Douglas Coupland - JPod. Page 190 of 449, as seen through the lense of my alien surveillance equipment. (view all) OK the last two entries were kind of a downer, so before the rest of my remaining readers jump the sinking ship I thought I should resume with something a little more consumer-friendly. I just finished Douglas Coupland's "JPod". As almost every other reviewer will tell you it's like an updated version of his early 90ies "Microserfs", which means it won't win huge literature prizes, but instead is light entertainment with a lot of insider jokes, jargon, an pop …

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flOw has everything I wish from a good game -- it's simple, yet it sets a great mood; it simply feels good to play it. And although the visuals are abstract it's a very organic game. There is a learning curve, but you're flexible in your approach to playing. And if you get the download version you can also play fullscreen. The game's only flaw is that you soon reach a point where playing on makes not much sense, because you've eaten all there is to eat. Not being an active gamer I needed a couple of attempts to …

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After the recent Ballmer debacle I merely glanced at a screenshot of the Channel 9 interview with Bill Gates, and downloaded the interview with Marc McDonald instead. This turned out to be a good decision. Most of the Channel 9 interviews by now are product presentations, but occasionally there are real gems that should be mandatory viewing for everybody in the field. The sessions with Bill Hill about Typography, human perception and interfaces are such gems (see links below). This session with Marc McDonald is of near Bill Hill-level quality, but admittedly on a subject that is a bit more …

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If you enjoy reading Ayn Rand, and are thinking about learning some key facts of her "philosophy of Objectivism": don't. I read "The Fountainhead" last year, at the recommendation of a friend. Only a small number of pages into the book I was already hooked, and finished the whole 700-odd pages in the course of three or four days. I enjoyed it immensely and still count it among my top five favorite books of all time. As the back pages of the book were filled with quotes about Rand's Objectivism I became curious and consulted the Web. The term Objectivism …

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I already gave a basic description of Pandora in my previous article, "Finally: An Alternative to Last.fm". Brief recapitulation: Pandora is a music streaming service that lets you control the kind of music that is played. You can define "stations" by bookmarking song titles or artist names, and the site then plays music that shares similar properties with your selected songs. In contrast to Last.fm, which is a social network, Pandora builds on a concept of rich metadata to find relationships between individual songs. This time I had the opportunity to actually use the system, so this should make an …

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Scoble interviewed Steve Ballmer (transcript, announcement). Finally! While watching the short video I was struck by the realization that the Steve Ballner shown here is not that different from the one in the monkey dance video. Even worse: the video shows that Ballmer is a scary, scary man. He looks like a gnome, a ghoul, with the eyes of a predator. He doesn't seem genuine, real, or honest; and he is striking an upbeat pose that does not fit. Anyway, I watched the video and became very bored and very disappointed very quickly. Lots of marketing fluff and the empty …

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I've just started using TextMate. My initial assumption was that it is still early in the development process, so I planned to wait for a later release before I would decide if I should register a copy; but then I started using it for a couple of days and found several functions that blew me away. A tip of the day introduced the "^R" shortcut that executes the current line as shell script and inserts the output into your document; this is quite useful to me as I'm starting to use the shell and especially shell scripts for various text …

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Designed as a replacement for the Windows text editor Notepad, Florian Balmer's Notepad2 is a small, fast, simple and beautiful open source application. Along with an impressive set of basic text editing features it provides several useful tools and lots of neat little helpers that will improve virtually all text editing experiences, both for the programmer and the occasional user. Notepad2 has a nice interface with well-designed icons. It provides customizable syntax highlighting for many file types: all major programming languages (including perl and python), various file types relevant for web development, along with some rather exotic ones like XUL, …

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I've just spent several hours looking for a free or open source hex editor, and it is surprising how many editors there are, and how few are worth checking out. I didn't think I would ask for much: a simple standard interface and the ability to open large files. I must have looked at more than 50 websites and installed nearly 20 applications, until I found HexEdit from Catch22 Productions. I have used the free version of ECS HexEdit for quite a while, but its nag screen and ancient interface started to bug me. xvi32 is a nice editor, and …

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Thomas Meinecke - Tomboy.Pages 128/129 of 251. As far as I can remember I first heard of this novel while driving, listening to the radio. I was on my way to Stuttgart or Karlsruhe, and they broadcasted a review of Thomas Meinecke's Tomboy, along with a general insight into the term "tomboy" and other gender-related subject matter. I later read a positive review in a German magazine and went out to buy the book. It lay on my shelf for a while, and I remember taking it with me on a canoe trip north of Berlin, in the hope …

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Don DeLillo - Underworld.Pages 222/223 of 827. Don DeLillo's Underworld is often described as the essential contemporary American novel, the Moby Dick of our time. A critic's evaluation is quoted on the back cover of the book: "Underworld is a rousingly impressive achievement in almost every novelistic department -- dialogue, structure, timing, precise description, heartfelt veracity ['truthfulness'] and the rest". I don't quite remember when I first heard of this book. After having planned to read it for a long time I finally gave in and bought an English copy. It then lay on my bookshelf, next to Pynchon's …

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