The clever kids at Bad Lip Reading never disappoint. Take special note of the voice actors doing Michelle Obama, HRC and Bill C. Absolutely perfect.
Call Recorder for FaceTime
I’ve been searching for a better way to record video chats and found my way back to the eCamm website and Call Recorder for FaceTime. I used Call Recorder years ago but was not aware they had created an app specifically for FaceTime. The app cost $30 and that’s a non-starter for most folks but I’m impressed with this little app. George Kopp and I were both using FaceTime from the desktop but this would have worked fine had he been on his iPhone.
Call Recorder also records audio phone calls. When someone calls my iPhone, I have the option of answering the call on my MacBook (if both are on same wifi network). I can then record the call using this app. Sample below.
“Wired Endorses Optimism”
“Right now we see two possible futures welling up in the present. In one, society’s every decision is dominated by scarcity. Except for a few oligarchs, nobody has enough of anything. In that future, we build literal and figurative walls to keep out those who hope to acquire our stuff, while through guile or violence we try to acquire theirs.”
Through five election cycles WIRED has written about politics and politicians but avoided telling their readers who they viewed as the best choice. Until now.
“The Republicans are the problem”
“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
Washington Post op-ed by Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Norman J. Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
Me and the Universe by Anders Nilsen
New York Times, August 17, 2016
People are deleting advertising from their lives
“People are deleting advertising from their lives. Many simply don’t like or want it and now for the first time they have a choice in the matter. With the shift to streaming, the so-called ‘millennial’ has abandoned linear TV and, in turn, the ads that grace it. Higher-income consumers are more able to afford an ad-free existence by paying subscriptions for ad-free service experiences such as YouTube Red, Hulu+, or Spotify. This further erodes the pool of young, upwardly-mobile consumers that the ad industry so covets. In the future, only older, poorer people will experience advertising.”
And those ads you “see” online?
“A display ad is considered as ‘viewed by the visitor’ if “at least 50% of its pixels were displayed on the visitor’s browser for at least one continuous second.”
50th high school class reunion
In a few weeks I’ll make the five hour drive to the little town where I grew up for the 50 year reunion of the Kennett High School Class of 1966. I attended the 10 year reunion and vowed I’d never go to another. And didn’t. But there’s a strange (morbid?) appeal to the 50th. Like stumbling across the finish line of a marathon, throwing up and crapping your pants, yet elated to have completed the race.
I suppose this qualifies as a “right of passage,” and there won’t be that many more. Of the approximately 150 people in our class, 33 (22%) have been called to the office of The Great Principal’s Office in the Sky.
I’ve been fantasizing ways to make this event more fun: A prize for the most marriages/divorces? A little trophy for most number of times arrested/years served? Or a plaque for Best (and Worst) Cosmetic Surgery?
I’m not on Facebook so I have not kept up with most of my classmates. I don’t remember much about the 10 year reunion. I think that is the one where you show off your second/trophy wife and hand out business cards with titles of success. Those vanities will, I’m sure, have faded. Replaced by… what? The unspoken reality that this is the last time we’ll see most of these people. A bon voyage party for the Great Beyond.
William Gibson interview
William Gibson fans will want to read this short interview by Business Insider. Mr. Gibson talks about ‘The Peripheral,’ the power of Twitter, and his next book set in today’s Silicon Valley.
“I am able to wake up, open Twitter, and sort of glance across the psychic state of the planet.”
What does a writer do when the world gets weirder faster than you can write about it?
“…he world is already that much weirder than it was when I started writing the book. You know the level of freakiness we have experienced in 2016 is so far off the charts, I am having to go back and crank up the weirdness in parts of the book I have already written.”
And it’s only August. Worried about the Middle East? Don’t be.
“And then I see NASA’s climate projection for the Middle East in 2050 or so, when they say none of it will be livable by human beings who don’t have space suits.”
1966: “rock ‘n’ roll” became “rock”
“But 50 years down the line, a case can be made that 1966 may have been the single most creatively expansive year of all. That was the year that “rock ’n’ roll” morphed into “rock,” the year that the 45 rpm single yielded to the 33 1/3 rpm long-playing album as the dominant medium for the music and the year that social and political issues became a regular topic of exploration among musicians looking beyond the next hit and aiming to exert a real impact on the world around them.”
— 1966: Rock ‘n’ roll’s most revolutionary year (Los Angeles Times)
Tiny House Hell! This fall on HGTV.
I have a hard time believing very many people continue living in these tiny houses for as long as a year (6 months?). The HGTV producers show the design, construction, a reveal and — maybe — a real short “now that they’ve been in for a month…” at the end of the segment.
What I want to see is two people actually living in one of these shoe boxes. You want some reality TV? Set it up like this: We’ll build your tiny home and give it to you on the condition you let us put cameras in and record continuously for three months. If you live in the house for one year, it’s yours, free and clear. If you can’t make it for 12 months, you have to pay back the cost of the house (let’s $50,000). This would work even better if it was a live stream on the net. We could tune in 24/7, just like The Truman Show.