I know this video is a bit older, but I thought I’d post it again, simply because daylight saving time frustrates me more every year.
Video by C.G.P. Grey.
Dear startups and other relevant parties: It’s 2012. It is no longer ok to
- Not offer a way to download our data in some sort of a standard, transparent, and at least somewhat human-siftable format
- Hide or otherwise be opaque about precisely what personal data you smuggle out of our devices
- Not offer a one-to-two-click process for deleting our accounts
- Fail to actually remove our data from your servers after we delete our accounts (while complying with applicable regional laws governing data retention)
- Believe that taking VC and selling your customers’s private information is the only way to get a company off the ground, let alone run a successful business
- Not use SSL for passing even the slightest bit of private information
- Offer Facebook Connect as your only signup option [hat tip to Zwei in the comments]
Did I miss anything?
I wholeheartedly agree.
The state of Apple's platform lock-in
I’ve written a piece for macgasm, outlining the current state of Apple’s ecosystem regarding platform lock-in.
If you’re interested in how ‘Apple’s golden cage’ — as it is sometimes called by pundits — actually looks like, I encourage you to read the article.
How to make Twitter's favourites more useful
Something I wrote for macgasm.net, that’s been bugging me for a while. The solution works nicely, I recommend checking it out.
Facebook Timeline Privacy Tips
On February 7th Facebook’s timeline feature will go live for all users.
what used to be an opt-in feature will be mandatory for all users.
A consequence is that many things the user might think long forgotten, will be easily accessible and many posts that were private will now be visible to the public.
The linked site gives an overview of the things you can do to protect your privacy and tweak the way your new MySpace Facebook timeline works.
I found this video thanks to Glenn Fleishman and he really sums it up best:
This 10-minute Hobbit walkthrough is a tour de force education in digital 3D stereography and filmmaking.
A few keywords that made my jaw drop: RED Epic, 48 fps, 5k, stored on 128 GB SSDs, Alan Lee and John Howe producing 3D artwork for Peter Jackson.
The UK gives you a brand-new way to infringe copyright with pictures
Harry Marks on his website Curious Rat:
From Amateur Photographer:
Photographers who compose a picture in a similar way to an existing image risk copyright infringement, lawyers have warned following the first court ruling of its kind. UK souvenir maker Temple Island Collection Ltd has won a ruling against New English Teas which it had accused of breaching copyright by using a photo of a London bus on its packaging.
Stupid and terrifying.
This opens up a whole new dimension of ways for businesses to hamper each other, for crooks and copyright trolls to make money and a world of pain for the courts.
Mac OS X is weird sometimes
Over the last two days a bug in OS X Lion has been driving me crazy:
My 2011 Mac mini simply wouldn’t go to sleep.
I tried everything: Pressing the power button on its back, clicking the sleep item on the -menu and pressing ⌘+⌥+⏏. Nothing worked.
Then I hit the internet and started searching for solutions, this is what I tried:
- Is some kind of sharing function was switched on? — No.
- Where any apps preventing it it from sleeping? — Not that I could see.
- Any weird events in the system log? — Nope.
- Does one of my USB drives malfunction and keep it awake? — No, again.
- Are there any network connections open that might stop it from sleeping? — No.
- Bluetooth issues? — Nope.
I even performed a PMU and a SMC reset, with no effect.
Essentially I didn’t know what was going on and I decided to call the Apple’s support hotline: After answering all the questions by the very nice representative I was still left with no solution.
I gave the internet one last try, stumbling on the pmset -g terminal command, which prints out a log of settings for hibernation and errors if any occurred. Nothing.
Then I remembered that earlier that day I had read that someone turned screen sharing on and off again to find out if it had any effect.
I turned on screen sharing in the sharing preference pane and hit ⌘+⌥+⏏, eyes closed… The Mac mini went to sleep immediately.
I turned it off again and the mini still went to sleep as ordered.
This is one weird bug, where not having any kind of sharing functionality turned on causes the Mac to not go to sleep. Oh boy.
I wrote a few posts for Macgasm.net
… and I hope there will be many more :)
Here’s the link to my author profile on the site.
I don’t want booth babes.
There’s a nice and very sensible post on The Loop regarding booth babes at trade shows (like CES and IAA). Peter Cohen quotes a Gizmodo piece by Mat Honan regarding the complaints about booth babes directed at the organiser of CES. Read it here.
A comment by a guest named ‘Coward Anonim’ rubbed me the wrong way, though:
If companies want to pay them and they want to get the job, then what is a problem?
Can’t adults (18+ years) make decisions for themselves? How the h… they are eligible to vote in a public election, then? Is not election more important???
(Let’s leave the elephant in the room — the degradation of women to sex objects — standing there for a minute. Let’s also make a distinction between normally clothed female sales staff and booth babes.)
When I go to a trade show I go there for the products. If companies need scantly clad women to get my attention, I immediately suspect that their product isn’t good enough to impress me on its own.
I like women as much as the next guy, but I find the practice of putting scantly clad women on display at such shows insulting. — Why?
Because what the people hiring them are telling me, is that I’m so controlled by primal urges to serve every female in sight, that I’ll flock to every booth with booth babes.
Good products don’t need booth babes to be sold. Modern men don’t need booth babes to find those products.
This is what bugs me: These monitors demonstrate that Samsung has some incredible designers.
Why do they still resort to blatantly copying Apple?
John Welch on the 'no comments on my blog' brouhaha
He hits the nail square on the head and actually makes a point I haven’t thought about: Search Engine Optimisation.
It’s a good and honest post, with a healthy amount of profanity mixed-in.
My take is that sometimes it doesn’t make sense to add comments to a blog, but many bloggers, developers and journalists who used to have comments on their site, are simply being dishonest about the way the removal of comments influences a potential discussion.
If you want a discussion on the topic you wrote about, allow comments or give people a way to make their opinions heard/read not only by yourself.
If you don’t want a discussion, or simply don’t want to be disagreed with on your own site, you don’t allow comments.
Other explanations, like this one from MG Siegler;
Earn your voice.
are just excuses so you don’t have to tell people the truth:
“I don’t care for your opinion as long as you’re not popular.” — which brings us back to what John Welch was saying. Go ahead, read his article.
When and how I attibute
Stephen Hackett had a nice post up on his site about how and when to attribute content or links to other people.
Proper attribution is important and sometimes not that easy.
Yesterday he posted a simple attribution rule that Chris Martucci lives by:
My criteria for via links are simple: If someone points me to an article I did not find on my own (either through my RSS reader or at its original source), I’ll include a via. Likewise, if an article I found on my own links to a second article, which I then post to my weblog, I’ll link to the original source.
The only thing I do differently, is to also mention the site I found a link on by my own, if the author of the second article added even the slightest bit of value to the original post.
Curious Rat - An Observation
A quote from the post:
You can preach all you want about rooting your phone and hacking your tablet to do inane things, like control your refrigerator light, but my family was actually getting things done within 30 minutes of opening and activating their new computers - yes, computers.
Ease of use and seamlessness are some of the things that convince many people of Apple’s products in my opinion.
I had a similar experience with my parents lately: I gave them my MacBook Pro, pre-loaded with OS X Lion, MS Office, the current iLife apps and a few other nifty things that I knew they’re going to use.
After about an hour of showing them around the OS and a few apps, my mother was hooked. Guess by which features?
Mission control and full screen apps, gestures and auto saving.
As long as the innards of OS X are somehow accessible to those who want or need to work with them, Apple can iOS-ify the system as much as they want, if it makes full-blown computers easier to use for normal people.
The Mother of all Hot Wheels Tracks — 512 Pixels
Click through to Stephen’s site for the link to this video, you won’t regret it. My thought during the first 30 seconds of the video was: “Meh, I’ve built more complicated things back in the day with my Darda tracks, but then at checked the time code and length of the video. My second though was: “I want to believe!”
