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@cpengel just posted a twittered about this amazing app phun that was created by Emil Ernerfeld as some sort of phun w/ physics tutorial. From the sample video it looks like he stumbled across a very cool, addictive, and from the looks of it extremely intuitive app.

Having spent most of my waking hours over the last 3 days thinking about how to make complex concepts simple, intuitive, and efficient, this is definitely right up my alley.

Too bad there is no OS X version…

Hey all, here is a few videos and sites that I love. They are from quite a while back, but they are good none-the-less.

Channel 101

There are a slew of off the wall “shows” that I used to watch on Channel101.com. All of these shows are somewhat of a parody of modern tv shows - weak plots, worse scripts, and overdone special effects. In the fashion of TV, each month the creators whip up a new ‘episode’ of their show. The shows are screened and the top 5 are carried on, while all others are cancelled. I don’t suggest checking these out if you are easily offended.

• The ‘Bu - As mentioned in a recent blog post, was my first introduction to The Lonely Island crew and (sometimes) features Elliot from Scrubs. Episode 1 is a good intro to this strip, I suggest going straight through, but if you are rushed for time then skip right to episode 8, the month where they “didn’t make an episode”. CLAP - CLAP
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• House of Cosbys - HoC to those in the know. If you lived through the 80’s and remember Jello, Picture Pages, and of course the Cosby Show, then this is the show for you. It had a great first few episodes but started to slide into the obscene, luckily it was saved from implosion by an unruly Cease and Desist.
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• There are many more: Yacht Rock, Most Extraordinary Space Investigations (often featuring Sarah Silverman), and so many more.
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Homestar Runner

Ok, this is definitely an oldy, and you shouldn’t need me to introduce you to this, but if you haven’t heard of Homestar Runner, or perhaps his more well known buddy - Strongbad, then please check it out right now. Below I’ve picked out a few of my all time favorites, but there are hundreds of fantastic videos on that site, you can lose days there. One of the best things about these videos is the easter eggs, you can find out more about them on the Homestar Wiki.
The intro to the site is available below (sorry about the bad audio), one of my favorite strong bad emails is anything. The side shows are pretty hot too, like Teen Girl Squad and many others!

Living the life of a blogger I found a recent SNL skit with Juno’s Ellen Page and SNL’s Andy Samberg as Diablo Cody quite funny. There are some great lines in there, such as “I blog to differ” and “Snoop Bloggy blog featuring Nate Blog”.

It’s getting linked quite a bit out there on the internets, and wth good reason, Andy Samberg is comic gold. I’ve followed him since his days at The Lonely Island, doing shows like The ‘Bu at Channel 101. Him, Akiva, and Jorma are gods of modern comedy. If you aren’t familiar with their work I suggest you check out The ‘Bu, earlier episodes of which actually feature Elliot from Scrubs.

I’ve been playing with Twitter clients over the past few days, trying to see which one would best serve my needs. Here are the results of what I’ve found. Oh yeah - obligatory twitter page pimp.

Before I dive into the various clients, I’ll first say that I found them all to be pretty easy to use as well as pretty much the same. There really aren’t any big differentiators. They’re all bubbly, web 2.0, with pretty much the same interface right down to the icons. There are differences in how you configure them, but with how infrequently you go through that I don’t see that as a differentiator.

• Snitter - http://snook.ca/snitter/
  
• This was my first client and I found it pretty intuitive
• Text entry bubble is at the top
• Interface is a little bulky and there aren’t really any options aside from color.
• Requires Adobe Air -which sometimes has issues with quiting properly




• Twhirl - http://www.twhirl.org/
• This is a bit tighter on the interface, which I like
• Good icons for conversations, as you can see on the top tweet (click through to larger version of the image)
• This can hide the text entry bubble (as shown here), but when in use, it’s at the bottom
• Ditto on Adobe Air issues




• Twitterific - http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific
• Has integration w/ Growl
• Doesn’t let me type more than 140 chars, v. annoying. I often go a bit over then edit my message down to 140
• Does have good graphics for direct and reply messages
• Didn’t show up in the apple dock or spaces, I don’t like that voodoo
• It’s a free trial, it’s fully functional though




• Instant Messaging
• Quick and easy for posts
• Known interface and already installed - who doesn’t have an IM client?
• Most clients don’t tell you your character count, major downside, I’m too verbose
• Only usable for posting and receiving direct tweets
• Text Messaging
• I did this quite a bit from the EEC Email Evolution conference -very effective
• Really the only way to twitter on the move, it’s good to use this in conjunction with a desktop client
• It’s a bit slow because I don’t have a keyboard on my phone
• It’s costly because I don’t have a good text plan
• Twitter.com
• Easy to use, very straight forward
• Nothing to install
• No auto refresh - which would be helpful

So where does that leave me? Well, no one is changing the game here. I’m not sure that you need to, but it definitely means that I’m not willing to pay for a client (Twitterific) if they’re only selling point is that their graphics are cuter.

I’m currently using twhirl because I like the more compact client than snitter, which otherwise seems nearly identical. Twitterific’s OS X issues and text entry limit were deal breakers for me. But I’ll keep my eyes out for any other clients that may pop up.
Did I miss any great clients? What is your preferred twitter tool? Let me know in the comments.

I’ve been using twitter for a bit over a week now and it’s quite nice. I am still trying to find the right cadence for my tweets (posts to your bloggers). I’m not the “Getting a short, skinny, hazelnut, cappuccino at starbucks”, “Just got up, hope it’s a great day!” kind of person. I try to pass along a bit more value with each tweet. To each his own.

With my short time using twitter I’ve found that they’ve done a good job with the interface, so I decided to do a bit of a review. Check it out, let me know if you agree.

It’s my first foray into this type of post, but I really liked doing it, I think you’ll be seeing more of it.

C[Google]] has just posted that they have a new project they are working on: Knol. They want to spread knowledge by having experts write on subjects they know about. Their goal is “find a way to help people share their knowledge,” hmmm, sounds familiar. I think some one else has a little side project trying to do something like that, what’s that called? Oh yeah, C[Wikipedia]].

It seems like the only differences are:

• It integrates with you google accounts
• You can make comments
• The author gets a picture

This seems like a bad idea for several reasons. The biggest one is that I don’t think we need competition for good content, this is like HD vs. Blu-ray - let’s focus on one thing. If experts have to try to keep knol and wikipedia up to date they give up on one or both - so which do I use.

It’s nice to attribution, I wrote this article, Yay for me! But no one knows, or cares, who I am. They didn’t care in Encyclopaedia Britannica, they don’t usually care much in wikipedia, and they probably won’t care here. I don’t know who to trust in the field of insomnia, and I if I did, then there probably wouldn’t be anything on Knol that would be news to me. Attribution is nice, and it’s the right thing to do, but it’s mostly vanity - no one cares, they just skim over it. Admittedly, there is value when you are doing research, such as writing a reference, but wikipedia could probably be slightly augmented to better support references (if it hasn’t already).

There are probably a lot of other problems with this, but I will point one last thing out - comments. Why is this helpful? This usually devolves into useless drivel, Google doesn’t even allow comments on their blog, why do they think it will work here? Wikipedia has a discussion page that is accessible, but not visible, from the main article. This makes sense, people who maintain these articles can debate finer points, but most of us don’t need to see that, it’s just confusing.

I don’t mean to sound overly sensative, but I think it’s silly for google to create such a system and not address the obvious question: “Why do this when wikipedia is already the expert here?”. Well, ok, I think they did, just not directly:

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

Oh, google, you guys are tricky! That’s it right there. I’ve often wondered about the debates people have had with W[Jimbo Wales]] trying to convince him to throw google ads into wikipedia instead of just asking for donations. Heaps of money are there to be made no doubt.

And if there is one thing that people at google are good at doing, it’s make heaps of money.

It can be hard to keep up to date with all the latest goings on in the world today. I try to keep up on the latest internet trends and memes. But it just impossible to stay aware of everything that is going down. Even some obvious things that have been around for a while can take a while for me to get to. One example is C[Skype]], this is a great tool that I’ve known about for years. I just haven’t had the occasion to actually try it out.

This is a great application, easy to use and fun. They’ve really built well on people’s understanding of chat tools. That’s really what it is, videochat. But it works quite well. This last weekend I talked for an hour with my uncle in Costa Rica. It was great to see him and hear how he was doing. The really fun part was that he hasn’t seen our house yet, so I walked around the house with my laptop and gave him a tour via the built in webcam. That’s pretty novel.

As the technology moves forward, some things that aren’t really huge leaps can make it all worth while. I can now easily chat for free over the web with my aunt in Boston, my uncle in Costa Rica, and my parents just a few hours away. It’s actually quite ironic that it was my aunt and uncle that got me to use Skype. Will wonders never cease?

I was looking for a new sound for my mail warning, the system beep was wearing on me, and I stumbled across FindSounds.com. Now I can easily download a bevy of fun sounds to keep me guessing which way I’m going…

FindSounds - Search the Web for Sounds

BTW, I settled on the lemming death noise!

If you have read any of my recent posts, you may have noticed that I’ve been using Google’s “My Maps” (user guide) to chronicle my travels through India. Now that the trip is over, I’m adding in many places I didn’t have time to find before. Finding locations in India isn’t quite as easy as here in the states, road names aren’t often in the maps, and I don’t have addresses for most places anyways. The only upside is that many of the locations are easy to find from an aerial view. (more…)

For those of you out there who aren’t hip to all the internet has to offer, there’s this great site out there called digg. What is digg? W[Wikipedia]], as always, has a good definition of W[digg]]:

Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control.

So it’s basically a site where people can post links and rate others that have already been posted. For those internet newbies out there, it’s basically a magical place to get all those email Forwards without the bad formatting.

This isn’t exactly news for me, I’ve been digging for a while now; it’s not something I do everyday, but it’s a good way to catch the latest vibes on the web. The reason I bring this up is that they have something called digg labs, which is pretty much like google labs, but with some what less useful toys. The one I wanted to show you today is called Stack. This basically show you, in real-time, which diggs are getting the most attention. There is definitely cool factor to that, but above and beyond that is the ease of use of this. It’s simple to use, and you can get to the stories without much effort.

Got a few minutes to waste? Go check it out.