Awesomest bear ever!

The producers of Channel Five motoring show Fifth Gear are quick learners: it only takes them one or two seasons after a format change to figure out how to make the show interesting again. This would be more of a virtue if they didn’t revamp the show about every three seasons, but we’ll take what we can get.

The pointless crush my car/breakdown/stupid car tricks segments: gone. The daytime-TV interstitials: less cutesy and less traditional (though some may not like the new Paul Greengrass shakycam feel to the new interstitials). The great reviews and insightful chatter: piled on! More Tiff: check. More Tom: check. Really, it’s an improvement on almost every element of the last season, itself a major improvement over the horrific season 10.

The 12th season really leaves just one major problem spot to deal with. Why is it that the British motoring shows seem to think we want more celebrities in our shows? Perhaps I’d care more if I actually knew any of the British footballers and talk show hosts Fifth Gear has on every week, but even if you replaced every single one with Christina Ricci the celeb segments would still be horrible. Celebrities driving cars do not often make for good television, and definitely not when Jason Plato pulls his usual “ha ha, look at how much I can scare the civvies by driving sideways!” schtick. The only segment in recent memory that bucked this trend was the Girls Aloud segment, and then only because one or two of the women actually seemed interested in going fast. Even then we got Plato’s lovely “don’t let girls around your Ferraris” comment at the end. Even that was ten times more exciting than the usual “let’s give this cricketer a Lamborghini and see how fast he can drive it” spot.

So consider this another well-reasoned plea to the producers of Fifth Gear. This time we’re only asking for one thing: remove the insipid celebrity fawning spots, add in another car review (or hell, bring Jon Bentley back in front of the camera, he was actually making decent, informative segments before he disappeared), and suddenly you’ve got a top-notch, high-quality show that acts perfectly as the higher minded, more journalistic compliment to Top Gear’s crazy antics.

Of course, if the usual trend continues, next year we’ll get an all-new Fifth Gear where Vicki Butler-Henderson co-hosts with Clint Eastwood’s monkey live from the Chunnel tunnel, Tiff Needell is replaced by Tim Lovejoy in drag, and all the segments feature Geri Halliwell giving you tips on how to do handbrake turns. Stay tuned.

There must be another Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie coming out or something, because another American city has completely overreacted to what it thought was a terrorist plot, and is now seeking restitution from the evildoers. Only in this case the “terrorist plot” was sprinkling flour in an Ikea parking lot to mark a running route, and the “evildoers” are two siblings laying the trail for a local beer run club.

Police fielded a call just before 5 p.m. that someone was sprinkling powder on the ground. The store was evacuated and remained closed the rest of the night. The incident prompted a massive response from police in New Haven and surrounding towns.

(…)

Mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga said the city plans to seek restitution from the Salchows, who are due in court Sept. 14.

“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” she said. “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.”

If you’re one of those people who’ve been avoiding and shit-talking Boston for their incredible lack of common sense regarding the Mooninite sign idiocy, you can now add New Haven to the list of places to avoid at all costs, lest you inherit their particular brand of lunacy.

Colin McRae, legendary rally driver and winner of the 1995 World Rally Championship driver’s title, is dead after a helicopter crash. All that’s left, essentially, is to officially identify the bodies, but McRae was believed to be piloting the helicopter and there were no survivors. Also on board was his five-year-old son and friends of the family, including another child.

In memory, two YouTube clips—one from his long, storied career in the WRC, and a much more recent clip from the X Games. Watch the X Games clip all the way through and you’ll see why McRae is considered one of the top rally drivers ever.

It hasn’t even been two years since the rallying world lost world champ Richard Burns to a brain tumour. The sudden loss of McRae hurts just as much. RIP.

Apple has taken measures against third-party iPod apps by encrypting the database file so that it’s locked to one particular iPod and prevents unauthorized modifications to the file. Result: any software that was able to upload music to previous iPod generations will no longer be able to do so with the current generation, at least until someone reverse-engineers the SHA1 hash creation process.

I have a fourth-generation iPod that’s served me quite well over the past two and a half years, but this is the final straw. When I replace the iPod I own (and that day may come soon, as I can no longer upload music via Firewire), it will not be with another iPod.

Guess who is the top Google result for “Another drake mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes” and has two thumbs?

Today I received a flyer in the mailbox with an appealing proposition: “Extend the Yonge subway to the 407 now!” Look a bit closer, though, and you start to see some problems.

The Yonge Subway North campaign is riding the coattails of the Ontario Liberal government’s MoveOntario 2020 transit proposal, intended to provide funding to a number of transit projects across the province. One of those projects is a heretofore unannounced plan to extend the current Yonge-University-Spadina subway up past Finch station, all the way to Highway 7/407. Not that such a extension hasn’t been considered before—in fact York Region Transit has always figured a subway extension would be required to handle the massive amount of traffic already flowing down Yonge Street into Toronto. But up until McGuinty’s announcement a couple of months ago, that subway was always seen as a possible “third phase” of YRT’s current Viva rapid transit project, the fruits of which are already visible on Yonge and Highway 7 today in the form of large, shiny blue buses. MoveOntario 2020 turned the extension into a near-future possibility, and as such YRT put their plans to build a dedicated bus right-of-way on hold in July.

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In certain corners of the geek world, people buy products not necessarily because of what they can do out of the box, but because of what they could potentially do down the road. And no, I’m not talking about the Playstation 3. (zing) Firmware hackers, kernel developers, reverse-engineerers and general-purpose tinkerers alike have all broken into (or just plain broken) tons of your favourite portable electronic devices in an attempt to make them do things their manufacturers never imagined or intended. From routers that run Linux-based firmware to iPods that play Doom, people have always gotten a perverse pleasure out of making devices dance to a new tune.

But the holy grail has always been that neat little hack (or collection of hacks) that suddenly unlocks a wealth of functionality previously tucked away in the depths of a high-powered processor punching well above its weight. It’s the digital equivalent of flipping a switch to turn your Toyota Corolla into a Lexus sports sedan. Such hacks are possible because oftentimes electronics manufacturers find it cheaper to produce one microprocessor for a host of different devices (at different price points) rather than developing a new processor for each device separately. To continue the car analogy, it’s like using the same engine for the $10,000 subcompact and the $80,000 luxo-sedan, and then artificially limiting the engines going into the $10,000 cars so they only produce a quarter of the horsepower. Remove the artificial limiter, and suddenly you’ve got a 400hp subcompact car.

So you can imagine the excitement certain amateur photographers must be feeling about this custom firmware for DIGIC II-based Canon cameras. Among other things, it theoretically turns any DIGIC II camera into one that can produce RAW files—even the relatively cheap Powershot A630. There’s also a histogram and zebra display, which are probably more useful on a day-to-day basis than RAW (which may or may not be a bit slow to write on consumer-level cameras). Theoretically a wide range of cameras support the hack, but at present only a subset of A-series cameras and the S2/S3 have firmwares you can dump on an SD card and go. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if greater publicity of the custom firmware brought new firmware files for Powershot SD cameras as well.

New iPods just got dropped on your collective asses today. Screw the commentary, let’s whip out the giant nerd chart! (It’s so giant that I tweaked the design of the entire site just to fit it in, suckas!)

This table was sort of generated on the fly; I don’t have any vast respositories of MP3 player knowledge or anything. So if there are any errors or things I’ve left out (specs or players) let me know in the comments.

Vancouver transit authorities warn of increased traffic as people return to school and work this week. This doesn’t make sense; why is this apparently a short-term, seasonal phenomenon? Do lots of people suddenly stop going to work or school again in October? Or are there really that many students on transit that wise up and start skipping their morning classes halfway through the semester?

I suppose it could be worse, though. Translink should be thankful they’re not the TTC these days.