The Betacantrips Travelogue

Seen on JWZ: this.

During a bizarre hearing there yesterday, a Superior Court judge dismissed animal-cruelty charges against a Moorestown police officer accused of sticking his penis into the mouths of five calves in rural Southampton in 2006, claiming a grand jury couldn’t infer whether the cows had been "tormented" or "puzzled" by the situation or even irritated that they’d been duped out of a meal.

Seen on Planet Debian: an interesting article about the BBC’s switch from Silverlight to Flash and the Free Software community’s response. The money quote:

What annoys me here isn’t so much that nothing works. I’m used to there being temporary gaps in Free Software functionality, that’s pretty normal. But I’m greatly vexed that one of these four used to work on a Free platform, and now it doesn’t — and that places like UbuntuForums are filled with people celebrating that fact.

Seen via the Crystal Labs Twitter feed: a brief list of indie games funding development on Kickstarter.

Unfortunately Kickstarter has no tagging mechanism, and its search feature shows the first 16 results only, so it’s pretty hard to search for indie games on it.

Sorry about the increased volume of posts, but now that rst2wp is totally working, I have a backlog of posts to go through.

Seen on Pixelstyle.

Vastly old news by now, but it’s kind of surprising how fast this blew over: source on Slashdot.

Several readers sent in word that Google has served a Cease and Desist order to Cyanogen, one of the most prolific Android modders: his CyanogenMod is enjoyed by 30,000 users. The move is puzzling. Gizmodo wonders what Google’s game is, and Lauren Weinstein calls the move "not of the high ‘Googley’ caliber" that one would expect of the company.

I’d like to clarify that while I bought a G1, this kind of bullshit is why I’m so dissatisfied. This is what I wanted to get away from. I’m keeping an eye on the N900, let me tell you!

Seen on JWZ. Though this meme is pretty well-known, at least one of my friends had never heard of "the one with Stephen Hawking".

Those of you who care about version control should be aware of Fossil. Distributed version control, like NoSQL databases, has rapidly sprouted a ton of contenders like mushrooms, and I’m not especially convinced of this one’s superiority to the incumbents (i.e. git, bzr, or darcs).

In addition to doing distributed version control like Git and Mercurial, Fossil also supports distributed bug tracking and distributed wiki all in a single integrated package… Fossil has a built-in and easy-to-use web interface that simplifies project tracking and promotes situational awareness. Simply type "fossil ui" from within any check-out and Fossil automatically opens your web browser in a page that gives detailed history and status information on that project.

Seen on True Chip Till Death: Steampunk DMG.

This will be a (fingers crossed) fully functional gameboy with blue backlight, wood paneling, luxurious pleather and felt, and leafed in gold all-surface spray. Whole thing cost me about twenty bucks for supplies, and I just scrapped a bunch of household crap to it: A button, an old camera case and lens, wood paneling from a dresser on the sidewalk, a melted clock, and a shitty iPod case.

Speaks for itself. From Slashfilm:

President Obama was photographed swinging a Star Wars lightsaber toy around during an announcement of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympic Games.

Yeah, OK, this is from a month ago. Oh well. Some fascinating stuff on Tor.com. Of special note are:

• Rare Star Wars photos. Some of these are really funny considering the formal, whitewashed, asexual Star Wars canon.

  

• Longmire does Romance Novels. Tor.com: "Ah, how fondly I remember For the Love of Scottie McMullet…"

• 20 Neil Gaiman Facts which (it goes without saying) are all totally true.

• I also read the four posted chapters of Queen of the Iron Sands. It seems to have stopped being updated, which is kind of a shame — the narrator’s voice is very compelling.