Category: General

The long-awaited beta of Opera Mini 4 (aka Dimension) has finally been released. It’s fantastic, and the best reason to get a data plan (until next Friday, if you live in the US near AT&T coverage).

Here are some points that stand out, because reading my site is so much better than checking out the official one:

• Full-screen view with zoom. This is similar to what the Nokia Webkit browsers (N series) do, and what Opera Mobile does on Symbian/PocketPC. The difference is that you get the awesome speed of Mini’s server-side compression/optimization.

Effect: Extremely fast web browsing with spacious views. No more single-column claustrophobia. This is what the iPhone will feel and look like, only without the touchscreen. But you can have it today.

• Better scrolling/movement. Something Opera Mini has needed for ages! Like many Sony Ericsson phones, mine has a joystick that get clogged with dust and fails to respond correctly most of the time. Putting heavy-duty actions like scrolling onto hardware buttons is a wise move. It also locks all content into invisible columns so that zooming in and scrolling produces nicely aligned text/images. It’s invisible genius magic.

Effect: A great mobile browsing experience like no built-in software can provide.

• Rewritten code base, from the ground up. The whole damned thing is 91kb and feels more buttery than the latest Firefox/Safari builds. When devs have time to code eye candy, you know the underlying product is solid. Unless said devs work for Microsoft.

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Bad 7-11 ad, originally uploaded by Freebusman.

This cannot be a mistake.

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At Play!, originally uploaded by sangsara.

I’ve mentioned this early Woody Allen movie before, here and here, but not in great detail. As I am short of time now, I won’t do it here either. But here’s the wikipedia entry for this great film.

What’s Up, Tiger Lily? is the first film directed by Woody Allen. He also wrote and appeared in this 1966 comedy, which utilized clips from Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi (literal English title: International Secret Police: Key of Keys, 1965, [1]), a Japanese spy film. Instead of translating the film, Allen added completely original dialogue that had nothing to do with the plot of the original Japanese film. By putting in new scenes and rearranging the order of existing scenes, he completely changed the tone of the film from a James Bond clone into a comedy about a secret egg salad recipe.

Here are some related egg salad recipes. If anyone would like to see this movie, there’s a link on my FaceBook. =D

Lauren’s sexy bikinis:

Ford Models has started a website/YouTube channel. If the above is any indication of what they’ll produce, I’m subscribing to every feed they’ve got.

And there’s something for everyone! Here, a hairstylist tells you sisters how to update your ponytail for the 07. Chckt!

How to: Make a simple ponytail modern:

Adventure game Secret Files: Tunguska coming to Wii, DS – Joystiq

The latest adventure game to hit 2/3 of Nintendo’s Pillars of Power is the strangely named Secret Files: Tunguska. It looks plenty awesome though. There’s a PC version out now, but I think I’ll wait.

Screenshots

I just find this comment very funny.

Apple – Mac OS X Leopard – Features – Accessibility

Lost in all the hoopla, are a couple of other important new features that will be in Leopard. Above, is a link to experiencing a very nice one. A new Text-to-Speech voice named Alex, that sounds very natural.

Another is that Photo Booth can now record video and do all the cool backdrop effects seen in iChat. The DVD Player now has full-screen controls, and a time slider at long last. Front Row works and looks like Apple TV.

One ‘feature’ I’m not happy about though, is the non-inclusion of a new blue Aqua wallpaper image. You don’t fuck with tradition. The green grass used during the keynote looked very Vista to me. And Steve claimed nobody uses the blue wallpaper for long, they like to put their own digital photos up.

In my own experience, no matter what I change the wallpaper to, I always come back to the blue Aqua gradients. Because they work, are soothing, and don’t distract the eye from anything else on the desktop. If any delicious generation developers can code a shareware app to randomly create those Aqua-style wallpapers, they’ve got my $15.