We Need to Talk about the Ads on Your Blog
Look, here’s the thing. Your blog is like a restaurant: people are willing to ignore the semi-offensive paintings on the wall if the Penne All’Arrabiata makes their knees weak. With every ad you shove onto your blog, you’re asking them to ignore another awful painting.
The bigger challenge for the next wave of tablets will be the hardware manufacturers, who seem hell bent on destroying the user experience with cheap skins on top of what amounts to otherwise interesting devices. This is the dark side of open-ness in the Android landscape.
The parable of the the PDA: predicting the smartphone’s future | asymco
The problem is that the vendors that lost this game failed because they listened to their customers. Like with PDAs or with the original mobile phones or first generation of PCs, early adopters are not the audience that should be consulted on how to improve the product.
Absolutely spot on.
What 20 Minutes On Facebook Looks Like: 1M Shared Links, 2.7M Photos Uploaded, 10.2M Comments
While these numbers are impressive, Facebook’s stats on “what 20 minutes on Facebook looks like,” are even more staggering. According to Facebook, 1 million links are shared every 20 minutes on the network. Here are a few other stats listed:
[…]
Comments: 10.2 million
Messages: 4.6 million
Related to the change in the dynamic of email, seems like people are … I dunno … taking to the Facebook messaging platform OK to me.
Patrick Stewart on one draft treatment of the script:
In the story I have been reading this weekend we are enmeshed in a context of Federation politics, fine interpretations of The Prime Directive and ancient history – as ancient as Star Trek – of conflict between two members of The Federation. In the middle of all this there is a vaguely defined, characterless, uninteresting civilization who seem to have attended too many performances of Siegfried and Roy. [..] what I have read would have hardly composed a moderately interesting episode somewhere in the middle of season five of TNG.
I’ve only skimmed the first bit of it, but if you’re interested in screenwriting, this looks like a terrific insider-read. Plus, it’s funky to be reading this book posthumously. It’s like a love-letter to fans from Piller, frustrating to see the result that ended up on screen. Find the PDF of the text here: Fade In.
He seems like a pretty honest guy. From the introduction, page 6:
I was the writer from start to finish. … Had it been any other circumstance, there’s no question in my mind that, before the final draft was completed, I most certainly would have been fired.
Pro users of yesteryear’s products, the people with the biggest investment in old technologies, are not the people who should be calling the shots in the design of their successors. These are the people who complain that an iPad can’t have third party software installed from anywhere but the App Store, ignoring the massive convenience and security gains the policy affords average users. These are the people who are still using slotted screwdrivers and Edison light fixtures and manual transmission cars.
As a power user, I have yet to hear a super-compelling argument as to why I need third party apps on the iPad. But I love my Edison light fixtures. Chris’s main point is on Facebook messaging and email, and the same thing stands. Since Gmail, I haven’t used email like I did in days gone by. I don’t filter or file, I thread and search. What this process costs me in microseconds per transaction is made up in spades by freeing me from the silly frustration of keeping my email folders organized. (Taking the time to learn how search really works is the single biggest process gain one can make in streamlining the day-to-day buckle-shuffle of email.) Once I made that liberating cognitive leap, de-evolution of messaging as is on display in Facebook is a lot easier to understand.
Video Games Boost Brain Power, Multitasking Skills: NPR
“Video game players are able to pick up very subtle, statistical irregularities in environments and use them to their advantage,” Pratt says. “And these same irregularities in environments are the things that help us guide our behaviors on a daily basis.”
Take that, luddites. Video games make me awesome-er.
Hyperbole and a Half: The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas
It was finally time for Jesus to be born. Due to my incomplete understanding of childbirth, the scene involved Jesus being tossed across the room, as if in flight, and me running over to where he landed and acting really surprised to find him there.
So, there is this bit where a child beats a baby Jesus with a stick, but you should realize before you read it that, in context, it’s funny. Really funny.
PhatPad for iPad on the iTunes App Store
PhatPad offers everything you need to express your ideas, enabling you to draw pictures, jot notes, or put a mixture of drawings, images, handwritten and typed text on a virtual scratch pad. The included handwriting recognition engine automatically converts your handwritten notes into digital text, and PhatPad even takes objects you scribble and translates them to perfectly formed shapes.
I loved my Newton for these very features. Can’t believe Apple didn’t include them in the iPad. Jury is still out on how well it works.
delicious blog » What’s Next for Delicious?
Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?
– No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.
Yes, the Internet was in a hurry. Yes, panic caused steaming scoop disorder. Sounds like those who care are working to find a good solution.
R.I.P. Delicious: You Were So Beautiful to Me
It was beautiful. And now it’s gone.
32 GB versus 32GB: Almost everyone is writing it wrong
The International System of Units, otherwise known as the metric system, sets the standards for not only what a given quantity is, but how to express it. On page 133 of the SI brochure, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures says, “The numerical value always precedes the unit, and a space is always used to separate the unit from the number […] The only exceptions to this rule are for the unit symbols for degree, minute, and second for plane angle.” (emphasis added)
Pedantry aside, I do this wrong all the time.
Official Google Blog: Find out what’s in a word, or five, with the Google Books Ngram Viewer
Since 2004, Google has digitized more than 15 million books worldwide. The datasets we’re making available today to further humanities research are based on a subset of that corpus, weighing in at 500 billion words from 5.2 million books in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. The datasets contain phrases of up to five words with counts of how often they occurred in each year.
The Ngram Viewer lets you graph and compare phrases from these datasets over time, showing how their usage has waxed and waned over the years. One of the advantages of having data online is that it lowers the barrier to serendipity: you can stumble across something in these 500 billion words and be the first person ever to make that discovery.
As much as I get to armchair rib Google for Chrome OS and the App Store, it’s stuff like this: that a company the size of Google can afford to let brilliance go to work in every little corner of the organization, that makes it an exceptionally interesting time in our history. They’re a great model for humanities research right now.
Yahoo! Products All Hands Screener
I certainly don’t know details — it was just leaked. The thing that strikes me is that it appears that Yahoo! is choosing to focus on all products with direct and compelling competition, while de-emphasising or closing properties with true uniqueness, innovation, and potential. The loss of Del.icio.us is a real tragedy – that’s been a go-to service for me for years.
African Pouched Rats Sniff Out Unexploded Landmines
The landmine-sniffing rats are trained Pavlovian-style. When a rat stops to sniff the odor of an explosive, the trainer alerts with a loud click (using a clicker similar to those employed by some dog trainers) and gives the rat a food reward.
I love rats. I’m very much a rat person. They’re sweet, clean, and falsely accused of being nasty to people, by in large. We have two sweet rats, Samwise Wunderkind and Maxamillian Fog, and they’re the perfect pets for our kids. That said, I think it might be a touch odd to have rats the size of our beefy house cats. Still, check out the picture — priceless.
It can reach up to anywhere from 4.5 to 6.8 kilograms (10-15 pounds) in weight. In its native Africa, this pouched rat lives in colonies of up to twenty, usually in forests and thickets, but also commonly in termite mounds. It is omnivorous, feeding on vegetables, insects, crabs, snails, and other items, but apparently preferring palm fruits and palm kernels.
Unlike domestic rats, it has cheek pouches like a hamster. These cheek pouches allow it to gather up several kilograms of nuts per night for storage underground. It has been known to stuff its pouches so full of date palm nuts so as to be hardly able to squeeze through the entrance of its burrow. The burrow consists of a long passage with side alleys and several chambers, one for sleeping and the others for storage. The Gambian pouched rat reaches sexual maturity at 5–7 months of age. It has up to four litters every nine months, with up to six offspring in each litter. Males are territorial and tend to be aggressive when they encounter one another; otherwise, this rodent is extremely friendly and has become popular as an exotic pet.
It is intelligent, social and can be very gentle if handled from an early age.
In Africa, it is routinely eaten as bushmeat. It is (along with other mammals) referred to by the pidgin name of “beef”.
