anime suggestions?

A while ago The verge posted about anime suggestions, and I've been meaning to see what people thought of the suggestions and get feedback on which I should start with. I'll highlight the one's I've already watched some or all of in Green. In general, I'm not in love with shows that are gundam based. I've watched most of Big O! and forgave it's gundam-ness because it managed to on about the time of night I was watching tv every night. Oh Adult swim, I almost miss staying up watching you.

• Code Geass
• High School of the Dead
• Lucky Star
• Black Lagoon
• Cowboy Bebop
• Yu Yu Hakusho
• Gundam Wing
• G Gundam
• Death Note
• The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi
• Big O!
• School Days
• Afro Samurai
• Evangelion
• Full Metal Alchemist (Original and Brotherhood)
• Detective Conan/Case Closed
• Hellsing (Original and Ultimate)
• Samurai Champloo
• Onegai Sensei/Twins
• Witch Hunter Robin
• Speed Grapher
• Love Hina
• Devil May Cry
• Welcome to the NHK
• Goshuushou Sama Ninomiya Kun

Going to Bat

I won't make any comments about either his service in the US military or the rest of his congressional record, but John McCain is sort of my hero this second. It's dull to watch for sure, but he introduced legislation to force cable companies and network operators to offer a la carte programming (choose just the channels you want) and prevent local market sports blackouts when the venue or team publicly funded. Both of these things are awesome, and chances of passing are about nill. The third point of the legislation should sound like an awesome victory for the startup Aero.



Source: The verge

Distracting distraction

Thanks to The Verge for posting this interesting video on the nature of distraction.

Long form journalism on the web

Maybe it's my age showing, maybe it's the liberal arts college talking; or maybe who knows why but lately there have been some really excellent long form articles on the internet.  It might be better to say, there have been some articles that are very long that I've enjoyed on the internet lately.  Either way, here are a few of them.


Forbes lays out the tragi-comic clusterfuck of HP's long slow decline.

The Verge wrote a interesting article on the practices and process of online scammers.

The New York Times did a piece on frightening children.


That's been the best of my weeks reading, how about you, any good reads of late?  I still working on my Rise of the Meritocracy follow up post.  I want to get it read before I add much more but thus far, at around 1/3 of the way through it I feel like the summary would be enough to get the real value of the book.  Some of the specific though fictional "how it played out" is interesting to see how closely his predictions charted with real history, but otherwise don't add any real context to the crux of his argument in my opinion.  Again, I'm not done yet so my opinion may be swayed.

Absurd Camera making process

So start trying to guess how much the camera kit being made in the video costs.  Any number that comes to mind, I will hide the number in with my handy script for you to try and guess. Hat Tip to The Verge for sharing this. Watching the video really got me to thinking though about how the optics, and the connections for controlling the toggles could all be re-used if the image sensor and processor could be an upgradeable part. The camera itself is just a housing for the sensor, and the rest of the knobs just a way to talk to the brain; the brain and sensor should be upgradeable. Why let this beautiful body for a camera languish with outdated parts at some point? Design the camera around a modular card that houses the brain and sensor with simple connectors (ie a bus interface) that would allow this camera to be upgraded sometime down the line. If you're going to dump this much money into a camera it should be future proofed to some degree!

RIP Chumby

So if you've never heard of Chumby (or the Sony Dash for that mater) it's fine, neither has anybody else.  The Verge just let me know that they are going the way of the Dodo bird and have no longer have any employees.  It's sad in a way, the device as envisioned was really a neat idea, and I wanted one in theory I just wanted everything about it to be different.  I heard about the device because of my interest and admiration of Andrew "bunny" Huang, MIT PHD that wrote Hacking the XBOX.  You can keep up with bunnie on his blog, dude does really interesting security research and just general messing with commercial products.

The gist of the device was an wifi connected alarm clock that can interact with different widgets.  Sounds cool right?

Well it wasn't.

It was slow, the touch screen was of a bygone era and cardinal sin of sins it only supported flash widgets you had to load on their servers.  In short it sucked.  I wanted to love you, and I hope someone tries again in this category of devices because it was really a cool idea. I currently use a discarded HTC EVO 4G i resurrected from the grave (it got run over) and to a lesser extent my Nook Color tablet for this type of a device.  If you want something that's fun and connected to the internet and does tons of stuff and doesn't make you into an iDouche, I love Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0).  It appears the android devs finally listened and support advanced network setups and proxies so I can actually use these devices in my workplace now!