I know I’m simple, but…

…this made me laugh.

I guess I’m digg l33t now.

Some Maximum PC stuff

Sorry for the lack of followup on the SXSW stuff. I still have notes from Will Wright’s presentation, as well as the Make keynote, and I’ll post them as I have time in the future.

I’m super-busy right now, along with Dave “The Murph” Murphy and our entire web team, finalizing the content of Maximum PC’s website. We’re planning on pushing the new website live next week sometime, so keep your eyes peeled. We’ve got a nifty, highly customized content management system, that’s much more powerful what we’ve had so far. The upshot is that we’ll be pushing more magazine archival content live than ever before.

That’s great and all, but the really big news is that we’re going to have a bunch of blogs for editors and a few select community members. The editor blogs will give you a little bit of insight into what we’re doing at the mag, what we’re working on, and what we’re excited about. We have a few (still secret) community members who are going to be writing about things like Modding, Linux, and other topics of interest.

Look for the complete redesign sometime during the last half of next week! When we are 100% locked down on the date/time, I’ll post official details at Maximum PC’s old site.

Copying movies

Right now, I’m testing about 30 different utilities to see which is easiest and best for copying DVDs. I’m currently leaning toward AutoGK, which has vastly improved since the last time I tested it. It’s even ripping discs–like the Incredibles–which I previously had serious problems getting the audio and video sync’d.

Next up is ripping HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, using the extremely immature apps from doom9

Why is CES in January?

It’s absolutely asinine to hold a major tradeshow one week after New Years. It seems like the best time to show off the next year’s upcoming consumer electronics gear would be in July or August, during the lead-up to the next holiday season, rather than two weeks following the close of the previous one.

I’m sure that the convention gets a smokin’ deal for the LVCC and Sands at the nadir for tourism in Vegas for the year, but when you bring a show as large as CES to town, you should be able to negotiate a good deal any time of the year.

This year, we close our March issue the week of CES, so I’m just flying up for one day. As a result, I won’t have time to take vendor meetings at all or even spend any time walking the floor.

Please, let’s have the massive industry-wide tradeshows in the summer. If you’re worried that the CES kids will miss out on the porn convention at the Riveria, then don’t–they’ll follow suit. They don’t call Vegas Sin City for nothing.

third week m-m-megapost!

Thus ends the third week of production for the February 2007 issue of Maximum PC. Since we publish 13 issues a year, that means we have to ship an issue every 4 weeks; the presses wait for no holidays, vacations, or trade shows.

Warning: This is a rambling, stupid-long, LiveJournal-esque, over-hypenated post. I apologize in advance.

The window from Haloween to CES is really the only time of year that I feel like making magazines is a grind, but thankfully this year the staff is back to full strength.

On a totally unrelated note, the new(ish) Bob Dylan album kicks ass. I’ve been listening to it almost non-stop for the last week or so. Also, new Shins on January 23rd. Can’t wait for that.

I’ve been making the most of the limited downtime I have by playing games and filling in my back knowledge of comics. I just finished Kingdom Come and The New Frontier, two of the modern DC “classic” series, and I’m on to either the first run of the Sandman (the Gaiman years) or the Crisis of Infinite Earths next. I’ve also started reading Skinny Legs and All and Busting Vegas, for completely different reasons. I decided to save Skinny Legs for the plane ride to Tennessee in a few weeks, but Busting Vegas (about beating blackjack) is entertaining and a very fast read.

On the games front, it’s been a lot of Gears of War in the evenings, with Rainbow 6: Vegas, various Wii games, and Final Fantasy III on the DS. I decided to stop playing FF3 so I have a good RPG for the trip back East. Vegas is suprisingly entertaining, and Gears is the most fun playing multiplayer I’ve had since BF2 and Halo 2.

That’s all we have time for this week. Come back next week when we talk about dog eye diseases and reading final pages.

My favorite pens

A story at Lifehacker about thin, bookmark-friendly pens made me think about my two favorite writing utensils. I spend a fair amount of time either taking notes or marking up pages, and I’ve found a couple of pens that work great for me.

The Uniball Signo RT Micro Gel has a 0.38mm tip that makes absolutely the thinnest lines I’ve ever seen from a ballpoint pen. It’s gel-based ink doesn’t seem to ever glob up or drip, and it writes on all but the shiniest papers. If you don’t like narrow tips, avoid this pen. It’s also worth noting that the medium version of this pen sucks. It delivers much too much ink to the paper all the time. Unlike many narrow-tip pens, this one moves very well across the page, only digging into the paper if you actually press pretty hard.

The other pen I use is a Marvy Le Pen in green. It’s a very basic shape and color, but works on virtually everything I’ve ever tried it on, and its very fine 0.3mm tip lets me cram a lot of comments into a small space, whether I’m proofing pages or editing copy. The plastic tip delivers a little more ink than the Signo, and it’s barrel shape makes it a bit uncomfortable for extended writing tasks, but it’s a great editing pen, and it comes in a variety of colors.

Both are relatively cheap, so when I inevitably lose one, I don’t want to kill myself.

Myspace and Copyright Infringement

This story at BoingBoing is really interesting to me. It says that Myspace is now prohibiting people from uploading music that appears to infringe on copyright (they’re using the Gracenote info to tell what’s copyrighted and what isn’t).
It’s really interesting to me, because I’ve contacted Myspace three times asking them to remove copyrighted Maximum PC content. To date, I’ve gotten no response. It’s funny, because the guy who set up this profile copy/paste’d the content directly from the front page of the website, and is using images hosted on our server, so it’s pretty blatant what’s happening.

On Blogging…

I just now figured out the real benefit of blogging. For me it’s quickly replacing the journal I never updated as a place to organize and flesh out thoughts on different topics. Here’s a “for instance”:
I’ve spent the last few days trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to write this month’s editorial about. For once, the problem is too many topics, instead of the opposite (and much more frequent) problem. And, to complicate things further, I also want to write the “official” farewell to Josh (hopefully without being too sappy) this month too, so the topic needs to be short and sweet.
After writing up a fairly long post for this blog on the folly of dedicated processors for tasks that don’t really require them–I’m looking at you Ageia and Bigfoot–I realized that with a little tweaking, it would make a great column.