”
“A Roman Catholic priest who floated off under hundreds of helium party balloons was missing Monday off the southern coast of Brazil… A video of Carli posted on the G1 Web site of Globo TV showed the smiling 41-year-old priest slipping into a flight suit, being strapped to a seat attached to a huge column green, red, white and yellow balloons, and soaring into the air to the cheers of a crowd.…”

“The Crazy Baseball Fan Rule”
If my livelihood depended on people paying money to watch baseball, then I too would try to keep the fans from realizing what it felt like to watch something exciting.

1979 Video Game Pitch Meeting
“You’re a truck driver and you try to kill frogs that cross the road”
“No. You are the frog” cheers
“You just blew my mind. He hops on alligators; he eats flies; and he makes it with lady frogs. Keep it coming…”
Also, worst online video experience ever.

“Not Funny, Lenovo”
“I honor the place where my work and your imitation become one.”

“Git Push: Just The Tip”
“Wherein our hero explores git-push. Just for a second. Just to see how it feels.”

AirBear
You know that scene in “American Beauty” where they go on and on about how “beautiful” the grocery bag was while it floated in the wind? I thought that was BS. People only call grocery bags beautiful because they’re trying to sound contemplative and deep.

Eagle kills a kid
Jimmy: Ah Mr. McLure I have a crazy friend who says it’s wrong to eat meat. Is he crazy?
Troy McClure: No, just ignorant. You see, your crazy friend never heard of the food chain.

The future
“ExpanDrive is like living in the future”

Generators
“Springing this on the uninitiated might cause their head to explode.”

High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas
Did anyone get the feeling that this elite “A-team” was in way over their heads?