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More on A Scanner Darkly

I don’t remember being so obsessed about a movie in a long time. I just ran into this article, called Watching the Detectives - Richard Linklater adapts Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, that talks about the film adaptation for ASD. I suggest you check it out, especially if you’re not familiar with the source material. Or especially if you are. I’m starting to consider creating an “ASD” category…

OSX software I use

I just finished updating my Powerbook to OSX 10.4.7, and I decided to make a list of the applications that I can’t live without when using OSX:

Mail.appetizer: Plugin for Mail.app that shows a transparent pane with the details of incoming messages.

Electric Sheep: Awesome screensaver.

Widescreen Plugin for Mail.app: As much as I dislike Outlook’s three-panel view, I have to accept that I enjoy using this recently released plugin on my widescreen Powerbook. Com to think of it, maybe if I didn’t have a 1024×768 screen at work I wouldn’t depise the Outlook layout as much.

Unison / Macpar / Split & Concat: A MUST if you use newsgroups.

Transmit / Cyberduck: Best FTP applications out there. Can’t beat the price on Cyberduck ($0!!).

Viena: I’ve already blogged about this. This is probably the best RSS reader on the Mac. It has an “iTunes-like” UI that I really like.

Azureus: No comments…

Deerpark: For those pages that Safari doesn’t like (demonoid, I’m looking at your Javascript…), it doesn’t get better than Deerpark.

This list will probably grow as I realize applications that I take for granted but use every day. I’ll update it with a new post at a later date.

Blogjet sample post

This is a sample post made with Blogjet. I’m already using it on my other blog, and it works great.

I’ll upload some pictures with it later today.

Airports are ugly

Douglas Adams has one of the BEST quotes ever:

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, ‘as pretty as an airport.’ Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort.

Everytime I fly through MIA or SJO, I can’t help but think of that quote. It comes from The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul , one of his non-HHGTG books. Thought I share it with you.

A Scanner Darkly

I love Sci fi. That’s pretty much all I read. Well, turns out that I just found out that A Scanner Darkly, the excellent novel from Phillip K. Dick, was made into a movie. The novel is about an undercover cop that infiltrates a drug organization, but starts having problems because of his own use of the drug. My understanding is that it is based on his personal experiences as a drug addict, with all the sci-fi stuff added afterwards because he felt that a non-scifi history written by him wouldn’t sell. Still, it has some pretty interesting concepts, like the suits that cover your whole body, from head to toe, and allows you to change your appearance. The BEST thing is the style of the movie. It uses a technique called Rotoscoping, that I first saw during Molotov’s “Frijolero” music video (not a bad song, BTW). It gives a completely different dimension to a movie about frying your brain. You can check out the trailer in the link below. Apple - Trailers - A Scanner Darkly EDIT: Corrected the link. Damn Editors. Thanks to Christian for the heads up.

On wine, recommendations, reviews and drinking buddies

A quick post to comment about Cork’d. This website recently exploded into the web (you can check out the statistics at the Cork’d Blog), and lets you track your favorite wines, and receive recommendations from other people.
I love wine, and this website is a killer for us non-connoisseurs… You can add me as your drinking buddy, just look for my name or for jalagl.

Happy drinking!