May 2013
1 post
The Verge's Paul Miller on a year without Internet →
While there’s an unavoidable undertone of glib hipsterism in the whole “offline for a year” experiment Miller conducted, this insight is one that goes too often unrecognized:
My plan was to leave the internet and therefore find the “real” Paul and get in touch with the “real” world, but the real Paul and the real world are already inextricably linked...
April 2013
6 posts
PHP feels less like COBOL these days
I joked on Twitter last night that I should follow up PHP is not an acceptable COBOL with “PSR-0 makes PHP a completely adequate FORTRAN” and let people guess whether that’s actually a compliment. This is not exactly that post, but what’s been going in the PHP world has been kind of interesting.
First off, a lot of people get really defensive when you attack PHP, or...
1 tag
The Clever Coffee Dripper
I have a confession to make that may get my B-List Nerd Card revoked, but I don’t think the Aeropress coffee brewer makes great coffee.
It makes good coffee, and when it comes to brewing speed and cleanup it’s unbeatable. But I’ve been using one off and on for nearly four years now, generally aiming to brew what I consider to be a standard twelve-ounce cup of coffee, and...
The Default Narrative
Earlier this week the web was abuzz with Apple’s latest clear strike against freedom: they refused the newest issue of the independent comic Saga to be distributed through ComiXology due to “postage-stamp sized” images of gay sex. Even though ComiXology is a third-party application, it uses Apple’s in-app purchase system—as it must, due to Apple’s iron fist of...
Foursquare wants to be your Yelp →
Mike Isaac, AllThingsD:
“Explore” is the direction Foursquare wants to go in for the future. Over the past year, the company has slowly moved away from its heavy emphasis on badges, mayorships and “gamification” (my least favorite word in tech), instead moving toward a mobile discovery service somewhat akin to the space Yelp currently inhabits.
Foursquare derives 1–10 ratings with an opaque...
Kent Tessman's name keeps coming up, at least if...
From late 1998 through early 2001, I was using BeOS as my primary operating system. Yes, it was really possible to do that—between Gobe Productive (a great “Works”-style app written by the team that wrote the original ClarisWorks), the BBEdit-ish Pe text editor, and the slightly buggy but awesome-when-it-worked “objected oriented” graphics program e-Picture (a lot...
The Bitcoin Bubble and the Future of Currency →
Reuters’ Felix Salmon—not blogging here under the auspices of Reuters—pens a fascinating analysis of everyone’s favorite crypto-anarchist virtual currency. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, read the whole article, not just to the point he says something you think you disagree with.
Bitcoins, like gold, are beholden to no government; they can’t be printed...
March 2013
11 posts
A passing question, not asked for the first time,...
Why is it that AOL keeps running the AIM service?
CyanogenMod founder Steve Kondik leaves Samsung →
CyanogenMod is “a customized aftermarket firmware distribution” for Android phones that adds new features; I think one of its main benefits is to decouple your phone from your carrier’s Android update timetable and let you run “stock” Android at the highest level your phone’s capable of.
At any rate, this news coming right after Samsung’s “Tizen is...
Samsung's Tizen-based future
Thom Holwerda at OSNews argues that Samsung is setting up Tizen to dethrone Android on their smartphones. While I think OSNews tries for thoughtfully contrarian, they far more often come across as reflexively so, but Holwerda offers some interesting data points this time around:
Samsung has said that the Tizen phones being released later this year are high-end, not low-end. This contradicts what...
Feedly →
In theory the impending demise of Google Reader doesn’t affect me because I switched to Fever a while ago. In practice, the truth is that I don’t really like Fever very much — its biggest theoretical advantage is its “hot list,” but I don’t really look at the hot list very much. It’s very rare that it shows me something I haven’t already seen before,...
“We had a sign that said, ‘days since cancellation’ and it was there...”
– Google Reader co-creator Chris Wetherell
Google, MPEG LA agree to royalty-free terms for... →
Peter Bright, Ars Technica:
> Soon after Google’s decision to open source VP8, MPEG LA announced that it intended to form a patent pool of companies with patents relevant to VP8. In 2011, it announced that 12 companies had identified patents that covered aspects of the VP8 algorithm. Google, however, maintained that it owned all the relevant patents. Since that 2011 announcement, there...
When does Flipboard flip?
You’ve almost certainly seen this news if you read any other tech sites (if you only read this one, hi!)—or, of course, if you use Facebook: they’ve redesigned their news feed to be bigger, brighter, more photo-ier.
The arguments on The Verge’s comments are all about whether Facebook copied Google+ or Google+ copied Facebook. (Consensus so far: first the latter, but now...
Three Views of Apple & Dr. Dre by Tech Punditry
Reuters:
Exclusive: Apple’s Cook, music mogul Iovine discuss new music service
In which we are somewhat breathlessly informed that Apple “has held talks with Beats, the audio technology firm co-founded by influential hip-hop producer Dr Dre,” about “a potential partnership involving Beats’ planned music-streaming service.” But in the third paragraph...
Inside TED: the smartest bubble in the world →
A fascinating article on the hip, quasi-intellectual—and, evidently, increasingly commercial—TED gatherings, from The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky:
TED is not flat, from a hierarchical standpoint. Though it strives to be flat — it wants to be a place where kings and peasants can exchange their equal currency of ideas — there are generational, economic, and societal...
Google's Vint Cerf explains why Facebook's... →
Chris Welch, The Verge:
Thus far Google has gently pushed users to display their real name on Google and the company’s other services, but it hasn’t backed away from traditional usernames / pseudonyms, either. Cerf thinks that’s the right approach. “Using real names is useful,” he said in a recent interview with Reuters. “But I don’t think it should...
Ungenerous Readings
Recently, John Siracusa, Ars Technica writer and late of the Hypercritical podcast, wrote on his blog (also called “Hypercritical”) about Netflix:
This is how products and services endear themselves to consumers: remove everything that gets in the way of what we want. We want to be entertained. We don’t want to arrange our schedules around your TV show. We don’t want to watch...
February 2013
7 posts
"LG doesn't seem to know why it just bought webOS" →
Nilay Patel, the Verge:
HP will indeed sell key pieces of its webOS product and team to LG for use in smart TVs, but contrary to earlier leaked reports, the deal doesn’t include the entire webOS portfolio. What’s more, LG’s plans include the possibility of eventually producing a phone or other mobile devices that run webOS, although the company remains focused on televisions...
Nokia’s continuing strategy: Push deep into the... →
Ars Technica’s Lee Hutchinson:
Nokia is expected to announce a lineup of low-cost handsets at [Mobile World Congress] next week. The new devices are expected to include several inexpensive feature phones targeted at developing markets—which are currently dominated by companies like Huawei (which is in the process of opening a new R&D facility right in Nokia’s backyard). Also on...
Culture Fit
“He said he liked your background, but didn’t think you’d be a good culture fit,” the recruiter told me.
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But we have lots of other clients.”
Truthfully, though, I knew what it meant: “Welcome to middle age in Silicon Valley.”
At the end of 2010 I’d been...
Free wi-fi and the echo chamber
Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica:
The frenzy began Monday morning when the Washington Post reported that “the federal government wants to create super Wi-Fi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.” Best of all, network access would be free. “If all goes as...
Boom. Sooner or later. BOOM! →
George Avalos, Oakland Tribine:
Silicon Valley’s job growth has returned to dot-com boom levels and San Francisco has emerged as a major new tech hub. […] Last year, the nine-county Bay Area added about 92,000 jobs. Of that total, Silicon Valley—defined as Santa Clara and San Mateo counties—accounted for 46 percent. “This is prodigious job creation,”...
In the Future, All Space Marines Will Be Warhammer... →
MCA Hogarth:
In mid-December, Games Workshop told Amazon that I’d infringed on the trademark they’ve claimed for the term “space marine” by titling my original fiction novel Spots the Space Marine. In response, Amazon blocked the e-book from sale. Since then, I’ve been in discussion with Games Workshop, and following their responses, with several lawyers.
In their last email to me, Games...
Good for Dell (maybe)
So Dell going private certainly is big news, yet it seems like there’s less here than meets the eye.
Yes, yes, Apple fans, “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders,” ha ha. But Dell isn’t shutting down—they’re getting out of the public stock market that has left most of us Apple watchers scratching our heads wondering what the hell traders are...
January 2013
11 posts
“To me, he looks like a killer. He looks as though he knows what he’s doing. I...”
– Sir Roger Moore, on Daniel Craig as James Bond
Facebook Is Done Giving Its Precious Social Graph... →
Josh Constine, TechCrunch:
Facebook has offered Find Friends for years. But those were years when it was a web-based social network. It’s more now, or at least it wants to be. Facebook hopes to host all the ways you communicate. That has pitted it against Apple, Google, and other companies in war for messaging that’s only just heating up.
Now Facebook is coming out swinging, citing its...
Nokia finally reports profit after six quarters of... →
Aaron Souppouris, The Verge:
As previously announced, [Nokia] sold 4.4 million Lumias over the quarter, a more-than 50 percent jump from Q3’s 2.9 million, and its best quarter since launching its Windows Phone line. The uptick in sales contributed to €8.04 billion ($10.73 billion) in overall revenue for the quarter, which when balanced with Nokia’s continued restructuring and other...
Google stands up for Gmail users, requires cops to... →
Cyrus Farivar, Ars Technica:
While relatively few tech companies publicly disclose how many government requests they get, Google appears to be one of the few e-mail providers that is challenging law enforcement agencies to produce a warrant to access users’ e-mail.
I grump at Google’s ad-driven business practices for being at least indirectly invasive; it’s good to call them out...
'Dell Dude' wants to save Dell by bringing back... →
Amar Toor, The Verge:
Ben Curtis is probably best known as the half baked star of the “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” from the early 2000s. In Curtis’ mind, though, he’s the answer to all of Dell’s problems.
At this point they could hardly do worse.
25 Things I wish I knew before moving to San... →
While I’ve seen this basic thing done before, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done better than Jason Evanish’s take here.
I live down in Silicon Valley proper, even farther away than the two peninsula cities he mentions (“Palo Alto and Mountain View are farther away than you think”); a drive from where I am to the heart of San Francisco is only about fifty...
1 tag
The Suburban Cocktail
This is an old but quasi-lost cocktail which I was introduced to not by my favorite local craft bar, Singlebarrel in San Jose, but by BB’s Restaurant in Jacksonville, Florida. Really. It’s a clear cousin to the Manhattan, and was apparently invented in the late 1800s at the Waldorf-Astoria.
The Suburban Cocktail
1.5 oz. rye whiskey
1/2 oz. dark rum
1/2 oz. port
dash orange...
The Verge's photos and tweets from Qualcomm's CES... →
Dieter Bohn:
2013 was the first time in many years that Microsoft didn’t host the opening keynote for the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas. Instead, the show went to Qualcomm and its CEO, Dr. Paul Jacobs. We weren’t quite sure what to expect beyond a new series of processors, but what we got was weirder than anything we’ve seen in all of our collective years...
The E-Reader Revolution: Over Just as It Has... →
Greg Bensinger at the WSJ invokes Betteridge’s Law:
The e-reader era just arrived, but now it may be ending. Dedicated devices for reading e-books have been a hot category for the past half-dozen years, but the shrinking sizes and falling prices of full-featured tablet computers are raising questions about the fate of reading-only gadgets like Amazon’s original Kindle and Barnes...
Happy 2013, or not
Apparently I am being gently downsized at my current place of employment—moved to part-time starting in February. This doesn’t wildly bother me yet (a 50% pay cut, while not good, is both better than unemployment and leaves me with a lot of time to try to do as yet undefined Other Things), but I’m beginning to wonder about my wisdom in employers and perhaps career paths. My...
December 2012
5 posts
No, actually, we're not going to do that
inothernews:
So now that Google Maps is on the iPhone everyone who doesn’t own an Android is going to act like Google Maps never existed on any other platform, ever, for like the past three years?
This would be worth grumbling about if, you know, anyone was actually saying that. But it’s only the imaginary Apple users in people’s heads that have — everyone actually...
Review: Solid design, great touchscreen can’t save... →
I confess I linked to this only because of the headline. The review isn’t quite as negative as that makes it out to be, either:
If Acer’s touchscreen-equipped S7 Ultrabook is an example of what we can expect from the company going forward, it might just be able to pull off this image rehabilitation. We’ve spent a few days with the 13-inch model, and there are quite a few...
A good observation →
incorrigiblerobot:
I read through two and a half trades worth of the Walking Dead before I realized that even extremely well-written soul-sucking shit is still soul-sucking shit.
The link is to a Boing Boing article entitled “Walking Dead 17: It’s Grim.” I admit I haven’t read or seen “The Walking Dead” largely because of what this quote gets at. I...
For Cable TV, the Mayans were four years off
Earlier this year, I wrote in “The Graph”:
There’s a falling line indicating the amount of money studios and networks estimate they’ll make by continuing to stick with the distribution channels they have now; there’s a rising line indicating the amount of money they estimate they could make by embracing the Internet wholeheartedly.
My mockup graph showed those...
News Corp to split off Fox Group entertainment... →
Dan Seifert, The Verge:
Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate, News Corporation, announced today that the two new companies being formed from its split will be called Fox Group and News Corporation. The company is being split to separate the media and entertainment side of the business from its news coverage.
Most of the tech press is specifically covering the end of The Daily, the...
November 2012
11 posts
Small dogs ripping one another apart is a sad... →
Kevin C. Tofel, GigaOM:
At a time when it could really use a break, Research In Motion can’t catch one. Nokia is seeking a U.S. ban on BlackBerry sales for any devices that use the 802.11 wireless LAN standard, according to Computerworld. Per the filing, Nokia says “[RIM] is not entitled to manufacture or sell products compatible with the WLAN standard without first agreeing with Nokia on the...
Microsoft's definition of obvious
Some anonymous writer on “ghacks.net”:
If you have purchased a laptop running Windows 8 recently you may have noticed that it may not contain a small label on the back side or battery compartment listing the operating system’s product key. The question that should come up at this point is how you are going to reinstall the operating system without the product key.
I suppose...
The Magazine, Issue 4
I mentioned Marco Arment’s The Magazine before — but, in the name of shameless self-promotion, it’s worth mentioning that I have a have an article in Issue 4, “Advertising On Demand.” For the time being The Magazine is only available as an iOS 6 app, but if you’re interested in the sorts of things that the articles cover — a fascinating melange aimed at...
Little, Big
I’m not going to go hunt for “claim chowder” on this, but I’m pretty sure that an awful lot of Apple pundits now celebrating the iPad Mini not too long ago argued that 10″ is the right size for a tablet, and that the sales clearly proved it. A 7″ screen may be great for reading books, but it’s too small to use a “pad” the way you use a computer. Right? Has...
Over 30,000 followers
And I bet nearly 1,000 of them are real people!
(Seriously, is it just me, or are there are a lot of bots infesting Tumblr these days?)
Does Google TV have its act together? →
When I saw mention of a Google TV update I confess my immediate thought was a headline something like In other news, Google is actually still making this. Instead, though, two non-flippant thoughts.
First, Google’s PrimeTime app looks close to the unified content view that I was pining for in the post yesterday. It’s not clear how integrated it is with services like Netflix and Hulu,...
"Over the Top: The new war for TV" →
The Verge’s Nilay Patel with a great overview article on the “war for your living room”:
How is it that you can get a dazzling new smartphone every year with an ever-growing list of features, a better display, and faster networking, but the experience of watching television in your living room remains almost exactly the same as it was five years ago? Why are TV and cable box...
Mistitled: Andrew Singer, RIP →
rms2:
Last night I learned (via tweet from my friend and former colleague Philip Borenstein) that Andrew Singer had passed away recently. Andrew was one of the founders of THINK Technologies, and nearly thirty years after the fact, those are names recognized by very few.
THINK created some of the first and most important developer tools for the Macintosh platform, built around C/C++ and...
