New Pepsi logo

So, apparently Pepsi has just spent 5 months and $1 million to update their logo:

Hmm… Something looks familiar about that. What could it be… Ah, yes:

Let’s just hope they don’t come out with a jointly-branded version that’s Seamonkey flavored. 🙂

Image manipulations

Fred and Borris both recently blogged about intelligent image resizing. This previously came up about a year ago, probably when this research video started making the rounds:

It’s cool stuff, although I’m a little doubtful about it working well for general web content. It would be a fun experiment, though!

Also in the news today is this New York Times article (via Neatorama) about an automatic “beautification engine” that modifies images to make the people in them look better.

Would that be interesting in browsers? I suppose some people would find in interesting in some cases (*cough*porn*cough*), but it’s a little scary and creepy to think about the kinds of social and psychological effects that would arise from subtly applying such an algorithm everywhere. (Consider a similar vein: automatically rewriting web pages more cheerful. A news article about panic selling on Wall Street suddenly becomes a doubleplus good story about the great weather, buying opportunities, and fluffy kittens!)

Stupid MobileMe

A month or two ago this stupid little icon showed up on my menu bar. I found it kind of amusing (in a sad kind of way) because it appeared out of the blue, without my having approved anything, and the dropdown menu had a bunch of redundant items that were all variations of “you are not using MobileMe”.

I noticed today that now it’s complaining about sync conflicts. Which is also kind of sad, because I *still* have never used it, and have no idea what those conflicts could be for (turns out they’re for iCal conflicts… but I don’t use iCal any more). It even *says* that I’ve never used it, and that syncing is disabled!

WTF, Apple?!