BrokenBlog

Who knew?

GIMP and Photoshop (from what I remember) insist upon 256 colors for GIF images. It makes sense, because that way a palette index only takes up one byte, so I just assumed it was a limitation of the format. I’ve been living a lie.

This is a pretty good idea. It’s a (groan) badge that allows anyone to chat with you over Google Talk when you’re online. It’s a pretty nifty idea. I just added one to this blog to check it out. Personally I think its up there with GrandCentral’s similar badge. They have one that allows other people to call you if they enter their phone numbers. GrandCentral then calls them, and connects them to your GrandCentral number.

Something like this can’t last though, the spam will come, it always comes.

This circa 1965 short film is just about the coolest corny thing I’ve ever seen. It’s embedded below…

I wrote a post a while back describing how wary digital distribution made me. Now a perfect example of the huge flaw in digital distribution exists. It was provided, surprisingly enough, by Google. They decided to back out of the pay-to-download video market, taking the videos people purchased with them. Refunds are offered, but in the equivalent of “store credit”. Google will likely do something to escape backlash, but more importantly, they really don’t have to do that. This is why digital distribution in its current form is very flawed, not because it isn’t a good idea, but because physical ownership is lost.

Edit: Looks like Google’s giving out full refunds instead of store credit, and they’re being extra nice about it too. Doesn’t change the fact that they didn’t have to do that.