Trotify—A bike attachment that makes your bike sound like a trotting horse.

I guess I can relieve Patsy of his duties now.

via Maria Popova

Do the companies Apple is competing with understand how making money works?

via Philip Elmer-Dewitt

I woke up this morning, started reading my RSS feeds, ran into this nightmare and puked a little inside my mouth:

Yes, you’re seeing that correctly. Comcast has co-opted the NBC peacock. No, this isn’t a prank.

I know companies aren’t people and don’t have feelings, and while I’m not going to necessarily lose sleep over this abomination, it does bother me. Like many guys and gals my age who grew up in the New York, tri-state area, I have a soft spot for NBC. The 3-note jingle, Saturday Night Live, Chuck Scarborough & Sue Simmons, Rockefeller Center, Seinfeld. I grew up with NBC, so in a sense, it’s part of me. Let’s not mention my wife has worked for NBC for over 10 years.

General Electric has never tried to incorporate the NBC logo into it’s own identity since it took a controlling share of the company in 1986. Comcast obviously doesn’t have the level of brand cachet that GE has. Comcast is Kabletown (note: Comcast is referred to as Kabletown internally too, not just by Tina Fey).

Business is business and life will go on, but moves like this just look pathetic. It’s the equivalent of pulling a Mercedes-Benz emblem off the hood of a car and wearing it around your neck.

Hey Comcast, putting a peacock on top of your head doesn’t make you look cool. It makes you look like a jackass.

Update: Perhaps a better analogy is if you ripped off a Mercedes-Benz emblem and stuck it on the hood of a 1982 Chevrolet Chevette.

I’m not sure why I didn’t do this earlier, but I’ve turned on the Do Not Disturb switch on both my iPad and my iPhone. I think many of us grow used to (dare I say addicted?) alerts and notifications.

Given that most of the day I’m working on my laptop, getting notifications from every device on my desk is too much. It’s not enough to just turn the ringer/sound switch off.

My guess is I’m going to quickly get used to this change.

ZDNet: Micro>soft pulls the plug on its Silverlight.Net site

<

p>Maybe Microsoft realizes the war is over afterall.</p

via GoodShit

Fortune profiled the Hell’s Angels in 1992 (via Noah Brier).

It’s a dry piece, but this bit about how they used to call themselves One-Percenters is great (not to be confused with the Muslim Five-Percenters):

What makes the Angels and the lesser outlaws so distinctive among criminal enterprises—and adds to the frustration of law enforcement officials—is that many Americans celebrate them and identify with them. Back in the 1950s, the American Motorcyclist Association, the voice of legitimate riders, pronounced that ”only 1%” of all riders were troublemakers. The outlaws gleefully accepted the label, and many still call themselves one-percenters. (The actual percentage is much smaller—counting the hangers-on police call associates, only about 0.2% of the estimated nine million motorcyclists in the U.S.) And plenty of people—including many who have never even sat on a motorcycle—like their style and applaud them for defying convention and authority.

I used to live a few blocks away from the Hell’s Angels NYC headquarters in the East Village. Definitely not the kind of guys you want to mess with.

Oblivion

New movie from Joseph Kosinski (director of Tron: Legacy).

via

It’s great to see the Daily Exhaust fumes traveling around the tubes*.

*Notice how I don’t watermark my images? You know why? These don’t belong to me, even (other peoples’) quotes I create in Photoshop and the scans I scan myself. These images belong to everyone.

taken from the poem, the suburban prophets (for R.D.D.) (c. 1960?), by d.a. levy

via IWDRM

To follow up my last film post, here’s some more media to enjoy this weekend:

A Short History of the Gif (about 2 minutes)

Quentin Tarantino’s 75 Minute Interview with Howard Stern (audio only)

Update: I need to add another short docu: A New Wave of Barbershops (via). In addition to Magnus Walter, this is yet another reason I’m getting more excited about living in LA the longer I live here.

Update 2: Yet another awesome short film film about an awesome car restoration out of Los Angeles. Bodie Stroud *sorta* restores a 1969 Boss Mustang. (via Shawn Blanc)

I’m building for myself on spec. It’s this out-of-control hobby vibe of just enjoying the process all the way through.

—Magnus Walker

Urban Outlaw (via So It’s Come To This) feels like a documentary specifically made for me. It’s about Magnus Walker—a Porsche enthusiast who owns and has restored every 911 between 1964 and 1972 (approx. 32 minutes):

This film resonates to me on a few important levels:

—Magnus is an autodidactic engineer like my father. He has little formal education. What he didn’t know he figured out. And he didn’t care what the “rules” were.

—He loves cars Porsches, and restores them himself. He designs his restorations based on his taste, not what other prospective clients might want.

—The film uses a great track from one of my favorite bands, The Kills.

—He designs and sells his own clothes. Again, like the cars, clothes he would like to wear. I’ve long been obsessed with graphic tees and have started making my own (see the sidebar of this site).

—He has a great wife. Examples of great marriages are between people who share the same values. After seeing what his wife was able to do with their dilapidated industrial property in the Arts District of Los Angeles, and they you look at what he’s able to do with old Porsches, it all makes sense. I feel the same way about my wife. She’s fanatical about fashion the way I’m fanatical about design and technology and cars.