A couple months ago Zach Gage started an awfully fun little thread with this tweet:

Dear internet, here is a crazy challenge for you. Design a game prototype where the rules fit in <=128 characters, tweet it w/ #128CharGame

This is well after the fact, and it looks like the hashtag has a life of its own, but I collected these favorites at the time:

• Players 1 and 2 buy $10 worth of food at Taco Bell, without revealing orders. Players exchange food; first to finish wins. (qubitsu)
• Two players clasp each others hand and stand on one foot. First player that touches raised foot to ground loses. (blefler)
• Players 1 an 2 each hide a 6 in length of scotch tape on a visible surface within the home. 1st to find the other’s strip wins. (bigGUNSfowler)
• Pass nerf 6shooter around w single dart, Russian roulette - kill self, -1 pt, live 1 pt. Aim at others & hit: +3pts, miss -3pts (Shnayke)
• Present 3 statements to a friend, two are sarcastic. Friend must guess which is real. (BrianNumberOne)
• Player take turn poking holes in a piece of paper with a pencil. First one to cause a rip that connects two holes loses. (Andy_Makes)
• 2+ players. Tape paper to backs. Get as many papers as you can. If your paper is taken, you lose, and your papers are out. (mikesmallhorn)
• Race with other players to get a high five from a stranger (urustar)
• During a pub night steal as many coasters as you can. If a player spots you, they win the coaster (urustar)
• All at once point to player with most perceived privilege—highest count out. Whittle to 2. Like Survivor, plead to jury of out. (jaimewoo)
• I pick a letter and a word it starts. You pick a 2nd letter and a word started by our 2-letter sequence. So on until stumped. (jefffal)
• Players wager for right to add rules of play. Wagers won by breaking previous rules. Game won by breaking fewest rules. (mc_frontalot)
• Three players each fight to gain possession of one soccer ball, then kick it between the other two players. (Blinkity)
• Everyone gets a blank A4 page at 9am. Person who has the cleanest, nicest page at 5pm wins. Play at work; sabotage encouraged. (hbmuscat)
• On GO!, teammembers try to change into each others clothes as quickly as possible. Audience wins. (TehSuckerer)
• “find the spoon” text your friend a picture with a spoon hidden but visible, they have 1 min to text you back where it is (banjaloupe)
• Players try to guess an objects color as a hex value, take a photo & use eyedropper, closest wins (netgrind)
• Do a Google image search on your phone. Hand it to a friend, 3 guesses what search was for. Object is to stump that person. (herebejoshua)
• 2 Players stand back-to-back w/hands at sides & count down from 3. On “Go” players try to touch other’s belly button (phoenixashes)
• Draw 9 dots on a piece of paper. Alternate putting fingers on dots. First player who loses grip on a dot or cannot play loses! (helvetica)

I kicked in the game Milk:

• Spike/bounce odd object off the ground. One-hand catch=1 pt. Touch it but don’t catch it, -1. Tackling ok after touch/bobble. (jimbiancolo)

(Only reference I can (easily) find to Milk is here from the great thread describing games Ultimate Frisbee players have invented/adopted/improvised over the years.)

Oh, just noticed Zach collected a ton of ‘em at his site, cool!

I keep track of some exercises in Excel, and I wanted to be able to highlight any cell that represents a personal best to date. I don’t want to just highlight the max value in a range, though. If I set a PB I want to highlight it, and then if I set a new PB later, I want the old one(s) to stay highlighted, and I want the new one to be highlighted as well. You can do this with conditional formatting.

I use this rule for spreadsheets where my attempts are arranged in columns (rule assumes the data starts at row 1):

=INDIRECT("R" & ROW() & "C" & COLUMN(), FALSE) > MAX(INDIRECT("R1" & "C" & COLUMN() & ":R" & ROW()-1 & "C" & COLUMN(), FALSE))

… and I use this rule where attempts are arranged in rows (rule assumes the data starts at column 1):

=INDIRECT("R" & ROW() & "C" & COLUMN(), FALSE) > MAX(INDIRECT("R" & ROW() & "C1:R" & ROW() & "C" & COLUMN()-1, FALSE))

Specify the highlight color you want to use when the formula hits, and you’re good to go. For example, here’s how it might look with column-based data. The orange cells are personal bests to date:

This was one of my favorite Listology lists back in the day, and I’ve continued to add to it since. I’m sure I’m missing some, but these are my favorite action scenes. They aren’t all good movies (although many are), but these scenes deliver regardless. One asterisk means it was a tough choice, two means it was damn near impossible. Last updated 6/4/13.

• 13 Assassins (2010) … the last 45 (!) minutes of the movie
• 15 Minutes (2001) … escape from burning apartment
• 28 Weeks Later (2007) … opening sequence *
• Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) … storming the plantation
• The Abyss (1989) … waiting for the crane to come down from the surface, and then what happens when it does
• Aliens (1986) … locked in with the face-huggers.
• Avatar (2009) … the whole finish
• The Battleship Potemkin (1925) … the Odessa Steps sequence.
• Behind the Sun (2001) … the chase through the woods
• Ben Hur (1959) … the chariot race
• The Boondock Saints (1999) … the toilet *
• The Bourne Identity (2002) … the car chase *
• The Bourne Supremacy (2004) … the car chase *
• The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) … fight with Desh **
• Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) … trying to trap the beast.
• Brute Force (1947) … breakout, especially on the drainpipe side
• Casino Royale (2006) … foot chase
• Chicken Run (2000) … in the pie machine (with plenty of Raiders references)
• Children of Men (2006) … escaping in the car that won’t start **
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) … shrine fight between Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi
• Dawn of the Dead (2004) … retrieving the dog
• Death Proof (2007) … ship’s mast and all car stuff thereafter
• District 9 (2009) … wearing the suit
• District B13 (2004) … opening foot chase **
• District 13: Ultimatum (2009) … tomaso in drag *
• Duplicity (2009) … executive tarmac brawl
• The Empire Strikes Back (1980) … battle on Hoth
• Equilibrium (2002) … “not without incident” to the end.
• Fearless (2006) … fight on the high platform **
• Fist of Legend (1994) … climactic fight *
• The Four Musketeers (1974) … the convent/cathedral **
• Goldeneye (1995) … tank chase scene
• Hard Boiled (1992) … hospital scene
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) … dragon chase
• Hero (2002) … duel with Sky *
• Jurassic Park (1993) … kitchen scene
• I Am Legend (2007) … the dogs and the ray of sunshine
• Ip Man (2008) … “i want to fight 10 men”
• Inception (2010) … rotating-gravity fight scene
• The Incredibles (2004) … Elastigirl and the doors **
• Ink (2009) … the kidnapping
• The Iron Giant (1999) … From the diving catch to the end
• Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) … Go Go Yubari fight (ball and chain)
• Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) … fight with Elle
• King Kong (2005) … the bugs ** (or the stampede, or the t-rexes, or the finale - hot damn)
• Kung Fu Hustle (2004) … two masters vs. the beast **
• Kung Fu Panda (2008) … fighting over the dumplings **
• Legend of Drunken Master (1994) … the axe gang fight
• Let the Right One In (2008) … the pool
• The Little Mermaid (1989) … the kitchen
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) … escape from the mines of moria
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) … Eowyn and the Witch King *
• The Matrix (1999) … opening sequence **
• The Matrix Reloaded (2003) … the highway chase
• Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) … skyscraper *
• Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005) … car chase (especially the golf club)
• Next (2007) … walking out of the casino
• Oldboy (2003) … hammer time
• Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) … Banderas and Hayek escaping from the hotel room
• Ong-bak (2003) … climactic sequence, possibly highlighted by saw fight **
• Our Hospitality (1923) … the rapids/waterfall scene
• Over the Hedge (2006) … caffeine
• The Princess Bride (1987) … duel between Inigo and the man in black
• Prodigal Son (1983) … attack on sleeping opera company
• The Professional (1994) … police invasion of Leon’s apartment
• Project A (1983) … the bicycle chase through the narrow alleys (what follows with the flagpole and the clock-tower is great too)
• The Raid: Redemption (2011) … first hallway kung fu? second hallway? first fight with Mad Dog? impossible to choose **
• Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) … opening sequence
• Red River (1948) … the stampede
• Rumble in the Bronx (1995) … fight at gang headquarters
• Safety Last! (1923) … the climb
• Sanjuro (1962) … final duel
• Saving Private Ryan (1998) … storming the beach (a rare unfrivilous entry here)
• Shanghai Knights (2003) … singin' in the rain
• Sin City (2005) … Marv’s apartment escape
• Skyfall (2012) … Opening scene
• Spider-man 2 (2004) … the train
• So Close (2002) … sword fight (best part of generally good closing sequence)
• Sorcerer (1977) … the trucks over the rope bridges
• Stagecoach (1939) … the chase scene
• Stardust (2007) … voodoo sword fight
• Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith (2005) … Palpatine vs. Mace Windu
• Strangers on a Train (1951) … the merry-go-round scene
• The Sword of Doom (1966) … the fight in the snow
• Terminator 2 (1991) … hospital breakout
• Thirst (2009) … sunrise
• Three Days of the Condor (1975) … fight with the mailman
• The Three Musketeers (1973) … stealing food
• Throne of Blood (1957) … Washizu’s bitter end
• Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) … car chase via remote control from the backseat
• Troy (2004) … Achilles vs. Hector
• The Twilight Samurai (2002) … steel vs. wood
• The Untouchables (1987) … shootout in Chicago’s Union Station
• X2: X-Men United (2003) … raid on the school **
• Zatoichi (2003) … confronting the gang, highlight being showdown with the bodyguard

A few stragglers; these I need to rewatch before I can pick:

• Die Hard (1988)
• The Fugitive (1993)
• Lethal Weapon (1987)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
• Speed (1994)

(* = hard choice; ** = impossible choice)

The big thing that keeps me from going streaming-only on Netflix is the selection. Of the 178 movies currently in my queue, only 68 are available to stream. Licensing, I know. There’s a good piece on the recent purge here, calling Netflix out on some of their spin, which included worrisome language about Netflix becoming an “expert programmer”. As in, “rather than let you see whatever you want, we’ll decide what you want to see.” Ugh.

Here’s what I don’t get: Netflix already makes their vast DVD collection available to me via the postal service. They have a particular copy of the movie, and they mail it to me. Nobody else can watch that copy because I have it. They haven’t copied the DVD to allow multiple people to watch it at once, so no foul there. So why not just do exactly that, without the technicality of shipping it to me? It seems, from my layperson perspective, like the Cablevision and Aereo decisions are a great precedent:

Aereo’s technology is designed to take advantage of a landmark 2008 ruling by the Second Circuit, based in New York. It held that a “remote DVR” service designed by Cablevision was legal because it kept a separate copy of a program for each user who recorded it. Reasoning that the same principle should apply to broadcast television, Aereo built a television streaming service with thousands of tiny antennas. Aereo claims that because it assigns each active user an individual antenna, and stores separate copies of recorded programs, it isn’t infringing copyright holders' public performance rights.

What if Netflix, instead of mailing me the DVD, stuck it in a DVD player I was renting from them, and streamed it to me? Seems pretty comparable. From there, it just seems silly to do it with plastic discs, so you digitize the disc and throw away the original (so they still just have the one copy that can only be watched by one subscriber at a time). And instead of me renting an actual physical DVD player that lives at Netflix, I rent a virtual player that lives on the Netflix server farm (or is an Amazon EC2 instance). So I fire up the Netflix app, look through my queue for all the movies that are currently available (at least one copy not currently being watched), and select it. Netflix moves that copy from the pool to my virtual player, and starts streaming it to me. Nobody else can watch that copy while I’m watching it. When I’m done (or if I stop it for some length of time), that copy goes back to the pool so somebody else can watch it.

Just like the DVD service, but without the postal lag, and without the plastic discs (well, Netflix still buys the DVDs to produce the pool of legit copies, but no plastic discs are mailed to subscribers).

Update: Oh, bummer, a couple years ago Zediva tried this and was sued out of existence. Netflix has deeper pockets, and the Aereo decision is recent (but Zediva decision is much more directly applicable), but still, given they probably don’t want to torpedo their existing streaming deals, and given their language around “expert programming”, I will not be holding my breath for Netflix to pick this battle. (thanks to Mark for the link)

So, keep that postal plastic coming!

WWDC sold out in two minutes, but it didn’t really sell out because there were all kinds of problems and Apple is still distributing tickets and trying to make it right. If nothing else, it seems like they should make it a true lottery, rather than making it a lottery masquerading as a race. So let folks sign up in a 24-hour window, and then draw lots to see who can buy tickets. It’d be better than what happened this year, but not at all satisfying. Assuming WWDC stays the same, and demand stays the same (or grows), I wonder if there’s a way to make it more fun, fair, or interesting (or all of the above).

I originally thought that five bad lotteries might be better than one bad lottery, so maybe you’d divvy up the 5,000 tickets like so:

• 2,000 (or 1,000) tickets to a lottery for folks who have never been before.
• 1,000 (or 2,000) tickets to a lottery for folks who have been before.
• 1,000 tickets auctioned off to the highest bidders.
• 500 tickets for the first people to solve 500 different puzzles, or some other game/challenge. Or maybe mined via some Bitcoin-style approach. Or maybe you earn chances in a lottery by dedicating processing power to folding proteins, or curing cancer, something like that.
• 500 tickets to Apple invitees.

It felt decent when I first posted, but then I mowed the lawn and the more I mowed the stupider it felt. Maybe the approach above lets you tweak the distribution of old hands and newcomers and folks with deep pockets and clever people, but you probably get something like that mix just leaving it to chance. And the 1,500 tickets going to auction and to the puzzle solvers just feel too much like giving them to people that have extra time and/or money.

By the time I was done mowing I was back to a lottery, but with a twist: instead of each person getting one chance in this lottery (since you need an active developer account to play), I like the idea of being able to earn extra chances in the lottery. Some ideas below. Obviously you’d use or not use some (or all) of these (and change the weights) depending on how you wanted to tweak the audience composition.

• Having an active developer account: 10 chances.
• Having no apps in the app store: 10 chances (if you want to bring in more newcomers)
• Having at least one app in the app store : 10 chances (if you don’t want complete newcomers)
• One chance per $X in sales.
• One chance per consecutive year with an active developer account.
• Entering the lottery and losing: keep your existing chances, plus get 10 more for next year.
• Entering the lottery and winning: pay half your chances in addition to ticket price.
• Chances handed out by Apple for, I dunno, evangelism? Advancing the cause? Doing something cool? Writing a great app that makes use of new APIs? Building an app with great accessibility? Running a conference? Giving a good talk at a conference?

This last one, that Apple can give out chances throughout the year for cool things, I’m liking. It just seems fun. “Achievement unlocked” kind of thing. Heck, part of me really likes the idea of hiding all the tickets in a big online game, but I also recently read the wonderful Ready Player One, so that’s probably what that’s all about.

Finally, while this is fun to think about, I can’t imagine anything like this would ever actually happen. Overcomplicated, and therefore almost certainly less fair than a true lottery. So, to end on a practical note, the true lottery approach:

1. First 24-hour window: accept lottery entrants.
2. Second 24-hour window: winners notified and can buy tickets.
3. Repeat 1-2 with remaining tickets, setting aside any for winners that show up in the server logs but didn’t consummate the purchase so support can follow up.

Put a true “tickets remaining” live counter on the website. Make an official WWDC app so you can get push notifications of the windows, lottery wins, etc. Perhaps make the app a requirement for entry.

I didn’t align the second stencil quite right, but I’m still pretty psyched with how this came out:

I took this great Iron Giant design by Kyle Wayne Benson, made a stencil out of it, and then followed this bleaching guide to transfer the design to my rucksack.

Lots of backlash against the Kickstarters Zach Braff and Veronica Mars. The screediest of these seems to be Kickstarter Abuse by Dylan Gadino, which I disagree with in every possible way, but especially the ugly and condescending tone. Here’s how he treats Braff:

To be clear, Braff secured money for the project, but he would have had to make sacrifices – you know, the way we all do every day in every aspect of our lives. So, instead of accepting this financing deal and creating the movie like an adult, he’s decided to beg us for money. His other options included not making the movie or liquidating $2 million of his assets – that is, if he doesn’t have the much sitting in an account – so he can pay his friends to make the movie, which is what he’s now doing with the donations some of you gave him.

To put it another way, Braff’s life was already great: He’s rich, famous and gets to put his penis inside a model’s vagina. But his life could be even better if only he could make another movie – better still, if he can do it exactly the way he wants with the exact people he wants in the exact location he wants using the exact equipment he wants and with your money to pay for it. I’m not saying Braff’s wealth excludes him from pursuing more wealth and happiness, but isn’t it obvious he should be using his own money to do so?

And the fans? Desperate and deluded:

If you’ve already given to projects of these types and you still think it was a good decision, by all means, keep doing it. If you’re so desperate to feel part of something that you believe the rich have your interests – and not their own – at heart, commit to it. But don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re actually part of something special; you’re helping the rich get richer. There’s nothing special about that.

Class act. Not even worth refuting.

Ken Levine is much more reasonable. I can relate to his Sundance analogy; that the big players will crowd out the true indies. But there’s limited space and time at Sundance, while Kickstarter can scale. True, there may be issues around discoverability, but when you are a relative unknown discoverability is always an issue. As for backers having limited funds to go around, backers will back what excites them, whether it’s on the scale of The Avengers or El Mariachi.

Since then, Kickstarter has chimed in, Who is Kickstarter For? Noteworthy:

The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff projects have brought tens of thousands of new people to Kickstarter. 63% of those people had never backed a project before. Thousands of them have since gone on to back other projects, with more than $400,000 pledged to 2,200 projects so far. Nearly 40% of that has gone to other film projects.

Also worth noting that the traditional model failed to get us a Veronica Mars movie, despite the avowed desires and efforts of the creators. Now there’s going to be a Veronica Mars movie. And there’s a bunch more money kicking around Kickstarter for smaller projects. Win-win.

I thought I’d reboot this site. These days, with Instapaper being central to how I read articles on the web, I am increasingly grateful any time I am able to just get the words and the pictures and nothing more, so that’s what I’m going for with the new look (or lack thereof) here.

Not sure what the content will be like going forward. Right now I post ephemera to Twitter, and might bring that back under this umbrella, although I know I don’t want this to just be a linkblog. I dunno, we’ll see!

Just a quick note, I jammed a finger on my throwing hand awhile back and have needed to tape it to another finger to play Ultimate, and no tape could deal with the sweat for more than an hour or so. Tried a couple brands of athletic tape, gaffer’s tape, and that emergency silicone tape that bonds to itself. Enter Leukotape. Totally awesome. Stayed in place for a full tourney day, was still sticking aggressively when I peeled it off at the end of play.

I somehow stumbled onto How Not to Make a Hang Drum, which is a hilarious mini-documentary of a failed DIY project (although I can’t really call it “failed” since it produced such a fun little movie). Here’s part 2.

Anyway, from here it was down the rabbithole (again) of various Hang-style drums:

• The Original Propane Tank Hank Drum on YouTube, by Dennis Havlena.
• His Hank Drum instructions and his impressive DIY instrument repository.
• Same idea, the TuneTank, and a smaller version made from an 11 lb. tank.
• Then there’s the Zen Tambour (YouTube) made by Exotic Vessels.
• … or these by Milltone Drums.
• Not big enough? There are Whale Drums by Jim Doble, who does pieces for Playgrounds and Children’s Museums.

A couple things have convinced me that I need a better camera than the one on my iPhone. I mean, I love it, and “the best camera is the one you have with you” and all that, but:

• Marco Arment got a retina Macbook Pro and discovered that almost nothing he’s shot since 2010 is usable as a desktop wallpaper.
• I visited with a buddy of mine who is an excellent amateur photographer, and he told me all about the advantages of shooting in RAW, showed me his Lightroom workflow, showed me the absolutely stunning archival-grade prints that are possible on a pigment-based printer, and more (wow, the technology we can have in our homes, magical times).

Anyway, so now I’m thoroughly overwhelmed, so thought I’d stumble through a few links for the next person who comes along similarly overwhelmed. If you want to read something by somebody that actually knows what they are talking about, you’ve come to the wrong place.

First, my knowledgable buddy recommended the Panasonic DMC-FZ150K, which looks great, but I know from past experience that if there’s any chance I will carry a camera with me, it will have to be smaller than that. He also had a Panasonic Lumix GF1 with the pancake lens, and I have to admit the size alone is awfully tempting. That, and I remember when the camera first came out and there were these glowing (and beautiful) testimonials like Panasonic Lumix GF1 Field Test – 16 Days in the Himalayas and my experience with a micro-4/3rds camera.

Since the the GF1 Panasonic has released the GF2 and GF3, and now the GX1. Whether or not the GF2 and GF3 are worthy upgrades seems to be up for debate (I get the sense they are almost for different audiences), but various forum threads (like this one or this one) seem to suggest that the GX1 makes some worthwhile improvements.

So the Micro 4/3 form factor and performance look great, but is that the right Micro 4/3 camera? There’s also the Samsung NX200. They are in a dead heat at dpreview.com (here’s their GX1 review and their NX200 review). In one of the threads above somebody mentioned, “But the price. GX1 too high. At that price, OM-D is attractive :D with more performance, build quality!” So I had to look that up, and indeed the Olympus OM-D E-M5 gets a great review, but it is also significantly more expensive, and I already feel like I’d be buying more camera than I have any right to as a newbie.

(This just in: the always-great Wirecutter has a new piece up, Best Mirrorless Camera Over $1000, and it’s about the Olympus.)

Along the lines of not buying too much camera, I’m not sure how I found it, but somewhere somebody mentioned the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 (actually, my buddy also owns a point-and-shoot, maybe this one?). It sounds like a helluva point-and-shoot. It gets lots of love from dprreview, is a LOT cheaper than the GX1 with pancake lens would be, and shoots in RAW. There are a bunch of helpful Amazon reviews, with this one titled ultimate serious photographer’s point & shoot summing up nicely.

I also wonder if shooting in RAW is biting off more than I will chew. I recognize that it’s the right way to go, but there will be a learning curve. Without post-processing, photos will look worse to the eye. So part of this decision rests in trying to predict how much time I will realistically put into this. Will I invest the time necessary to get good? I would like to think so…

Anyway, I thought these summed up the RAW thing pretty well:

Anyway, no answers here, but this is what I’ve found so far. The question is, do I buy for who I am now, or for the dream of who I will become?

So there are these two awesome tools, Dropbox, which needs no introduction, and Everything, which is a Windows file search tool. Everything doesn’t look like it’s seen any development in the last couple years, but it is still the best file finder out there (IMO). II like it so much that I’ve been sticking with it even though it hasn’t been willing to index my Dropbox folder. But, happy day, somebody posted a fix/workaround that seems to do the trick for me! It works so far, I hope it sticks.

I’m going to copy it here, just in case it ever goes away:

Did anyone try adding the Dropbox folder to the Includes section in Everything? Its a little deceiving, since its called Exclude, but you can also Include folders there!

In Everything: Tools, Options, Exclude, Add Folder, [choose Include type], [pick your Dropbox folder]…

Also add your other HDDs, otherwise you’ll only be seeing your Dropbox.