The Writing Rooms of Famous Writers

in Books | September 21st, 2007

Here’s where great writ­ing gets done. The Guardian has post­ed a nice col­lec­tion of anno­tat­ed pho­tos of the work­ing spaces used by famous writ­ers, includ­ing Sea­mus Heaney, AS Byatt, Michael Frayn, and Alain de Bot­ton. (Get the full list here.) My favorite selec­tion is Jonathan Safran Foer’s, the Rose Read­ing Room of the 42nd Street Branch of the New York Pub­lic Library, a beau­ti­ful place to work.

Anoth­er quick obser­va­tion to men­tion: Most all of these rooms are paint­ed com­plete­ly white. For most of the world, that’s hard­ly strange. But if you live in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, the site of one white room after anoth­er is fair­ly jar­ring. It’s pas­tels here all the way. Source: Boing Boing

Sub­scribe to our feed

Also check out our list of Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es and For­eign Lan­guage Les­son Pod­casts.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

NBC Leaves the iTunes Fold

in Apple, Television | September 20th, 2007

Apple took the world of dig­i­tal enter­tain­ment by storm when it start­ed offer­ing new tele­vi­sion shows on iTunes in 2005. The big net­works signed on (even­tu­al­ly) and it was sud­den­ly pos­si­ble to catch an episode of The Office or Lost for $1.99 on a video iPod or a PC.

NBC was one of the ear­ly adopters, and appar­ent­ly they’re not hap­py with the mod­el. They want to charge more than $1.99 an episode: Apple refus­es. So now the net­work has announced its own iTunes killer (or at least com­peti­tor). The net­work already offers stream­ing ver­sions of its shows for a lim­it­ed peri­od after each one airs. Now fans will be able to down­load and watch new episodes for up to a week after air-date.

Clear­ly, this is all about mon­ey. As Tivos and their ilk pro­lif­er­ate, few­er peo­ple than ever are both­er­ing to watch tra­di­tion­al TV ads, and the net­works are strug­gling to find new ways to make mon­ey. NBC hopes to make mon­ey by run­ning ads (that you can’t skip) dur­ing each show and, in 2008, by charg­ing peo­ple to “own” episodes they down­load beyond a week. Is NBC mak­ing the right move? Would you rather watch some ads and deal with a new set of soft­ware and video play­back issues or pay for some­thing that already aired for free?

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Bob Dylan Video Goodness

in Music, Uncategorized, Video - Arts & Culture | September 19th, 2007

dylancard.jpgMark Octo­ber 1 on your cal­en­dar. That’s when Bob Dylan will release a new box set of his “great­est songs.” Now, cut over to the web­site designed to mar­ket the album, and you’ll find a cou­ple notable pieces of video. First up, you can watch the video that accom­pa­nies Mark Ron­son’s remix­ing of “Most Like­ly You Will Go Your Way (& I’ll Go Mine).” (Watch it on the web­site here or on YouTube here.) It’s appar­ent­ly the first time Dylan has allowed a remix of any of his songs, and the song has been get­ting some air­play this week.

And then there is this video con­cept. Back in 1967, D. A. Pen­nebak­er released Don’t Look Back, a well-known doc­u­men­tary that cov­ered Dylan’s first tour of Eng­land in 1965. The open­ing seg­ment of the film has Dylan stand­ing in an alley, flip­ping through cards inscribed with lyrics from Sub­ter­ranean Home­sick Blues. (Also the beat poet Allen Gins­berg looms in the back­ground. We’ve includ­ed the orig­i­nal video below.) Now, I’m men­tion­ing this because the afore­men­tioned web­site lets you re-work this video seg­ment. Click here and you can re-write the cards that Dylan flips through, and then watch your edit­ed ver­sion. It’s anoth­er form of re-mix­ing, I guess.

Last­ly, I want to direct your atten­tion to the trove of videos that Google put togeth­er back when Google Video was a real liv­ing, breath­ing thing. Cre­at­ed to coin­cide with the release of Dylan’s last stu­dio album, Mod­ern Times (2006), this col­lec­tion lets you watch 11 videos in total, rang­ing from unre­leased footage from D. A. Pen­nebak­er’s Don’t Look Back, to Dylan’s appear­ance on The John­ny Cash Show, to his per­for­mance of “Dig­ni­ty” on MTV’s Unplugged. Good stuff, to be sure.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

iPod Classic Not Quite Ready for Primetime

in Apple | September 19th, 2007

Robert X. Cring­ley’s week­ly article/podcast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) may make you think twice about buy­ing an iPod Clas­sic … at least for now. Despite the name, the guts of the iPod Clas­sic are actu­al­ly new, and the bugs haven’t been ful­ly worked out. The list of prob­lems expe­ri­enced by users includes (and I quote Cring­ley direct­ly):

  • VERY Slow menu switch­ing response
  • Dis­play of clock rather than song info when “Now Play­ing”
  • Inabil­i­ty to use exist­ing AUTHORIZED 3rd par­ty dock prod­ucts (includ­ing Apple-adver­tised)
  • Audio skip­ping dur­ing oper­a­tion
  • Slow con­nec­tion to Macs and PCs
  • Inabil­i­ty to dis­able “split-screen” menus
  • Lag­ging and unre­spon­sive Click Wheel
  • Cam­era con­nec­tor not work­ing
  • Inabil­i­ty to use EQ set­tings with­out skip­ping and dis­tor­tion

See­ing that the “Clas­sic” is Apple’s only iPod that cur­rent­ly has more than 16 gigs of stor­age, the com­pa­ny will be hus­tling to fix these prob­lems. But, for now, pod­cast lovers might want to stick to their tried and true mp3 play­er. Source: I, Cring­ley

See our Tech­nol­o­gy Pod­cast Col­lec­tion

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The World of Words & Carnal Knowledge

in Books, Podcasts | September 18th, 2007

carnalknowledge.gifGram­mar is in vogue. The sta­tis­tics don’t lie. The Gram­mar Girl (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) remains one of the most pop­u­lar pod­casts on iTunes, and The Gram­mar Grater (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) is hold­ing its own. From gram­mar, it’s just a short step to words, to ety­mol­o­gy. And, today, we want to high­light Pod­ic­tionary (iTunes — Feed — Site) for you. It’s a “word-of-the-day” pod­cast that spends an easy three to five min­utes sur­vey­ing the his­to­ry of com­mon words in the Eng­lish lan­guage. (This makes it use­ful for native and non-native speak­ers alike). Its cre­ator, Charles Hodg­son, has so far tack­led over 600 terms, which means that he’s amassed an exten­sive audio archive that you can access here.

And his work on words does­n’t stop there. Hodg­son recent­ly pub­lished a new book called Car­nal Knowl­edge: A Navel Gaz­er’s Dic­tio­nary of Anato­my, Ety­mol­o­gy, and Triv­ia (St. Mar­t­in’s Press). Far from pedan­tic, the book uses engag­ing prose and fun facts to tease out the mean­ing of words we use to describe our bod­ies. The whole body gets cov­ered here, from the “eye” to the “simi­an line” to the “gul­let,” and it goes straight down to the nether regions, too. For more infor­ma­tion, spend some time with the blog that accom­pa­nies the new book.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ten Pod­casts to Build Your Vocab­u­lary

Sub­scribe to our feed.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The New York Times “Opens Up” at Midnight

in Media | September 18th, 2007

nyt-160×160.jpgEffec­tive at mid­night, The New York Times will make the “Times­S­e­lect” sec­tion of its web­site entire­ly free. (It used to cost sub­scribers $49.95 a year.) And it will also free up “its archives from 1987 to the present … , as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the pub­lic domain.”

In mak­ing this move, the paper will be giv­ing up $10 mil­lion in annu­al sub­scrip­tion rev­enue. But it will like­ly make up that mon­ey (and then some) by using ads to mon­e­tize those pages. For more info, read the full arti­cle here. And click here to see what for­mer­ly closed-off con­tent will now become freely avail­able.

Update: Have a look at Deeplink­ing’s piece called Min­ing the New York Times Archive. It pulls out of the archive some inter­est­ing finds, includ­ing reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Oscar Wilde’s Dis­grace (1895), plus arti­cles that sur­vey the dynam­ic art scene of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.

Explore our list of 100 Great Cul­ture Blogs

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Keeping Wikipedia Honest

in Web/Tech | September 18th, 2007

wiki2.jpgWikipedia is now the 9th most fre­quent­ed site on the web, and it hosts over 7 mil­lion arti­cles in over 200 lan­guages. Like it or not, Wikipedia is here to stay.

Rec­og­niz­ing this, some inno­v­a­tive pro­gram­mers have start­ed devel­op­ing ways to shore up Wikipedi­a’s some­times shaky foun­da­tions. In par­tic­u­lar, they’re find­ing ways to mon­i­tor Wikipedia entries for tam­per­ing and par­ti­san manip­u­la­tion. A cou­ple weeks ago, we men­tioned a new site called Wikipedia Scan­ner, which allows users to deter­mine whether par­ti­sans have edit­ed par­tic­u­lar wiki entries by match­ing the entries against IP address­es. Now, anoth­er site, Wiki­rage, lets you track the pages on “Wikipedia which are receiv­ing the most edits per unique edi­tor over var­i­ous peri­ods of time.” This is a nice fea­ture part­ly because it pin­points which topics/entries are gen­er­at­ing buzz at the moment (today it is Black­wa­ter USA, Michael B. Mukasey, Fred Thomp­son, the Unit­ed States Con­sti­tu­tion and Dane Cooke — a log­i­cal sequence, to be sure.) But Wiki­rage is also handy because it high­lights which entries “have high revi­sion, van­dal­ism or undo rates.” The upshot is that mil­lions of peo­ple have built Wikipedia. But it’s smart pro­gram­ming, mixed with some man­pow­er, that’s keep­ing the whole enter­prise a lit­tle more hon­est and reli­able. Stay tuned for more on how this works out.

See Life­hack­er for the 10 Top Wikipedia tricks, and to find the most pop­u­lar pages on Wikipedia in absolute terms, click here.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

500 Greatest Albums of All Time

in Music | September 17th, 2007

at least accord­ing to Rolling Stone. (Get the list here). Yes, these lists are always high­ly sub­jec­tive. But if I were the arbiter of musi­cal taste, I’d pick many of the same, so here it is.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast