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KenFlix 23-day review

We’ve been subscribing to KenFlix for 23 days and loving it! Here’s what we watched:

  • Juno - better than I expected.
  • Saawariya - the first ten minutes were so bad we turned it off.
  • Once - we saw it in the theater and liked it. still good, but this movie is best watched once.
  • Sopranos - Season 5 disc 4. They all blur together. I can’t watch any more of these for a while.
  • No Country For Old Men - Good, but far too violent to watch with Jess and the parents.
  • Someone to Eat Cheese With - Much better than I was expecting.
  • Planet Earth on Bluray - We got this to test Bob’s sweet new home theater system. The encoding quality was disappointing. The places where you can usually hide quantization noise (foliage, high-freq areas) were encoded very poorly. It was sad to see panning shots across the forest exhibit so many compression artifacts. These guys need to use an encoder tuned to such scenes. Note: don’t ask a video codec engineer to review encoding quality of Bluray discs unless you want to get an earful..
  • Be Kind Rewind - Slowish, neat plot but could have been much better.
  • Congorama - Whoa. Unexpectedly, my favorite KenFlix so far!
  • War - dunno. Only Bob watched it.
  • Wave Twisters - Great, but Bob hadn’t seen it, and the DVD wouldn’t play. Oh well.
  • Futurama: Beast with a Billion Backs - Disappointing. We had such high hopes!
  • Eastern Promises - Very intense. Good, but good thing Jess didn’t see this one.
  • Stray Dog - Japanese noir. Kurosawa is always good.

14 in 23 days.. I don’t think we’ll be able to keep this rate up once Bob starts work. We’ll probably drop down to about one a week. We’re a long way from the 165 per month theoretical maximum!

Bob & Jess, anything to add? Did I forget any?

Zara is a mad hatter!



Zara is a mad hatter!, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

-bob and raj

Gobby: Open-Source, Cross-Platform Collaborative Text Editing!

Shag and I were collaboratively hacking on a new radio station for the archive, and we needed a collaborative text editor. SubEthaEdit is great, but Mac-only. Shag found Gobby, which is a like an open-source SubEtha that works great on Linux.

If you haven’t used a collaborative editor before, multiple authors can work on the same files, and everyone sees each others edits in real time, differentiated by background color. Gobby has syntax highlighting, integrated chat, over-the-wire encryption, and is a pretty solid text editor too. We love it! Here are some ideas we had for future patches:

  • indent-region
  • sound cue upon message receipt
  • auto-indent
  • birds-eye view of the file to watch changes go in
  • function dropdown

As soon as we get indent-region and function dropdowns patched in, I’ll switch my main unix editor from KDevelop to Gobby.

Beaker: unsung muppet hero

Beaker is one of my favorite muppets. Just watch this video, and you’ll agree!

What would your ideal notebook look like?

Suppose you could design your own moleskine-esque notebook, where every page and the cover is fully customizable. What kind of pages and images would you include? Please leave your ideas in the comments!

Wildfires visible from bernal hill

- bob

Reddit open source release party at Swig

Come join us!
Bob, raj, Sam, and rita

Samovar!



Samovar!, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

Its chai:30!

-bob

Spam Onigiri



Spam Onigiri, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

This is what my friend walt is having for lunch. A humongo piece of
spam sushi! I never even knew such a thing existed!

may

Mesh Day!



Mesh Day!, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

Mesh Day is tomorrow. Ralf is busy unpacking these cute little nodes
from open-mesh.com

Overheard at work last night



Overheard at work last night, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

Person 1: Dude, are you going to get one of those new 3 gig iPhones?

Person 2: Naw man, mine is already 8 gigs.

(I was wondering why apple stock was down after the keynote yesterday)

-Bob

KenFlix: 165 movies for $20/month

We are on the second day of our KenFlix subscription, and loving it! I was wondering if KenFlix was limited to just one movie per day, or if you could get a movie, watch it, and then immediately walk back to Four Star Video and get a new one. I told the folks at 4star we were going to have a KenFlix weekend where we would see how many movies we could watch in two days, and all three people working behind the counter said that was a perfectly great idea. Ridiculous!

So anyway:
(11 hours open per day) * (30 days per month) / (2 hours per movie) = 165 movies a month!

coredump

Seen outside archive HQ:

Today, while trying to burn a Knoppix DVD, I had four senior programmers standing around me, helping with cdrecord command line options.

me: I can’t believe I’m wasting four other developer’s time trying to burn a dvd…
sam: That’s the difference between Linux and Windows.

Photo credit: Paul!

Video Feedback by Sam Stoller

Sam made this trippy video feedback clip by pointing a 1982 RCA video camera at a 1987 Sony trinitron. Playing with Sam’s video feedback rig is super fun.. you can mess with the zoom and focus of the camera and the color settings of the tv to interactively manipulate the video.

(click play to start) (link to high-rez version)

photo.jpg



photo.jpg, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

–tracey
iPhat fingured this frome my iPhone
http://aidslifecycle.org/3287

photo.jpg



photo.jpg, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

–tracey
iPhat fingured this frome my iPhone
http://aidslifecycle.org/3287

photo.jpg



photo.jpg, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

–tracey
iPhat fingured this frome my iPhone
http://aidslifecycle.org/3287

photo.jpg



photo.jpg, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

–tracey
iPhat fingured this frome my iPhone
http://aidslifecycle.org/3287

photo.jpg



photo.jpg, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

–tracey
iPhat fingured this frome my iPhone
http://aidslifecycle.org/3287

photo.jpg



photo.jpg, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

–tracey
iPhat fingured this frome my iPhone
http://aidslifecycle.org/3287

Tiki Resurrection

After a long hiatus, George made an appearance at Mike’s 35th bday bbq!


Saz made George back in 2003 to preside over the TikiCrawler. Max made the tronix for the fire, and foo did the welding for the frame.

The TikiCrawler was an awesome group project.. We need a new project this year! Also, I need a TikiCrawler to drive around the city. Even hammocks are faster than muni :)

Photo credits: mike and catweasel!

Raj & jorge



Raj & jorge, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

si, jorge del fuego grande

Geooooorge



Geooooorge, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

george lives! Mang lives!

photo.jpg



photo.jpg, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

–tracey
iPhat fingured this frome my iPhone
http://aidslifecycle.org/3287

photo.jpg



photo.jpg, originally uploaded by tiki.robot.

–tracey
iPhat fingured this frome my iPhone
http://aidslifecycle.org/3287

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