Whizziwig Blogs

Another fun-with-shortcuts app, this one for creating iphone-style shortcuts.
It even tries to do some intelligent scaling of favicos.

manual UI:

Finished product (facebook and google are BetterBookmarks shortcuts):

Pro-tips:

• For google reader, use URL: http://www.google.com/reader/i/ and Icon URL: http://www.google.com/reader/ui/iphone-icon.png
• For facebook, use URL: iphone.facebook.com

I’m sad that android doesn’t have home screen widgets, but the shortcuts, as proved by anycut, can be pretty cool.

Go Home is an app that lets you add a home screen shortcut to get directions from your current location (gps or cell tower) and automatically route you to the address associated with that shortcut.

There are currently only 4 icons bundled with this (but that’s better than the web browser bookmarks support), but I think they cover work, home, significant other, and anything else. Enjoy. Also, apologies for the drop-down widget being so hideous.

I will update this app if google maps on andoird gets transit support so that you can specify the transportation mode as well.

To use, either long press on an empty part of the home screen, or, from the home screen, go to menu->add. Click “Go Home”

Fill in this screen:

Done!

I’m planning to write an app that allows you to create home screen shortcuts for “go to address X from my current location,” but for now, a partial solution is to open AnyCut, make your own shortcut, set the action to android.intent.action.VIEW and the data to http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&daddr=. You’ll still need to explicitly tell maps to start from your current location, but it’s still faster than all the clicks to open maps and open directions and pick an address.

Culled from http://androidguys.com/?p=2967 and http://www.jsharkey.org/blog/2008/08/22/driving-directions-in-android-09-sdk/

• A recent joint venture of the National Film Board of Canada determined that 1747 was the best year ever. Further findings concluded that The Best Week Ever occurred in 1911.
• Originally due to a clerical error, but later maintained through malfeasance and graft, the Guinness book of world records listed the tallest man in the world at 5′3″ for the first ten years of its publication.
• The reason there are so few vegan bookstores is because most paperback books are bound with glue made from duck bills.
• Mint flavored condoms date back to the early 1800s, when menthol was used as an solvent in the preparation of the linen prophylactics.
• Ernest Goes To Camp was based on the true story of Jim Varney’s childhood experiences at summer camp.
• 62% of presidents have stated on record that their favorite color is blue. Scholarly research has shown that at least two presidents have lied about this. Martin Van Buren’s favorite color was pink.
• Grizzly bears are unaffected by marijuana. Polar bears are highly sensitive to it.
• A common misconception is that modern rail gauge is derived from the wheel spacing of ancient roman carts, but actually, the spacing comes from the wingspan of none other than Julius Caesar.

Almost identical to add_files, but for adding to your iPod (those of you with iPhones might need to tell me what the source “kind” is — I assume it’s k.iPhone.

usage: copy_to_ipod.py /path/to/music1 /path/to/music2 …

This one is for dolapo — recursively add all the files in multiple paths specified as command line arguments to iTunes. Braindead, doesn’t check for filetype.

iTunes and I do not get along. I like to organize my own music and tag it using hacked perl scripts. iTunes does not notice when I delete files out from under it. So I needed a way to fix that.

There’s Super Remove Dead Tracks, but that’s written in AppleScript, and I loathe applescript, I can’t even look at it for long enough to learn it.

But then I found appscript which exposes most AppleScript as python classes, which is awesome. It’s also stupid easy to install, in leopard, all you need to do is

sudo easy_install appscript

Which is awesome, and then you can access all the AppleScript hooks in everything and it’s far more pleasant. I wrote a script to remove missing/deleted tracks from your iTunes library. It seems that the mere act of processing my iTunes library in python caused iTunes to notice the files were missing and add the (!), but still not remove them. So this basically does the exact same thing as Super Remove Dead Tracks, but is 5-10x more pleasant.

I can’t quite figure out when something is a method and when something is a class, and loading my iTunes library takes way too long (I don’t blame it for the time it takes to put the entire thing into python objects, though lazy-loading would be nice), but it’s still neat.

If you’re going to play with appscript, you should definitely play with ASDictionary which writes out nice files describing the applescript dictionaries for arbitrary programs. The command line tool kept exiting with “Error: ASDictionary has quit or relaunched since asdict was started. Please re-run asdict to continue.” but the GUI works great.

More iTunes scripting to come. Thanks to bbum for a decent intro to appscript.

I’m trying to resharpen my writing skills:

War Inc is a terrible movie, the only redeeming features of which are Marisa Tomei’s smile, Joan Cusack’s facial contortions, Hillary Duff’s russo-whore getup, and a particularly lovable OnStar system.

In War Inc, John Cusack plays his character from Grosse Point Blank, only this time he’s an assassin for a Halliburton/Blackwater stand-in called Tamerlane. Tamerlane, under the direction of Cheney stand-in Dan Akroyd, has recently completed military operations in the first fully outsourced war in a made up county called Turaqistan. The company is mounting a tradeshow called Brand USA to encourage investment in the region, and Cusack’s character, Brand Hauser, is tapped to assassinate the country’s oil company minister, while directing the tradeshow as his cover. At this expo, Yonica Babyyeah (Duff) will marry her boyfriend, a thuggish middle eastern prince. Along the way, he falls in love with journalist Natalie Hegalhuzen (Tomei), shoots a bunch of people, sentences a man to be buried alive under a mountain of goat shit and finds a family. Oh, and Ben Kingsley shows up, because he’s now required to be in every movie shown at the Angelika.

For a movie that wants so badly to be high-brow satire it’s unclear why the movie spends so much time on needless backstory and uninteresting action sequences. What no one realizes is that the main character in this movie shouldn’t have been Cusack’s recently acquired gray streak, but Tamerlane the heartless corporate behemoth. Yes, every piece of military equipment and personnel in the movie is wearing a bright red Tamerlane patch, and yes, it’s funny that the soldiers are hopped up on Tamerlane brand freeze dried coffee squeeze bottles, but that’s all a backdrop to the story of Hauser’s inner demons, his love interests and his redemption. Towards the end of the film, Hauser gets in a Humvee and drives far outside the “Emerald Zone” to a burnt out city where Natalie is being held hostage. He’s literally running away from the center of the satire, to make the point that the safety and redevelopment of the Emerald Zone is a sham — but we knew that already, as evidenced by the repeated bombings inside the city, even without five minutes of Cusack and Tomei stumbling through rubble.

It’s impossible to care about the characters in this movie — Hauser’s existential doubt is predictable, Yonica’s brooding lost-girl sensitivity is predictable (and predicted by Natalie) and the romance between Hauser and Natalie is inevitable from the minute they meet.

The women do their best to save this movie — if Tomei continues in this role, she’ll be the sexy Julia Roberts in a few years. Hillary Duff is really hot, and plays her caricature as well as one could hope. Joan Cusack does that thing where she contorts her face and throws up her hands and screams, and that will never get old. The woman who thinks she’s been shot while in the implanted journalist experience VR simulation is very convincing as well.

If War Inc. was a slower, more focused movie — Idiocracy meets Wag the Dog, it could have been at the very least, cute, and at best, funny and relevant. But instead the movie moves so quickly and absurdly that the jokes feel tacked on and the plot meaningless. The heavy handed liberal bias of this movie isn’t going to convince anyone who isn’t already an opponent of the privatization of the military, but it’s not letting those of us in on the joke laugh much at it.

The presence of a secret cylon running in the 2008 election has been widely discussed and documented, as seen here:

However, another of our political candidates may be unaware that she is being manipulated by a sinister cylon agent. Or, even worse, perhaps she is in collusion with the cylons and this entire election is a sham to hand control of the white house over to the toasters.

My evidence:
On the left, known cylon agent Tory Foster, adviser to the president of the twelve colonies, and on the right, Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s “body woman.”