Choi Feed

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LOLz my favorite dictator

OK, so if crazy Kim Jong Il does try nuking Hawaii this weekend, don't blame me. He was planning on it before this horrifying and hilarious gallery of shameful Photoshops appeared. Oh god, what have I done?

First Place — Nick Dwyer
Second Place —T. Baxter
Third Place — Dave Corrasa

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This is for you David

There's something different about this building. Can you guess what it is?

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The Best Links:

1. 13-Story Building Tips Over in Shanghai

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ultimate geekery

Missed out on the last 40+ years of X-Men comics and feel like you need a scorecard to work out just who knows, is in love with or has married, one another? You're in luck: Such a scorecard exists.

The X-Men Universe Relationship Map - seen in miniature form below just to give you a glimpse of how insanely complicated it is - does all the heavy lifting and explains 40 years of crushes, affairs and reincarnated characters from alternate dimensions for you... As well as making you feel very curious about just how much of a slut Wolverine really is.

The full-size version is available here; get ready to feel sorry for Iron Man. [UncannyXMen.net]

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And if Muni and BART offered free rides, we'd get a similar blog entry decrying "we have a gazillion dollar deficit and you're giving away free rides for a 'canned national campaign'?!?!?!"

The average American saves $9,000 a year by getting rid of their car, according to a report by the American Public Transportation Association. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? And the savings for San Franciscans are even higher: you pay $12,131 a year for the privilege of sitting in traffic. After all, we have California's most expensive gas, and good luck finding a cheap parking spot or an honest mechanic here in town.

The report was coincides with "Dump the Pump" day, a national ad campaign that promotes public transit. Alas, San Francisco will not be participating, at least not in an official capacity: this year, both Muni and BART decided to forgo the "canned national campaign" in favor of something cheaper or more locally appropriate. Oh, good.

· More Than $9,000 Saved Annually by Individuals Who ‘Dump the Pump’ and Help Save the Environment by Riding Public Transportation [APTA]
· Gasoline Rocket Begins to Sputter [Central Valley Business Times]
· Muni and BART Dump Dump the Pump Day This Year [Streetsblog]

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What ... the ... fuck

One of the reasons Starcraft is still such a big hit at LAN parties is that, like most "older" PC titles, it supports multiplayer over a local network. Starcraft II will do no such thing.

Blizzard's Rob Pardo has told Kotaku:

We don't currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.

Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we're encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II. We're looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for StarCraft II in the near future.

Which will no doubt be crushing to LAN party fiends...if, that is, they still exist.

StarCraft II Developers Talk [IncGamers]

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barf ... yay for patents making public transportation usage harder

paimin writes "A struggle is breaking out in San Francisco over whether the developer of a publicly-funded installation of real-time tracking for the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency has a right to control the use of data from the system. The situation is not totally clear, but this sure seems like an attempt to use patent threats to hijack public data. The city paid for the system, and the developer claims he lost money on the deal, so now he's shutting down applications like Routesy and Munitime that use data from the system unless they license the 'copyrighted' data from him."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kid gets inadvertently hit with a baseball bat, proceeds to fall over. I might be a horrible person because I LOL'ed at this.

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1. Here’s Another One of My Fave Child Violence Videos - The Toddler Hockey Brawl

The Find My iPhone feature? It works, as evidenced by Kevin and his two friends, who went an adventure that involved Lego, a dive bar and some fast urban walking. Read on to see how everything played out. – JC

Myself and two compadres, Ryan and Mark, are in Chicago (each of us for the first time) to attend Brickworld, the world's largest Lego convention. Yes we're a bunch of dorks. Yes you totally wish you were here too.

Last night, after seeing Second City improv, we ate at a pleasantly sketchy dive bar in uptown Chicago, where the food was mediocre and the characters were questionable. I definitely had my iPhone while at our table, and I definitely did NOT have it (whoops!) when we were 100 feet down the street.

I raced back into the bar, not even particularly concerned, but it was gone like baby. In less than five minutes, with very few people in the small place, my beloved JesusPhone had managed to vanish into a black hole. Our waitress was sympathetic, and I left a number, but I was immediately glum about my prospects of seeing it again.

So I felt like about zero cents, but then we giddily realized that I had *just* activated the brand-new Find My iPhone service. Even better, Mark had a Sprint (yes, Sprint) USB dongle giving him Internet access over 3G on his MacBook Pro. Excited to try it out, we hopped onto me.com and clicked the Find My iPhone link.

"Your iPhone is not connected to a data network or does not have Find My iPhone enabled."

Well, crap. I guess all bets are off if the thieving person has the bright idea to turn the iPhone off. Oddly the phone still rang when we called it, suggesting it wasn't off; but, one way or the other, it was unable to broadcast itself to Apple so I could track it down. We sent a message to the phone - "CALL 512-796-xxxx" - but no luck. The MobileMe website said it would send me an email when the message had been displayed, but no email arrived.

Dejected, we prowled the bar one more time, but it wasn't that big a place and there weren't any places for the phone to be hiding. Game over. We went back to the hotel and I was disconsolate. This morning we checked again with no additional luck, and when Mark tried dialing the phone around noon, it *did* go straight to voicemail. The odds of ever seeing the phone again were slim to say the least.

After lunch, while at the Lego convention, I checked my email...

Holy crap! I jumped back to me.com and clicked Find My iPhone again, and to my absolute shock and amazement, it displayed Google Maps and drew a circle around Medill St.:

The block was about four or five miles west of the bar. It was too perfect to be a random glitch.

I sent a second message to the phone, slightly more to the point: "This phone is missing. Please call 512-796-xxxx to return it. $50 reward." Almost immediately I received a second confirmation email that it had been displayed on the phone. And yet, the minutes ticked by and no call was coming. I kept refreshing the location, and though the circle varied in size, it kept floating around that same block, five miles west of the bar.

The Lego convention was drawing to a close and it was time for the closing ceremony. But I wasn't about to spend an hour sitting through awards and Lego-themed thank-you speeches while my poor lost iPhone sat in some random Chicago neighborhood. So we packed my Lego creations, tossed them in the rental car, and drove from Wheeling back into town. Mark reestablished his trusty Sprint connection and as we drove, every five minutes, he refreshed the location. The phone wasn't moving. It appeared to be in a row of buildings on the north side of Medill St.

We parked along Medill and hopped out. It was a Puerto Rican neighborhood. On the south side of the street, an outdoor birthday fiesta was convening, and some of the participants eyed us three honkeys questioningly. Now at this point I had no fricking clue how we would find the phone; did I think I'd find it under a bush? I certainly didn't plan to go door-to-door, nor did I expect the cops to regard a blue circle around the entire block as sufficient cause for a search warrant. I sent a third message to the phone that I'd been formulating in my head: "We have tracked the phone to Medill St. and are locating it. Please call 512-796-xxxx to help us and claim a reward." Short version: WE KNOW WHERE YOU ARE.

In a burst of inspiration, I took Mark's computer with me as we walked down the block, figuring the recipient of the message might see us prowling the area with an open laptop and realize we meant business. I kept refreshing; the circle kept hovering; but it still stretched across the entire block, and worse, this included a big apartment building.

Suddenly Mark called my number - the umpteenth time he'd tried - and to our shock, somebody answered! He immediately passed the phone to me, but by the time I could say hello, the person on the other side had hung up. DAMMIT! I knew we were on the trail, but as we walked up and down that block of Medill for the third time, I had no idea how we'd get any closer. I pictured the possibility of driving away from the neighborhood knowing my iPhone was around. It was more frustrating than having had no idea where it was. I pulled up Google Translate, and sent a 4th message to the phone: "Por favor, devuelva el teléfono o nos pondremos en contacto con la policía." The email confirmations were arriving immediately in my Inbox, meaning our threats were showing on the phone's screen in real time.

Then an amazingly lucky thing happened. I refreshed the iPhone location and the circle moved, to the corner of the block, and shrunk in size to maybe 100 feet across. I waited a minute and refreshed again. The small circle had shifted southward down Washtenaw.

"THAT WAY!"

Us three skinny white guys walked at a rapid pace in the direction of the circle. We moved past the birthday party, curious if one of the participants might be culpable, but the circle again shifted farther south. I was ready to break for our car if the phone started moving away faster than we could catch it, but it hovered at the very end of the street, at the corner of Washtenaw and Milwaukee:

Ryan and Mark raced ahead, literally making a flanking maneuver to the left and right, as I approached the intersection.

I clicked Refresh. The circle moved again. It was directly over the bus stop on the south side of Milwaukee Avenue.

I yelled and pointed.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of the iPhone thiever who will momentarily be entering the story. You might have told yourself, "Hey, free iPhone!" the night before. You might have seen the gently-threatening messages and ignored them, maybe even scoffed. Then the phone told you it was on Medill St. It talked to you in Spanish. And you saw three skinny white guys prowling in the street with a laptop computer open.

So you take off down the road, and to your shock and horror, the honkeys follow you. You stand at your local bus stop, expecting to lose them. And they converge on your location from across the intersection, the bald one with the laptop yelling and pointing at you. You probably think the angels of death have found you.

He sheepishly waved me over.

"Have you got it?" I asked as I marched up to the guy, acting far more intimidating than I felt. Our iPhone-pilfering friend apparently works at the sketchy bar, and as he fished around in his bag, he gave a questionable alibi about having found the phone, intending to return it, but being intimidated by "all these scary-looking messages" that kept popping up on the display. "Um, yeah, those were from me," I replied curtly. He pulled my phone out, totally unharmed, and handed it over. I resisted the urge to giggle.

I shook his hand - Lord knows why I did that - and the three of us walked off. We laughed triumphantly, adrenaline racing, feeling like the Jack Bauer trio. (Disregard the fact that we'd just left a Lego convention.)

I'd been amazed that the phone had enough battery life to make it through the night and still beam its location; the moment its battery was dead, then it would be game over for our little scavenger hunt. I unlocked my phone and saw almost 20 missed calls. And then, at that very moment, the iPhone shut down and displayed the "Connect to power" icon. My phone's battery literally hung on until the second it was in my hand. I wuv you, iPhone.

All said and done, it was almost worth losing the phone just for the thrill of finding it like this. We want to pitch a reality show to the Discovery Channel: "Phone Hunters." It certainly felt like we were in one there for a second.

And that, my friends, is why the MobileMe service is worth the damn money. It's been around for just over seven years and it FINALLY got a killer feature.

A few thoughts on our successful effort:
- If the man hadn't made a break for it down the street, we probably never would have been able to find him. Oh well, his loss.
- Yes, we sent a real number, not actually 512-796-xxxx.

A few bugs we found with the Find My iPhone process:
- Even though iPhone's alert notification plays whether it's on vibrate or not, it still obeys the ringer volume - so you can still, regrettably, keep it from playing. Also it's a lighter daintier sound effect than we'd prefer for locating something by sound. Hell, I'd prefer it if I could take pictures, play my iTunes library, and tase whoever was holding it.
- There's no real reason MobileMe shouldn't push the location to us; needing to refresh the location repeatedly on the webpage was silly.
- None of this would have been possible without Mark's 3G USB dongle for his MacBook. The biggest single problem is that you can't use me.com from the iPhone, meaning you can't find one iPhone using another. Hopefully Apple realizes this.

Responses to some of the comments made:
- The references to race are for two purposes:
First, to be self-deprecating about how little we actually looked like a bad-ass iPhone tracking team;
Second, to establish how much we stood out in this particular neighborhood.
Besides a bit of self-mockery, I don't think I said or implied a single negative thing about anyone's race.
- Yeah, we could have called the cops, and they probably would have yawned. Granted, in retrospect, chasing after a thief isn't the MOST prudent thing to do, but in the moment we had our adrenaline going and sure as hell weren't just going to watch the little circle recede into the distance.

Reprinted from Happy Waffle with permission by Kevin Miller

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I only like corrupt super heroes now. Also Alex Ross doing the cover? Yes, I am a fan.

Project Superpowers may be - in its own, quiet way - the oddest, most subversive superhero comic around... plus, thanks to co-creator Alex Ross' covers, one of the best looking. Here're some examples of Ross' covers to the new series.

For those who missed the first "chapter" of Superpowers, you've already missed the return of many public domain superheroes from the Golden Age, as well as a plot that involves an illuminati-like organization that uses zombies as US soldiers in the Middle East, supervillains becoming terrorist organizations in Europe and the true nature of the atomic bomb as a diversionary tactic revealed. Project Superpowers: Chapter Two, which launched this past Wednesday, looks set to keep the weird level up with a President who (spoiler) just happens to be a supervillain from the future, and the return of all manner of child sidekicks ready to kick their former mentors' asses just to keep them in line. But if you're concerned that all this oddness detracts from old-school superhero action, then take a look at the covers for the first four issues of the series below and tell us if they don't make you feel nostalgic for a past you've never had.

Project Superpowers: Chapter Two #0 is available now in comic stores.

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from the director of Old Boy

The new vampire movie from Park Chan-Wook (Old Boy) follows the agonizing blood lust of a vampire Priest, and his desires for his best friend's girl in Thirst. Plus school-girl vamps fight winged nasties, in Blood: The Last Vampire.

Thirst
You know Park Chan-Wook's work from Old Boy, but I'm really curious to see this director's take on self restraint, religion and lust, through the lens of a vamped-out priest. We've got a look at the latest one sheet from the movie as well as the trailer. The movie itself has been getting praised for style, but a little roughed up over edits and pace - yeah, it's Park Chan-Wook, I'm still going to go see it. The film will be released in select theaters on July 31.

Official Synopsis:

Sang-hyun (The Host) is a priest who cherishes life; so much so, that he selflessly volunteers for a secret vaccine development project meant to eradicate a deadly virus. But the virus takes the priest, and a blood transfusion is urgently ordered up for him. The blood he receives is infected, so Sang-hyun lives – but now exists as a vampire. Struggling with his newfound carnal desire for blood, Sang-hyun's faith is further strained when a childhood friend's wife, Tae-ju (Kim Ok-vin), comes to him asking for his help in escaping her life. Sang-hyun soon plunges into a world of sensual pleasures, finding himself on intimate terms with the Seven Deadly Sins.

Thirst Red Band Trailer:

Blood The Last Vampire
Based on the Manga series, Blood follows a 400-year-old halfling vampire slayer. She spends her life killing vampires, but hopes that this time she'll be able to execute Onigen, the evil patriarch of all vampires. Oh and she makes a little friend along the way.

Clip:

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Now this is just ridiculous ...

I HERD THAT BILL GATEZ WILL DONATE IF U DOWNLOAD IE Taking a cue from the scams that have been floating around on the internet for years, Microsoft will donate to food banks for every download of its new version of Internet Explorer. Next up, gas companies respond to you not buying gas one day by lowering prices, and Disney adds lots of dirty things into its next film. [Consumer Reports Electronics]

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Hot

Former cubicle jockey Jonathon Wilson now works from home, but it’s almost exactly as if he’s at his desk at the office. In the comments of my recent article on working remotely, Jonathon explains his unconventional setup:

I still have my computer at work, in my office cube (right in the middle of things). I set up a webcam there along with speakers. I have second cam at home, and I simply Skype in to my own cube at work. Skype can be configured to auto-answer, if desired, so my ‘cube’ Skype simply picks up when I dial in…

… for hours at a time.

I also pipe my home desktop onto my cube’s monitor (using VNC). This combination is very close to actually being there in the cube. People walk right up to my cube and talk to me, just like they do when I’m in the office. Because my code’s up on the screen, we can work through issues there at my desk just like normal. Similarly, people glancing at my screen can see exactly what I’m doing (coding), so there’s never a question of whether I’m actually doing my work from home.

I can ‘overhear’ the dev conversations in the cubes around me (just like when I’m in the office), and even pipe in. My coworkers and managers are quite used to it and its become completely natural. After trying many different things, this is, by far, the best approach I’ve come across.

(Bold section mine.)

Sounds like the office desk would really have to be in the middle of things to overhear conversations, and the microphone and speakers sensitive and loud enough to jump into those overheard conversations. I imagine this setup might feel strange to those not used to remote technology or office visitors. (Especially the VNC desktop remote control which looks like a ghost is typing away in front of you; that’s always creepy the first time you see it.)

However, Jonathon works on a team of software developers, savvy folks most likely to get used to this kind of thing easily. It’s a pretty neat solution for a team who’s willing to participate and an employer who’s willing to keep a remote worker’s desk free and available for this use. For more on VNC, see my (somewhat dated) tutorial, How to control your computer from anywhere. Thanks, Jonathon!

Master the Art of Working Remotely [Working Smarter]

Now instead of drawing attention to sweaty armpits, this onesie from “Babyglow” laced with heat-activated-pigment will change color if your baby has a fever.

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Now instead of drawing attention to sweaty armpits, this onesie from “Babyglow” laced with heat-activated-pigment will change color if your baby has a fever.

Contribute: Add an image, link, video or comment »

Now instead of drawing attention to sweaty armpits, this onesie from “Babyglow” laced with heat-activated-pigment will change color if your baby has a fever.

Contribute: Add an image, link, video or comment »

Now instead of drawing attention to sweaty armpits, this onesie from “Babyglow” laced with heat-activated-pigment will change color if your baby has a fever.

Contribute: Add an image, link, video or comment »

Now instead of drawing attention to sweaty armpits, this onesie from “Babyglow” laced with heat-activated-pigment will change color if your baby has a fever.

Contribute: Add an image, link, video or comment »

Now instead of drawing attention to sweaty armpits, this onesie from “Babyglow” laced with heat-activated-pigment will change color if your baby has a fever.

Contribute: Add an image, link, video or comment »

Now instead of drawing attention to sweaty armpits, this onesie from “Babyglow” laced with heat-activated-pigment will change color if your baby has a fever.

Contribute: Add an image, link, video or comment »

Now instead of drawing attention to sweaty armpits, this onesie from “Babyglow” laced with heat-activated-pigment will change color if your baby has a fever.

Contribute: Add an image, link, video or comment »