guest post by Eddie Codel

While making my way on the tram through Vienna, Austria I felt a felt a strange pull to the dark side. I turned around and discovered Darth Ticket Validator.

photo by Eddie Codel

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Darth Ticket Validator

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Harry Partridge envisions what the classic anime film Akira would be like if it were made for an American audience. On a related note, Leonardo DiCaprio is producing two live-action films based on Akira.

via Cartoon Brew

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What If Akira Was Made For An American Audience?

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Hine Mizushima has created an awesome new t-shirt “The Machine & The Squid” for They Might Be Giants.

t-shirt illustration by Hine Mizushima

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They Might Be Giants T-Shirt: The Machine & The Squid

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Laughing Squid head of “special projects” John Law has just made his literary debut with “The Space Between”, a new book of short story fiction focusing on John’s obsession with bridges. It’s being published by Furnace Press, an independent publisher started by the Brooklyn arts groups Ars Subterranea and Place in History.

“The Space Between” is a collection of three stories inspired by the author’s lifelong obsession with bridges. An avid urban adventurer and bridge historian, the author shares his passion for these engineering marvels while delving into their potential to fuel our dreams, fears, and nightmares. Part dreamscapes, part adventure tales, these narratives take the reader on an exploration of bridges to inspire contemplation on a structural as well as metaphysical level.

A release party for “The Space Between”, including a book reading and bridge slide show by John, is taking place on Tuesday, December 9th at Proteus Gowanus in Brooklyn. It will be followed by a reading and slide show on March 5th at City Lights Books in San Francisco.

“The Space Between” can be ordered online through the Furnace Press store.

image via Furnace Press

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The Space Between, Short Story Fiction About Bridges by John Law

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Since October some subscribers to The Squid List have had problems receiving email from the list. Email subscriptions for The Squid List are handled by FeedBurner which converts the RSS feed to email. I tried deactivating and then re-activating FeedBurner’s email subscriptions service, but that just seemed to make the problem worse.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to contact FeedBurner for support, so if anyone has any ideas how to get in touch with them, it would be greatly appreciated.

In the meantime, you can always access The Squid List directly through the online calendar, get updates via RSS, subscribe via iCal or using your mobile device.

Another option would be to subscribe to the list using FeedBlitz, RSSFWD or Feed My Inbox, which are all similar services that convert RSS feeds into email.

I’ll update this post when I have more information on the status of this issue.

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Problems With FeedBurner Email Delivery For The Squid List

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Windows/Mac/Linux: Opera released an alpha version of Opera 10 today, a first step toward the next major release of the popular cross-platform web browser. First and foremost, Opera 10 is looking to offer stiff competition with the blazing rendering engines in the upcoming Firefox release (Tracemonkey) and Google Chrome (V8) with an update to its rendering engine, Presto—which Opera claims offers a 30% speed boost over the previous version of the engine. But that's not all.

Opera 10 has also added a few new features and overall standards improvements that should make any Opera user smile—including inline spell-check, full HTML email support for Opera's built-in email client, and a perfect score on the Acid3 web standards test.

Passing Acid3

Inline Spell-Check

Sure, Firefox had built-in spell-check since its release in October of 2006, but any Opera user whose been waiting patiently for this feature should be thrilled.

Full HTML Email

Updated Dragonfly

Developers will be happy to see that Dragonfly—Opera's built-in tool for debugging web sites, similar to the Firebug extension in Firefox—has been updated with more and better features.

Opera 10 is a free download for all platforms. Keep in mind that it's currently in alpha (the final release isn't likely to hit until somtime much later next year), meaning you should expect a bug or three. That said, if you give it a try, let's hear how you like it in the comments.

Mac OS X only: Using your Mac's iSight camera to detect the hand gestures you make in front of it, free utility FluidTunes controls your iTunes library playback based on those motions. File this under "really cool but not sure I'd actually use it every day": you swipe your hand back and forth in the air in front of your Mac to move through your iTunes library in Cover Flow mode, and then swipe at a button to play a selected album. FluidTunes shows what you look like on your camera behind your album covers, so you can center your hand over buttons to press them. (It's dim, but it's there—in the screenshot above the user's hand is at the bottom of the screen.) While not touching the keyboard, mouse, or any other digital remote to play your music is amazing, you'll look like a flailing crazy person while you use FluidTunes. Here's a video demo.

FluidTunes is a free download for Mac only.

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Remi Kart, A Real World Version of Mario Kart by Remi Gaillard

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Windows/Mac/Linux: Free Xbox Media Center (XBMC) spinoff boxee has updated with great news for Netflix lovers: The popular media center application now supports streaming Netflix Watch Instantly video to your boxee media center. There are, however, a couple of catches. First, the Netflix streaming only works on Macs (with Microsoft Silverlight installed), so Linux users are out of luck until Netflix begins supporting Linux. Second, those of you enjoying boxee on an Apple TV are also out of luck (for now) when it comes to Netflix streaming. Now for the good news. The boxee update also introduces a handful of great new feature improvements and bug fixes that everyone can enjoy, including:

• a new Hulu – looks more like hulu.com, enables you to login (so you can get your Hulu Queue), works faster, and playback should be greatly improved on Apple TV
• a new YouTube – new look, as well as higher quality video playback. some of these YouTube clips look pretty good on your 46” LCD
• a new CNN, Flickr, Picasa and Apple Movie Trailers – we’ve re-written all of these plug-ins to work faster and look better
• Boston Globe’s The Big Picture – it’s a great photo-blog, which we really like, and thought could be pretty cool in a 10-foot experience. if you’ll like it we could bring much more of these type of services (let us know!)
• integration with MTV Music – when you click on an album you’ll see a new option to let you watch music videos of the artist. check it out. MTV said they can give us higher quality videos, and we have a few more ideas for providing a great music video experience on boxee
• theWB – on our quest to bring more TV content to boxee is the latest addition. it means shows like Buffy, Babylon5, Firefly, One Tree Hill and The O.C. are now available on boxee

I've been playing around with the new boxee all morning, and it's a great update to the interface. If boxee has been buggy for you in the past, you may want to give this release another try, too—it features lots of behind the scenes code improvements as well.

Finally, to Windows users wondering why they've been included on this download: boxee has also released a pre-alpha for the Windows crowd to a couple hundred of new testers. While that means it's not available to everyone yet, it hopefully will be very soon.