Hilarious: ask Google Maps for driving directions from New York to
Dublin, Ireland and they’ll give them to you, including this step,
“Swim across the Atlantic Ocean 3,462 mi.” Weirdly, they instruct you
to swim to France, drive the Chunnel to England, then take a ferry back to Ireland. Surely there’s a more efficient totally impossible route?
(via Kottke)
Ha ha! One of my favorite video podcasts - “Ask a Ninja” - got to interview Will Ferrell and Heder about Blades of Glory, LOL:
iLounge: “Apple today announced Complete My Album, a new iTunes Store feature
that allows customers who have purchased individual tracks on an album
to buy the full album at a reduced price. “Complete My Album offers
customers up to 180 days after first purchasing individual songs from
any qualifying album to purchase the rest of that album at a reduced
price,” explains Apple.”
The
United States Postal Service has unveiled a collection of 15 new Star
Wars stamps and has invited the public to vote on a favorite:
Link - via Geeks of Doom
Robert Rodriguez, the director who helms one of the two movies in Grindhouse,
told SCI FI Wire that he got the idea for the project after watching
1970s exploitation movies at Quentin Tarantino’s house. “Quentin is the
one who grew up going to these movies the most,” Rodriguez (Sin City)
said in an interview in Beverly Hills, Calif., over the weekend. “He’s
a film collector, [and] for the past 12 years he’s had his own theater
in his house, [and] he’s been showing me these double [and] triple
features. Either stuff he’s grown up with or stuff that he’s
discovered, and he wanted to turn me on to.”
Watching films such as Vanishing Point and Blood Feast
gave Rodriguez the idea to do his own version of a “grindhouse” double
feature. “I got really excited about doing a double feature, and when I
took the idea to Quentin after Sin City, I said … you should do one, and I should do the other. He said, ‘Oh, we’ve got to call it Grindhouse. We’ve got to have fake trailers.’ And we realized it would hearken back to that time period.”
Rodriguez’s half of the film is called Planet Terror and is a straight-up gory zombie movie. Tarantino’s (Kill Bill) is called Death Proof and is an homage to car-chase films such as Dirty Mary Crazy Larry. Rodriguez and Tarantino enlisted their filmmaker friends Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), Rob Zombie (House of 1,000 Corpses) and Eli Roth (Hostel) to come up with the fake trailers, for such films as Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S.S., that link the two features.
Rodriguez added that he and Tarantino artificially aged their
movies—adding dirt and scratches, missing reels and jump cuts—to
simulate the experience of watching a real exploitation movie in a
cheap theater—or Tarantino’s own home theater. “Because his prints are
sometimes all screwed up,” Rodriguez said. “And it adds a really great
texture to it and a vitality to it that when I go back and see the same
movie on DVD, and it’s all cleaned up, it’s lost half of its charm. So
I thought it’d be really great to use the damage as a dramatic device
and try to use that as another tool in the tool box.” Grindhouse opens April 6.
Probably not as cool as 300, but still….
IGN: “The Greeks, Egyptians, and Persians gear up for another ancient Mediterranean brawl on this RTS for PC.”
China’s construction of a 13-mile (21-km) long concrete dragon along the top of a ridge in Shizhu Mountain may be stopped due to environmental impact. Good thing Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi who started the Great Wall didn’t have to fuss with those darned environmentalists!
Link - via Unique Daily
Slashdot: “According to a BetaNews article, Dell confirmed on Wednesday plans to
offer Linux pre-installed on select desktop and notebook systems,
beyond its current Linux-based servers and Precision workstations. No
specific time frame was given for the expanded Linux plans, although
the company said in a blog posting that it will provide an update in
the coming weeks regarding the effort. It will detail ‘information on
which systems we will offer, our testing and certification efforts, and
the Linux distribution(s) that will be available,’ Dell said, adding
that, ‘The countdown begins today.’
Windows/Mac/Unix
(Firefox): The Google Homepage Resizeable Columns Greasemonkey script
lets you customize the size of each column on your Google Personalized
Homepage.
After you install, it’s not instantly obvious how to work it, but if
you just click on the white space between columns 1 and 2 or 2 and 3
and drag, you’re ready to resize. If you’re a Google Personalized
Homepage user (and it seems a lot of you are),
this little script will let you organize your gadgets into columns
based on how much space they really need to be useful. For example,
that little date/time gadget is nice and all, but you’d never need it
to take up more than a thumbnail’s space - and now it doesn’t. Results
are only local, naturally, but this is a handy way to add a little more
customization to your Google homepage. — Adam Pash
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