I’m in the midst of a huge round-up of iPhone golf-specific GPS (range finder) and/or scorecard apps for Macworld. As of now, I’ve identified 32 of them, but I’m wondering if I’ve missed any. If you have a second, please check out this list and let me know (via a comment here or via Twitter) if you’re aware of any other apps.

Read on for the list (note that some of these may be mis-categorized as I haven’t tested all of them yet)…
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Recently a friend introduced me to something called literal videos. A literal video is a remake, with a twist, of a popular music video, usually something older from the 1980s or 1990s.

The twist in the remake is that the lyrics for the song in the video are changed to reflect what’s actually happening in the video. So if there’s a shot of a car driving down the street, the literal video’s lyrics will be something along the lines of “So there’s a car … driving … driving down the street.”

The words are sung by someone doing their best to match the musical sound and pacing of the original singer, making it seem like this is how the video has always been.

It’s actually much harder to explain than it is to demonstrate. So, without further ado, here are four of the funniest (to me, at any rate) literal videos I’ve found. If you haven’t seen the original versions of these videos, the literal videos may not be quite so funny; I’ve included links to the originals, too.

• Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart [original • literal video]. This one is, by far, my favorite. Some of the lines are absolutely hysterical. After watching it way too many times, there’s no way I can watch the original now without hearing the literal video version’s lines playing in my head.
• Meatloaf’s I’d do Anything For Love [original • literal video]. Another very good effort, with some bits that are laugh-out-loud funny.
• The Beatles Penny Lane [original • literal video]. John, Paul, George, and Ringo have never been quite so funny…and what is with that horse?
• Journey’s Separate Ways [original • literal video]. Not as good as the first three, but still worth a chuckle or two.

I’ve searched YouTube pretty extensively, and these are the best examples I’ve found. Anyone have any other recommendations that I may have missed?

This is a story about chance, and how, well, chancy it can be.

Today I flew across the country to visit my dad for a few days. The first leg of the flight left at 6:00am, which meant a very early start to my day (even by my standards). Out the door at just after 4:00am, after parking and shuttling to the terminal, it was a bit after 5:00am. Check-in went fine, so then it was off to the security lines. At the Portland airport, they run two security lines–one for first class and one for those of us in the cattle car.

Both lines were quite long this morning, but moving at a good pace. As I neared the front of the commoner line, I looked to my right and noticed a familiar face standing almost right next to me, in the first class line. It was Bill (names have been changed, as I didn’t get permission to share this story), whom I worked with at my last job (prior to joining Macworld full time).

I hadn’t seen Bill in person for probably three years (I left the company in 2005). However, Bill and I had been trading voicemails for a few weeks, trying to get together for lunch and to set up a round of golf at some point. But we kept missing each for one reason or another.

So it was very odd to stumble into Bill at the airport, especially at 5:15am on a Tuesday morning. He was traveling with his family, heading off for a week-long vacation. What was even more chancy about this encounter is that, for at least a couple days, Bill and I will both be in the same city on the east coast! How very odd.
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The following is my rough timeline for the aging of Jack Bauer, lead character on 24. The original inspiration for this post was the 24 Wikipedia entry. While browsing, I noticed the way time absolutely flies between 24 seasons.

24 first aired in November 2001, and was set on the day of the California presidential primary, but no specific year was provided. Just to make things simple, I’ve arbitrarily chosen 2000, which puts day one in June of 2000. Any year, however, would work just fine for tracking Jack’s age.

In June of 2000, Kiefer Sutherland was 34.5, so let’s assume that was Jack Bauer’s age as well. From there, as the seasons progress, time moves rapidly. In the following table, all of the After Prior Day values came from the 24 Timeline on wikia.com.

The only real issue with this is that the timing of the Redemption movie is off–it’s supposed to occur on the day of the presidential inauguration, which has been on January 20th or 21st for over 70 years now, but the timeline shows it in February. I’m not sure why there’s a discrepancy.

Little is known about season eight, other than it’s set in New York City and will begin “very quickly” after the end of season seven. Let’s hope so, lest Jack reach mandatory retirement age prior to the day’s start date. Of course, after preventing seven major terrorist actions in just over 13 virtual years, Jack’s probably earned early retirement!

Here’s how it’s done…

1. Have your cat awaken you at 4:30am, pawing your face to let you know he’s hungry.
2. Head downstairs in a stupor, leaving the annoyingly-bright lights off.
3. Open cat food and start scooping it into the cat’s bowl, letting the cat know just how you feel about the 4:30am wake-up pawing.
4. See the light from, and hear the click of, the downstairs bathroom light coming on.
5. Have heart attack.

OK, so clearly I didn’t actually have a full-on heart attack. Instead, my pulse merely doubled and I had an amazing adrenaline surge.

As soon as I started breathing again (quietly), I reasoned that any intruder with even a quarter of a brain wouldn’t actually bother to turn on the bathroom light, nor would they have ignored my easily-audible talking to the cat.

So what was the cause of the spurious pulse-quickening light? It turns out that our six-year-old daughter apparently heard me, and had gotten up to use the bathroom. Why she chose to come downstairs–very quietly, I might add–I have no idea, as there’s a bathroom just down the hall from her room.

Needless to say, after bundling our daughter off to bed again, I found it basically impossible to go back to sleep, given the adrenaline coursing through my veins.

I’m a big fan of golf, both real and virtual. The best iPhone golf game I’ve yet found is Tiger Woods PGA Tour, from EA. At $10, it’s not cheap, but it is fun. It does, however, suffer from one fairly annoying problem: it’s way too easy in its default mode. As an example, here are the final results from a four-round tournament at St. Andrews:

Per round, my average score (my player’s first name is Wheat) was 15.25 under par, which is simply unbelievable. Look at second place–14 under par for four rounds, or worse than I do for one round! At about 3.5 strokes under par per round, however, the second place score is much more realistic.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that TW for the iPhone includes both a caddy and a putt preview feature. Combined, those two features making putting the ball ridiculously easy. Here’s how to use those two features together to crush the PGA events in Tiger Woods.
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Greetings, my faithful handful of readers…

For an upcoming Macworld project, I need a large volume of email. To that end, I’ve set up a new account in which to build my collection. The address is:

ineedalearjet@gmail.com

Please feel free to share this address with anyone, post it on your blog, Tweet your friends about it, etc. I’m looking for a big collection; I assume most of it will be spam, but if you feel like just dropping a line and saying “hello!,” that’s fine, too! Note that I won’t be replying to any messages sent to this account.

Thanks in advance for help spreading the word!

Note: Updated and republished for 10.5.7’s release; skip it unless you really really care about all the OS X releases. Originally published on November 14th, 2005.

Below the break is a table showing all major releases of OS X, from the public beta through the latest public version, which is 10.5.7 as of May 12th, 2009. Note that this release marks the 50th release of OS X (counting both major and minor versions, and skipping two ill-fated updates). Wow.

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With this morning’s semi-annual changing of the clock for Daylight Savings Time (DST), I’m once again left to ponder…why, in this era of GPS-equipped automobiles, do I have to manually set the clock in my car? We had, until very recently (we sold one), three cars with factory GPS units. Of those three, only one uses the GPS signal to set the car’s clock. In the other two vehicles, we have to manually adjust the clock, even though an extremely accurate time and date signal is one of the features of the GPS satellites.

So my car knows the date, and it knows the correct time…so why can’t it figure out that DST has started or ended?

Things have definitely improved over the last 30 years, though–today, we had only a handful of clocks to change. In addition to one of the cars, there were a couple of televisions (another device that seems to me should be capable of changing its own clock), our microwave, and a few assorted clock radios and wall clocks. But most of the clocks we own synchronize automatically with a time signal, so they were correct when I woke up this morning. The computers, of course, handle the change seamlessly. (The fact that I stopped wearing a wrist watch a few years ago also helps; I have ten or so sitting in a drawer somewhere, but I no longer bother to set them.)

I’m not sure I’ll live long enough to see a DST start/stop day where I don’t need to manually set a clock…but I’m hoping I do!

For quite a while, I’ve wanted an electric radio controlled (R/C) helicopter–one of the small ones you can fly around inside the house. Over the last couple years, I’ve tried cheap versions (complete waste of money; they fly like crud), and the expensive versions seemed too, well, expensive for what would be nothing more than a silly time waster.

Then, just before Christmas, E-Flite released the new Blade mCX, a smaller, lighter, and easier-to-fly version of their Blade CX2. The CX2 was one of the expensive models I’d passed on earlier. The mCX, however, comes in $50 cheaper than the CX2, and came close enough to my self-imposed $100 limit that I bought myself one for Christmas :). (Click the image at left [and any image in this writeup] for a larger view.)

After only a few minutes with the mCX, I was hooked. This machine is unlike any other R/C helicopter I’ve ever tried to fly. Within a couple minutes of my first power-up, I had it hovering in place, and could maneuver it relatively well. Even for me, a complete novice to R/C flying, this machine is incredibly easy to fly. R/C purists probably dislike it, though–relying on dual counter-rotating rotor blades and a gyro, the mCX isn’t a “real” R/C helicopter in any sense. But for my desires, it’s (nearly) perfect.

The mCX weighs one ounce (with battery), and has a rotor span of just 7.5 inches. Everything about this machine is tiny, including the motors (the round items in the image at left) and the battery (visible at the bottom of the image; it’s got a red dot on it). The front of the machine is the brains, though–a circuit board there holds the gyro, motor control units, fully proportional servos, and radio receiver. Amazing that it all weighs but an ounce.

Combine that with very sensitive flight controls, and you can fly the mCX almost anywhere–I’ve flown it above the garage’s workbench, for instance. The throttle is amazingly precise, making it easy to fly at whatever altitude you desire. As a brief example, here’s a video of me flying around in the den, trying to keep the mCX within view of the fixed video camera:

Read on for more about this amazing little machine…
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