Random Thursday

A few random observations while silently cursing Apple for yet again making my cool stuff seem old and busted.

• Speaking of the iPad, here’s another interesting project seeking funding via Kickstarter: LetterMpress is a virtual antique letterpress application. The software is demoed in the following video.

  This certainly appears to be a beautifully crafted app, and probably a lot of fun to experiment with. I love the look of letterpress prints, and if nothing else, this project will help preserve a disappearing aspect of human creativity. I haven’t decided whether to kick in a few bucks, but I’m leaning toward doing it.

• From the “You Don’t Want to Know” collection, we present…Robo-Lassie!
  

  As the folks at Neatorama put it, while it’s not clear exactly what this is all about, it has the makings of the most awesome Lassie series ever!

• From the “Truth in Advertising” department, we present the aptly-named creepy, a program that uses the geotagging information on the digital photos that you upload to map your location and plot the time of day you were there. If this bothers you, use something like GeotagSecurity to “scrub” your photos of this metadata. Personally, I don’t really see the big deal, but then I’m not sneaking around with a telephoto lens trying to peer into peoples’ backyards. As far as you know. [Links via PetaPixel]
• OK, we keep coming back to the new iPad. What did you expect, really? Anyway, if you’re going to replace your old and busted, less-than-one-year-old model with the new and hotness iPad 2, here’s a nice tutorial on how to “sanitize” the old one before selling or giving it away.
• This site alone is sufficient reason for why the internet should exist.
• I confess that I’ve been less than kind toward Kirstie Alley on various social media regarding her upcoming appearance on Dancing With the Stars. In response to someone’s hope that they’ll pair the, um, bigger stars with professionals of comparable size, I posted “so, we’re gonna need a bigger pro” for Kirstie. Normally, I would never make light of another person’s weight issues, but, really, we all know that Kirstie’s sole remaining claim to fame is her weight, and that notoriety also the only reason she was selected for the DWTS cast. In any event, I don’t expect that she’ll be around for very long; she was quite unimpressive during the introduction of the cast on Monday night, even before she rumbles onto the dance floor. Oops, I did it again.
• I’m trying to figure out how this is a good idea…doing a “prescribed burn” in Crockett County, under the supervision of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Anyone else remember the Cerro Grande wildfire in 2000, another “controlled burn” under government supervision that ended up burning 48,000 acres along with 400 homes in Los Alamos, New Mexico? And as I type this, another “controlled burn” is, well, uncontrolled in Brewster County. Common sense, anyone?