- ‘Useless’ Is A Loaded Word – “In almost any life situation where you need to get something out of another person, being a dick is never the right method to go about it. Using loaded words like ‘useless’ or ‘worthless’ is being a dick. We will listen to your feedback and thank you for it, but unless it is some urgent issue that will affect every user, it’s most likely getting shoved to the bottom of the pile in favor of doing things to make the friendly customers happy.”
- Don’t blame inflation for all the price rises – Summary: food and gadgets are cheaper, entertainment is considerably more expensive.
- We should stop running away from radiation – “A sea-change is needed in our attitude to radiation, starting with education and public information.”
I want to like ebooks, I really do.
I like that the Kindle is smaller than a real paperback but can store dozens, hundreds even, of novels. I like that you can lose the hardware device and just download the books again. I like that I can read the same book on my iPhone as well as my iPad. It doesn’t even bother me that there’s no physical product. I’m not going to re-read most of my books yet they continue to take up the limited space in my London flat.
This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Mother Nature.” I wanted to do something a little better than a pretty landscape or a beautiful landscape. Sure, they’re both by mother nature but I don’t think that’s all there is. I wanted to show the creation and the power and, to a certain extent, how little control we have over the whole process. Iceland is about as good as it gets for that kind of thing, with the volcanos and geysers. We didn’t see any volcanos when we were there — which would have fitted the theme even better — but this is an image at Geysir. It’s dark and miserable, even at 11.30, in December but it’s still spectacular.
Most developers of iOS applications have a love-hate relationship with the main interface with Apple.
No, let me re-phrase that.
Most developers of iOS applications hate iTunes Connect, the main impediment to a good relationship with Apple.
To be fair it has improved since it opened in mid-2008. One of those improvements has been the inclusion of crash reports. A crash report, in case you’re not a developer, is something that iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads write out when an application crashes. It includes all kinds of useful information, including some, but not all, of the internal state of the application in question. It’s very, very useful for diagnosing problems.
- Why I am an amoral, family-hating monster…and Newt Gingrich isn’t – “So, just a suggestion: if you want a relationship that lasts, don’t rely on god, lawyers, and social pressure to force it to work. Love and reciprocal trust are the only chains that last, and the only ones that make you feel happy while wearing them.”
With a startling lack of originality, I present my entry in this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, “Polished.” I say unoriginal as it’s a pretty literal interpretation of the theme and it’s also an image I used for an earlier PhotoFriday (“Shiny“). It was taken in Stockholm, Sweden.
Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Ethereal.” I’m entry number 173.
It was nothing like as dramatic as my iBook dying one evening, but there was no getting around the fact that my nearly five year old MacBook was no longer up to the tasks that I was trying to throw at it. Developing applications, even for resource limited devices such as the iPhone, needs a pretty substantial piece of Mac software called Xcode. My photography pushed me towards getting Aperture to manage all my pictures. It’s great, but it did have a tendency to grind to a halt when it was least convenient.
- Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now! – Despite multiple failures there has been no significant release of radiation.
- Japan Earthquake: before and after – Amazing and shocking.
- Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors – I did think that the coverage suggesting a nuclear disaster was unlikely. This explains why my intuition was (probably) right.
- Twitter tells third-party devs to stop making Twitter client apps – “More significantly, it demonstrates the vulnerability of building a business on top of a Web platform that is controlled by a single vendor.” This is exactly the lesson I found with my Delicious.com client.
- Illinois scrubs death penalty – Another step in the right direction.
- NYT and “torture”: Searching for a justification – Apparently the definition of torture depends very much on who is doing it.