July 2010
24 posts
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QUIZ: Can you put off trimming your beard for...
Do you work exclusively from home?
A. No
B. Yes
SCORE YOURSELF
If you answered A. to Question 1: Ha ha ha ha ha maybe. If you answered B. to Question 1: LIVE FREE, NOBLE SAVAGE
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In response to my latest screed about Steam, Faruk...
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Apple Offers Free Cat Sweaters to Address iPad...
CUPERTINO , Calif. — Steven P. Jobs, chief executive of Apple, acknowledged Friday that the company’s iPad 3G posed some health risks for cats when users placed the device on top of their cats and then sat on the device, but said the same problems affected all tablet computers and had been widely exaggerated by the media.
“This has been blown so out of proportion that it is...
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Judge OKs iPhone class action against Apple, AT&T →
marco:
[many excellent points snipped]
How did this suit get past a judge?
It’s important to understand that the judge hasn’t ruled on the merits of any of the plaintiffs’ claims. That will happen later, when the motion for summary judgment is litigated. This step is called class certification.
All that’s happened so far is a judge has agreed with the...
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What if Apple made an iPad with the same pixel...
I’ve had my iPhone 4 for two weeks now, and I’m still not used to the Retina Display. It’s so much sharper and clearer than any display I’ve ever used that just reading text on it is an amazing experience. The difference is so striking that I almost can’t stand to use my iPad anymore: what the hell are all these dots doing here? Why can’t every screen be as good...
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June 2010
18 posts
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What, you want a protocol now?
bananacasts:
I opined a few months ago that printing from iOS won’t happen until we see some bare bones protocol to print a PDF (easily generated by iOS as it is in MacOS) with some additional instructions for thinks like ink usage, etc. I doubt we’ll see anything like this until adoption of iOS devices — namely, iPads — reaches a critical mass to prompt the rather aloof printer makers to work...
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“We drive 20% less than cities of comparable size, and because we don’t...”
– Holy shit: a politician making a rational economic argument about a polarizing environmental issue. Maybe I should move to Portland.
Self-reblog bookmarklet updated
Remember this thing I made? Turns out there was a bug: if your blog had Descriptive URLs — the feature where Tumblr appends five or six words to each post URL so you can tell which is which — turned off, it wouldn’t recognize that you were on a post page.
Well, that’s fixed now. Thanks to distantheartbeats for spotting it.
To update your copy, delete the bookmarklet the same way...
Unbelievable
My mom is in town, and she brought with her a TomTom GPS navigator thing. It’s about twice the size of an iPhone and cost several hundred dollars. She’s leaving tomorrow, so she asked me to help her program it to direct her to the airport.
The touch screen on this thing is nearly impossible to use, but never mind. After a few tries I figured out how to find the airport in its list of...
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Background Audio in iOS 4.0 →
A post I wrote for the Rogue Amoeba company blog, about an update to Airfoil Speakers Touch that I’ve been working on.
“Don’t make them give an email address. Don’t pre-check the ‘subscribe to...”
– Matt Gemmell, Your App’s Website Sucks
Bullseye, Matt. Bullseye.
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“I’m not in the ‘sudoers’ file of her heart.”
– Jon Deal.
Ugh. So sorry, buddy.
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On multitasking, sparkle ponies, and saving state
In an article for TUAW called Multitasking in iOS 4 is not a magical sparkle pony, TJ Luoma gives a pretty good overview of some of the multitasking features available in the new OS and why they might not satisfy all users’ needs without extra effort from developers.
In rebuttal to TJ’s piece, Benjamin Mayo writes:
In previous versions of iOS, state-saving was the sole...
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Karma
This isn’t news anymore, but in case you missed it, here are some of the striking new hardware features of the iPhone 4 which Steve Jobs revealed in Monday’s WWDC keynote:
The screen resolution is double that of all prior iPhone and iPod touch models: 960x640 pixels.
The screen is made from a material called “aluminosilicate glass” which is 30 times more...
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Drop-crotch pants?
I hadn’t heard the term until Liana tooted about them, so I went to Google Images, and I… I just… fuck, look at this:
This is not fashion, or even clothing. This is despair.
This is the baked-on gunk that’s stuck to the saucepan from the time the phone rang and you forgot you were making Spaghettios but the pan’s still fine otherwise so rather than washing the...
May 2010
17 posts
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Steam, Steam, Steam.
I knew this would be a love/hate relationship from the start.
You see, Steam for Mac, I love your games. Well, some of them. A lot of them are crap. But the ones your parents, Valve, made, like Portal and the Half-Life series, are unparalleled. Team Fortress 2 seemed like great stylish fun when I tried it briefly (under Windows), although it’s not really my thing. And you distribute some...
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Watch
Final Fantasy XIII: The Empire Strikes Back begins with the main protagonist, a former soldier, riding a train with their astonishingly stereotypical black sidekick to go fight an evil authority of some description. Wait a girlfriend-impaling second: haven’t we been here before? Well, yes, twelve extremely “final” times. But the seventh outing more than any other. Of course,...
This could be bad
If you try to break a car window with a hammer, you’ll have a hard time, but if you throw a bit of porcelain from a spark plug at it with only moderate force, the window shatters. This is because porcelain (being a type of ceramic) is harder than tempered glass, but steel isn’t.
Occasionally I find myself setting my iPhone down on my iPad. Sometimes I gently toss it, because what the...
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Watch20-minute video. I know, I know. Today’s Saturday, so what the hell.
It’s an incredibly impassioned and moving talk Dean Kamen gave in 2009 at a TED spinoff called TEDMED. Yeah, Kamen is the Segway guy, but that’s pretty much the least interesting thing about him. His latest project is developing fully articulated artificial arms for the more than 1600 soldiers who’ve...
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