Twilight Universe

God that was an awful, poorly made, badly plotted, poorly researched movie. Then again, what else did I expect from an over-hyped airport novel? Miriam has started reviewing movies in Haikus, and I think she nailed this one:

Tom Hanks is confused
Searching for some dead lady
I want a refund

However Ian McKellen steals every scene he is in by treating it as exactly the kind of turd that needs a completely over the top hammy performance. If you are truely interested in this movie though… wait for it on DVD and rent it. It’s not worth any more of your money.

Have you ever seen Channel Chooser? This website is a brilliant online video streaming site that has all the free to air cable and satelite channels - seemingly from around the world. It even has BBC News, the Sci-Fi channel, and many many more.

Finally! Totally bookmarked.

Some clever person over at Slate.com has decided to start ‘textcasting‘. Basically a blank file with a bunch of text.

Dear god why? The idea was to get text onto an iPod. Newsflash guys: The iPods ‘Notes’ feature is designed exactly for that! This is the kind of thing that is a good idea (including the text along with the podcast) completely taken to the next, very stupid, level.

Talk about re-inventing the wheel.

I suppose the idea is to lever the current podcasting software into automatically downloading it onto the iPod, but there are already RSS -> notes downloaders, and some of them are built into some podcasting software.

I’m really scratching my head over this, can anyone provide any decent rationalisation for it?

Google used to do a zietgiest thing that was very cool, but they tapped into all that data and let us search it (after all if you are going to organise the worlds data that includes your own right?) They called this: Google Trends. Well, as the net knows all… I thought I’d see what it tells me.

I give you 10 things I learnt on Google Trends:

Retro: VH1 was right: Everyone loves the 80’s.
Politics: The Democrats are only marginally more interesting that The Republicans but Labour still can’t fail to be more interesting than The Conservatives
Browsers: Firefox destroys all before it, IE and Safari are tied for last, but Dublin still loves IE more than is probably healthy.
Nationality: The UK kicks the USA’s arse!
Web: Blog is the new Website and, despite a lot of marketing, no-one really cares about ASP - they want PHP.
Knowledge: Mexico loves Encarta, but Wikipedia beats everyone.
Music: Britany Spears star is at last finally fading, but Australia wishes it wasn’t.

and finally? Well my ass beats your ass. I know, don’t cry too much.

I’ve always liked IP2Nation: a free database that lets you find out from someones IP what country they are in. It’s a nice example of someone collating the free data out there and then distributing it in a useful format.

But what about cities?

There are lots of services that charge up to $800 for databases that allow you to look-up where city an IP is coming from. Of course these cannot be that accurate, no matter what they claim, it’s just the nature of the data. I’m in Oakland right now, most show San Mateo or San Francisco as my location. It doesn’t matter that they can give me the map co-ordinates for that position, they are still wrong: they can only go as local as the data allows.

So why should I pay that much for data that isn’t accurate? This information must be publically available, so how do I find it? I want to collect the data for everyone and then give it away for free, just like IP2Nation does, in fact it would be nice to organise it so that it worked with IP2Nation.

I’ll be the first to admit that I have no idea where to start with this, other than making up a big form and asking people to fill it in, so I’m putting out the call: Help me! Know how I should start? Know of someone that might? Please, let them know and ask them to help me do this.
This might just benefit you in the end.