In this world, you can only buy movies in the movie shop. Most large cities have a movie shop, though smaller cities often don’t and towns are right out. Live in a village? It’s off to the big city to get your stories, kiddo.

And no, you can’t buy movies online either. OK, you can, but there’s only like three websites that sell them and they don’t carry a lot of stuff and they look really sketchy. You wouldn’t trust them with your credit card.

Anyway, back to the movie shop. In the movie shop there are all sorts of movie-related products for you to browse: toys and games, clothing, promotional posters and soundtracks… and even a few DVDs containing actual movies. These discs themselves occupy at most a third of such stores.

Also found in the movie shop are movie geeks. These social outcasts love nothing more than to talk about their favourite movies with each other, the weary employees, and if you’re particularly unlucky, other customers.

You see, gentle reader, on this world watching films is considered a terribly expensive and anti-social past-time. Most movie-watchers are actually embarrassed to talk about their hobby outside of the safety of their local shop or an internet community. Sometimes a radio drama or a play will be made based on a movie’s plot or characters (though not often both), and it might even do quite well, but mass cultural acceptance of the medium is forever fleeting.

Does this world seem strange to you? It doesn’t to me, nor will it to anyone else who reads comics. Yes, that’s the Shamylan-esque reveal that nobody saw coming – Bruce Willis I was in the present talking about comic books the whole time!

Comic books are, after all, just a story-telling medium like movies. They don’t just tell stories about people who wear capes and fight crime, just as not all movies are about spies who wear dinner suits, and not all books are detective stories wherein the butler did it. Very often these days the butler didn’t even do it!

Then again, the really good ones are about people who can fly, the rest is just pretentious nonsense about Nazi mice and whatnot. And the butler generally did it.

The comic scanner, on the other hand, must first carefully remove the staples, then spread the pages on a flat-bed scanner. Then they fire up their favourite image editing program and, one by one, scan each page before slicing each image in half then tuning the colour balance so that each page looks right sat next to its opposite number scanned from a different sheet. Finally the images must be ordered and named before archiving them into a rar or zip file. It’s labour-intensive stuff, but these guys do it tirelessly, every Wednesday, slaving through the day and night so that a legion of people can get their comics fix.

Getting comics onto an iPad is no picnic either. The most reliable way is to make PDFs for Apple’s free iBooks app. Including the initial download it works out as a four-step process for getting your free comic fix.

Well today DC made their first same-day digital release through their brand-new iPad app: Issue #4 of Justice League: Generation Lost (which just happens to be fun comicking). At £1.79 it’s a modest saving of 41p versus a “real” store that’s likely due to an exchange rate wobble (the US price of $2.99 matches the comic’s American RRP), but the real drive here is the simplicity. I tap buy, confirm my iTunes password, and before my torrent client could have built up steam the issue is ready to read, right there in my hands. It’s the same process that Apple used to turn buying music and software into an effortless way to part customers from money.

It’s just one comic for now, with DC quiet about future plans, but it’s a good comic and it was stupidly easy to buy and enjoy. Hopefully the experiment works well and it’s not long before I can buy a new week’s Batman or Spider-man on my shiny Apple-toy. Until then, it’s an easy choice between driving half an hour to Nottingham or firing up Demonoid.

I’m pretty sure nobody would mind about Flash so much then.

Let’s not kid ourselves, nobody outside the FSF has an ideological problem with flash being “closed” software, and it’s not like Flash is the only way you can make annoying ads (you may have seen people mention BusinessWeek’s animated header-covering HTML5 animated ad). Nope, the performance is all John Q. Web User** cares about.

Meanwhile, browser makers are deadlocked in an arms race towards faster, more efficient and more stable HTML, CSS and JavaScript rendering so that they can compete for your business (that would be the fractions-of-a-penny that search engines pay them every time you use that built-in search field).

Earnest competition in an open market leading to a better product? Somebody call Maggie Thatcher!

I’m thinking a detective show with a poorly-matched pair of partners who solve overly-dramatic crimes, only in this world Hitler was deposed early in World War 2 and the Japanese moved to the forefront of the Axis and won. It’s set in 2009 and Europe is enjoying it’s 68th year as an annex of Japan and these guys solve clichéd crimes.

A bit too Man In The High Castle? OK, how about a flatmates sitcom in a world with reversed traditional gender roles. It’s still 2009 though, and it’s a progressive society in which gender is, while not fully, increasingly a non-issue. The guys obsess over planning a wedding, even though one of them’s always trying to act more like a girl and never commit to a serious relationship -inside he’s just as manly as any other.

Hold on, I’ve got more. How about a legal drama on an Earth where communism somehow triumphed and spread during the 20th century. England’s not been communist very long, and people are still adjusting – it’s changed a lot about how the country works, the laws in particular.

Last one – a medical show that’s basically about doctors sleeping with doctors, but in a world where a lot of people have superpowers. ER with victims of super-villains, heroes who fell prey to their one secret weakness on a golfing weekend, and occasional fallout from cosmic-scale crisis.

Nuggets of gold here, people. Pure gold.

Sharing calendars though, that’s done in a really stupid way.

Unless you actually call your calendar “Bob’s calendar”, in your prefs, nobody can tell it’s you. And that’s not made clear. So I have no reason to suspect I should call my calendar anything other than “personal” or “gcal” or “calendar”, because it’s mine, but in my friends’ lists it just has the same obtuse name I gave it. Google knows exactly who that calendar belongs to, but it won’t tell you. You can at least re-name the shares you see, once you work out whose is whose.

Another thing: I have work and I have play, and I am busy for reasons that fall into each of these; calendar entries are divided accordingly. Why then, when sharing busy/free-level information, does it still show my friends both of these calendars? All I want them to know is if I’m busy, not why I’m busy (since I might be busy giving their mum a good seeing to).

And don’t even get me started on how iCal sees all this, though the wacky distorto-lens that is Google’s own special idea of how calDAV delegation should work.

Enter: Waveboard.

Waveboard is a site-specific-browser (SSB) that loads up wave.google.com/wave, so the experience is exactly the same as in your regular web broswer (sort of, more on that later). Once it’s loaded it can badge its dock icon, trigger a Growl event, or colourise its menu bar icon to let you know there are new waves or blips that might merit your attention.

It’s early days yet – Wave itself isn’t even ready for public consumption – so it’s quite excusable that Waveboard is missing some stuff I’d expect. The ability to make sounds is a key one, since pings, waves and new blips in a wave are all subtly different events and it would be nice to tell them apart audibly.

One nice feature is that it re-maps some of the keyboard shortcuts to more mac-like ones – to finish editing a blip in Waveboard you no longer type shift-return, but command-return, and bolding text is done with command-B. Smooth stuff.

I have reservations about SSBs – browsers are prone to running off with all your RAM if you leave one open long enough, and this is essentially a site-restricted browser that you would want to leave open all the time. That said, Wave seems to behave faster under Waveboard than in Safari 4, even animating transitions which just change immediately under S4. It uses less memory too, just about.

A surfeit of clients is going to be vital to Wave’s take-up, so it’s nice to see one available so soon. I can only hope that someone from the delicious generation will take up the challenge and make a truly mindblowing desktop client. And maybe an iPhone app that supports push, while they’re at it?

So yeah, a snatch of music for free on a free podcast actually made a band a few pennies.

And he was like “I’ve not got a condom” and I was like “I don’t care!” and he was like “I’ll get you pregnant” and I was like “I don’t CARE!” and then I was like taking his trousers off and he was like “you sure you wanna do this?” and I was like “er… nooooo”. I was SO drunk!

Oh to be young and retarded again

Try as I might, I couldn’t shake this page from “The New Adventures Of Hitler”

Hitler, haunted by the future-ghost of John Lennon

As I’ve formally studied more than a little quantum physics in my time I thought it might be useful if this could be explained in simpler terms.

You know the Schrodinger’s Cat Experiment, right? You put a dead cat in a box and there’s a 50-50 chance the special properties of a radioactive isotope will bring it back to life to briefly shamble around the laboratory mewing for brains. It’s taught in primary schools these days, though the practical itself was removed from most curricula some time ago.

In this case what they’re doing is similar, but slightly different. First, you take a cat and show it a video of the above experiment so it might fully grasp the gravity of the situation. Then you put it in the box with a cryptography textbook and a number written clearly on a ruled index card. You waft in the smell of some fresh tuna and you tell it it’s only getting some when it factors the number, and until then it’s both alive and dead and hungry all at the same time. In short order you should find yourself with some prime factors and a very relieved cat.

Of course, it’s not quite so simple, because crypto researchers have been doing this for years with lab-sized apparatus. The real breakthrough of this discovery is that this team has shrunk the cat, the box, the aroma of tuna and the crypto textbook down to the size where it can all fit on a silicon chip and be attached to a regular computer. No doubt soon every mobile phone will have one, allowing two thirds of the world’s population to straddle the barrier between life and afterlife on their weekly commute.

Anyway, I do. And I noticed something – the iPhone summary in iTunes is too tall to fit on-screen without a scrollbar unless you hide the dock and make iTunes as tall as it can be.

I suspect that some iTunes developers don’t feel an always-on dock is the way forward? Or maybe they keep it at the side of the screen like perverts?

Spurred by this I’m trying out a hidden bottom-dock for a while, to see if it’s any nicer. If I don’t get on with it hidden I think I’ll try a side-dock before I go back to a shown bottom-dock.

And, well, it’s a bit complicated for 140 characters so Paul: see below.

I was thinking about how I plug my MacBook into the TV and get my Boxee on, and then use my phone for IM and whatnot. We all do it – something to do with the waning attention span of today’s youth, the MTV generation and so on. When was the last time you just sat and actually watched TV, didn’t do anything else?

That’s actually pretty backwards: there’s a laptop, which is great at doing lots of things at once, sat there just playing video; and there’s a phone, trying to do lots of things at once and not being great at it, but it can play video pretty well.

At least, the 3GS can. Did you know that? It totally can. It won’t… but it can. I imagine it’s probably on a par with the Apple TV in terms of what it can actually handle.

So wouldn’t it be great if the media player was the phone, sat in a dock pushing just-good-enough-HD onto your TV, while your laptop was… well… on your lap?

Apple actually already make a cable for that (what, no HDMI?), and a dock with a little remote too, so we’re part-way there. Incidentally, has anyone actually used one of these? Does it give a special TV-sized interface to click through? I’m imagining has a kind of Front Row interface. It ought to, for my purposes.

But what if the phone rings while I’m watching a movie? There should be a preference not to bug me with messages, email and calls if I’m busy watching something. A slider switch or something. But what if I do want to be bugged? Should it come up on the screen? Should the dock have a nice mic so I can answer a call on speakerphone from the sofa?

And that got me thinking of all those old sci-fi shows in the 80s where people would have a “vid-phone” in their front-room – what if the phone docked with its back to us? You don’t need the phone’s screen now, since the interface is all on the TV, so what if its back is facing out and the camera is trained on you, supine and sipping your beer on the sofa?

You could get some proper retro-sci-fi video phone shit going on, is what!

So yeah. September the 9th. One more thing. Totally called it.

There’s a story over on BetaNews about Apple’s market share of the “premium computer” market – computers that cost more than $1000. I’ll save you clicking the link – their market share is 91%, which is pretty fucking high. Their overall market share is below 10%, since most computers now cost considerably less than that.

Incidentally, I can remember when computers cost in the region of £2000 (roughly $3300). Of course, back then in 1999 all home computers could arguably have been considered premium products, but it’s still jarring to see that something that ten years ago cost the same as a cheap second hand car or a nice Rolex is now considered pricey at over £600. Cars and gorgeous watches, of course, still cost the same today as they did then.

Enough showing my age – what’s interesting here is when you consider this news coupled with Apple’s drive to make software run quicker on the same hardware. Snow Leopard especially, and the last couple of OS X releases in particular are all about running faster on a given machine than the big cat that came before. Well, faster on the same reasonably-new machine, anyway. Meanwhile Steve Jobs is often quoted, and I’m paraphrasing, that the reason Apple doesn’t make netbooks is because they don’t know how to make a good computer for $500. Apple make $1000 machines because they don’t know how to make a Mac for anything less… yet.

But what about when it becomes possible to make that good computer for $500? What happens when the chips needed become smaller and faster? More importantly, what happens as the software undergoes successive obsessive performance tuning? When it’s possible to make a good mac for $500, will it be possible to make a usable PC for $250? (ignoring, of course, that it’s already possible to make a crappy PC for $250) Will the market slide ever downwards until people use Windows PCs that came free with cereal rather than pay $50 for a Mac?

I don’t think it will. I suspect that Apple’s push to streamline their desktop OS is indicative of a drive to bring the cost of building (and, hopefully, of buying) a mac down faster than Moore’s Law affords. Perhaps by the time you can buy a MacBook for $500, the Windows laptop on the shelf next to it** will not be so far beneath.

* Yes, those same eight people are probably still the only ones who will read it. Shut up.

** No, I’ve never seen Macs and Windows PCs on neighbouring shelves either.

It wasn’t actually that bad, and most of the unpleasentness was probably due to trying to remove three days’ growth with the last blunted razor I could find in the bathroom.

I did still moisturise afterwards, mind you, so I’ve not gone totally wild man of the north, all shaving with a sharpened rock by the light of my camp fire.

In conclusion: shaving foam is likely a worthless modern frippery, designed to wash your money down the sink. Maybe. I’ll try it again with a proper razor and let you know.

*assuming your grandpa liked his balls smooth and his bush trim. I bet he did.

See, BeeJive on your phone talks to BeeJive’s server. It’s that server that logs in to MSN and AIM and whatnot for you. Like so:

[phone] <-> [server] <-> [MSN]

Which might seem like an unnecessary middle-man, but this lets their server stay logged into the other servers for you all the time, pushing out a little message to your phone if a new IM comes in. Suddenly IM works like text messages*, only better: people can see your status before they send a message, and it’s free, even internationally.

Said like that it seems almost trivial, but that still blows my mind. I guess I’m not telling it right? Let me try again: knock knock…

I guess for some people push** changed email like this a while ago, but outside of work I only really use email to get spam and semi-spam from web services and companies I have some kind of profile with. The information I actively want all comes via IM, Twitter and Google Reader (the sooner the other two get push-capable clients the better).

It’s not all roses, mind you. The app’s a little crashy right now, and signing in from my laptop makes MSN and AIM throw up (Jabber is fine with it, of course). Also, I’m not so good at ignoring messages when I’m busy. Why people insist on sending nonsense IMs when you’re set to “busy” I do not know, but I guess the burden there is on me to just ignore it if I really am busy…

*by which I mean SMS, since IMs are text messages, obviously

** by which I mean Blackberries, obviously. What is this “push” email? What’s pushing where? Don’t you push me, mister! I’m confused.

Its an old trope beloved of lazy writers, but sometimes that really is the most effective way to describe a new thing to someone unfamiliar with it (assuming that your audience is familiar with both Y and Z).

Better Off Ted is like Mad Men meets Eureka.

Ted is a suave, highly competent creative manager with a permanent 5 o’clock shadow (like Don Draper in Mad Men), who manages a team of research scientists at a super-high-tech company with a finger in ever industry (like Eureka’s Global Dynamics). Hilarity ensues, more thanks to the great writing than the cast, but solid and earnest hilarity nonetheless.

Better Off Ted is still airing its first season right now, a mere seven episodes in. I only caught it because it was mentioned on Murmer‘s “this week in TV”, which seems to be the result of the iFanboy staff** getting at once sick of talking about comics and a chronic case of the 2.0s. There’s a podcast too, just one episode so far. Maybe you should listen to it.

*X is also sometimes like Y on Z, where Z is some kind of narcotic. Something explored past its logical conclusion by Lee and Herring back in the day when they spiked Norman Wisdom’s drink with acid to see if it really would make him act like Lee Evans. (shitty video link)

** All of them but Ron (that’s “the fat one” to you, Matt).

Today I got totally blindsided by someone who said “address” when they meant “email address”. I was confused for a moment, since a postal address made no sense in the context.

Is it just me who still fills in “postal” if they hear “address” without a qualifier? I suppose it makes sense for “address” to mean email now but it’s still odd to contemplate, like it’s a stone’s throw away from pod babies with silicon-augmented brains who piss designer drugs.

It actually strikes me as strange that I still default to thinking like that. I have a whole bunch of addresses – Skype, websites, MSN, AIM and other acronyms. It’s months since I sent documents through the postal service, whole years since sending an actual letter; I would go so far as to say that physical mail is something of a novelty. Hell, writing an email longer than a couple of sentences is a novelty outside of work. And yet here I am, still thinking of the internet as some strange new thing that might get turned off tomorrow, once everyone’s bored with it.

Welcome to the future. Call me.

Anyway, this morning I imagined myself fielding the dreaded “what is sex?” question from some precocious 9-year-old.

Some of my favourites:

“Sex is when daddy and mummy lock the door and do terrible things to each other.”

“It’s a very dangerous contact sport that you can’t play until you’re older.”

“Well, when a man and a woman… or two men, or two women, or sometimes a mixed group of more than two people… you know what? You should ask someone else.”

Post your own in the comments – let’s see what kind of therapy bills we’d have to pay if we ever reproduced~

1. Spark

Does anyone use Spark? I’d never heard it mentioned on the Mac web, never even ran across it until I worked in a computer showroom and they used it to make such and such an app launch on the till PCs by pressing F12.

It’s wonderful.

What I discovered last night is that Spark 3 b9 has appeared, adding controls for brightness and iTunes playback, and I do so love it when one add-on adds functionality that allows me to remove another. There’s also Growl support, for letting you know what you just did to iTunes.

Spark 3 b9 screenshot

2. Mplayer OS X Extended

If you go to the MPlayer project’s download page you will see that MPlayer for OS X rc2 has a bold “outdated” by it. I don’t actually know what this means, since it works fine, but it prompted me to ferret out MPlayer OSX Extended.

MPOSXE is the MPlayer we all know and love with a more powerful GUI to get you and your mouse in touch with more of MPlayer’s powerful features that are normally just for command-line folks. Features like support for styled subtitles, stream selection, and click-able playback controls in fullscreen mode. Plus, it was last updated about a week ago, which is always encouraging.

extra controls, see?

3. Snow Leopard

Thus far I can tell you that everything that works is exceedingly fast. It’s a developer preview though (I’m currently playing with 10a222), so lots doesn’t work. So far I’ve found the CS4 installer hangs, you have to log out for changes to your desktop picture to take effect, the finder’s sidebar shortcuts aren’t spring-loaded, and waking from safe sleep doesn’t seem to work.

Did I mention that it’s fast though? I mean, really really fucking quick. This is especially noticeable in Mail, which has long been the ugly duckling of OS X’s native apps in terms of performance.

No sign of the new “Marble” chrome in this build, I think it’s only been spotted in some recent build that hasn’t made it out to torrent sites yet, or it’s just a rumour. Also no sign of resolution-independence in the UI or ZFS support, which I think is going to be server-only.

The motivations for the giveaway are vaguely political and not too interesting, but the outcome is that I didn’t have to pay for CrossOver Mac Pro, a piece of software based on Wine that lets Mac users run Windows software far faster (and some degree less robustly) than the more traditional virtual machine solution.

Faster, you say? How much faster?

Do you have Office 2008 for Mac? How long does it take to load up a copy of Word? On my 2.4Ghz MacBook Pro it takes 22 seconds from clicking the icon to being able to type text. That’s not awful, I suppose, though quite slow compared to Word 2007 on a 2.4Ghz Windows machine.

Speaking of Word 2007, loading it through Crossover takes a mere 10 seconds until I can type. That includes the time it takes for Crossover itself to launch.

Hell, if it wasn’t free I’d have bought it!