Posted on by mwhybark

Paper sushi

HyperGami offers this paper sushi kit. There’s also this display page of various models on a different site. The models apparently stem from different sources, such as the tako (octopus) model, this selection of gunkan. Of course, what goes with paper sushi better than a nice, frosty mug of paper beer?

To eat sushi, someone must go down to the sea in ships. Up anchor under that paper moon and set sail over a cardboard sea with these vessels.

A slow-loading, insanely-detailed model of the British galleon HMS Mary Rose, with comprehensive instructions – in Russian! Enjoy. Once you’ve knocked that out, here’s another ship from the same period at the same site.

And finally, in case that sushi was out a bit too long, may I recommend Ed Bertschy’s fabulous nineteenth century hearse? Scroll down to see it in all it’s macabre glory, and note some of the other goodies he’s got on offer, among them a paper cello, a plunger-style “Blasting machine” of great beauty, and of course, a working paper steam engine!

Posted on by mwhybark

Iphigenia at Aulis

Having managed to view fragments amounting to one half of the final episode of the decidedly average The Spartans, I variously learned or was reminded that:

  • Upon the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, about 7,000 Athenian invaders were imprisoned for a fair period of time in a quarry at Syracuse, exposed to the elements and fading fast. According to the transcript of the show,

    The Athenian prisoners had only one chance to live: the Syracusans had a passion for the verses of the playwright Euripides, and prisoners who could recite them in a style that pleased their tormentors were allowed to leave the quarry to be sold as slaves.

    To clarify: The Syracusans held the prisoners of war in an outdoor prison camp, subject to torture, and would not let them go until they said words which pleased them.

  • Upon the Spartan-led defeat of Athens, the Spartan leader Lysander erected an expansive monument to himself and his allies. The show did not display a reconstructed image, and I wonder if someone has assembled such a thing. I had thin luck Googling for it at all.

  • Following the Spartan defeat of Athens, Sparta was the dominant military power in the region, and “her commanders became known for corruption,” a fact which sourly comforts me.

Interestingly, I came across these class notes for a play by Euripides which appears to directly address these themes.

Posted on by mwhybark

Englebart's GUI

I, Cringely hangs out with Doug Englebart and reminds us of who that might be, extending the Cringley streak (he’s been traveling afield a bit since moving East and it seems to have increased the scope of his work).

Computers had no user interfaces in the sense that we know them today. Heck, they had no USERS. Computers were not networked. They didn’t even print. And into this primitive world, Doug Engelbart drove to work the day after he’d proposed to his sweetie, wondering what to do with his life. And by the time he got to work, he had in his mind something not at all unlike our computing experience today. Amazing! It was so amazing, in fact, that Doug had to keep most of his ideas secret simply to avoid ridicule. He shared his vision with colleagues, and they counseled him to keep it quiet so being a kook wouldn’t hurt his career.

Posted on by mwhybark

Unwired

Manny’s junking his Wired archive. He highlights a 1996 article by Neal Stephenson. Interestingly, this story was the moment that Wired shortcircuited, for me. Of course, my disenchantment with the mag first crystallized with the terrible, faux-fad cover story on the Zippies. My suspicions deepened at the obvious shill job on Walter Wriston (We’ve seen the future – and middle-aged bankers will lead us there, french cuffs shining whitely in the bitstream!).

But Stephenson’s long, sloppy French kiss to the ideals of Ayn Rand really did me in. It’s one long love-blind poem to global capitalism, romantically propagandizing for an adolescent fantasy of tax-free offshore data havens, and I threw it across the room, cursing, several times as I read it. I believe the most commonly used word was “Bullshit!” I have a recollection of telling someone that I expected to see headshots of fiftysomething white men in suits, jauntily puffing cigars, adorn the covers shortly (trawling the cover archives, the Wriston cover appears to be the closest fit, although this comes close; so, um, I guess I got that wrong).

In hindsight, Stephenson successfully described Enron’s business model. Boy howdy, we should be glad that no-one has implemented the apparently-frictionless hyper-exchange he visualizes. Imagine a world run by countless Enrons! I’d rather die!

Instead of possiblities, I saw lies; instead of a grand vision I saw the death of community; instead of liberation I saw failed nation-states and global war.

Of course, I can’t make it through one single article in The Economist without the same enraged, stuttering profanity. I am not unaware that I’m an edge case; of course that by no means changes the fact that I’m right. 😉

Posted on by mwhybark

Beyond Last Year's News

As an element in my comprehensive rearguard exploration of last week’s/month’s/year’s interesting computer doohickeys, I have finally begun a sustained experiment in using Gmail, which is proceeding apace.

Only one bump to date: the unflagged blackholing of a flood of comment spam from comments.cgi on the blog left me a mite frowny – if I can’t see the mail, it’s hard to click the mt-blacklist link, now innit?

As is my wont, here are some Gmail toys, for whenever I get around to them.

Mark Lyon’s list of Gmail candy. It includes Pop Goes the Gmail, for POP3 access, as well as his GML, an app to allow you to pop your current mail archive into Gmail, should you feel so inclined.

Most useful on Mark’s list in the short run is Address Book to CSV 1.1, which enables a user to export from Address Book into the format that Gmail supports to build its’ own contacts list.

There’s also the propellerhead tomfoolery of a PHP script that converts your unused Gmail space into an offline backup solution, something that I could have sworn that tall guy over there wrote about, but I find no trace of it.

Posted on by mwhybark

OmniWeb 5

TidBITS’ Adam Engst says it’s time to take another look at OmniWeb, a Mac-only web browser by the Seattle-area Omni Group.

I’ll be investigating it further sometime in the near future. Omni is a pretty interesting operation, something of a rarity on the Mac side, that clearly is devoted to the ‘first in space’ biz model. This means that they have consistently been first-to-market for significant application uses at nearly every juncture of the evolution of Mac OS X. It also means that follow-up developers solve problems left unsolved by Omni while adopting Omni’s successful solutions.

The first-to-market aspect of OmniWeb 5 is the product’s use of WebCore, an underlying element of the OS that Apple introduced recently. Without hitting the books, it’s behind parts of both Safari and Help Viewer, as I recall.

Paul Frankenstein has been musing on what WebCore and other things-to-come may mean in future. OmniWeb 5 may be of interest to him for that reason as well.

Posted on by mwhybark

in a lonely place

Saturday night, I caught two Bogart films on TMC, 1951’s uneven The Enforcer, a fictionalization of the discovery and prosecution of the notorious Murder, Inc., and a great film I’d unaccountably missed in my peerings at and mumblings on the era’s work.

That film is In a Lonely Place (1950), based on the recently-republished Dorothy Hughes title of the same name. earlier this year, Bookslut ran an intriguing, thoughtful appreciation of the original book.

I won’t rehash the plot here, but I will reiterate Bookslut’s note that the film is much changed from the original. Bogart plays Dixon Steele, whom Hughes presents as a wannabe writer; in the film, he’s a has-been screenwriter.

The film’s writers, Andrew Solt and Edmund North, have a ball with the screenwriter’s tension between book and film, going out of their way to establish the screenwriter’s obligation to discard the book. The film’s tense narrative kicks off with the murder of a hat check girl last seen at Steele’s home. She has come by to retell the narrative of a potboiler that Steele is being sought to adapt. Steele makes no bones about his contempt for the source material.

Perhaps I was sensitized to this content by last year’s wonderful Adaptation – but I sure didn’t find any commentary about it elsewhere on the web.

The film is one of the most effective films I’ve ever seen Bogart in, and I highly recommend it to you.