The popular Twitter account @DRUNKHULK appears to be shutting down, with a series of less drunk tweets than usual. This one looks sort of definitive, doesn’t it? If you want to relive the phenomenon that is DRUNK HULK, check out Smashed: The Life and Tweets of Drunk Hulk by Christian A. Dumais. A book’s a pretty nice way to wrap up the saga of the intoxicated green giant, isn’t it?
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Twin Peaks returns
Twin Peaks’s coming back. I never watched it back in the day, but I guess I’ll have to now.
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Game Boy Twitter
I don’t understand much of this page, mostly the pictures really, but the important thing is that there’s a Twitter client for Game Boy Color. One of the better ways to start a new week, wouldn’t you agree? Too bad it turned out to be an April Fools hoax… Thanks @pontushellgren.
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Shello searches Ello
Trying to find the right people to follow on Ello, and you’re already following me? Don’t worry, Shello not only lets you search Ello, it also has a list of featured users.
Now, if you really don’t want to use Shello, you can always search Ello in your favorite search engine, by typing site:ello.co your-search-query. It’s that simple.
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Megadeth, Arizona
From the story behind Megadeth, Arizona, pioneering promotional website some 20 years ago:
So even though no one had a clue what I was talking about, I wrote a proposal to create a “virtual cybertown in cyberspace.” It would be called Megadeth, Arizona—based on where the band lived and recorded their album.
My boss, Lou Mann, the Senior Vice President of the label, actually signed off on the proposal and gave me a whopping $30 grand.
He had no idea what it was for, and I can guarantee you… neither did I.
Great read.
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Fitbit obsession
David Sedaris, writing about Fitbit obsession and picking up litter, among other things, for the New Yorker:
I was travelling myself when I got my Fitbit, and because the tingle feels so good, not just as a sensation but also as a mark of accomplishment, I began pacing the airport rather than doing what I normally do, which is sit in the waiting area, wondering which of the many people around me will die first, and of what. I also started taking the stairs instead of the escalator, and avoiding the moving sidewalk.
I enjoyed this piece, partly because I’ve had an UP24 strapped to my wrist for a couple of weeks. While I’m not as enthralled in the step chasing game as mr. Sedaris, I’ve found other things to reflect over after these weeks. That’s for an essay to come though, for now, be sure to read Sedaris’s piece Stepping Out, it’s a good read.
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The best startups are side projects
Paul Graham writes about startups:
This is not only possible, it’s how Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all got started. None of these companies were even meant to be companies at first. They were all just side projects. The best startups almost have to start as side projects, because great ideas tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.
We embrace this at Odd Alice by rolling our own internal incubator-thingy, called satellite programs. I think it’s a good idea. The first graduate, Tech Troopers, is an anomaly though since there are outside founders, but BlankPage is built under these principles.
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Den smutsiga nördkulturen
Magnus Edlund skriver bra om nördkulturen, och behoven att städa upp i leden. Nej, det är inte en metafor för utrensning, bara tillförsel av allmönt hyfs och basala människovärderingar.
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Ian Fleming on writing thrillers
Ian Fleming, in an essay on writing thrillers, published in 1963:
We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.
The whole thing is worth a read.
A bit of self-promotion follows. If you need more inspiration and helpful emails to reach your writing goals (you have goals, right?), do request a beta to BlankPage, an online writing app I’m a part of. Ping me on Twitter and I’ll fast-track your beta invite.
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Disney pulls Star Wars games, screws players
Disney has pulled two Star Wars games from the App Store and Google Play. Tiny Death Star and Star Wars: Assault Team are no more, no big loss if you ask me, but players of these titles are more than allowed to throw feces at the company and its decision. These titles are monetized from in-app purchases, and Disney pulling them like this makes them all but unplayable in the long run. Players who’ve invested money in gameplay are being screwed over.
This isn’t the first time such things happen, nor will it be the last. Always online, freemium based titles are available at the mercy of the publisher, which is a good a reason as ever to be wary of those types of games. In the long run, this is a problem for the App Store’s reliability.
Oh, and you should probably not trust Disney with your in-app purchases anymore. Assholes.
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Pokémon TCG hits the App Store
There’s been Pokémon apps released on the App Store before, but the recent release of Pokémon TCG, a trading card game with a lot in common with the likes of Magic: The Gathering, is probably the first who’ll actually get some fair usage. The app is free, but you’ll have to buy a bunch of cards if you want to excel in this game. Obviously.
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Century old Sherlock Holmes movie found
This is amazing. A silent movie that’s almost a century old, from 1916, featuring William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes, has been found and restored.
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The importance of Dropbox
I’ve been a paying Dropbox user since forever, and I don’t intend to stop, despite some pretty serious competition. Assuming Dropbox won’t go all evil on us, it’s a resource I want to use. I’m trusting it with the bulk of my data right now, and I have for years.
That said, I trust Apple more than I trust Dropbox. Apple entering the cloud game with iCloud Drive is great news, and my initial reaction to the announcement was, literally, ABOUT FUCKING TIME!!! That still stands, but I think Dropbox is more important than ever. The recent iCloud outages notwithstanding, I’m just not sure if Apple is ready for this. Data is important, and while an online sync and storage service isn’t a backup (seriously, backup your stuff elsewhere), the nuisance of losing data because of weird things happening is bad enough. And while I’ve yet to lose data from iCloud in any way, I have had some pretty poor syncing experiences. Granted, most of those are in third-party apps and the developers might be to blame, but still. That rarely happens with Dropbox, and when shit hits the fan, Dropbox has its versioning safety net, which I’ve been forced to use on a few occassions.
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GifBook prints GIF books
GifBook is a startup that lets you print GIFs in flipbooks, $30 for a 50 page book. Fun idea, it’ll no doubt get some press, but whether it’s a viable product or not obviously remains to be seen. GifBook is made by levels.io, who’s doing 12 startups in 12 months as an experiment.
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Beware the USB
The BadUSB hack is out, released into the wild by researchers Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson. This means that malicious types can make trouble for you just by accessing your USB ports. There is no fix for this at the moment, the problem is in the USB firmware and that’s not something that gets patched easily.
Why release something like this, especially when the original BadUSB creator Karsten Nohl chose not to? From Wired:
“The belief we have is that all of this should be public. It shouldn’t be held back. So we’re releasing everything we’ve got,” Caudill told the Derbycon audience on Friday. “This was largely inspired by the fact that [SR Labs] didn’t release their material. If you’re going to prove that there’s a flaw, you need to release the material so people can defend against it.”
The reasoning is that known exploits gets fixed faster, which is true, but with the USB hack it’s not quite a simple as releasing a system update. On the flip-side, knowing that this USB security flaw exists and is widely available will make it possible to take to proper measures to protect sensitive data from malicious people. And yes, that includes government agencies.