Bunny Blog

If you’re a living human, chances are you’ve tried to send an important document via email to your attorney, John Arai Mitchell  – only to later realize that you completely forgot the little detail of actually including the attachment!  Idiot!  No wonder he never writes you back!  He’s got better things to be doing than helping you and your slowbrain recall how the little paperclip button works!  He’s a professional law person.

Well, if you use Apple Mail, fret no more.  Attachment Scanner is a little plugin that scans your email for words that indicate that you think you’ve included an attachment… and then stops you dead in your tracks when you try to hit send!

Now, it doesn’t do the hard work of helping you add an attachment automatically or anything cool like that, but come on, how lazy are you?  This is a nice, free little tool that will give you added peace of mind and a long, healthy, equitable relationship with John Arai Mitchell… nothing more.  Enjoy!

Hey friends!  Seen these badass new Transcend HUD goggles?

That’s right, they’re ski/snowboard/whatever goggles that have a live heads-up display feeding you moment-by-moment data on your speed, direction, temperature, whatever you like.  Basically, it turns you into a living human F-16.  Pretty badass, right?  At $350, even I am tempted to buy a pair, and I’ve never been snowboarding in my entire life.  That’s how cool they are… in theory.

So how the hell do you make a promo video for something so badass that fails to actually show you an immersive simulation of what it’s like to actually wear them??

As someone who’s spent a lot of time creating exactly this kind of video, I’m really disappointed in this obvious oversight which makes me wonder… did they somehow manage to make this product not cool?

Find yourself wasting endless hours online, distracted by a constant litany of emails and pokes and pings?  Can’t stay off Facebook for long enough to keep focused on your Great American Novel?  Can’t stop compulsively checking the Bunny Blog?  Then what you need is a healthy dose of the ironically-named Freedom.

Freedom is a donationware OS X app that shuts down your network communications for a specific period of time.  Nothing short of a full reboot will revoke this shutdown.

A communication disruption can mean only one thing: productivity!

You have your choice between shutting down just your internet access or all access including your local network.  You’ll need an administrator password to make it go.

Freedom is a handy escalation from another ironically-titled app I was using for a while, SelfControl, which disables access only to a specified list of URLs.  If your only vice is espn.com or comaperiod.com, you can just block those sites.  Me, I prefer the ironclad veil of silence of Freedom.  I used to enjoy incredible productivity on airplanes, with zero distractions, but now even that is in threat.  Freedom is here to liberate me.  As a man once said, “Hell is other people.”

As another man once said, “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves,” so here’s the link!    Go get yourself some Freedom now!

I woke up this morning to discover we had been bombed by a foreign aggressor.  Before you get too alarmed – particularly if you are a certain business partner of mine currently honeymooning in Hawaii – I should disclose that the target of these attacks was this blog, and the foreign aggressor was “BestDP.com”.  This site appears to be an aggregator of reviews and an Amazon.com affiliate store, which is probably why our blog was relentlessly hammered with an unusual series of positive reviews for Amazon’s Kindle digital book-reader.

“Oh, so someone spammed your blog.  Big deal.”  That’s a rational response.  But what I found interesting was that these reviews were not the usual gibberish full of links - no, they were actual reviews apparently written by actual humans.  Now, of course, they weren’t written for this blog or in any way relevant to what we’re discussing, and it was pretty obvious they were spam by the way 14 separate reviews were posted in the span of about 4 minutes.  So it might seem hardly worth discussing – except that this indicates a real problem in our current connected culture.

Humans are generally very easily influenced.  We want to believe what others tell us.  But “others” has become a very nebulous term.  Why are all of these Kindle reviews so overwhelmingly positive?  Is it because the Kindle is a great product?  Is it because of the psychological nature of reviewing (I might go so far as to call it the inherent corruptness of reviewing) – by which we feel compelled to give passing marks to even truly flawed dreck?  I don’t own a Kindle; I can’t say.  I hear they’re rather nice, actually.  But my guess is this: it’s Christmas season and you can sell a lot more widgets if you cherry-pick reviews.  Everyone wins.

Or do they?

All of this is a long-winded way of saying: look out, folks, there’s a “scam” going around.  When anyone can be a publisher, anyone can be a con man.

YouTube has been beta-testing their new channel layouts. Eventually all YT channels will look like this, but in the meantime they’ve let some channels switch over to the new design, which I really, really like. Since we were rebranding our YouTube channel anyway, we decided to take the plunge.

So first of all, why are we rebranding our channel? Well, our YouTube channel consists mostly of original content - be it web series pilots, short films, animations, or trailers for our films. Since we now have launched an entire original content brand, we decided that it made more sense to convert the present channel rather than creating a new one. So here it is!

They allow you to upload your own banner now, fitting across the entire length of the screen, and also upload your own background.  The main design change is that now people can watch all of your videos without clicking away from your channel.

For the most part, the change-over was really easy. Sometimes the design editor wasn’t very responsive, however. I had to upload the background about three times before it actually kicked in. A lot of the font color pickers were the same way. The nice thing is that YouTube saves your previous channel, so if things really aren’t working out, you can just switch back. I haven’t tried this, however, so no promises that it works perfectly.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new look!

To learn more, go to this explanatory video from YouTube.

Friend Lists.

I’ve been using these for a while, but nobody seems to know what I’m talking about so I thought I’d let the word out. If you have more than 100 friends on Facebook, and you’re having trouble filtering the status updates of your very best friends from the people you met in the elevator, friend lists are AWESOME.

On your facebook homepage, look on the left column that starts with “News Feed.” You can already filter things down so that you just see “Photos” or “Links” or “Status Updates” rather than have all of them feed into your newsfeed.

Ok, now click on the “more” text at the very bottom of this column. Now more filters pop up, along with text at the very bottom that reads “Create New List.” Click that. Now you can choose which friends and fan pages will belong to that list. For instance, I’ve made one called “Comedians” where I put all my friends that have funny status updates. Now I can click on that, and only see updates of those particular people

What’s also great is that you can also use friend lists with your privacy settings. Would you rather coworkers not see your photo album from Vegas? Your privacy settings let you make certain photo albums available only to friends of friends, or only to people you’re personally friends with, or to THIS list, or to everybody except THAT list. It’s really pretty powerful.

Paris drunk in Vegas

Also, when you make new friends, you can immediately add them to pre-existing lists. So when my Aunt finally joins Facebook, I can put her on my “Relatives” list at the same time I accept her Facebook “friendship.”

Anyway, just felt most people weren’t getting the most out of this feature.

If you follow sports at all, you can’t have missed the news recently about pitcher Mark Buehrle’s perfect game for the White Sox – a remarkable feat that’s only been done 18 times in all of big league baseball’s 170,000-plus games).  But while Buehrle and the Sox didn’t miss a beat in their 5-0 victory over Tampa Bay, Major League Baseball has been missing all of the most critical beats when it comes to building and maintaining their brand online, in an age when many people already find baseball irrelevant.

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The other day a stranger asked me what I did and I said “game designer” without really having to think about it anymore and that was pretty awesome. But it got me thinking about one of the roads that got me here and before long I was thinking about one of my childhood’s favorite amusements: text adventure games. Especially this one:

Seriously, this is a great little game. Odd, but great.

You sit at the computer and read this blog post and wonder what this has to do with anything going on a Psychic Bunny. You can see a link sitting here that leads to a longer post.

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One of our favorite tutorial websites, Video Copilot, just released an updated version of their Action Essentials stock footage collection, and the leap in quality since their last installment is AMAZING. They now have 720p HD, as well as 2K. Included in the package are multiple clips of explosions, smashing glass, bullet holes, blood bursts, fires, muzzle flashes, falling debris, powder, smoke, sparks, 3D shell casing models, water splashes, textures and MORE!

They’ve got a really cool trailer, some tutorials, and a way more in-depth video about how huge this collection is. We just bought the $249.95 2K resolution box set - we’ll let you know how it works out. As much as we’ve used the first Action Essentials (which is dinky by comparison) I don’t think there’s any way we won’t get our money’s worth. As far as stock HD or 2k video footage goes, this is dirt cheap.

It happens to everyone.  No matter how exquisite your taste, how diverse your collection, you hit that wall where your music collection is no longer sufficient.  It’s boring.  You need the freshest music on the planet to fix this, and you need it now.

So you head to Pandora, Jango, Last.fm, and you… No! You moron!  You head to thesixtyone and you check out how some smart interactive designers with a background in video games have already made your life better.

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