Joshua Topolsky

Sorry world, but is this what you want your news to look like — and where you want it to come from — in the near future?

Ah yes, famed technology writer Bruce Emmerling. Famed technology writer Bruce Emmerling who can’t grammar or spell-check his work, and writes with a mastery of his subject akin to that of a 6th grader rushing to complete a paper on a book he hasn’t even read.

Honestly, this is what tops Google’s “news” results in science and technology? If that’s the case, we should be kinda worried. We’re quickly moving from citizen journalism (a dangerous / questionable proposition to begin with) to bot journalism… at least that’s how the above article reads.

Remember, you may be discerning, but most people aren’t, and most people will take a story like this — poorly sourced, poorly written — and digest it as fact. Now, there’s nothing particularly inaccurate about this piece of news — except that it’s written like garbage and essentially cites no sources. Plus, most media outlets reported on this last week, so why is it front page news now? And why does the article refer to “reviewers” when no one has actually used or reviewed the device? And who the fuck is Bruce Emmerling?

Examiner.com (and sites like it, hello Associated Content) should be closely watched by those who care about honest reporting and reliable sources. Here is a site that mixes random, unknown entries with aggregated (er, scraped) content from CBS and sites like ours. It is a dangerous and dishonest mixture which most people won’t catch.

I know, some of you will call foul here. Say I’m being hypocritical. Claim Engadget is guilty of all the offenses I’m griping about. But, of course, you’ll be wrong whether you believe it or not. Sure, we’re not a traditional media outlet — not the kind the world has known for hundreds of years — but we do have a stringent process for both reporting news and choosing the people on staff who write that news. It’s not a perfect process — nothing is — but it’s a process. I’m not sure the same can be said for Examiner.

Look, a shifting perception of media / journalism is one thing, but we’re starting to dismantle the basic structures in which we test the validity news, provide an editorial process, and at least pretend to care about some diligence and transparency. With arm-chair enthusiasts cranking out a tsunami of edit-free noise like the above story, being able to find the real story — or dry land — will soon seem like a distant memory.

Here’s an email I received last night. I think I really understand where this person is coming from.

Dear Josh,

You, my dear, are a fugging idiot. I heard you on the podcast. “Landscape keyboards are too wide”? WTF? And i thought you liked good keyboards. They are large and comfortable to use, and make you look like a power user. I have not seen any portrait keyboard phone that looks like it would be comfortable to type on. Especially Palm’s keyboards. Those buttons are tiny as hell and look horrible to use. Landscape keyboard phones make you more of a power user, and they look good, too. And also, on the issue of “the iPhone’s keyboard is the best virtual keyboard ever….well, what makes it better than HTC’s Hero keyboard? Better autocorrect? Can you prove that? Bigger letters I think would be the only advantage, past that, it is HTC’s all the way. You can add words to the custom dictionary, you have different suggestions as you type, it is more sensitive to taps. What is wrong with your brain? Just because you’re ugly as hell doesn’t mean you have to be stupid as hell as well, but it seems you are. Landscape keyboards are easily more useful than portrait, unless you are a baby and have tiny hands. Portait keyboards are good for babies, they are nice and cramped.
They are not for men. Of course, you aren’t a man, so I don’t think that matters anyway.

Thanks for this, A. Walters. I’ll take that constructive criticism to heart!

Update: I just received a very nice apology. That’s a start!

Trying out a little something different here. I’m hoping I can publish to Wordpress then beam the RSS to Tumblr which will shoot the content on over to Twitter… which eventually hits Facebook. Will this work? Let’s find out. Together!

I’ll be nice, I’m including a delightful image.

If you’re like me (and let’s be honest, you’re exactly like me), you use a bunch of apps which add items (or menu extras, or menulets) to the right side of your menu bar. Unfortunately, due to some screwy API issues, not all of these icons can be moved, which is frustrating if you like things to be in specific places. Since you’re just like me, I know that you do.

Just loading apps (or particularly when booting, loading at startup) doesn’t do the ordering trick, because it’s solely dependent on how quickly apps load. There doesn’t seem to be a real way to stagger them, even by rearranging your startup apps.

Long story short, last night I kinda / sorta figured out a solution — a simple AppleScript which tells your computer to load a succession of applications with brief pauses in between. Like so:

It takes a little tweaking and experimenting, but you can get the timing just right pretty easily. Save the script as an app (Save As…), and stick it in your startup apps list. All done.

Still, you can’t rearrange, and if you have to quit one, you pretty much have to quit all — but for the most part, this does the trick without me having to think about it.

Now, if someone could just code a quick utility that makes all of those icons movable…

Some of you may be wondering why you’re not seeing the latest piece of Digg’s news-puzzle — the DiggBar — on Engadget. Let me explain.

If you’ve seen the tool in action, then you know that it appears to offer an easy way to read an article you might want to Digg by providing you with a dropdown toolbar and a shortened URL — all courtesy of digg.com. It’s certainly a super solution for making users aware of related stories on the site and generally keeping them in the Digg ecosystem… but that’s part of the problem.

In Digg’s efforts to keep you swimming in their stream, they completely obscure the original URL you’re supposed to be looking at. And no, not just the URL you follow from a particular Digg on their site — all the URLs you visit (via clicks) until you kill the bar. Additionally, if you’re browsing around a site under the bar itself and you kill it, it transports you back to the original URL you landed on, thus completely breaking continuity and making it almost impossible to know where you’ve actually browsed to.

Maybe that’s okay for users who aren’t really paying attention to where they’ve arrived or where they’re going while reading news — but we consider that information valuable, and don’t wish to obfuscate it.

In our opinion, the DiggBar takes Digg’s approach to news gathering and dissemination one step too far. By hijacking URLs, they complicate an end-user’s experience on our site, and from a publishing standpoint, we think it’s a step backwards to mask the content you’re visiting with shortened URLs from an unrelated site. See John Gruber’s excellent piece on this which gets a bit more technical, and this Search Engine Land post which gets really technical.

Ultimately, this is both a technical and philosophical decision. We believe that the work of content creators should be protected and treated as the unique product that it is, and that an end-user’s experience shouldn’t be tainted with a “catch-all” tool which diminishes context.

So here’s how our solution works: If you follow one of our links from Digg — and you have the DiggBar active on your account — it now redirects to our original URL. You’ll see the DiggBar for a moment, but ultimately end up at the original content you clicked on in the first place.

Which is how it’s supposed to work, mind you.

I just want to get a hold of the big guy and ask him (or her, whatever you prefer) why my blog got all hacked and whatnot. Not only is that not classy, it’s super annoying, stupid, and totally not-awesome (as we say around here — Australian accent only).

Anyhow, the point I’m trying to make is this: stranger or bot who is responsible for this hack, if I ever find you, I will kill you, your family, and anyone who has ever met any member of your family. Then I will kill your pets no matter how cute they are. Then I will blow up the planet Earth.

Gino Felino (Steven Seagal) is an NYPD detective from Brooklyn who knows everyone and everything in his neighborhood. He grew up in the neighborhood as a poor kid surrounded by wiseguys and made men but decided to become a cop. Gino has ties to everyone in the neighborhood, including the mob, and he has an understanding with them that neither will harm the other.

In the opening scene of the movie, Gino and his partner Bobby are waiting to bust up a multi-million dollar drug deal. Gino sees a pimp beating up a woman and intervenes; Gino promptly disposes of him. When he throws the pimp through the windshield of his car, we see red pimp shoes sticking out and then the iconic shot from the point of view of inside the car of Seagal scowling.

Shortly afterwards, we see the film’s main villain, Richie Madano (William Forsythe), murdering Gino’s parter Bobby Lupo on 18th Avenue in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in broad daylight in front of his wife, Laurie, and his two kids. Everyone knows that the killer is Richie, a crack addict who has been Gino’s and Bobby’s enemy since childhood.

Gino knows Richie is not going to leave the neighborhood and he tells his captain (Jerry Orbach) that all he needs is an unmarked police car and a 12-gauge shotgun. His Captain gives him the clearance, providing Gino with a Remington 870 pump action shotgun and a brand new 1988 Chevrolet Caprice 9C1 from the Brooklyn 65th precinct. Gino visits his mob connection Frankie and his boss Don Vittorio to tell them that he is going to find Richie, while they want their own revenge on him for killing a cop on their streets. Gino starts the hunt for Richie at a bar run by Richie’s brother Vinnie Madano. Vinnie and his friends all refuse to provide information, so Gino assaults all of them until they (including the local legend known as “Sticks”) are all left bloodied on the floor. He still doesn’t know where Richie is, but their attitude problem has been taken care of. This scene is also known for its use of the Sicilian terms “Fanocch” (short for fanocchio, meaning faggot) and “Minchia” (dick) several times. Furthermore, Seagal also utters the movie’s most famous and dramatic line with “Anybody seen Richie? Anybody know why Richie did Bobby Lupo?”