British Government Caught Pirating On Prime Minister’s Website - TorrentFreak

So imagine Anthony’s surprise when he discovered that his NetWorker theme for WordPress had been used by the British government without honoring the Creative Commons license. The theme has been heavily modified, including the removal of all links back to his site, but Anthony has been able to verify from the source files that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s own website is in fact built on NetWorker.

Not only have they illegally appropriated Anthony’s WordPress theme, the company who “developed” the site tried to deny the claim that it was originally their creation, and they only used his design for inspiration. However they forgot to clean the code thoroughly and they left in Anthony’s NetWorker credits at the end of the CSS source.

I think the final insult in the entire situation is that the government slaps their own Crown Copyright on the work, which is clearly someone else’s.

For a country that has nearly as backwards of a view of copyright and intellectual property laws as the U.S. does, this is quite an amusing mistake by the U.K. government. Unfortunately, the piracy is far too esoteric for the common public to understand, so it’s unlikely to gain any traction in the mainstream press.

Gizmodo has an interesting article on the evolution of the TiVo remote from basic prototype to its various forms over the years.

“There were a lot of jokes about the shape. Not just the obvious ones,” said Newby. “I can remember some referencing to an earlobe, or the shape of the lower back/butt area.”

I think part of what makes the TiVo remote so successful is that it is a three dimensional shape unlike the vast majority of remotes which are mostly flat. The remote sits in your hand with gentle curves longitudinally and latitudinally but curves giving it depth as well. As weird as it must have been, those jokes should have been flags that the designers were on the right track. Evoking human emotions while using a technology product is really difficult. By reminding users of body parts it made the remotes seem more alive, comfortable and likely to be accepted by the public at large.

I haven’t put my hands on a Series 3 or TiVoHD remote and compared it to the Series 2 remotes that I’m used to, but I hope they solved the one issue I had with the Series 2 remote: it was easy to grab the remote in the dark and not realize you had it pointed the wrong direction since it was nearly symmetrical front to back, minus the gentle weight of the batteries.

Making the Most Amazing R2-D2 Cake Ever - B-Side Blog

Completely edible (minus a dowel or two). Fondant covered red velvet cake, rice krispie legs.

Though as a true Star Wars geek, I have to point out that it’s not R2-D2. It’s an R2 class droid for sure, based on markings and design, and it’s similar to Obi-Wan’s R4-P17, but the colors are reversed.

Over the years I’ve seen a number of very lame music videos with people espousing their love for their Mac. None of them really capture the real essence of the Mac anyway. They all come across very hokey, and forced.

This one seems to be an exception. The song itself is not about the Mac at all, and the video is not portraying any love for it, other than just using it in clever ways. It’s well executed and subtle, and that’s why I think this works. Astute viewers will see that the video starts out in 10.4 Tiger, and moves on to 10.5 Leopard when the Photoshop scene starts.

Louis C.K. on shaving his goatee for a role in a new Ricky Gervais film:

Ricky and Matt asked me to shave my beard for the part which was kind of a shock to my system. I have had a goatee beard since I was in my early twenties, so pretty much my whole adult life. So shaving it off and seeing fourty percent of my face for the first time in about twenty years was kind of… awful. “So that’s what’s been going on under there”. Ugh. My chin, and the one behind it, looked like a porn actor’s shaved balls.

I’ve had mine continuously since I was 19. The mustache comes and goes as I feel, making it a Van Dyke some days, and a goatee on others (if you’re in to specifics, though most people just refer to all of them as goatees).

Louis had a pair of balls after shaving his Van Dyke. Does that mean he had a Dick Van Dyke under there all along?

Apparently performing simple magic tricks, like making a toothpick disappear and reappear will get you fired from substitute teaching in Florida.

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas made a toothpick disappear, then reappear in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land O’ Lakes, Florida. The Pasco County School District says there were several other performance issues, but none compared to his “wizardry.”
“I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue. You can’t take any more assignments. You need to come in right away.’ I said, ‘Well, Pat, can you explain this to me?’ ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’” Piculas explained.

Can we just kick Florida out of the union if we get it ratified by two thirds of the states? That’s all we have to do to for a constitutional amendment.

When Maury was speaking closely to this young woman with an interesting phobia, Kristen remarked, “That’d be cool if he was talking to her with pickle breath.”

She’s not just a casual Obama supporter, she’s actively campaigned for him. This is probably the biggest example of stock media coming back to bite someone as I’ve ever seen. I hope some people on Clinton’s creative department started work on their resumes.

Don’t talk back to Darth Vader, he’ll getcha!

Just a few days ago, HandBrake 0.9.2 was released with a slew of tweaks and new features. The one that was significant to me was EyeTV support. I haven’t had much time to play with it, but I can report that I successfully converted an HD broadcast captured with my EyeTV Hybrid with EyeTV 3.0.

The final result looked quite nice. I’ll have to do some more testing with 720p and 1080i content, exploring 5.1 sound, and all the other goodies associated with the new version of HandBrake.

On a related note, I should start a pool of when HandBrake will reach 1.0 status. It seems to be inching closer but never quite hitting 1.0.