of great stuff over at iLT these days—check out the last couple of weeks in type—but here are some items I especially enjoyed:
Neat-o.
Jeffrey’s online Japanese-English dictionary as my online resource of choice for Japanese language lookups. However, as you can see, the interface leaves much to be desired—you can shut off the eye-stinging colors, but the layout is atrocious and very difficult to use, and linking the kanji information to the results doesn’t seem to work. And don’t even get me started on the kanji lookup.
Of late I hadn’t been using it too much, though, because of the interface, and because I had supplemented it with the competent (but not comprehensive) Japanese dictionary built in to Mac OS’s Dictionary app, and Kotoba!, the super-useful iPhone app that is unparalleled for kanji lookups when paired with the iPhone’s Chinese input system. However, neither is quite good enough to serve as a complete Jeffrey’s replacement.
So I was pretty happy when, a few days ago, I discovered 電子辞書 (denshi jisho, or electronic dictionary), a J-E dictionary site with a decidedly better user interface, and as comprehensive a wordlist as Jeffrey’s boasts. Super terrific!
So I got an Apple TV for Christmas, and I just watched my very first rented HD movie on it: V for Vendetta (4 stars).
I have no idea whether the movie was especially faithful to the graphic novel on which it was based, but I found it, if not precisely thought-provoking—if you think about it, considering its timing, in terms of a political statement, it’s a bit clumsy and heavy-handed—intelligent and well-made.
It was not as visually stunning as we’ve come to expect from modern comic book adaptations, but it was made with aggressive competence, and Natalie Portman’s understated but really rather powerful performance carried the film, along with the relentless and interesting story. I am glad I was watching it with remote in hand, because you really couldn’t look away for a second.
The important thing here is that it worked, leaving everything else aside, as a good piece of entertainment. Recommended.
About the Apple TV renting experience—I’m going to cancel my Netflix account pretty soon, since even though ATV doesn’t have the same selection, I have wasted so much money in the last 6 months alone on the same two movies (which I still haven’t watched!) that I could have rented 20 full HD movies from the iTMS—browsing is a bit stilted if you want to go through the entire library and don’t really know what you’re looking for, but renting and watching is supremely simple. iTMS is steadily improving its selection, so it won’t be long before it rivals Netflix, provided you would be able to rent TV shows like you can with the DVD service.
The quality of the HD film was great, and only rarely was I distracted by visible compression artifacts in the image—my TV has one of the best black levels available in modern plasma panels, but scenes where, for example, you see white smoke on a black background showed some artifacting. Overall, I am very pleased with my first Apple TV renting experience.
So in an attempt to be a bit more organized and less forgetful, I recently purchased Cultured Code’s excellent, excellent to-do tracker software, Things—my previous to-do tracker being various hand-written slips of paper.
Now, you might think that a focused to-do tracker might be overkill, but Things’ gorgeous, intuitive interface and well-thought out design will change your mind. It’s pricey, but worth it.
But what happens if you want to manage your to-dos on multiple computers and mobile devices? The latter is not an issue for iPhone and iPod Touch users because Things also has an iPhone version with built-in sync support—there’s also a slightly more complicated method you can use with any device iSync supports. What about multiple Macs, though? If you’re a MobileMe subscriber like me, you could use the notoriously unreliable iDisk to store your Things database (a simple XML file), but, well, it’s notoriously unreliable.
Enter DropBox, an online file syncing and sharing utility of the elegant it-just-works variety of Mac software. Simply copy your Things library to DropBox, and when you start Things up, tell it to use an alternate library just as you would with iTunes. Awesome.
This 5′×10′, 60000-piece LEGO diorama of Hoth is indescribably awesome. I’m still geeking out about it. (via)
it was too good to be true. I should have known, as soon as things started going well, that the piper would demand his payment eventually.
So I was flying back to SF yesterday from my annual Chicago holiday visit, and I was to go through Portland. On the first leg, I got upgraded to first class (!), and on the second, I had an exit row seat. What’s more, even though there was a substantial delay in the first flight due to repairs on the plane, I was guaranteed not to miss my connection, as the subsequent Portland-San Francisco flight was using the same plane and crew. Pretty awesome, right? So you’d think.
Fast forward 6 hours and witness me standing like an idiot next to the baggage carousel, when all the bags from my flight have come and gone without a sign of my own bag. I’m thinking, what could possibly have happened? It was the same plane on both legs of the flight. All these geniuses had to do was leave the bag on the plane.
But, no. Apparently that was too difficult, since for some unholy reason the bag was offloaded in Portland and spent the night there. Now I’ll have to wait until later today or tomorrow to get it. Typical.