February 2010
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“I think of science fiction as the realism of California.”
– Kim Stanley Robinson quoted in an article entitled Kim Stanley Robison maps the future’s gray areas in the Los Angeles Times.
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Names
Writing about the Toshiba TG01 reminded me of this post by mrgan:
Product names currently topping Engadget’s feed: (these are all real and not particularly cherry-picked)
Kula TV PMP
Optio I-10
Gateway EC14D
Alienware M11x
Projectiondesign Remote Light Source
DMC-ZS7 (Or is it 7SZ? Or SZ7? Or Z7S?)
MvixUSA Ultio Pro
Moto CLIQ
OLPC XO
Mustek MER-6T
I like “iPad”.
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Foundem vs Google
Foundem, “the world’s most advanced vertical search engine” (as they sell themselves), is one third of an antitrust complaint against Google. They’ve previously complained about being dropped from Google search results, although that’s apparently been resolved since.
In the business news segment on Today, the section that caught my ear was a company representative...
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“I think people in general […] think enterprise is bigger than consumer....”
– Tim Cook, Apple COO quoted in Business Insider’s coverage of the Goldman Sachs conference.
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“My highlights from the day included Jon Spooner from Unlimited Theatre who used...”
– Jez Paxman, in That’s the story, talking about a talk at The Story conference Matt Locke organised that I attended on Friday.
Spooner’s talk, which was early in the day (when most people were still shocked at arriving at Jackanory Live rather than How To Convey A Narrative) probably...
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A Manifesto.
unlinkyourfeeds:
You need to stop automatically dumping your feeds from one account into another. Look, I know it’s tempting. New service, not sure how you’ll keep up with the ever demanding maw and there’s the “import your content” button, right there in the sign-up process. A quick trip through a login screen or an OAuth link and there you are: All your stuff automatically aggregated into a...
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“In its urgency to offer a me-too product, Buzz confuses the read/unread email...”
– Buzz launch wasn’t flawed, Google’s intentions are at counternotions.
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A short list of Chrome issues (beta 2)
An update on the issues listed in December:
You can’t invert open behind - on Safari command shift click opens in a new window behind the current one with command click opening in a new window in front/focus, whereas Chrome is hard-wired to do the opposite (and with tabs to boot)
Tab moves between all link and form elements, not just form elements (Gmail does this on Safari now too. Boo!)
...
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RWW vs Facebook; users vs devs
Yesterday, ReadWriteWeb posted a vaguely interesting story about Facebook integrating with AIM, and were then shocked to find the comments overrun with people complaining about how the design had changed and they couldn’t log in. After two and a half pages of comments, Jolie O’Dell, a site admin posted this comment:
We’ve determined by looking at our traffic stats that people are...
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“On the internet, “design” usually means heavy use of rich graphics and textures....”
– Marco.org, in a footnote to Optimal iPhone UI.
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“Byelaw 6 has been amended to remove the total ban on “dumping...”
– London Reconnections: Upcoming Changes to the Railway Byelaws.
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“The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and...”
– Dick Brass in an editorial for the New York Times:Microsoft’s Creative Destruction.
After my post about possible iPad competitors, it was suggested that I was premature in ruling out Microsoft, with a link to a Gizmodo story about the Courier tablet project. However, years of experience have led me...
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“I’m attacking the bearded dude that was on the 10 pound note until he was...”
– Another putdown from Rocío Rødtjer’s The Classics, Revised.
I have a terrible habit of getting the Charleses confused. It’s their fault for both having names beginning “D”, ending in “n” (more or less), and living in the 1860s. I’d probably rather read...
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“unlike Beckett, he actually wrote his novel in French because he was French, and...”
– Rocío Rødtjer, in The Classics, Revised.
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“During the iPad keynote, four of the most impressive (and in-depth) demos were...”
– Steven Johnson in his article for Time: Apple iPad Shortcomings Spark Questions About Updates.
I suspect that iWork was, on some levels, a bad choice of software to demonstrate. iMovie feels creative to people, whereas Numbers and Pages don’t, even though I’d place bets on there being...
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“If I just want a piece of toast, I shouldn’t have to know how to build a toaster...”
– Minimal Mac, quoting from Why a Computer is Not Like A Toaster – And Why It Should Be
On the other hand, if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
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The Breaking Newspaper
Phil Gyford’s currently working on a project to write a newspaper covering the week’s news, although it seems to be having a bumpy start.
At least I was able to provide a useful link, to the Guardian’s index of ‘main section’ stories. This is updated daily with the contents of the paper edition, and I tend to prefer it to the front page for the reasons Phil talks...
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Rich Feeds for Tumblr Blogs
benw:
the RSS output from Tumblr stinks. I assume it’s an evil incentive to use the Dashboard.
So, I’ve written a feed script. It’s called Tumblfeed, which sounds like tumbleweed… which I suppose is a metaphor for the semantic desolation of the Tumblr RSS feeds… or something. It was an accidental rhyme.
This looks good. I may even start offering feeds of my stuff through it.
