Who here likes buttons? Like, honest-to-God buttons that you push and then something happens? I do. It’s one of the reasons why I’m fairly nonplussed by the iPhone. (All the pre-launch THIS WILL CHANGE THE WORLD nonsense also bothered me, too.) I’m not trying to be all “unreasonable” or anything, but I simply prefer the feeling I get when pushing a physical button. Hence, before they go the way of the Knicks, my endorsement of buttons today. Rule Britannia.

Just because I endorse, so to speak, buttons doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that touchscreens and other touch-based inputs aren’t the future. I know they are. That’s why we’ve got things like the Surface hotting up, and cellphone after cellphone ditching buttons in favor of touchscreens. I myself have a cellphone (a first gen LG Chocolate) that lacks physical buttons. And you know what? The touch there stinks on ice.

I’ll slide the dumb phone open and, oh, say, 40 percent of the time the “touch” buttons don’t respond. It’s like I never even tried to push them. Or, if I’m lucky, I’ll push one touch button or whatever it’s called and a different will react. I tap down, it goes up. Brilliant.

I don’t mean to make this entire piece a rant against my POS phone; I do that every other post as it it. So I’ll just move on from that now.

Buttons, physical buttons, simply feel more natural to me. At least they do now in 2008. Who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll all be like, “Man, buttons are dumb. I’m so glad we have holographic interfaces.” But we’re not in Batman Beyond’s world quite yet. I don’t care how great it is for interface designers to not have to deal with crushing issues like button placement. I don’t care whether or not haptic technology makes the whole touchscreen experience just a little bit more like pushing a real button. Why re-invent the wheel? When I order a burger, I want a burger. Pizza is good, fine, but that’s not what I want.

I know I can’t be alone in this real button crusade. My normal “what’s a blue ray, a type of fish?” friends are more comfortable with regular buttons. Hand them the Chocolate or whatever Phone of the Week (with haptic!) I have and they bristle. “So I just touch the screen? That’s weird.” Even controlling for their technologically incompetence, which is significant, it’s hard to ask someone who’s been hard wired to push buttons forever to forget all that and move onto a new system.

Basically, I prefer real buttons to this touch nonsense. For now, at least. Like I said, my opinion may well change as my touch-whatever talent points increase, but for now, give me real buttons or… well, not “give me death,” but something equally dramatic.

Continuing with this week’s festival do Linux, I’ll be endorsing open source software today. Not so random, no. Only software that’s free as in freedom has been considered; freeware that I can’t futz around with the source code, not that I would know what to do, rightly, was ignored. Devastating, yes.

This endorsement is a twofer. First I’ll try to answer the tough question as to why, pray tell, you should give a damn about open source source, hereafter referred to as OSS. I write that sentence knowing full well that, oh, say, all of you already know what OSS is and why it’s worth your while. I’m merely following orders. Anyway, part two will be a few applications that you might want to check out… again, knowing full well that you’re probably aware of lots of them. Have you heard of Firefox? I hear it’s all the rage these days.

Anyhow, OSS. It’s cool. Use it.

You’re reading this, sipping your cup of coffee while, wondering, perhaps aloud (to the annoyance of your co-workers), just what exactly is OSS. And you should! The Open Source Initiative, sort of the BCS of OSS, has 10 criteria that a piece of software must meet in order for it to be considered, “officially,” open source. Wikipedia has all ten commandments, but the gist of it is that the software’s source code—the software’s blueprints, kinda—needs to be freely available for all to see and modify.

Firefox, arguably the most popular piece of OSS, has its source code available for all to see and modify. You can check it out here if you’re so inclined. (It’s the .bz2 file)

What are the benefits to you, the end user with a mortgage and kids who hog your big screen TV all day long? The community has your back.

Think of it like this. If a critical flaw is found in Internet Explorer—that’s happened once or twice I think—you’re at the mercy of Microsoft. If it takes one day or one month to release a fix, well, you’re waiting. Since Microsoft controls the source code of its wonderful browser, only it can alter it any way. Compare that to Firefox. Let’s say a critical flaw is found overnight tonight. Could happen. Theoretically, anyone with an Internet connection could help patch the security flaw. It all sounds very socialistic, people helping each other out. I don’t know, y’all get it, I trust.

Oh, also! If you read sites like Slashdot, digg, CrunchGear, etc. it’s pretty much a requirement to prefer OSS to closed source software whenever possible. That’s the sense I’ve gotten over the years, at any rate.

Would would someone want to make their software open source? Why would they prefer to give away their work, their labor, for free (under the GPL is many cases)? Part of it is that Craigslistian philosophy of wanting to help your fellow man. Real altruism. Real crazy, I say. (Not really.) Wired had a piece the other day talking about for-profit OSS, which just seems sorta weird. Not that the Mozilla Foundation doesn’t make money off Firefox—Google pays it every time you use the built-in search bar—but, to me, OSS always seemed to serve a higher purpose. OSS coders were the white knights, the good guys, riding in from the hills to save all of us from horridly written, horribly insecure (fast fact: I actually had written “unsecure” instead of “insecure” right there) software. They weren’t supposed to be in “it” for the money. Again, that was always the feeling I got.

So that’s my gross oversimplification of OSS. Back when I was 16 or so, I was way more into the whole “movement” than I am now. Something about having bills to pay and other real world issues to confront sorta sapped much of my interest in it. Same thing with video games.

Lo! the software! My God in Heaven, the software! There’s so much OSS out there for you to play with. SourceForge is a fine place to search, as is Open Source Alternative. Linux and Open Source Blog is a neat resource, too, as is ZDNet’s Open Source.

I recommend y’all check out the following: Firefox, VLC/MPlayer/Xine/XBMC, Adium/Pidgin, AIM Sniff, Gimp(shop), Audacity and Azureus.

Firefox
Hi-res version

There’s no way to avoid mentioning Firefox, what I consider to be the epitome of OSS. The browser first gained mind and market share among the Slashdot crowd, a generic term I use haphazardly for people who heavily use the Internet. Now it’s the preferred browser of 17 percent of all Web users.

What first attracted me to it way back when it was called Phoenix was tabbed browsing. That it was inherently safer than IE and not made by Microsoft sweetened the deal. (Youth truly is wasted on the young.) Nowadays…

The browser is slated to hit version 3.0 in the coming months, but, in my opinion, Firefox just isn’t what it used to be. I had it open a minute ago, idle, and it crashed—did I look at it the wrong way? I’ve switched to Safari as my browser of choice, but Firefox is still worthy of praise.

VLC/MPlayer/Xine/XBMC
Hi-res version

At least one of these three applications should be on your system at all times. They’re all based on FFmpeg, an open source Swiss Army knife of audio/video handling. They all support pretty much every file format known to man, save for the proprietary ones like WMV, which is only partially supported.

XBMC deserves a special mention. Back in the Xbox1 days, XBMC was what I used to watch movie rips on my impressive-for-a-dorm-room TV. Everything about it makes sense and everything works; it was my replacement Dashboard for quite a while. Note that it’s still in development, even though Xbox1 has long since passed the torch to the 360.

Adium/Pidgin
Hi-res version

Easily the best IM application(s) out there. Every time I see someone using iChat in class, I think to myself, in a football hooligan’s tone, “You don’t know what you’re doing!” Both are based on libpurple (formerly libgaim), an OSS implementation of the various IM protocols in use today. All of us here use at CrunchGear, except Doug (who uses AIM Pro), use it for our everyday, excruciatingly mundane AIM needs. Yes, I know they don’t support video chat, and that’s terrible, but I’ve video chatted maybe twice in the past year. For that, fire up iChat and call it a day.

Both are great because they’re customizable. I use a Mario sound set with Adium, so every time I get a message I’m reminded of happier days when all I had on my plate was figuring out how to get to Special World in Super Mario World.

Aim Sniff
Hi-res version

This application, as the name implies, lets you snoop AIM conversations, which I brought up during SXSW. Legal? I don’t know. But I do know that my dorm freshman year was filled with a bunch of dullards. The most interesting IM conversation I intercepted was one of my roommates having cyber sex. Big deal.

The program was a pain in the ass to setup on my PowerBook G4 since you had to compile the source and do all sorts of wizardry (MITM attacks on my dorm’s switch, etc.) to get it up and running. Maybe similar applications exist, I don’t know, but it’s what I used. Could make a fun little weekend project.

Gimp
Hi-res version

Gimp is sorta like Photoshop, only it’s not as good. Gimpshop is similar, only it’s designed to mimic the look and feel of Photoshop a little more. It is free as in freedom, however, and will take care of most of your photo editing needs.

Audacity
Hi-res version

She’s a fully featured audio editor. I use it when I’m editing my DJ mixes, but not for much else. Definitely one of those apps that, for me, sit on your hard drive for months at a time without being used. Still, it’s the OSS audio editor.

OpenOffice.org
Hi-res version

Before Google Docs, OO.org was the best way to read and write for free on any platform. Along with Firefox, OO.og was the best example of what open source software could be. Writer, Impress and Calc are the standout components here.

Azureus
Hi-res version

Azureus is a gigantic resource hog, but for whatever reason I find it seeds torrents much better than Transmission does. It could well be my imagination, but in my experience Azureus is bulletproof. It sucks that it’s all “Vuze this, Vuze that” now, but that can, and should, be simply ignored.

If you know of any “hot” applications I miseed, and I’m 100 percent sure I did, feel free to drop me a line and/or harangue me.

All About Linux 2008

We’re endorsing the George Foreman Grill today. This is how I spend my spring break.

Before using the GFG, I didn’t know how to cook. After using the GFG, I still don’t know how to cook! Is that the fault of the grill, or the fault of my own faulty upbringing and complete lack of ambition? I’m gonna guess it’s my fault; the grill was cool.

Being that it’s 2008, I’m sure most, if not all, of you have seen the GFG advertised on TV. Some of us may have sat down for the entire half-hour infomercial, largely out of a lack of anything better to do. I say that because, given that, there’s no reason to explain exactly what the GFG is and does. Briefly, it’s a small, cramped NYC apartment-friendly grill that cooks food quickly. There’s no built-in Bluetooth nor does it feature haptic technology in any capacity.

Hello, salmonella

Since I have so little experience in the kitchen—I know how to make a mean rice and beans dish, but that requires a trip to the Goya aisle of the supermarket and several hours of preparation; a sandwich can be made in seconds—I expected to be able to plug it in, throw a piece of meat on there and, minutes later, be enjoying a fine meal. That wasn’t meant to be, dear friends! I had to buy all sorts of spices and ingredients, then prepare the meat, then set it on the grill, then grill, then eat. I guess my complaint here is that—and this isn’t a knock against the grill—cooking is hard and I don’t like doing it.

The GFG itself is pretty solid. Yes, I’ll define what “solid” means in a bit. I sprang for the smallest model. I contemplated buying the big bad booty daddy version ($1 if you understand that reference), but then realized I live alone and have no reason to cook an entire steer in 15 minutes. I’m not training to fight Randy Coutoure or anything.

Yes, “solid.” While I didn’t test the unit’s durability by throwing it down a set of stairs or off a speeding motorbike, I did accidentally drop it already. (It came in the mail a few hours ago, mind you.) It still cooked my stupid piece of chicken and, later, a couple units of broccoli. Hooray for healthy food!

I don’t know, it seems weird to me to call the grill good when so many have already done so; I’m just piling on. It serves no purpose as far as I’m concerned.

But I do have my gripes. For one, the electrical cord is entirely too short. I know most kitchen appliances have short cords, but it’s still a pain in the ass. I have to rearrange my whole kitchen area, including removing my coffee maker and blender, just to get it plugged in. Also, while cooking, it makes what could only be described as sounds you’d hear in Silent Hill. It sounds like the thing is screaming for help. It sure as hell freaked me out. (But it does smell good when cooking, I’ll give it that.)

In conclusion, if, for whatever reason, you haven’t bought one of these grills already, you can now do so with great confidence. Cooking is still a pain, what with all that nonsense prep work, but the grill works as advertised.

Now—hack ending alert—I have lunch to eat!

There wasn’t an endorsement last week—frowny face—because head whip cracker Biggs had me write that cute Usenet primer. As a result, one of you wants me thrown off the Internet for good, which I wouldn’t be altogether opposed to.

But we’re back to basics today; another plain jane, vanilla otherredundantword endorsement for your Wednesday afternoon. Digital SLRs are the focus of my attention today.

You aught to invest in a digital SLR. I don’t care if you’re taking pictures for Magnum or capturing your friends’ drunken stupidity for later Facebook placement, you need an SLR. (For a an idea of what an SLR is on a more technical level and how they differer mechanically from a point-and-shoot, mosey on over to Wikipedia for a hot minute. With any luck, the CG server will still be up and running when you’re done.)

An SLR won’t just take “better” pictures than point-and-shoots, either. Since you’re able to manually control the two basic operations of the camera—shutter speed and aperture—you can be a whole lot more creative with your photos. Take these two pics I took last autumn.

This unknown male model posed for a quick shot at a club here in New York. Due to the oddities of club lighting (there is none), I had to screw around with the settings of the camera just to be able to capture any light at all. With a point-and-shoot, all you would have had is some shoddy built-in flashed washed out image; you wouldn’t be able to appreciate this real life Ancient Greek statue. Further playing around with the settings of the camera, you can take photos with all sorts of light tricks. Trails like the kind seen in the photo below (pictured: one of the club’s janitors (left) and some sort of CEO (right)) make you look like a skilled photographer when in fact you’re just an average joe fiddling around with a couple of dials on the SLR’s body.

In my case, I started using an SLR (the old Canon Rebel XT) just to take photos at trade shows and the like. In fact, I was offered a job once at some “press event” (read: party) just because I was the only gun running around with an SLR. Granted, I never followed up with the guy because I’m a myopic jerk, but it was neat nonetheless. It wasn’t until I took a class on photojournalism and then started trolling photography message boards that I started to appreciate photography. If you’re just using a point-and-shoot, you really are limiting yourself.

True, I understand that it’s not exactly convenient to haul an SLR all over town, especially if you jump in the deep end and bring extra lenses and so forth. (Though I must say, companies like Lowepro and Crumpler make top-notch camera bags.) I totally understand that bringing an SLR to a Six Flags or whatever can be a pain. By all means, bring your point-and-shoot in that case. Just know that you won’t be able to play around with the depth of field (which would make for some really interesting photos… just check Getty for examples).

Even Barcelona striker Samuel Eto’o uses an SLR!

SLR prices aren’t too bad nowadays, either. You can get an entry level one for under a G, if not significantly cheaper. And don’t panic over which brand of camera to get. At the entry level, SLRs from the likes on Nikon and Canon and Olympus et al. are all more or less the same; there’s no real opportunity cost in picking one over the other.

Can a point-and-shoot do that?

In summary, SLRs are worth figuring out how to use. Be my guest and keep using that point-and-shoot of yours, but once you’ve tried and gotten used to SLRs there’s no reason to go back. I tired to use a point-and-shoot just yesterday and was like, “How the hell do you use this, this toy?” Needless to say, I’ve run back to my SLR.

And there you have it.

In about two hours I will be watching either Manchester United tear apart Olympique Lyon or Barcelona and its Fantastic Four give Celtic a lesson in… losing to Barcelona. In the meantime, I just have to make with my random endorsement, which has become less and less random as the weeks have gone by. I actually have to think on the subway to myself, what in God’s name am I going to extol today?

The answering to that question today is satellite radio, specifically XM since I’ve never listened to Sirius except for Oakenfold’s radio show (which I download). I assume Sirius is just as swell, but I’m not sure. I’m only one man.

So yes, XM is okay by me. Why, you ask?

I first listened to XM on a regular basis two years ago when I got some portable Samsung radio to review. The unit itself was pretty decent, if only lacking storage space (1GB flash) but boy oh boy did I listen to XM like whoa. (That’s right, “like whoa”; it’s 1998 all over again.) Some of you may have guessed given my propensity to drop DJ names left and right, but the “dance” channels were my fav. I used to be all over BPM—I’m pretty sure Above & Beyond’s “Can’t Sleep” was played every hour on the hour—but now my tastes have matured; whatever channel plays house is what I’ll listen to.

But beyond my weird like of all things house, XM has a lot of other normal people music/content. The Zeppelin channel that launched a few months ago was tremendous. No one was “bringing the Led out” or playing “Stairway” and pretending that it was the only song in their entire catalogue. It treated Zeppelin fans like sentient beings, which, in radio, is damn rare.

I’m also a fan of all those [indie] rock channels, like XMU and Ethel. And what’s wrong with a little Fox News to get your patriotic blood pumping, or some Opie & Anthony for the latest in whateveritistheytalkabout? (Ron and Fez, noon to 3.)

But you know what’s even better about XM? It’s how much it makes regular, commercial (terrestrial) radio look like complete garbage.

Tomorrow morning turn on your local rock station and soak in the utter banality of it all. Castrated jocks reading off a pre-approved script that’s designed to offend no one and bore everyone. Heaven forbid you say something that might offend one gentleman or gentlelady and you’ll be whisked right out the door followed by an apology the next morning proclaiming the station’s innocence.

You may think that has little to do with the radio experience, but if jocks, who are supposed to be programming the music on their own (not PDs) and acting like an actual person on the air, are held to ridiculous standards, the medium suffers. If they’re too concerned with saying the wrong thing and finding themselves with a pink slip, they can hardly be expected to produce good, interesting radio.

And never mind the song selection. On XM I can hear all the trashy pop music I want, along with stupidly obscure songs on Deep Tracks and terrible 90s tracks that remind me of my perfect childhood. What do I have on FM here in New York? Two rock stations playing the same songs we’ve heard since the beginning of time and some other crap I have no interest in. Hanniy’s cool, but that’s about it here.

So that sorta turned into a rant against the current state of radio, but that plays into XM’s strengths. For $15 a month, or the price or a couple drinks at your local dive bar, you don’t have to put up with that nonsense. And I’m nothing if not looking for a way to avoid nonsense.

XM Satellite Radio

Back to tech today. Well, software. Whatever. It was raining hard and windy and I dropped my umbrella in a garbage by accident earlier. I’m not kidding*.

Today I’m giving a “shout out” to some the smaller Mac apps that make my life a little easier. Small apps, not the big obvious ones like iTunes or Firefox.

Aurora, Unison, NetNewsWire, PithHelmet and Growl are all little Mac wonders. If you use Apple’s OS, be sure to check them out after reading the following chicken scratch.

Aurora

Hi-res version

This application turns your Mac into an alarm clock. Unlike a normal person who owns a clock+radio, I prefer to use my computer as an environmentally unfriendly alarm clock. My iMac’s on 24 hours a day as it is (building my BitTorrent ratio at night), so might as well use it to wake up. Aurora works with iTunes to play whatever playlist you want at whatever time you want. I wake up to those songs every day.

You can also configure Aurora to launch any application. It’s pretty nice waking up and having Mail.app, Adium and Safari all open as soon as I sit down.

The thing about Aurora is that you can use it to independently set the volume you want to wake up to. Once 6 a.m. rolls around, “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” literally scares me out of my bed. The rest of my system sounds are unchanged, but for the duration of the alarm the volume is as loud as I want it to be.

Unison

Hi-res version

I use Usenet a lot to download whatever the alt.binaries.* groups have to offer. Usually just dumb stuff like lasts night’s episode of Conan or whatever or the latest opus from Lil Wayne. If you’re on a Mac and use Usenet, you need to be using Unison. The interface is so Mac-like you wonder how you ever downloaded binaries using MT-Newswatcher or Thoth. (Funny story about Thoth: the developer stopped work on it some time ago because it was being pirated left and right. A pirated program used for piracy. How 21st Century.)

Setup is painless, just your news server settings and where you want the downloads to go. I won’t explain any further re: Usenet since it’s one of those “the first rule of Usenet is you don’t talk about Usenet” things. That said, my favorite feature has to be the built-in music streamer. Say you’re browsing an MP3 group (the indie one is one of my favs) but don’t want to actually download the song you’re interested in. Just hit the play button and Unison will stream the song. That way, you get an idea of what the song or band is all bout before downloading the album to your hard drive. Very handy and very much the way I discovered more than a few new bands and DJs.

NetNewsWire

Hi-res version

As a blogger, you’re pretty much forced to use RSS to follow all the different blogs out there. NetNewsWire is what I use. It doesn’t do anything special, but it’s a solid reader: doesn’t crash, spiffy interface, etc. And now it’s free (it used to be shareware) as in beer. It’s got a bunch of features I can’t be bothered to use—apparently you can script the hell out of it—but as a reader it does the job, which is all you can ask for.

In one sense, NetNewsWire is only as good as the RSS feeds you give it, but I’ve got it loaded up with some gems. I’m waiting for Nas’ new album to drop and rather than head to a BitTorrent site every 10 minutes, I’ll just use the provided RSS feed to have NetNewsWire check for me. So every morning when I fire the app up, I can check to see if TheAlbumWhoseNameIProbablyWouldGetInTroubleForSayingHere was leaked. Ding!

PithHelmet
No pic here :-(
PithHelmet is sorta like AdBlock for Safari (my browser of choice nowadays… Firefox was cool was it was called Phoenix). That’s all I use it for, at least. Sometimes you just gotta block annoying ads while online. If you use Safari, PithHelmet is the way to do it.

Growl

Hi-res version

Growl is one of the best little apps on the Mac, so much so that I’m surprised Apple hasn’t ripped it off yet like it did with Konfabulator. It’s a system-wide notification thingy. Anytime something happens on your Mac, be it you get an IM, your download finishes or a new song begins playing, you get a little message on your screen saying so. Keep in mind that applications have to be coded to work with Growl, so your favorite app, whatever that might be, may not work with it. The most useful Growl notification, the one for Mail.app that display the sender, subject and first line of an e-mail, doesn’t work with Leopard so far, but the new version is in beta and should be out soon enough.

If I could give an honorable mention, it’d go to Quicksilver, which I used to use before Apple came out with Spotlight. It’s an application launcher (and a whole lot of other things I never used) that makes opening apps and docs faster. Just hit the hotkey—mine was control+spacebar—and the first letter of what you want to open and Quicksilver scans your hard drive for the relevant item. Seeing as though Spotlight now does that and it’s built into the OS, I haven’t been using Quicksilver lately. But maybe you’d appreciate its fancier features.

Those are just a few of the many little apps that make Mac great. Check MacUpdate or Versiontracker (or use their RSS feeds) for other neat little apps. HTH.

*I’m really not kidding. I was in the bathroom after class and was trying to dry my hands with paper towels from the little dispenser. As I pulled the little lever, I dropped my umbrella in the garbage can right underneath. “You douche!” I muttered to myself, then had to walk like five blocks in the Perfect Storm rain to get to the nearest Duane Reade to buy another umbrella. A day in the life!

Watch this video first. Listen to the words, man.

/me Clears throat.
/sings 18 and 0 (18 and 0) one more to go (one more to go), SuperBoooooooooowl.

Patriots fans no doubt heard that song a few times between when they beat the Chargers to clinch the AFC and Sunday night. Too bad they’ll now have sing, 18 and one (18 and one) what have we done, we suuuuuuuuck. Get real, Pats fans, the Giants absolutely destroyed your little team.

Today’s endorsement is given, with great pride, to the New York Football Giants. Dynasty!

Before I get into the details of this endorsement, let me say that in all my 22 years, this was the first NFL season I paid to. I was always a baseball guy growing up and had picked up on the Champions League—fútbol—in high school. But after constant harrassment from some of my friends, who questioned my Americanness, for not watching football. I tried to follow this as best I could, time permitting. To be fair, the media’s (ESPN and Drudge) constant “OMG THE PATS ARE UNSTOPPABLE” helped keep my interests… even though, so I’m told, the Colts go 11-0 pretty much every year. But I’m not from Boston and don’t give a damn about its sports teams.

So the Giants. What a wishy-washy team. That’s part of what makes their victory so amazing. Starting the season 0-2 and with a quarterback who the papers here loved to vilify, you half-expected the Jets to do better. (But then you laughed at the prospect of the Jets winning their division much less the world title.) The team’s performance on Sunday was magisterial. Praise has and will continue to be heaped upon Eli, but you’d be silly to ignore the team’s defense that night in Phoenix. Sack after sack it shut down the Patriots’ vaunted offense—Moss made what, like, one catch all game? In our dumb Internet jargon, the Giants pwned Brady. Stamp a big FAIL on his forehead. No disrespect to Brady, of course. One day I hope to be a part of the biggest choke in sports history.

18-1. Thus must really sting.

To paraphrase a friend of mine who’s a legit Giants fan and could well bleed blue, the victory was like the Declaration of Independence being signed all over again except it won’t be John Hancock but Eli Manning who has the biggest signature.

I also enjoy Strahan’s wiseass attitude. Watch any interview he does and just do a slow clap for him. He deserves it.

Big deal, Kennedy endorsed Obama. Today I endorse surround sound and I fully expect sales to increase one million fold.

Yes, after a brief hiatus in which I spent my time watching Home and Garden TV and refreshing Drudge every eight seconds, I return today with the endorsements. No doubt many of you don’t give a damn what I think—you have something in common with my father—but pay attention to this endorsement. It’ll win you friends.

With this, I mean to say that surround sound is good. Oft ignored by people for reasons of ignorance or practicality—a surround sound setup in a cramped apartment?—surround sound is as much a necessity for that home theater feel as an HDTV is. Whereas I’m sure, based on legally inadmissible anecdotal evidence, that most folks are keen to go to BestBuy or Amazon, say, “I want a plasma with that HD thing” you, CrunchGear reader, owe it to yourself and your never-stays-quiet-when-you-need-her-to wife (or husband!) to rock a surround sound system.

[Note: I'm not recommending any specific models here, just the concept of surround sound.]

First, like in all two-bit academic papers (or endorsements, as is the case here), we have to define what a surround system is, and what it is not. For our purposes here, surround sound is defined as (at least) a 5.1 Dolby Digital system—bonus points if you can afford a higher end lossless surround sound system. (Those Blu-rays and HD DVDs you’ve been buying? They come with lossless, high-def audio that’s better than regular old Dolby Digital.) What surround sound isn’t, in my endorsing opinion, is those two-speaker jawns that are advertised on late night TV. How on Earth you expect to make me feel like I’m surround by sound with only two speakers I’ll never understand. I don’t believe it, wouldn’t buy it and won’t put my good name on the line for it. Five speakers (or more) or bust. Take me to bed or lose me forever.

Why should you spend any sort of money on this aural excess? Watch Saving Private Ryan with a surround sound setup. Play The Orange Box or Assassin’s Creed with a surround sound setup. Then do that all over again, but using your TV’s built-in speakers. Awful. If you want to sash your friend with a chair after hearing the difference I totally understand. Bullets whiz by your ear—there’s trouble afoot!; the pitter-patter of footsteps compel you to look over your shoulder; sword and shield clash in 300, the unmistakeable ringing of metal cause you to cringe. It’s all good.

It’s all good.

Surely, then, something must suck about surround sound, right? I understand that price can be an issue for some people. I got my personal setup (these Pioneer speakers) around Christmastime on some sort of Buy.com sale for just over $100. That’s a hell of a deal, believe me, especially since I was a new Safari tab away from dropping $400 on an Onkyo setup. Volume could also be an issue. My speakers are terribly loud. When I do a little Xboxing during the day on the weekends, all bets are off; it’s cranked up to 11. Sue me, neighbors. What are you gonna do, call the landlord and get me kicked out of my Queens apartment? Do me the favor, please. At night, though, I am respectful, lowering the volume to decent levels. In fact, sometimes I have to lower the volume so much that I need to watch/play with subtitles. It sucks, but I won’t be a total jerk about it. I fully realize that late at night my neighbors aren’t interested in hearing my TV. Fair enough.

So yeah, surround sound. Catch it.

There was controversy when I endorsed the movie “Once” last week, primarily because some folks (where “some folks” is defined as one of my friends) argued that movie reviews have no place on a tech site. Well, hater(s), this is my column and I’ll endorse whatever the heck I want. Today, though, I’m bringing it back to tech.

Wikipedia, you just got endorsed.

Wikipedia has replaced Google in my life, as far as looking up information is concerned (as opposed to maps and e-mail and so forth). I use it both for work—when did that phone come out? what studios exclusively support Blu-ray?—and for fun—which Crash Test Dummies did I have growing up?, how much is De Beers worth?, how great is Arrested Development?—which makes me both a nerd and jerk.

On top of that, Wikipedia helped me ace my political science final exams that I took on Tuesday and Wednesday. So much for it being inaccurate.

I took two exams this week, one in a class called Western European Politics and the other in National Security. Briefly, Western Euro dealt with the changing landscape of politics in Western Europe, how the democracies of the UK, France, Germany and Italy came about, what’s the deal with the EU as an institution, etc. National Sec was about the Patriot Act (which I defended), the scarcity of oil and why Saudi Arabia matters so much (generally, it has plenty of oil but doesn’t use it, therefore it can control world prices), and so on. Wikipedia has so much information on these topics, often in infinitely more readable prose than that of my overpriced textbooks.

Like, check this out. From this one little chart, I was able to gain a spatial understanding of the the EU’s three pillars: who does what and where, who hooked up with whom at the party on Saturday night, etc. One chart, no doubt put together by some busybody with too much time on his hands, brought it all home in a way that my awful textbook spent six or so pages struggling to describe.

I remember when I was taking an astronomy class two years ago, I would often look up concepts and theories on Wikipedia because the textbook we used did such a terrible job of explaining it. Oh, that’s what a parsec is. So kids, don’t listen to your teachers when they say Wikipedia can’t be trusted, because it totally can be. I mean, use your better judgment, obviously. Once, for example, I wanted to check what information Wikipedia had on détente, maybe something that my awful textbook left out. Yet the entry for detente was describing something like Israel’s role in shaping U.S. foreign policy in vaguely anti-Semitic terms. Something clearly was amiss. Ten minutes later I refreshed the page and all the correct info was there. See, self-policing works.

School work aside, I certainly can’t be the only person who goes on Wikipedia to look up things like old Nickelodeon TV shows and to learn the entire history of FC Barcelona in English, Spanish and Catalan?. It’s such a time sink.

Wikipedia, you have greatly enhanced my quality of life. Thank you very much.

Wikipedia

Well, well, I’ve just been giving permission to expand my “Random Endorsement” column beyond the world of tech. That’s fantastic news for everyone, because, if you couldn’t already tell, I was running out of tech-related things to endorse.

Today I endorse the movie “Once,” easily the best movie I’ve seen all year, and that includes “American Gangster.” (Here’s a fun game: every time Denzel Washington throws a cup or knocks a cup off a table, take a shot of your liquor of choice. All Denzel does these days to show he’s angry is knock over cups.) Please note that I haven’t seen “There Will Be Blood” or “No Country For Old Men” yet. My opinion may change when I see those.

Spoilers!!! (Not too many, though.)

Set in present-day Dublin, the movie tells the story of a street performer, “Guy” since we never learn his name, and a Czech girl, “Girl.” They meet when Guy is playing one of his own songs at night (as opposed to a cover). Girl likes the song and comes back the next day, thus beginning their friendship.

Naturally, Guy thinks Girl likes him, but he finds out that no, he’s just a douche who completely misread the situation. The plot isn’t the most complex I’ve ever experienced—that honor belongs to “Dude, Where’s My Car?”—but it’s so easy to believe you’re sitting there like, “yeah, I could see this happening to me, like, later today.”

So the movie is kind of a love story. Sue me.

It’s also a bit of a musical. But not musical in the “all singing-all dancing” sense, but in that the movie is centered around music: a Guy and his guitar and a Girl and her piano. Look, I understand that sounds incredibly lame, but it’s really not. The soundtrack is top notch if you’re into bands like Elliot Smith and that whole indie scene. I’d say Beirut, but that guy/band/whatever is more weird and not as singer-songwriter-ish.

What else can I say about the movie? I liked it, loved, it has a fine soundtrack and I’ve since downloaded Guy’s band’s back catalog.

The DVD comes out next week, but something tells me if you put “once” into a certain pirate-themed BitTorrent search engine you’ll find a rip.

Once [Fox Searchlight]

After throwing Peter under the bus last week with my random endorsement defending e-books, I felt it was necessary to return the random endorsement to its roots. That is, giving me an opportunity to take everyday objects and laud their capabilities, often hating on other present-day “tech” in the process.

Today I endorse umbrellas, albeit somewhat reservedly.

I’m mainly endorsing umbrellas because of their simplicity: they block stuff, be it rain or the sun’s harmful rays. That’s it. No shoe-horned whiz-bang features or embedded ads for you to deal with. There’s no built-in social networking—not everything needs to be a social network; frankly, I could give a damn what my stupid friends are up to at all hours of the day, nor do I care what junk they’re buying online—nor crappy GPS (like in that episode of “The Office”). It’s a gadget (at least I’m considering it one for the purposes of this wonderful column) that works out of the box, no assembly required, no Engrish manual to sift through.

Held in one hand (or two if you’re crazy!), the umbrella is activated with the touch of a single button. By pressing it, the one part instantly shoots up from the other part, granting you protection from the elements all in one slick motion. It’s sort of like sliding to unlock, only better. Better because I think the iPhone is dumb.

No, the umbrella isn’t perfect—they break too easily. Like, if there’s even a hint of wind prepare to have it turn inside-out, possibly even blow away, making you look like a complete boob in the process. You’d think after however many thousands of years someone would have invented an umbrella that doesn’t turn inside out at the drop of a hat. (I guess engineers are too busy working on integrating Web 8.0 into my cup of coffee.)

If anyone wants to send me endorsement ideas that’d be great. I think I’m scheduled to endorse potato peelers next week.

This endorsement is by no means random. It is a direct challenge to one of the many well thought out theses put forward by Peter Ha in his terrific Kindle review:

I’ll be the first to admit that e-books suck. They’re great in theory, but they’ll never catch on. There’s nothing that screams dork more than an e-book. I, like many others, enjoy the real thing. There’s just something comforting about having a paper book to carry around, to bunny ear, scratch notes on, highlight words/phrases and whatever else you may like to do.

I’ll spare you the rest.

Imagine you could resurrect Christopher Columbus. You’d be all, “Yo, Cristobal, what’s up? Check this out.” Then you point upward at an airplane. “How’s this grab ya: we’ve invented these things called airplanes that can take you clear across the Atlantic Ocean in six hours. Oh, and check this out. It’s called the Kindle. On this little plastic thing, we can read every book ever written anywhere we want. If we’re on the beach and want to read ‘Black Hat‘ we can; if we’re on the train and want to read ‘State of Emergency‘ we can.”

After Columbus freaks out from seeing the airplane overhead, he’ll probably be picking up his socks. You see, for the Kindle concept—the e-book—will have completely knocked them off.

The e-book, for all its faults, is the future. And I completely endorse it.

When I read Ha’s opening line, I’m pretty sure I blacked out. How in the hell can he so casually cast aside a technology that stands to revolutionize not only the way we read, but the way we learn? Like, it really is mind boggling.

Let’s take schools. I know that as I was making my way through high school, studies were coming out showing that kids’ backs were being destroyed by having to carry tens of pounds of books in a backpack. Some schools purchased two sets of books for students, one for home and one for in-class. But that’s expensive, especially after purchasing several editions of the same textbook after a few years. Why wouldn’t you, either as a student or a parent, want to see a little hunk of plastic with all of the required textbooks installed? For the schools themselves, when it comes time to update the books—I remember being in 11th grade American History class and still reading about the possible threat posed by the Soviet Union—all that’s required is a mere software update.

Yeah, that type of Communism will never take off. Who wants students to have access to information?

As for the “I like holding a book in my hand as I read it” quip—bologna. Again, Peter shows that his grasp of the issue goes from A to B. What difference does it make if I’m holding a couple hundred pages of paper or a hunk of plastic? I’m still holding one object, only now I have several books to choose from rather than just one. And to the “waaah, who needs to read more than one book at a time?” crowd. I do. What if I want to finish one book on the train and start reading the next one right after that? Or, something that we can all relate to, take your iPod and put only one song on it. Just one. I mean, if you subscribe to the “one and done” policy, then why the hell should anyone ever want more than one song on their person at all hours of the day?

Like it or not, e-books are the future. I simply cannot understand why some people cling to their paper books like they’re some sacrosanct instrument of American Virtue. “Real books won’t crash.” Yeah, smarty pants, then how come you put up with cellphones that crash and iPods that freeze? That’s exactly the opposite mentality I’d expect from someone even remotely tuned into technology. (I say remotely because not every revision of every cellphone ever is worth analyzing as a “game changer,” or some other empty phrase.) Why invent the cellphone when POTS phones work great? Who needs a CD player when you can, I don’t know, invite the Foo Fighters to your living room for a live rendition of “Everlong”? Who needs a sink with running water—I mean, I could just go, on horseback, to the Long Island Sound and grab some water when I need it.

I 100 percent, without any hesitation endorse e-books. Not the Kindle specifically, but it’s the closet device thus far to even come close to exploiting the potential of this technology.

Enjoy Thanksgiving. Have fun cooking your turkey over an open fire because, you know, the oven will never take off. It’s a stupid idea and never should be spoken of again.

Like I said last week, my random endorsement column will be a little unorthodox sometimes. It won’t be all Product A is great, I endorse it. No, sirs.

Today I endorse you all, the CrunchGear readers. And a special endorsement+ to all you who leave comments. Aside from our delightful chat room, y’all make it worth getting up stupid early to do this.

Take a bow.

Why bother endorsing you guys? For starters, quite literally, without you we’d be nowhere. Actually, no, I know where we’d be: Biggs would be in Poland working in agriculture, Vince would be a DJ who just so happened to own a weather Web site, Hickey would probably be president of the United States of America, and Ha would in Koreatown hawking the same electronics he writes about. I’d be an even more anonymous college student than I already am.

That you take even five minutes out of your day to read our ramblings is quite humbling. (That people even read my nonsense is particularly amazing: it’s all house music and Opie & Anthony references and calling Hillary Clinton a jerk.) I don’t know what our age demo is like—I imagine you’re guys for the most part—but you can’t all be 15-year-old kids reading us after school. Reading us during your lunch break, or while you should actually be working… all very nice of you.

I even like you guys when you say terrible things about me and mine. Like that OiNK Leopard leak post from this past summer. Look at the comments: that’s some kind of vitriol right there. What did I do to deserve that? All I did was say that the build was leaked on OiNK. And let’s be real for a second: did you think that the RIAA or whoever didn’t know about the site? What’s the saying about security through obscurity. Oh, right: It doesn’t work. Oh well. I had a blast reading the horrific comments. Keep ‘em coming.

If there’s one thing where you guys sorta let me down it’s the contests. We put a solid five to six minutes coming up with ways to give away all sorts of stuff and get very few entrants? What gives? The day I gave away some iTunes song, I only got a handful of response and all you had to do was e-mail me. Don’t you get it? Since a relatively low number of people enter the contests, your odds of winning are huge. Do it up. We’ll give away a cactus or something.

But that’s a minor point.

The bottom line is, you guys rule. Really.

HOUSE MUSIC!

I see myself as slightly less corrupt Krusty the Clown. I won’t put my name on just any product, no sir. There won’t be any Deleon Brand Grade F Meat Substitute nor will you see my name on books I don’t approve of. So when I endorse a product, rest assured that you can say to yourself, “Hey man, if Deleon’s down with that, I need to be down with that.” Then we can throw our hands in the air and party like it…

Anyhow, today I throw my good name behind the iPod nano. I know, it’s not exactly breaking news for someone to speak highly of the iPod nano, but as the weeks go by, this column will probably become Dennis Miller-like in its obscurity, so best to start as simply as possible.

Why am I endorsing the iPod nano and not, say, any other member of the iPod family? Well, I eliminated the Touch from my consideration because I’m not about to spend $400 on something that’ll stay in my pocket 99 percent of the time. Since I primarily use iPods for their music-playing ability, the touch screen interface is essentially irrelevant to me. (Hence, my general “eh, so what?” attitude toward the iPhone.) I did consider getting a 160GB classic, but when I played with one at an Apple Store, I noticed a serious amount of lag caused by the hard drive. That would have driven me insane. More insane than I already am. No thank you.

So the nano it is. The black one, to be exact. I use it mainly so I don’t have to communicate with the mutants that live in New York. Like, if I’m on the subway, why in God’s name would I want to hear a mariachi band? No offense to those guys, but if I’m heading home after a long day of taking notes and eating subsidized dining hall food, I do not want to have to deal with any unnecessary, external agitators. This includes pan-handlers, kids selling candy, guys promoting the invasion of some country while donating clean socks to another, etc. It’s so, so annoying. Like, I’m pretty sure I’d have a heart attack in Union Square if it weren’t for the nano.

So in many ways the nano prevents me from having to deal with people, which can only be a plus in my book. Go to class, listen to a podcast or two en route, keep to myself, maybe do a little reading on the way, etc. Happy as a pig at a monster truck show.

So that’s essentially it. I endorse the nano because it makes my life slightly more livable (which stems from the fact that I’m neurotic). I can take it to the gym without worrying about having a two-pound brick in my pocket and it fits enough songs so that I’m not just listening to “Stayin’ Alive” over and over again, which was a problem in the old days of MP3 players.