What gets me about this video is that it sums it up by saying, “Pretty impressive for a bunch of plastic blocks.” What? Who cares about the Legos! That’s pretty impressive as a piece of technology designed OVER 2000 YEARS AGO! That’s what blows MY mind.

There’s a lot of people I know in the marketing side of the world who are getting quite excited and perhaps even infatuated with these QR codes. I find myself resisting them, though, because my perception is the people who they’re generally aimed at find them annoying — at least here in the United States.

Am I wrong?

How do you feel about these things?

Okay, this is just so silly that it’s cool. This is on Neatorama via Make… I present to you probably the first of many Apple accessories made for Klingons.

I don’t see why it wouldn’t work with iPods, too. In fact I would think it would be better with iPods because all this metal (that is metal, isn’t it?) would mess with the iPhone’s antenna signal.

This is clever, charming, and I felt I must share it.

Here’s one from the Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Out To Get You Department:

“An examination of 101 popular smartphone “apps”—games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones—showed that 56 transmitted the phone’s unique device ID to other companies without users’ awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone’s location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders.”

This is from a recent Wall Street Journal investigation.  It goes on to say:

“Apps sharing the most information included TextPlus 4, a popular iPhone app for text messaging. It sent the phone’s unique ID number to eight ad companies and the phone’s zip code, along with the user’s age and gender, to two of them.

Both the Android and iPhone versions of Pandora, a popular music app, sent age, gender, location and phone identifiers to various ad networks. iPhone and Android versions of a game called Paper Toss—players try to throw paper wads into a trash can—each sent the phone’s ID number to at least five ad companies. Grindr, an iPhone app for meeting gay men, sent gender, location and phone ID to three ad companies.”

You can read the full story at the WSJ (subscription required).

For those of us defecting to Mac from Windows who miss the actual Delete key (as opposed to the Mac ‘Delete’ key, which to us is a Backspace key) hit Fn-Delete.

Yay! It’s delete as we know it!

Addendum – Here’s all the keyboard shortcuts:  Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts

The software industry gets away with this kind of thing, but only because they usually give the crippled version of their program away for FREE. But imagine buying a computer and getting it home, setting it up, only to find it’s as slow as snot, and to actually get the full speed out of it you have to pay an extra $50.

That’s exactly what Intel wants to do. They’re trying it out now to see how people react.

Thank goodness I’m not the only one to react negatively to this:

• Facepalm of the Day: Intel charges customers $50 to unlock CPU features – ZD Net
• Intel + DRM: a crippled processor that you have to pay extra to unlock – BoingBoing

If Intel doesn’t get a signal — a very LOUD signal — that this isn’t acceptable, then you’ll see all sorts of other business follow suit.

If you agree, this is what I suggest you do.  Tweet:  I don’t want your stupid, crippled processor, #Intel

And tell your friends to do it, too.  This should send a clear message to not only Intel but everyone else in the industry.

I had such high hopes for this app. It seemed promising. The feature set came across so impressive and useful that I bought it immediately.

Silly me.

The reality is, this is a toy for would-be writers so that they can pretend they’re writing something. Two clues that it’s not actually for professional use:

1. It gives you a choice of parchment background styles for you to write on.
2. It presents your manuscript to you as if it’s already published in a hardbound book.

Ergo, this is a wish-fulfillment app, not an actual writing tool.

It could be saved, though. Add the ability to format your text, and improve the export feature so that it gives you a professionally formatted manuscript, and it would actually be useful. I mean, I don’t really have anything against it being on a parchment background, or looking like it’s already hardbound. What does piss me off is that I spent money on it without realizing it won’t do simple — and I mean basic — things like indent your paragraphs and underline words.

For you aspiring writers out there, here’s an important tip: professional publishers like to see their manuscript submissions in a specific format. This app claims to enable you to produce a submittable manuscript within the confines of the app itself, and that is not true.

Until Black Mana Studios fixes at least this basic flaw, there’s no way I can recommend this to anyone who is serious about creating a manuscript on the iPad. Take your money and instead buy Apple’s Pages. It may not come with all the plotting tools, but at least it gives you all the standard, necessary formatting features you’ll need to produce a professional manuscript.

Forget immersing yourself into a computer generated reality.  It looks like in the very near future, computer reality is going to be generated on top of our outer reality.  And onto us.

This is the first new interface technology to actually fire my imagination in a long, long time.

The CompactFlash Association has announced their CF5.0 specification, which allows memory cards up to 144 petabytes.

That’s PETAbytes, which translates to 150,994,944 gigabytes.

Unfortunately the new Compact Flash specification only allows transfer speeds up to 32 megabytes per second, which means a full 144PB card would take about 153 years to transfer.

(from Michael Zhang at PetaPixel)