March 2011
39 posts
Engadget: “Videotron parent company tries to push... →
Am I surprised? Not at all. Here’s why.
Coverage of the Canadian iPhone 4 launch on TVA last year made no sense whatsoever. They emphasized on Antennagate, saying the iPhone 4 is essentially incapable of making calls due to the placement of the antenna. They said this as they were unboxing the phone an hour or so after launch, so clearly, they hadn’t tested the iPhone with whichever carrier they...
The X Means "No Access"
My college has a wireless network. Many people use it on their iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads. But laptop users tend to connect to wireless networks across the street if they’re in the cafeteria, mostly because the wireless network is damn near impossible to connect to.
The problem is a technology called 802.1X. It’s a standardized authentication mechanism for both wired and wireless networks....
How To Make Love to a Trans Person →
A pretty eye-opening, probably not safe for work poem on transsexuality. Good stuff. (via the awesome Trivium tumblelog)
Snipe →
Snipe is an extension for Chrome and Safari that lets you access all the tabs you have open in your browser via fuzzy-matching on a string. If you are an Alfred/Quicksilver/LaunchBar user, you will probably love this. No more control-tab, control-tab, control-tab, control-tab, control-tab.
“The first change is a pretty significant one; if you launch the app in the...”
– Mashable on Color’s upcoming update. Good luck getting that past Apple’s approval process.
“Slacktivism (sometimes slactivism or clicktivism) is a portmanteau formed out of...”
– Wikipedia article for slacktivism. How about instead of making a big deal out of turning off the goddamned lights for an hour you look at ways to reduce your energy consumption the other 8759 hours?
THE MORE YOU KNOW ★ミ
Ways to Get Around the New York Times Paywall
Not only is the pricing insane, but they make it too easy to circumvent their paywall:
Follow links shared via social networking (Facebook/Twitter).
Use the Times’ own Twitter feeds to get up-to-date links to all articles, free thanks to the social network exception.1
Read content within Times Skimmer. Not only is the experience better than any of the Times’ paid experiences, but...
Lendle is Back →
Earlier in the week, it was reported Lendle’s API access was revoked. Now it’s back, minus the book sync feature. So Amazon, enable lending on international devices and then maybe I’ll buy stuff in the Kindle Store.
First Impressions of the Amazon Appstore
Today, the Amazon Appstore launched in an attempt to correct mistakes Google made with the Android Market.
The good:
Every day, a different paid app becomes free, and it is prominently displayed on both the Web site and the app.
Product description pages on the phone are much nicer than those in the recently redesigned Market app, and infinitely better than the Web equivalent.
One-click app...
Engadget: T-Mobile G2x announced →
The biggest issue with the LG Optimus 2x is how the people at LG told themselves “hey, we have this great phone with a Tegra 2 so let’s shove a ton of crap into our custom UI to show off what this awesome hardware can do”.
Of course, they’d do this conveniently forgetting that Android’s UI isn’t hardware accelerated 99% of the time, and so the phone would be...
WatchJust what we needed: another movie about DDR.
The last attempt at that was La maquina de bailar (trailer), a horrible Spanish movie about a DDR competition whose outcome would determine whether or not some big dramatic event I don’t remember would happen or not. I remember watching it and counting the amount of Perfects in the entire movie… it was something like 14, which is absurd...
Amazon Kills Lendle →
Lendle was essentially a peer-to-peer library of sorts for Kindle users. You could put up the list of books you owned on the site, and it would expose those books in a beautiful user interface. The number of books you could borrow in a set period was calculated from the number of books you put up for lending yourself, which means you couldn’t just leech books off other people.
...
I want my look and feel
Since the title of the blog hasn’t been mentioned since I launched it and chpwn just asked me about it, I might as well clarify where the title of the blog comes from:
In MultiFinder on System 61, if you left the About MultiFinder window open for about an hour, eventually messages would start showing up in the about dialog. The messages were “I want my”, “I want...
AT&T Buys T-Mobile USA →
Look on the bright side: at least AT&T will have Android phones that don’t suck now.
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It was late one night in early December.
We were staying after-hours in the computer lab after ten hours of nonstop stress. We had to hand in our big semester project we’d been working on for three months the very next day. As the day went on, we saw other teams leave their presentations devastated, sometimes nearly in tears, and we feared what was to come. Amidst the chaos of last-minute...
Non-Geeks and Non-iPads
Yanik: I’d love to see Motorola open a store to try and sell the Xoom. Tony: The what? Yanik: My point exactly.
Luc-Olivier: There was an article where some guy explains in detail how hard it is to set up the SDK for the PlayBook. Tony: What’s the PlayBook? Yanik: Exactly, again.
“Stop, don’t say that it’s impossible
‘Cause I know it’s...”
– Eric Saade’s song Popular not only won Melodifestivalen yesterday, but accurately describes the mentality behind the scenes of the jailbreak community. (Speaking of which: iPad 2 jailbroken.)
“The song is a parody about songs that participate in the Swedish heat of the...”
– Värsta schlagern @ Wikipedia.
One Other Quick Idea
One of the odd things about Twitter clients is how very few of them synchronize where you last left off. Arguably, it would be hard to do this without having one universal way of doing this or using the same client on all platforms.
But one thing every client could be doing right now and isn’t: If your client refreshes the stream, and I have posted a new tweet, assume that is the point at...
Today, Apple released iOS 4.3 for third-generation devices and later1. That means it’s time for me to shift my development devices’ firmwares.
Until now, I’ve had a device for every major release of 4.x:
a 2nd gen iPod touch running 4.02
a 3rd gen iPod touch running 4.1
my personal iPhone 4 and iPad, both running 4.2.1
Shifting all of those devices to a new firmware means restoring them,...
SitBy.Us (Unsurprisingly) Gets Ready for SxSWi →
I love the idea of SitBy.Us; find out what sessions your friends are at and where they’re sitting. If only they’d do more conferences… like Google I/O. :x
Looks Like I Missed The Awl's "Liveblog" of the... →
Absolutely hilarious.
Oh My God, Oh My God, What the Hell Just Happened? →
Expressen got to it before I did, but yeah, three sets of numbers were switched, meaning no one is certain if this week’s results are really supposed to be this week’s results. There was no acknowledgment of this during the show either meaning that as far as the inattentive audience knows, Sara Varga and The Moniker are both headed to the final in Stockholm next week.
I hope this...
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I Think Someone's Going to Get Fired
099-902 XX numbers were switched between Loreen/Sara Varga and The Moniker/Linda Pritchard in the recap sequence of today’s second chance round of Melodifestivalen.
I didn’t notice if that was also the case for Jenny Silver/Love Generation, and it was not the case for Shirley’s Angels/Pernilla Andersson.
Somewhat surprised no one has seemed to notice this yet; we’re...
Yes, There is Still a Market for Twitter Clients
When Tweetie, which was long considered the best Twitter client on the iPhone, was acquired by Twitter, many people speculated that it would mark the end of the third-party client market. After all, people had trouble competing with Tweetie when it cost $2.99, so how could they compete with Tweetie when it would be free and backed by Twitter?
The sad truth, which I had seen coming from the...
“He also provided evidence that people continue playing Angry Birds after that...”
– Joystiq on Angry Birds reaching 30 million downloads on Android. Note that sustained interest isn’t necessarily what’s going on here; since Froyo, you can turn on automatic app updates. And if Android users are anything like iOS users, many people have tons of apps on their devices they...
