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Rainbow

This is an insanely hilarious video of an actual broadcasted version of a European children’s TV show called “Rainbow.” I personally don’t know about the show, but here’s what it says in the site:

For those of you who don’t have kids or are far too young to remember the splendid children’s TV programme “Rainbow”, this may be a little lost on you… but it must have been a great episode to watch! Almost too ridiculous to believe… These are taken from original Rainbow scripts and there’s no way these could have been done by accident. Innuendo all the way….

The accents are obviously british, and since the video’s audio quality isn’t quite “pristine,” its not easily understood unless you’re used to their way of speaking. They’ve transcribed the script… but of course since the video was on the same page, it was impossible to read and view at the same time.

I’ve pasted the dialog below, which you can read while viewing the video on a separate browser window. Read More

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Transparent backgrounds

One of the fads nowadays is taking “transparent” desktop shots of your computers. Don’t know what I mean? Check this gallery out: http://www.flickr.com/groups/transparentscreens/pool/

I thought I’d have a go, and since a lot of the stuff I see there are hard to top creatively, I went on trying to add some difficulty to the shot so people can appreciate it.

Basically what I wanted to do was:

  • Take a shot with me in it (pardon the pantulog clothing)
  • Try it without a tripod (handheld)
  • Capture decent ambient light so the cathode lamp of my Athlon rig can be seen.
  • Shoot at an angle (meaning not straight on, which is what I see most of the time)
  • Get a somewhat challenging DOP (depth of field), since I wanted to take as much of the background as much as possible with minimal blur.

At frist I shot it at f22 with FEC 2 stops up to allow a real fast shutter. It worked, but it would drown out the Athlons CCFL light and Powerbooks Monitor (which would kill the final shot). So I had to settle for a big-ish f8.0 – which resulted in a significantly shallower DOP.

I though it was simple enough but boy was I wrong! Read More

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Apple wins

Apple

It seems that Apple has been granted the right to search and destroy the sources of ThinkSecret’s information… and correct me if I’m wrong, but the case against ThinkSecret itself is different – Apple filed a separate suit against ThinkSecret alleging that they induced Apple employees to steal trade secrets. Dunno about you, but to me, thats just a convenient, valid legal excuse to sue the publisher.

Two of my favorite “read lines” with regards to the whole Apple charade.

There’s another old saying in my profession: The mission of journalists is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

A letter to Steve Jobs by Mike Langberg of San Jose Mercury News.

and…

Saying that no one has the right to publish information that could have been provided only by someone breaking the law, judge James Kleinberg ruled that online reporters for Apple Insider and PowerPage must reveal their sources.

via Linuxwrangler Read More

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Extensis Suitcase X1

X1

I was messing with my font collection so I could check out Extensis’ Suitcase X1 (pronounced “eleven”). I ended up moving so much fonts around that I wanted to start from scratch.

Stupid me, I even deleted fonts from my /System/Library/Fonts folder. But not because I had a death wish. I already had copied the said fonts somewhere and just wanted to do some sort of a “clean install” of them.

The bad part was I couldn’t copy the fonts back. Permission errors abound (which weren’t really permission related) Suddenly my menubar acted weird, apps started crashing (probably because they couldn’t render the system fonts (because they were erased).

I had no choice but to reboot… but on reboot, I couldn’t get into any GUI… I was thrown into the Darwin commandline. Sweat proceeded to pour down my forehead as I was thinking that I may just end up like Joel and his Archive and Install adventure… which I didn’t have time for. Read More