Trailer for an upcoming film called Revolver. Song is by The Glitch Mob off their album Drink the Sea.

This is just one of many awesome videos found on Devour, which is the most awesome video website I have ever visited. They curate the best videos from YouTube, Vimeo and their ilk for your viewing pleasure.

See also Words, Starburst Zombie and Bad Romance by Brett Domino.

You should bookmark Devour – now.

A few years back I upgraded to my Nintendo DS Lite and sold my silver Gameboy Advance SP. I wanted to keep my SP and it was a great piece of hardware, but alas I had to figure out a way to cover some of the cost of the new DS. Off to eBay it went and I kept all 50 of my old Advance games. (I was able to justify keeping them due to the DSes’ backwards compatibility – even if I never played them that much.)

Recently I found my old Gameboy Color (Check out that radical Kiwi color!) and started playing the new DS Pokemon games with my 7-year-old niece. By finding my old Color I could play that generation of games natively on the original(ish) hardware. I noticed that I could not do this for my Gameboy Advance titles. This got me thinking about my SP and how it was such a great little handheld.*

Jackie and I did some searching on craigslist and eBay and found a SP for cheap. Since then, I’ve been looking through all my old games and showing them to my daughter. I came across a copy of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and noticed my old save game stated that over sixty-five hours where logged.

Wow! I don’t remember playing that much of this one game, but this had me thinking. Imagine if I added up all the saved play-time from each of the 50 games. What would I end up with?

This:

That’s right, I’ve clocked in over 318 hours into my Gameboy Advance. Other interesting stats:

• I only completed 17 games out of 50.
• A substantial majority of my games don’t track the time played – 28 to be exact.
• Looking at the year of release – 2002 is the most popular.
• Role-Playing games make up the majority of the games that do track time.

I can’t believe I soaked so much time into this generation of handheld games. To make it even more mind-blowing here’s a few additional things to remember. This was just my handheld console. I also had my PS2 and Gamecube during this time as well. Additionally a large percentage of my GBA games don’t have time tracking. Big games like Zelda and the Mario titles don’t show you how long you’ve played. Imagine if I were to add those in. Lastly, this doesn’t track all the times I’ve saved before a challenging part of the game then died!

So in closing I’d have to say this is a great example of how this was such a great generation of games and I encourage you all to dust off those old consoles and give em’ another spin.

*And a great generation of games. Both Metroid titles, the 3 Castlevanias, Golden Sun Megaman Zero, I could go on.

Nearly a year ago I hired a bright young man by the name of Will Sutton. Over the course of the following months Will and I made this – the official Saint Louis University iPhone App. (Which you are most welcome to download at iphone.slu.edu)

Will initially started from scratch, learning Objective-C and his way around XCode. Even more impressive was the fact that he really never used a Mac much before.

Like a fish to water he quickly had a rough prototype up and running. It was serviceable, but very, shall we say, rickety.

Then we were alerted to the existence of a great open-source app framework created at West Virgina University by then student Jared Crawford.

Will set about updating the framework with SLU specific data sources. We had to meet with legal, create icons and vet our data sources for reliability. With Jared’s awesome framework we were able to quickly turn around a tight first release of what I’m sure will be a vital asset to any SLU student.

Meanwhile the IT department was preparing to launch a mobile portal for some of the very same services. Like some superhero wonder group we joined forces and released our apps simultaneously. Being web-based their app has a much larger reach, but our app allows us to perform some hardware specific feats.

Our next step is to squash a few 1.0 bugs, update the app for the new Retina display and start adding additional features like dining information and athletic reports.

You can read more about the apps from this nice press release.

versus

The FBI agrees with Auernheimer’s assertion that this exploit is of national interest. So much so,CNET reports, that they raided Andrew Auernheimer’s home on a warrant (we assume “Escher” is a pseudonym). They found “illicit drugs,” and Auernheimer is now being held on felony charges.

I like hackers. They’re a needed group of nerds. But instead of going for the fame, contact the company and let them know in private. Don’t be a jerk and blab on about it. You’ll gain much more respect as a “freelance security research team”.

click to embiggen

I’m very much a visual person. So I whipped up this little graphic demonstrating the supposed* new resolution of the next iPhone. Just how big is 960×640 in comparison? I threw in a couple of other sizes – 800×600 was the resolution of my first desktop computer.

Interesting and maybe unrelated, but by default iMove 09 outputs ‘HD” at 960X540. A coincidence I’m sure.

*We’ll find out on Monday!

Anyone using Flash is in the content creation racket. I’m not just talking about video, but navigation, apps, games you name it. And if you’re creating content you’re most likely concerned wether or not people can see what you’re creating.

I do a lot of browsing on my Mac and iPhone and you know what happens when I come across a flash doohicky that doesn’t work?

I leave.

I don’t bookmark for later. I just walk away.

As someone who develops web content, if people are walking away from the stuff I’m trying to get out there because I have some egotistical hang up about the openness of (insert framework,language,codec here) then I lose  customers, I lose relevance and I lose the job.

If you’re a content creator and you can walk away from however many iPhone users and  iPad users there are, great. But I don’t know too many people who can afford to do that.

(Sidenote: Do you know which application is in the iPhone/iPad/iPod dock by default? Not the App Store, but Safari. What does that mean?)

The entire story is an allegory for faith instead if trying to figure it all out and make sense of all the mysteries. (as Jack did for a long time)

The point of how the relationships we have and people we meet are more important than how the smoke monster worked or how the island moves.

It’s a story about people who were lost in life. By the experiences they shared in the adventures on the island they came to find love, loss, hope and courage.

I’m not embarrassed to say that I cried my eyes out after watching the credits roll. I was sad and happy all in the same moment.

And it’s not because I’m going to miss one of my favorite TV shows, but because the story that has been told over the last 6 years through a little box in my living room has reached out to me and made me feel, for once in a very long time, content with my mortality and appreciative of the people I have in my life.

We all die someday and we should spend our precious time on Earth in the company of the ones we love.

Just let go and enjoy.

I’m totally digging the Hipstamatic app for the iPhone. It’s a recreation of a camera developed in the great wilderness of Wisconsin in the early 80s by two brothers. The whole story is being kept alive by the older brother of the two Hipstamatic creators.

The app is very slick and plays a great homage to the cheap all-plastic cameras of yore. With the tiny viewfinder, different films and lenses and the always different results it’s a blast to watch your photos ‘develop’.

The best thing about the app for me is the high-pitched whirring of the flash when you turn it on. Perfect.

1. White Winter Hymnal – Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

2. Sun It Rises – Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

3. Horchata – Vampire Weekend – Contra

4. Little Secrets – Passion Pit – Manners

5. Blue Ridge Mountians – Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

6. Oliver James – Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

7. Skinny Love – Bon Iver – Fore Emma, Forever Ago

8. Meadowlarks – Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes (Damn, this is a good album!)

9. The Beastie Boys Vs Matt And Kim – Good Ol’ Fashion Rump Shaker – The Hood Internet – The Mixtape Volume Four (download here)

10. Vultures – John Mayer – Continuum

Here’s the top 10 list of songs released in 2009.

1. Little Secrets – Passion Pit – Manners

2. The Beastie Boys Vs Matt And Kim – Good Ol’ Fashion Rump Shaker – The Hood Internet – The Mixtape Volume Four

3. Zero – Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It’s Blitz!

4. Brother Sport – Animal collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion

5. Hysteric – Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It’s Blitz!

6. Passion Pit vs. Juvenile – Back That Sleepyhead Up – The Hood Internet – The Mixtape Volume Four

7. 1901 – Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

8. Evident Utensl – Chairlift – Does You Inspire You (I dug the music video before the song)

9. Bead Prez vs. Grizzly Bear – Two Weeks of Hip Hop – The Hood Internet – The Mixtape Volume Four (orginal version of Two Weeks came in at #16)

10. Happy Up Here – Royksopp – Junior

Here’s a list from 2006 as well. Apparently I skipped 2007!