The Brooks Review

Year: 2010

  • Prevent Deactivation of Find My iPhone

    Great tip, go do it. (You need to have a MobileMe account)

    [Updated: 12/31/10 at 2:01 PM]
    Correction you just need the free account for Find my Device. I forgot that they had made this free, sorry about that.

  • Webkit Mac Antialiasing

    Some of you may have noticed that when I pushed the new site design the text looked, well shitty. Then when you scrolled around all was well in the world. Needless to say I was freaking out and when I couldn’t get it sorted out I turned off Typekit to resolve the problem. I contacted Typekit on Get Satisfaction and they sent me this link. You see that little text that says “Powered by Fusion” was set in 10px type. That was causing all the problems, a couple of CSS edits and bumping the size up to 11px seems to have solved the problem. If you still see it contact me, but we should be good now.

    This link is to an excellent technical description for the problem, along with the remedy.

  • Back to the Future (Our Future)

    It occurred to me the other day, that today’s youth doesn’t know the world without things like: Facebook, Google, Broadband Internet speeds, Microwaves with butter softening settings ((Highly recommend, very cool option.)), waiting for food, not knowing where a person is, getting lost, and so much more. As you think about each of those — think about how different news delivery today is from what it was when you were a teenager.

    I get most of my news from an RSS reader and all my breaking news from Twitter and email alerts. Neither are very old systems

    With that in mind try to imagine what the world will look like in our life spans — hell what the world may look like in just 5 years. It is almost impossible to imagine these things — this is the reason that technology never ceases to excite me.

    Endless Possibilities

    What technology holds five years from now is not knowable — though we can discern a few things here and there. For example we know battery life improves every year and computers tend to always get lighter, smaller, and faster. We also know that internet speeds keep increasing, as do file sizes, as does the amount we pay to companies providing us with services we had never heard about a year ago.

    It is important to remember though that it is not just the big things that change our world — it is also the small things. Things like light sensing backlit displays, backlit keyboards, not having to screw cable connections into your computer. Those little things make life a whole lot easier and they change the way we work too.

    The Future

    Moving forward there are a lot of things that I want to see change and improve. Most of all I want to see us all using less paper — it is a violent medium that gives you some of the most painful cuts a grown man can experience.

    I also want to see better and cheaper broadband internet for the masses, helping to level the intellectual playing field. I want to see technology continue to push boundaries — wowing even the largest luddites.

    I want Google Maps with real-time satellite imagery.

    A Note on Our Past

    I love going on road trips, but every time I venture out I think about my childhood. Not because we spent a lot of time in the car, but because when I was a child getting lost meant: you were lost. It didn’t mean you would have to pull over and check Google Maps on your phone, or program in your GPS. You couldn’t even call someone from your car to ask for directions and help. If you were lost you had to go find an actual live person and ask them for help. ((Or read a paper map.))

    That is mostly lost on today’s generations. They will never know what it is like to simply not talk to a loved one during the day. Think about how before cell phones most people that left on a road trip would not check in until they made it to their destination. It could have been days without people knowing if they are alive and well.

    Today if I am on a road trip without my wife and I haven’t checked in with her recently I will get text or a call for sure. I don’t know if today’s kids are as paranoid about losing contact as people in my generation seem to be, but it is certainly an interesting paradigm.

    Cell phones have changed my world almost as much as the internet has — that is no small feat.

    Anyways

    All of this is just a fancy way of telling everyone to keep dreaming and make those dreams huge.

    Here’s to the future.

  • TBR to the Future

    When I started this blog back in April of this year my only goal was to get my blog out there and to do my best writing. Turns out that I have started on a good path with the first goal and I think my writing has only improved since day one.

    What I didn’t expect was to get some of the amazing emails I have gotten. Perhaps the most amazing thing that happened was that I have made some great new friends along the way — to all of you I want to thank you for your kindness and I look forward to our continued friendship.

    That Was Last Year

    Twenty-Eleven

    I
    want to make 2011 even more bad ass. I look forward to forging new friendships and starting new debates. Please don’t ever be shy about emailing me — even when I get overwhelmed by the amount of email I receive, I always crave a bit more.

    Most of all: tell me when you think I am wrong. I am always happy to debate, or even change my mind.

    There are two major changes that I am pushing right now to the blog:

    1. Ads: I feel incredibly lucky and fortunate to have been invited to join the Fusion Ad network. I had been reserving virtual space to get one ad on the site when I found the appropriate network and I think Fusion is that network. I look forward to joining the ranks of some outstanding blogs and I hope I can live up to the reputation associated with them.

    2. Logo: Until today everything on the site had been designed by me or adapted from other themes. Today though, TBR has a new logo designed by an amazing graphic designer and all around great guy: Aaron Mahnke of Wet Frog Studios. I took advantage of an offer he made on Twitter and decided that TBR could use a better logo. I am very happy with what Aaron came up with and I hope you enjoy it too. ((As a side note be sure to get in touch with Aaron if you have any kind of graphic design work you need done — you won’t regret it.))

    Miscellany

    A couple people send me links to stuff they think I might like and I would like to encourage all of you to send me tips and suggestions. Even if you just want to know what I think about something, or have something you think I should review — send them in.

    Thanks for a wonderful 2010.

    One last thing if you don’t see the new logo refresh again or dump your browsers cache and you should get it. Thanks

  • Quote of the Day: Brett Kelly

    “However much time you spent building the retaining wall, writing the web application or mixing the homemade parrot shampoo, spend one percent more of that time making sure you didn’t dork something up along the way.”

    I need to do this more often — we all do.

  • Hotel Washes Every Coin They Get As Courtesy For Guests

    Ben Popken on a hotel that washes coins it receives:

    The practice at the St. Francis hotel in San Francisco is said to have started when hotelier Dan London observed that some coins sullied a woman’s white gloves.

    It is very cool that they still do this.

  • Confusion Happens When Print Tries to Imitate Web

    For better or worse one of the most popular trends on the Internet is to create infographics on topics (see a bunch here). Some of these graphics are stunning and really paint a nice picture, while others are, well, let’s just say others are less than helpful.

    Those who follow me on Twitter know that I am in Miami right now, last night I grabbed the red eye from Seattle to Miami in hopes of seeing Will Smith — only to find out contrary to the song) he doesn’t live in Miami full-time. ((That is not really why I am in Miami.)) Part of my airport ritual is to purchase a physical magazine to read during take off (when digital devices are not allowed), this time was no different.

    This time around I purchased Bloomberg Businessweek and it was a special ‘Year in Review’ edition that promised:

    365 days, 61 Charts, 289 Pictures, 7 Essays.

    businessweek_tmb_02.jpg

    I grabbed this issues because it appeared that Businessweek decided to make an entire infographic issue of a printed magazine. ((I realize infographics have been popular since before the web.)) So how did they do?

    Pretty shitty.

    businessweek_tmb_01.jpg
    businessweek_tmb_03.jpg

    I have never been more confused in trying to read a magazine ((More confusing that iPad apps.)), or just trying to figure out why all the numbers and charts and lines they are showing are important. I cannot recommend this issue of Businessweek to any of my dear readers.

    If you need a concrete example just look at the bottom left corner of the last picture — they are not saying that those percentages represent each half of the country — no they just put percentages randomly over the top of the country and then colored it differently to show how “equal” they are. Lame.

    Unrelated

    I had a goal once airborne to use my MacBook Air and InDesign to finish up a form for work — middle seat in coach on Alaska Airlines does not work so well for this task. I slept instead. In fact it doesn’t work at all for this task, I needed more elbow room to properly use the track pad — frustrating. More on this when I get back though.

  • Daddy Days and Remote Work in the Netherlands

    Katrin Bennhold on Microsoft’s Netherlands campus:

    Ninety-five percent of Dutch Microsoft employees work from home at least one day a week; a full quarter do so four out of five days. Each team has a “physical minimum;” some meet twice a week in the office, others once a quarter. Online communication and conference calls save time, fuel and paper waste. The company says it has cut its carbon footprint by 900 tons this year.

    A great story how Dutch workers are really taking to spending more time at home and trying to cut their work days from 5 to 4. I work from home on Fridays — it is not only the best day of my work week, but it is also my most productive.

  • Macworld Reviews Postbox 2

    Nathan Alderman’s conclusion of Postbox 2:

    If you’d like a top-notch upgrade to your e-mail experience at a reasonable price, and you can live without Exchange support, the terrific and thoughtful features built into Postbox definitely deserve your consideration.

    Postbox is one of those apps that I want to love (another one is Pixelmator). I have tried Postbox many of times, including the 2.0 release after Chris Bowler posted about how much he loved it. I just can’t get into — I think I may be too stuck in my Mail.app ways.

  • Skype Video Calling for iOS over Wi-Fi and 3G Now Available

    Looks like a good update — personally I never use Skype, but this is a great way to do video chat over 3G on the iPhone. I may just have to start using Skype again.

  • 44GB is all Ian Hines Needs

    Ian Hines on how he got to only using 44GB on his MacBook:

    As I mentioned above, I didn’t get to this point out of some coordinated effort to use less. Less is not more. Enough is enough. And for me, this is enough.

    For reference I use 159.24GB on my MacBook Air, just a testament to what I said from day one about what a ‘normal’ computer user needs. If you are using more than 200GB of storage you are not in the majority.

  • QuickCursor

    A neat little utility to allow you to write in your text editor of choice and then upon closing that window have the text magically appear in say a mail message window. Clever and it supports TextMate. Here’s the thing though: there was another menubar utility that did this same thing a while back (like more than a year) bonus points if you know what it was/is.

  • Marco Arment’s Top 10 Tech Failures of 2010

    Marco Arment weighs in with a very accurate list.

  • RIM struggling

    Josh Ong after reporting on the Playbooks current 3 hour battery life:

    Despite these concerns, RIM’s Jim Balsillie has insisted that the PlayBook is “way ahead” of the iPad. Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis recently said in an interview that the PlayBook OS is will lead RIM into the “next decade of mobile computing.”

    I sure hope the “next decade” of computing doesn’t mean 3 hour battery life.

  • F is for Failure

    Yesterday I posted about CNN’s list of the top ten technology failures for 2010 — in the linked list I wrote that I no longer trusted CNN and would not be reading them. Upon thinking about it more I find their entire list to be pretty silly. Here are CNN’s top ten failures in tech for 2010:

    1. iPhone 4 Antenna
    2. 3-D TV
    3. Microsoft Kin
    4. Nexus One
    5. Facebook Privacy
    6. Google Buzz
    7. Gawker Media Site Hack
    8. Content Farms
    9. Digg Relaunch
    10. iTunes Ping

    Apple deservedly makes the list twice — but this is hardly a list of the biggest tech failures and the iPhone 4 antenna issue is hardly at the top. Compare CNN’s list to LAPTOP Magazine’s list:

    1. Microsoft Kin
    2. Augen GenTouch78 Android Tablet
    3. AT&T 3G MicroCell
    4. Literati E-Book Reader
    5. Qik Video Chat
    6. Cisco Flip Side HD
    7. Google TV

    This list makes even less sense. Let’s look at PC Worlds ginormous list of failures, which were annoyingly put in a slideshow format:

    1.Google Buzz
    2. iTunes Ping
    3. Google Wave
    4. Net Neutrality
    5. Facebook Privacy
    6. McAfee’s False Positive 
    7. Palm Pre / WebOS
    8. HP Slate
    9. Android Tablets
    10. Nexus One
    11. JooJoo
    12. Plastic Logic Que
    13. Lost iPhone
    14. iPhone 4 Antenna
    15. White iPhone 4
    16. Blackberry Torch
    17. Ask.com
    18. Blockbuster
    19. MySpace
    20. Microsoft Kin

    This is probably the best list I have seen, but it is hardly definitive.

    With that in mind let me now rank how I see 2010’s biggest technology failures:

    1. BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
    2. White iPhone 4
    3. Microsoft Kin
    4. Slate Tablets announced at CES
    5. Google Buzz
    6. Google Wave
    7. Gawker Media Hack
    8. RIM
    9. Tumblr

    That is it, only nine things. So let’s talk about a few that made the list and why and then I will mention why I have omitted a couple of others.

    BP

    Many of you may be wondering why an Oil Spill constitutes a ‘technology failure’ — I would argue that BP and the U.S. failed to use all available technologies to resolve the situation. More so they failed to properly use technology to prevent the spill in the first place.

    Ignore the poor management of the clean up — a lot of technology failed to make the spill as bad as it was.

    Slates

    These were supposed to be huge, instead did one even ship with Windows on it? Ok — but they sure as hell didn’t live up to anyones standards. This was a massive technology and business failure.

    RIM

    Where the hell were they? Where is all the technology that they purported to be shipping? Ugh…

    Ping

    I left Ping off because if you re-read the definition above you will see that Ping did as advertised. Ping isn’t great and barely anyone uses it, but is that really worse than anything else on the list?

    iPhone 4 Antenna

    Did it stop users from buying it? If Kin makes the list for lack of sales than why would the iPhone 4 make the list…too many sales?

    Facebook Privacy

    I hate Facebook, but apparently I am in the minority. Yes, they are making things less and less private — but I don’t recall something worse than the other things on my list happening.

    Lists

    I didn’t really want to make a list, but I saw no way around it. So if Apple ships the White iPhone 4 before the 1st then you have me to thank. ((They read this blog…right?))

  • iPhone’s Group Messaging in iOS 4

    Shawn Blanc enlightening readers about iOS group messaging:

    Since Group Messaging means messages are sent as MMS no matter what, if you’re sending to people using Blackberries or non-smartphones then they have to open and download your text message as if it contained a media attachment. They think you’re sending a picture, but you simply sent some words.

    File that under: “I had no clue”.

  • Instafixed

    A huge thanks to Marco Arment for not only fixing the bug mentioned earlier, but for doing so quickly.

    Marco Arment:

    Users affected will need to tap the grayed-out stories in the iPhone/iPad app and select “Redownload” to fix them. Sorry about that.

  • InstaFavor [UPDATED]

    [Updated: 12/29/10 at 11:23 AM] Thanks to all that emailed me — this looks to be a widespread problem for more than just my site. If you are seeing this please feel free to continue to report it and also report it to the developer of the apps that you are using. Thanks.

    [Updated: 12/29/10 at 11:27 AM] Marco Arment the developer of Instapaper emailed to say that he is working on the problem. Please don’t flood his email box anymore. Thanks for your help.

    To all readers using Instapaper for iOS could you please do me a favor and try to add this post to Instapaper by whatever means you usually do this. Once you do this can you sync your Instapaper account to your iOS device and let me know if the article shows up.

    I have been getting scattered reports that an article (not linked list items) are showing as “unavailable” in Instapaper for iOS. This of course annoys me to no end and must be incredibly frustrating for you — the reader.

    Shoot me an email to comments@brooksreview.net and let me know if it works for you or not and the steps you took.

    Instapaper appears to work just fine for the linked list items.

    Thanks!

  • Cultured Code’s Biggest Problem Isn’t OTA Sync

    A great write up from Stephen M. Hackett on how Things’ lack of OTA sync is really going to spell trouble for the company. Just look at the reviews that he links to and ask yourself: if you didn’t know anything about Things — would you buy it today based on the app store reviews alone?

  • CNN Posts Link Bait — Loses My Respect

    I don’t care if you are going to list Apple’s iPhone 4 antenna problems as the biggest fail in tech of 2010 (though you would be wrong), but at the very least make sure you make a case for it being the biggest failure. Look at how CNN sees Apple’s “fail”, through the eyes of Doug Gross:

    Months later, the problem is all but forgotten and the phones show no sign of dipping in popularity. So “fail,” in this case, is a pretty relative term.

    So CNN is it a fail or not. Never mind I am just not going to read your crap anymore.

    I mean clearly Ping is a bigger failure, yet it only garners 10th place? WTF.