Well, that’s good news.

Why do retailers an manufacturers package stuff in blister packs? They’re horrible. I suppose from a retailer’s point of view, they’re bulky and impossible to open, which means they’re hard to steal. Customers can also see the actual item in the box, and I suppose that’s nice.

But for normal humans, and for our children who have to live in a world getting fuller and fuller of trash, blister packs are horrible. Can things like USB drives be sold in a more eco-friendly way?

USB drives and other similar devices that come in blister packs are small, expensive, the default packaging for them is always a blister pack. The blister packs take up more room in the box, requiring more boxes on the truck, ultimately requiring more trucks, more fuel, more wear on parts and tires, more smog in the air, more smelly truck drivers. Once at the store, blister packs take too much room on the shelves, too much space room in the storeroom. Once I’ve purchased it, it’s a pain in the butt to open up, which frustrates me and makes me hate the company that sold it to me. Then it’s not easy to recycle blister packs (if they get recycled at all; anybody want to make an estimate as to how many pounds of blister pack sits in land fills across the U.S.?), and all it did was… what? What did the blister pack actually do? I’d say it did nothing more than put a product inside some trash that I had to take the product back out of again, then throw the trash away. Why couldn’t the company have thrown the trash away for me, or, better yet, not have packed it in trash?

At least one company out there gets it: Apple. I bought a small video adapter today, and any other company would have put it inside a blister pack, but Apple put it inside a sandwich bag with a recyclable cardboard topper. I ended up throwing away a comparitevly miniscule amount of trash, recycling a bit more, and the thing was easy to open. I didn’t curse anybody, and actually took pictures in the hopes that somebody buying a similar small electronic product can write to the manufacturer saying, “hey, Apple got it right. What makes you so special?” and have pictures to illustrate the point.

Look, if you’re a parent or a grandparent, the world isn’t yours any more. It belongs to your kids. You have to buy things, fine, but please buy things that wont bury your descendants in huge piles of trash.

[iTunes link] Excellent. I’d write a review, but that would cut into my play time.

In October, 2005, Lifehacker showed us how to make Gmail, in your web browser, be your default mail app on your Mac. That is, when you click on a mailto link in a Web page, a Gmail window pops up, allowing you to write your email. Once sent, the window or tab closes itself and it’s back to surfing like normal.

Here’s a direct link to the Google Notifier, which you’ll need.

And, for the record, I disabled the notifier’s actually checking anything for me. It just sits there allowing my preference for a Web page to be my default continue on, even after I’ve launched Mail.app for whatever reason.

UPDATE: here are instructions directly from Google on how to make this work. Seems it works for Windows, too.

I found a bunch of interviews with the band regarding the album and the tour. The sound quality isn’t always perfect, but the vibe and presentation is stellar. There are at least two references to being married to four people, which makes me smile.

Interviews: Blaze Bayley, Nico Bermudez, David Bermudez (my favorite), Larry Patterson, End of Tour Compilation.

I’ll tell you, I haven’t been this captured by a record in years. I think the last time was Alice Cooper’s Brutal Planet in 2000.

Did you know that people in civil unions, as opposed to marriages, don’t get protections for families of crime victims? They can’t inherit their spouse’s estate, either. Actually, there are about 1,138 cool little features married people get that civilly unionized folks don’t get.

Somebody explain what, exactly, we’re protecting marriage from when we deny a dude who’s been with the same partner for 35 years the right to make his sick partner’s medical decisions at the end of his life.

Yes on 8: Let’s show the world that we didn’t learn a stinking thing from the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s.

Hannah Crisan:

PETA’s name has become so notorious that as soon as someone knows they are associated with an issue, they close their minds to PETA’s message, even if it may be an important and excellent one.

(iTunes Link, sort of.) Since leaving Iron Maiden in 1999, Blaze has released five studio albums. The first two are his best. The third is a mixed bag: half the songs are amazing, half are throwaways. The fourth and this new one, Promise and Terror, they’re his best, too.

Actually, these last two albums, The Man Who Would Not Die and Promise and Terror are very similar. They’re heavy in less an Iron Maiden kind of way and more of a Megadeth kind of way. And the emotion! Blaze is a fellow who can sing sadness and bewilderment with conviction, and no wonder: in 2008, his wife of four months died of a cerebral hemorrhage. So when he sings, “Why must I face this life / Why am I here alone / Where did the future go / Why am I here alone?” his voice reaches right through my earbuds and yanks on my  heart strings.

If you’re into metal of any stripe, get this album. Hell, if you listen to any music played by real humans and not a DAT machine, get this album.

UPDATE: Seems Blabbermouth.net has an archive of the statement Blaze released concerning the passing of his wife in 2008. It’s well written, honest, open, and heart-breaking. I’m shocked and humbled by his work-ethic.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings:

It’s not a huge priority for us because we’re so focused on the larger screens. Until we get our TV ubiquity and our Blu-ray ubiquity and we’re getting close on video game ubiquity, then we would next turn to the small screen. So it’s something we will get around to, but it’s not in the near term.

Absolutely lame. They gave away $1 million in a programming contest last year, but they wont get some staffers to write an iPhone app. For all my complaints, though, I’m sure it’ll happen eventually. When the Netflix iPhone app rumors start surfacing, I think the biggest questions will be, “will it only work on the iPhone, or will it play to a TV with an AV cable, dock, and remote?” and also, “will it work on 3G?” I’m betting no on both.

Facebook is just useful enough not to get rid of. My sister writes and posts pictures there sometimes, and I like that. Pretty much everything else about it is crap, though. Even http://lite.facebook.com. I wish my sister would post to Flickr or Picassa instead, so I could stop loading that unfiltered mess.