Geek Chic

This is totally amazing — a really clever marketing campaign from Nintendo on YouTube.

You have to check it out

via AjaxBlog

Google announced its first foray into the smartphone market yesterday with T-Mobile’s HTC Dream, which uses the Android Mobile OS.

I honestly have to say I’m not particularly impressed with what I’ve seen so far.  If the iPhone is the sexy MacBook Air of the mobile world, the Dream feels like the equivalent of the One Laptop Per Child laptops: interesting enough to play with for awhile, but not enticing enough to buy.

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Dear Apple,

Regarding your recent behavior towards your iPhone Developer Network: please stop being such fascists.

It’s one thing to hold your developers to high standards and reject apps that do not meet those standards (I’m looking at you, AIM).  It’s quite another to reject applications because they are like yours and (heaven forbid) possibly even perform better than your own.

Be nice.

Sit back, relax, and remember just how much you rely on the developers of the open source community — how much of their code you’ve rolled into your own.

What’s wrong with a little competition?  What do you have to be scared of?  People should be challenging you to improve your own applications.  Let us, the users, make the choice.  If we want to have 3 mail applications, 12 versions of Sudoku and 85 different ways to upload our photos to Flickr, we can agree that’s stupid, but that should be our choice to make.  And really, we both know your apps are going to be better in the end anyway.  But let us figure that out for ourselves.

We’re smart.  We bought your iPhone in the first place, didn’t we?  Trust us to put what we want on it.

I don’t want to hear any more crap like this from you.  Really?  A statement of confidentiality to gag your developers, preventing them from venting that they just blew months of dev time on an application you rejected for no reason? Come on.  You’re better than this.  Or at least you used to be.

Shape up!

Until you do, I will scream from the hilltops that Jailbreak is the only way to iPhone.

Sincerely,

Jeff
Lord Geek Supreme
Geek Chic

I’m not always a fan of these t-shirt people (you know, the ones infesting the ad system in Facebook).  Most of their jokes are sort of sad, strained frat humor.  But I like this one:

As always, though, when it comes down to the critical question of ‘would I actually wear this more than once?’ the answer is, sadly no.

but you can, if you’re so inclined

via FFFFound

I’m not sure who’s behind this ad, or even if it’s real or photoshopped, but I think it’s really clever.

via FFFFound

what are you doing, Steve?

Over the weekend, a lot of dirty laundry was aired about Microsoft’s anti-Apple campaign, including:

1. The entire campaign was created on Macs, as evidenced by metadata scraped from some of the ad campaign’s photos.
2. The ad agency behind the campaign, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, was profiled a few months ago on Apple’s Pro site as being fanatical Apple users.
3. Microsoft’s Mojave experiment — designed to convince users to take another look at Vista — apparently fudged a lot of its numbers.
4. The Times quote that Microsoft uses on all of their campaigns, ‘Windows Vista is beautiful,’ was apparently taken out of the context of a highly critical David Pogue article, in which he talks about how clunky the OS is and how most of the interface was ripped off from Apple.
5. RoughlyDrafted wrote a concise, chilling rebuttal to Paul Thurrott calling Apple ‘the Bad Guys’ and ‘liars’ for exposing Vista’s flaws (which brings up a very good point — could Microsoft possibly make the argument that MacOS has huge flaws?  I’d like to see that one.)

All of this adds up to what looks like a huge embarrassment for Microsoft.

Over the weekend I was doing a bit of video work for my theater company — compiling some work sample DVDs.  A couple of times (as sometimes happens), Toast threw an error that turned an otherwise perfectly usable DVD into a coaster.  This, over time and over a large number of users, must generate a lot of waste.

Since the idea of generating less waste has been on my mind a lot lately — especially in terms of trying to reduce my consumption of plastic — I started investigating whether CDs and DVDs were recyclable.

Turns out, yes!  There are a couple of services that will accept old CDs and DVDs (and their cases), recycle them, and send them back out into the world:

• CD Recycling Center is a free resource that accepts CDs, DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blue-Ray discs and CD cases for free (!!!) all you have to pay for is postage.
• EcoDisc does the same

There are probably more out there — these were just the easiest ones to find on Google.  It’s also possible your city’s recycling program accepts these items along with your plastic recycling.

This is all good news, no?  Yes, it takes a little bit of effort, but not too much.  And it seems worthwhile to not unnecessarily contribute any more plastic to our landfills or the accumulation of plastic in our ocean’s gyres (why the latter doesn’t show up in the news more often is completely baffling to me).

If there were any justice in the world, AOL would foot any bills generated by recycling CDs and DVDs.  I would love to see a figure on what percentage of CDs in our landfills came from them…