Angry Puppy

If you haven’t tried out Joost yet, here’s another reason. They now have V: The Series.

The Resistance fighters have gone their separate ways since the mini-series, but the invasion never really stops in this blast from the 80s. And you’ll never get the theme song back out of your head.

It occurred to me that it sounded a lot like an 80s nighttime soap with some futuristic sounds thrown in to spice it up.  Lo and behold, when I searched YouTube for the V theme, I found this V/Dallas mashup. They do line up pretty well - like Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz.

Now that Joost is starting to get some content I’m interested in (albeit archival), my remaining complaint is with the interface. This is by no means a dealbreaker and is actually a testament to Joost that I can get this picky with the complaints - complaints that could be fixed with minor software updates, not complete overhauls.

The heads-up displays are great; you can keep watching a show in the background while you search for other shows and manage your channels. Perfect for multi-taskers and those with short attention spans.

But using the interface is another matter. Let’s say that you want to watch all of the V episodes that they have from first to last. I had to search for all the episodes, know their order by name and create a channel. That’s not too bad, but a minor adjustment to the software would let me pick a series and sort chronologically. Also, my channels tend to disappear from time to time, leaving me with just the pre-defined ones.

There are still some bugs there too, though. I’m watching Star Trek: TOS on its own, pre-defined channel, and I noticed that instead of Episode 2 “Charlie X”, I have an episode of Lucy Daughter of the Devil. Star Trek picks up again with Episode 3 “Where No Man Has Gone Before”.

If you’re interested in watching V, here are the Joost links to the first five episodes.

• Liberation Day
• Dreadnaught
• Breakout
• The Deception
• Sanction

Is anyone else using Joost? What are you watching?

You can see our latest vlog post at AfterElton.

Topics:

• Blu-ray Wins the HD War and AppleTV Preserves the Peace
• Lost - “The Economist”
• Torchwood - “Meat”
• District 13
• 10 Movies That Deserve a Second Chance

Confession: Like around ten percent of the male population, I am mildly color blind. Luckily I can use this as an excuse for my lack of fashion sense and high tolerance for garish camp, like Flash Gordon.

Now, daltonics no longer need to fear mockery over their mismatched clothing or poor taste in movies - though maybe a little over their eyewear. The SightMate LV920 from Eyetonomy is intended for those with certain, more serious, visual disorders, but also seems to benefit the color blind. [Via Crave]

When they get these things into regular lenses (or better yet - into contact lenses), I’ll be the first in line. Then there will be no more arguments over whether the bathroom is painted white or “light green”!

In a related note, I’m a big fan of ambient devices, but as someone who has problems distinguishing colors, I might not get much out of some of the more interesting commercial ones. These seem accessible / programmable:

• An umbrella that tells you whether to take it or not at a glance? I want one.
• A glowing orb that changes with the price of electricity, reminding you to reduce unnecessary consumption? Very neat.
• A rabbit-thing that tells you when you have e-mail? OK, well, no, but I admire its spunk.

I hope that designers will continue to integrate color with other cues or provide an option switch. For instance, instead of just red equals “stop” and green equals “go”, there could be an option for flashing dot-dot-dot when green and dash-dash-dash when red. Maybe that sounds too complex to make something like an umbrella economically viable, but, let’s face it, this is a wi-fi enabled device that’s inevitably going to cost more than the ones you buy on the street, even from the mid-downpour price gougers.

If you’ve never considered color blindness before, especially if you’re a designer of any kind, you can gain some empathy with simulation software. I’ve used one called Color Oracle (Mac only) which “applies a full screen color filter to art you are designing - independently of the software that you are using.”

For designers, it’s most likely not a pressing concern, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a quick look, especially if color is being used to convey information.

I try not to subscribe to mailing lists (RSS…RSS…), but for some reason I get Apple marketing e-mails.

“Surprise your valentine with a pink iPod nano,” read the subject line.  Blech.

The e-mail, once opened, revealed a bigger horror within:

Double blech.

If you go in for this sort of thing, let me translate.  I saw something like this:

The only nano my Valentine would be interested in would be along these lines:

You would think they would segment their list into different market groups.  But then again, maybe they already have. Triple blech.

Disclaimer: I am a fan of Mac OSX. I generally like Apple hardware (though you should always let someone else be the guinea pig for new products before purchasing).

But Microsoft trounced Apple in one major area yesterday.

While the Macworld Keynote featured Randy Newman sing-talking something about George Bush and Nazis, the Macworld Blast, a launch party for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, was headlined by none other than our #8 top geek band ever, Devo.

Well played, Microsoft.  Steve Jobs, please leave your Pixar buddies at home next year.

Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog