Harry McCracken leaving to start a new site

So Harry McCracken is leaving PC World on June 2nd to start his own tech site. The man’s a titan in our industry, I can’t wait to check out what he’s got cooking — good luck, Harry!

P.S. -And no, the EIC gig I referenced the other day wasn’t this, so there you go.

Quote from Helvetica

As a type geek took me longer than I’d like to admit to catch Helvetica (the movie), but there was definitely one quote by Lars Müller about the quaint ubiquity of the modern world’s “default” typeface that stuck with me: “What I like is that this very serious typeface tells you the dos and don’ts of sweet life — it must be Helvetica.” [Photo by Marcos Dopico]

CNN headline t-shirts: tacky, hackable

I’ve been almost completely incapacitated for the last week due to this crazy flu I picked up — but damned if I didn’t feel like I was still in a fit of feverish delirium when I found out that CNN took a page out of the Weekly World News playbook, using an instant t-shirt app to merchandise those tawdry headlines. How about instead we use CNN’s tool to make a shirt that actually bears some resemblance to truth and reality?

Veronica is blowing up!

So everybody found out today that V’s heading to Revision3 to do Tekzilla — but that’s only one of her two new regular post-Mahalo gigs. But besides the other thing (which is equally if not more awesome) did I mention she also had a song written about her recently? And did an interview with RCRD LBL? Looks like I’m gonna have to step up my game to keep pace!

Selling News.com to bloggers? No, thanks.

James Nicholson over at Seeking Alpha thinks CNET should sell off its tech news division, News.com, to some other network of “top-tier tech blogs” (Engadget, Tech Crunch, etc. are named), and keep the best writers of the defunct brand to build a better blog network at CNET. Um, yeah, no thanks. That plan makes no sense, not only because the only thing that makes News.com any good is its editors, but (and no offense to all my pals at CNET) the editorial and business models of that division are becoming increasingly deprecated. So yeah, in that regard it does make sense to start thinking about a sale, I suppose — especially considering how much work (read: catching up) Dan Farber’s got to do about right now.

Help Veronica and me stay caffeinated, recommend a machine

Usually Veronica and I usually just head to one of the 38 cafés in our neighborhood to get some coffee, but after a while the mediocre baristas just can’t stack up to the Rituals and the Blue Bottles, which are just out of reach for the daily routine. So we’re about this close to picking up a home machine, except I’m still hesitant to drop the coin being that pulling a proper shot can be a somewhat daunting (yet enticing) task. So here’s where I defer to the home espresso brewers in the house. The candidates of machines we’re looking at (no particular order):

• Solis SL-90: Supposedly not a bad Swiss-made auto machine, and it’s got pressurized and non-pressurized filter baskets so newbs like us don’t suffer at the onset (but can theoretically ease into pulling a proper shot with a non-pressurized basket). Still, I hear it’s a generally mediocre machine — plus it doesn’t feature a 3-way solenoid valve.
• Breville 800ESXL: Cheap n’ pretty Aussie machine with high quality parts and a pressurized basket. Has to be modded to take non-pressurized baskets though, and even then generally seems to be thought of as a wolf in sheep’s clothing for budding coffee nerds. It’s a tempting buy, but it also doesn’t have a 3-way solenoid valve and I keep hearing “avoid!”
• Gaggia Classic: A very well respected machine, but supposedly prone to breaking down and no option for pressurized baskets. Bah.
• Rancilio Silvia: The most beloved consumer espresso machine and so, so pretty — but also difficult to master. I don’t necessarily trust us to get our tamps and grind just right, so my inclination is to go a little more user-friendly and sacrifice some of the sheer Rancilio awesomeness.

Your recommendations for a machine (hell, and grinder!) are much obliged. As you can tell, we’re looking at mid-range single-boiler consumer models.

Potential conflict, what do you think?

So last week I was invited to attend and speak at a semi-exclusive pre-trade show press event; not at all unusual or noteworthy in and of itself, but there are some things about it that some might find gray. In the interest of transparency, I figured I’d see what you think.

Among other things, our long-standing editorial policy at Engadget strictly prohibits junkets — paid airfare and accommodations to visit a company and engage their staff — of any kind. Since the event is on behalf of a major trade show, what’s proposed is not technically a junket, and they do appear to be sensitive to editors’ need to steer clear. But there are aspects that certainly feel a bit like it is: CE companies make up the governing board of the trade show, and the offer is to pay my way to Spain to stay at a four-star resort for three days, as well as speaker’s fee (a few thousand) to be on a panel and “share my perspective on US trends” in consumer electronics. (The audience would be comprised of journalists and execs from tech companies participating in said trade show.) There are no expectations of coverage on Engadget, although there will likely be something there worth covering.

Some other big names in the space have apparently received and accepted the offer under what may be different terms. My take? I’m leaning on the side of passing — there might be too many red flags and too much ambiguity. What do you think?

Going magenta

I didn’t really have the time to re-tool my site to go magenta the right way like the Phone Scoop guys, but feel free to swipe the above image — that’s Engadget Mobile magenta #ed008c with Linotype’s VAG Round (which can be found online for free with a bit of searching).

On a personal note, I feel kind of bad for T-Mobile US on this whole thing. I’ve always had a really positive relationship with their teams and they’re the ones really feeling the blunt end of this reddish-purple-hued fiasco, certainly not their clueless parent company Deutsche Telekom, which initiated it. (And yes, there is a difference between T-Mo US and Deutsche Telekom, just like there’s a difference between Engadget, AOL, and Time Warner.)

P.S. -Not an April Fool’s joke. (Still!)

Culture + charts / graphs = new sites

Despite being a cat owner I’ve never really been super into LOLcats — but this whole culture + charts and graphs mashup thing? Yeah, I can get behind that. Prepare to see the jamphat meme perpetuated indefinitely through the newly launched culturegraph (done by my pal Jeremy, among others), as well as graphjam (by the Cheezburger people), two sites with the same concept launching on the same day. I feel another chart coming on…

Excellent.

Vimeo pulls Engadget video with no notification

Apparently we jumped from the frying pan (YouTube) into the fire by hosting Engadget video on Vimeo. It was nice for a little while until they pulled our BlackBerry 9000 video down “as a result of a third-party notification by Research In Motion” without so much as emailing to let us know what’s up. (FYI, the video in question is of an unreleased cellphone, but not belonging to or copyrighted by RIM.) Of course, Vimeo was a lot more forthcoming once I emailed to find out why our first upload of the video was killed, and the second immediately dropped into private mode. Guess we’ll be taking our traffic and exposure elsewhere until we get the new version of our own embedded video player finished.