February 2012
1 post
Print - The Hunter Becomes the Hunted - Esquire →
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January 2012
1 post
Too many gadget choices: product lines simplify as... →
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December 2011
5 posts
2011: Shift Happens →
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App Developers Betting on iOS Over Android →
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Waldo Jaquith - On the impracticality of a... →
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How to Fix Apple TV 2 Netflix Bug
I’ve spent the past few days tearing my hair out over a bug with the Netflix app on the Apple TV 2 version 4.4.3. Solution: rolled back/reverted/downgraded to the previous firmware version.
The specific bug I was experiencing was that after signing into the Netflix app I was presented with only two menu options: ‘Search’ and ‘Sign Out’. The search function...
I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore →
Dan Pallotta on how ridiculous business conversation has become.
(Via Ben Brooks)
November 2011
2 posts
“Apple didn’t invent the iPad or the iPhone, another company did. That...”
– Best reader comment I’ve seen in a while. Stuff.co.nz always brings out the loonies.
“Sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the think of it, but in the...”
– Stanley Kubrick when asked for an explanation of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.
October 2011
9 posts
Steve Jobs « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry →
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Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator's Dilemma - James... →
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m.guardian.co.uk →
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gladwell dot com - creation myth →
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Lock screen improvements in iOS5
There’s a lot of new stuff to discover in iOS5. I like these improvements to the lock screen:
All notifications received while the phone was locked are shown in a list. They’re actionable by swiping across them while the screen is locked.
Before iOS5 you could double-tap the home button to bring up volume controls while listening to audio. It always drove me nuts that the...
“There are two kinds of people in this world: people who touch their screens, and...”
– John Siracusa on episode 35 of 5by5’s Hypercritical podcast
“Worst movie iv ever seen, no plot, no character development and half of it is...”
– My favourite iTunes customer review of 2001: A Space Odyssey
Arrested Development returns! →
What is possibly my favourite TV comedy which, sadly, only ran for three seasons, will be returning for another season and a movie.
EXCITED.
Game Review—El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron
You probably haven’t heard of the apocryphal Book of Enoch before, but it sure makes good source material for a video game.
Seven angels from Heaven went to earth to get with the human women. Their offspring, called nephilim, turned the world into a nightmarish place, eating each other and growing into giant fire nephilim capable of mass destruction. God wanted to sort this mess out before...
September 2011
9 posts
Android is Forked
An interesting thing to know about the Kindle Fire is that it’s an Amazon tablet. You’ll notice that Amazon never mentions this anywhere. This is because they’ve taken the ‘Open’ Android source code and forked it to make their own OS.
Such is Google’s downside of making Android open source.
So far they’ve had phenomenal success entering the mobile...
The Kindle Fire
So Amazon finally unveiled their long-rumoured and recently-confirmed entry to the tablet market, the Kindle Fire.
Priced at $199 USD it’s less than half the price of an iPad. It appears to be about half as capable as an iPad though: half the storage, no cameras, slower hardware, less than half the screen real-estate. Even so, it’s a good price. Analyst Gene Munster of Piper...
UnFormat →
I’ve been using this dashboard widget for a while, it’s simple and super-useful.
It’s a one-click button that strips all the formatting out of any text you have in the clipboard. Great for pasting text between applications when you don’t want to also carry over formatting.
For me, at work, it’s useful for two major reasons:
Getting easily around the ever-present...
Thoughts on Windows 8 for tablets
The fact that the demo of Windows 8 requires laptop-grade Intel CPUs to run smoothly doesn’t bode well for Microsoft shipping tablets in at least 12 months time with good battery life at an affordable price to compete with the iPad.
Sure it has the full Windows OS, but in the same way that consumers hate netbooks, they’ll hate the traditional Windows experience on a tablet even more....
Is Happy Feet a Happy Meal? →
Awesome headline from the Dom Post. Trumps Stuff’s boring ‘Where’s Happy Feet?’ headline, for sure.
However this quote is only in the Stuff article:
Kevin Lay, a wildlife telemetry consultant at Sirtrack said it was the possibility that no-one wanted to think about, but Happy Feet could have become another creature’s meal.
Of course the company responsible...
A Markdown Primer →
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Hewlett Packard's awesome internal division naming
While listening to the latest Talk Show podcast John Gruber pulled out this gem from a reader email he received in response to this post which mocked the name of HP’s ‘Office of Strategy and Technology’.
This guy works for Hewlett Packard, and he described what his email signature looked like in 2009:
He worked in the Global Delivery Application Services which was part of...
August 2011
8 posts
The Macalope vs. Jackasses →
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Lion's Resume feature is perfect for reading
I’ve just started reading a PDF book using Preview on the mac, and discovered an awesome use-case for Lion’s Resume feature.
One problem with digital reading is remembering your place. E-reader apps all do this but Resume adds this feature to Preview. When I’m done reading I simply quit Preview, and when I launch it again the PDF is at the same place when I left it.
InDesign tip: add hyperlinks to objects for PDF...
I’m working on a newsletter that gets delivered as a PDF via email and download. I need the PDF to support old versions of Acrobat because much of the readership are on old IT-managed PCs.
I’m adding to the latest issue some icons for the publisher’s Twitter and Facebook pages but the problem is that the only way to have hyperlinked objects in InDesign is by turning them into...
The New Zealand iTunes store now has the 90-second...
90-seconds is much better for gauging the feel of a song. Now I can stop switching to the US store to preview music.
Film review: Rise of the Planet of the Apes
I’ll admit, if you’re looking at it from the outside, there’s not a lot going for this film. The title is a mouthful that might conjure up bad memories of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes from 2001. You might have seen the poster–depicting a freaky-looking ape defiantly raising his fist while San Francisco smoulders in the background—and assume it’s a Godzilla-style...
July 2011
23 posts
To be or not to be: Adobe and OS X Lion
Yesterday OS X Lion was released on the Mac App Store, and has since had over a million downloads. Also yesterday was a press release by Adobe detailing the laundry list of their software incompatibilities with Lion.
I’d expect them to maintain compatibilities for at least CS5 and CS5.5 and that this would be squared up before launch considering Adobe, like every other Mac developer, has...
“iPad was a $6 billion business last quarter. That is twice as big as Dell’s...”
– Verne G. Kopytoff / NY Times
Partial-content RSS feeds
A few months ago I migrated from reading a bunch of websites every day to subscribing to their RSS feeds. It has meant I can skim and consume more information that I could before, and in a easy to digest format thanks to Reeder and Instapaper.
One thing I have noticed, though, is that one of the websites I used to read only have partial-content RSS feeds. Too bad for them, I don’t find...
Jim Ray on Grilling Burgers →
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“… Regards,
Firefox 5”
– How I ended an email reply to a trader whose bank account name and email signature is ‘Chrome Browser’.
I love the palpable feeling of relief when I can...
I’m sure many cosmetic products have translations for countries that the product isn’t sold in, just so they’ll look extra flash.
Both Sides of the Google+ Coin
Ben Brooks’s sentiments around Google’s primary motivation for Google+:
Yes, call me paranoid, but Gruber’s right — Google wants Google+ to be huge, because it is the fastest and most accurate way to better target advertising — of which it makes billions off of doing — not because they want to compete with Facebook.
So Google is offering a free social network that is better than...
Perfection in the Men's
I like the the paper hand towel dispenser in the Men’s room at my work. It is perfect in every way:
One paper towel is enough to dry wet hands
The grip on the towels isn’t so strong that it rips when your wet hands pull at one …
And not so weak that you accidentally pull out more than one
It’s surprising how many dispensers get at least one of these things wrong.
No more Apple dock connector?
This thought popped into my head a few days ago and I have a note to blog about it. This Wall Street Journal article about the 2012 iPhone just reminded me:
with one person saying the company has been experimenting with features such as a new way of charging the phone.
Now that iOS 5 will have wireless syncing, induction charging is the next logical step.
If you’re unfamiliar with...