Louis C.K. on shaving his goatee for a role in a new Ricky Gervais film:

Ricky and Matt asked me to shave my beard for the part which was kind of a shock to my system. I have had a goatee beard since I was in my early twenties, so pretty much my whole adult life. So shaving it off and seeing fourty percent of my face for the first time in about twenty years was kind of… awful. “So that’s what’s been going on under there”. Ugh. My chin, and the one behind it, looked like a porn actor’s shaved balls.

I’ve had mine continuously since I was 19. The mustache comes and goes as I feel, making it a Van Dyke some days, and a goatee on others (if you’re in to specifics, though most people just refer to all of them as goatees).

Louis had a pair of balls after shaving his Van Dyke. Does that mean he had a Dick Van Dyke under there all along?

Apparently performing simple magic tricks, like making a toothpick disappear and reappear will get you fired from substitute teaching in Florida.

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas made a toothpick disappear, then reappear in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land O’ Lakes, Florida. The Pasco County School District says there were several other performance issues, but none compared to his “wizardry.”
“I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue. You can’t take any more assignments. You need to come in right away.’ I said, ‘Well, Pat, can you explain this to me?’ ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’” Piculas explained.

Can we just kick Florida out of the union if we get it ratified by two thirds of the states? That’s all we have to do to for a constitutional amendment.

When Maury was speaking closely to this young woman with an interesting phobia, Kristen remarked, “That’d be cool if he was talking to her with pickle breath.”

She’s not just a casual Obama supporter, she’s actively campaigned for him. This is probably the biggest example of stock media coming back to bite someone as I’ve ever seen. I hope some people on Clinton’s creative department started work on their resumes.

Don’t talk back to Darth Vader, he’ll getcha!

Just a few days ago, HandBrake 0.9.2 was released with a slew of tweaks and new features. The one that was significant to me was EyeTV support. I haven’t had much time to play with it, but I can report that I successfully converted an HD broadcast captured with my EyeTV Hybrid with EyeTV 3.0.

The final result looked quite nice. I’ll have to do some more testing with 720p and 1080i content, exploring 5.1 sound, and all the other goodies associated with the new version of HandBrake.

On a related note, I should start a pool of when HandBrake will reach 1.0 status. It seems to be inching closer but never quite hitting 1.0.

Donnie says I suck at Photoshop. You know what? He’s right.
Warning: Some moderate crude humor and language.

You Suck at Photoshop #1:

You Suck at Photoshop #2:

If you want to use a Mac on your Vizio VX37L 37″ LCD TV with a DVI to HDMI cable you’ll need to use a utility like SwitchResX to enter custom timing and resolution settings. The Vizio normally outputs 1280×720 resolution via HDMI, which looks awful. These settings should map the display just cleanly as the VGA/RGB port does, but with a little less pixel blurring. It appears to be a perfect 1 to 1 pixel map of 1366×768 (more than enough to do 720p).

These are the SwitchResX settings that I came up with late last night that work perfectly. Enter them as a custom resolution, and reboot, then select the custom resolution you created.

Pixel Clock - 85.25

Horizontal:
Active - 1366 pixels
Front Porch - 128 pixels
Sync Width - 130 pixels
Back Porch - 174 pixels
Scan Rate - 47.414 kHz

Vertical:
Active - 768 lines
Front Porch - 2 lines
Sync Width - 6 lines
Back Porch - 19 lines
Scan Rate - 59.64 kHz

Positive sync unchecked for Horizontal.
Positive sync checked for Vertical.

A few notes:

• I did these tests on a 1.83GHz MacBook Pro, which has an ATI Radeon x1600. It may be different for machines with different graphics cards. I believe (but could be wrong) that some G4 era machines need pixel dimensions in multiples of 8, so 1366 may not work (you might need 1360, and adjust the porch settings accordingly).
• An HDMI to DVI cable does not carry audio, so you’ll still need to source the audio somehow. I use a Mini-Toslink to Toslink cable connected to my surround receiver. With a few tweaks, it can also output surround sound via Front Row, Quicktime and VLC.
• These settings work on a VX37L. I do not know if it’s any different for a VW37L or an L37. It’s also possible that these settings will work on a VX32L, VW32L or L32, as they’re also 720p displays.
• These settings might work for DisplayConfigX, but since the author isn’t kind enough to let you try the software before purchasing it, there’s no way for me to know for certain.

Update 2/21/08:
Reader Joe chimed in with success on his Vizio GV42L on a PowerMac G5 with a Radeon 9650. He mentioned he had to use 1360 for the horizontal resolution, I assume because the Radeon requires the resolution to be a multiple of 8, as many older ones do. Here’s his settings:

Pixel Clock - 85.25

Horizontal:
Active - 1360 pixels
Front Porch - 128 pixels
Sync Width - 130 pixels
Back Porch - 174 pixels
Scan Rate - 47.573 kHz

Vertical:
Active - 768 lines
Front Porch - 2 lines
Sync Width - 6 lines
Back Porch - 19 lines
Scan Rate - 59.84 kHz

Positive sync checked for Horizontal.
Positive sync unchecked for Vertical.

This leads me to wonder if other Vizio 720p models will work with similar settings.

My personal favorite newsreader since I stopped reading feeds in Safari has to be NetNewsWire. For a few years I’ve enjoyed the Lite version of NetNewsWire, which has some features removed from the full version, yet was free. I was considering purchasing the full version of NetNewsWire, though with today’s annoucements that NetNewsWire is now at version 3.1 and completely free, I’m super happy. NewsGator, parent company of NetNewsWire also made some of their other products, FeedDemon, NewsGator Inbox, and NewsGator Go! free as well.

Brent Simmons, author of NetNewsWire sums it up on his blog,

Why go free? Nick Bradbury and Greg Reinacker explain it better than I would, but it boils down to this: the software is great marketing for our enterprise software; and the more users we have, the better able we are to calculate relevance and importance.

I dream of being able to make it so you spend less time reading stuff you don’t care about—I want the important news to go right to the top.

As a fan of independent developers, I’m glad to hear they’re doing well enough with their enterprise level software to give away their consumer one. As a consumer, I’m glad I saved $30 and get to use a great product.

Shawn Blanc did an awesome, in depth review of NNW a few weeks ago.

Download NetNewsWire.

As Cat said, I tend to “twitter my ass off,” and the reliable twitter tools plugin posts a digets here every evening. However, I have decided that as great as the twitter tools plugin is, I don’t like the amount of spam it puts on to my blog. It also reminds me of how infrequently I post on here, and yet at the same time prevents me from feeling like I need to post.

I think I may either put a twitter badge or plugin to list the 5 or so most recent tweets. I haven’t really decided, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do.