The Brooks Review

Year: 2010

  • MultiFl0w Brings Exposé-Like Multitasking To Jailbroken iPhones

    Looks really cool, but I don’t get how it is more useful that the app switching is in iOS 4?

  • Use Voicemail More Effectively at Work

    Lifehacker:

    The short version: When you call up a coworker and get their voicemail, make sure that you are prepared to leave an effective message, and make sure that a voicemail message is the appropriate way to contact your coworker. Succinct, purposeful communication, regardless of the medium, is effective and keeps everyone productive.

  • E-mail Classifier

    Hillary Mason, via a NYT interview:

    I think e-mail should be sorted by importance, not by time

    I love it, and want it.

    [via iA on Twitter]

  • How Not to Be a Boss, How to Potentially Be Sued

    Last night my wife was watching the show “Spin Crowd” about some dip shits running a PR firm in LA. The boss spent the opening of the show berating a new employee over how she looked, apparently she did not look slutty enough for him. It was a horrible mess, and I kept wondering when the show would cut to him being sued for this blatant sexual harassment.

    This woman should sue him now, pathetic boss, pathetic television.

  • Advice from Frank Chimero

    Chimero:

    Stop trying to be cool: it is stifling.

    Read this entire post before you start work this Monday, it will change your entire perspective.

  • Stop Recieving Paper Junk Mail

    Simple Organized Life:

    Junk mail accounts for over 40 million tons of paper waste in this country each year. To help lower the amount of waste and to reduce the amount of paper you have to deal with at home, make sure you sign up/register with each of the following services (all are free):

    • Catalog Choice – Stop receiving catalogs from companies you would never buy anything from.
    • DirectMail – Stop the junk mail and advertisements.
    • OptOutPrescreen – Stop credit card offers.
    • DMA Consumers – Another direct mail list to remove yourself from.
    • Do Not Mail – Petition site to create a national Do Not Mail registry.

    Great tips, take the time to do this today.

  • Quick Hack to Make Your Boss (and you) More Productive

    Mark Suster:

    And the funny thing – by the time you were ready to walk through 7-8 issues with your boss you realize that you had already figured out 3 or 4 of them on your own. With a bit of patience it’s surprising just how many times you find answers to your own issues if you just try (seems like a lesson I’m trying to teach my 7 and 4 year olds these days).

  • Minimal Mac on Via: The Endangered Species

    Patrick Rhone:

    Attribution and acknowledgement of sourcing are not only the right thing to do, the honorable thing to do, they are the very strands in the thing we call the web. They are what connect it all together. They help to explain how I got here from there and why. They also help you navigate back down that thread and, hopefully, onto other places filled with wonder, curiosity and delight.

    I started to do this, and even have a CSS style for it, but thus far have been terrible at remembering to say where I found out about some links. I am going to be better from here on out, Rhone is absolutely right here. (Incidentally I found this link from the Minimal Mac twitter account, and my RSS reader)

  • What I Carry – Fridays & Weekend Bag

    Continuing on from my pockets to my lightweight weekend and Friday bag:

    What I Carry Fridays - Sunday

    • Case: Booq Boa Push
    • Apple iPad 16gb Wi-Fi
    • Verizon MiFi
    • Bose Headphones
    • Sharpie Pen (blue)
    • Sharpie Liquid Pencil
    • Mini Moleskin
    • Business Cards

    All in all a pretty light and ultra-mobile setup that I try to use on Fridays and the weekends (only if needed).

  • Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Accused of Rape [UPDATED]

    Asssange’s response to date has been that of a paranoid egotistic ass.

    [Updated: 8/21/10 at 9:08 AM] New York Times is reporting that authorities have with drawn their warrant for Assange’s arrest.

  • There Is No Justice

    Brian Lam on Twitter (the Gizmodo guy partly behind the stolen iPhone 4):

    left my phone at lunch, lady turned it in. good thing we were nice, earlier, and gave her the chair she asked for #karma

    Wow, you mean they didn’t sell it to the highest bidder? The link is to the Google cache as Lam has locked his Twitter account, also Gruber got a screenshot of it here.

  • Daring Fireball: Creep Executive Officer

    John Gruber:

    More and more, I get the feeling that if there’s a rift between the old “Don’t be evil” Google and the new “Let’s do whatever we want” Google, that it’s a rift between Schmidt and Larry/Sergey — if not personally, then at least culturally within the company. On the one side, the Larry/Sergey Google that makes amazing cool things — the search engine, Gmail, Android. On the other, the Schmidt Google that, in its efforts to serve ads as efficiently as possible, no longer seems concerned with the traditional Western concept of personal privacy.

    Great analysis.

  • HP Board Sued Over Hurd Payout

    Paul McDougall reporting for InformationWeek:

    “In announcing his resignation, Hurd acknowledged that ‘there were instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect, and integrity that I have espoused at HP,’” Levine notes in his complaint.

    This simple statement could really come back to bite HP in the ass.

  • What I Carry [Updated]

    Patrick Rhone has a what I carry Meme going on right now, here is a shot of what I carry.

    What I Carry

    I keep my car key and house keys separate because I can’t stand the jingling when I drive. The wallet is a Holstee that I just got. All I keep in it is ID, credit cards and a business card, along with the occasional cash that I may have.

    I used to carry a pocket Moleskin, but Simplenote on the iPhone killed the need for that.

    Updated to include a better picture.

  • GNU social

    Facebook for your own server, this is not the well known Diaspora project, but it is close.

  • A Closer Look at the Privacy Features of Facebook Places

    Looks like they did a decent job controlling the privacy of Places, but the thing that would bug me the most (if I was still a Facebook user) is the ability of friends to be able to check me in places. That I don’t like, I would disable that immediately if I were you.

  • Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right

    Saw that coming.

  • Apple’s App Store Director Sells His Own Fart Apps

    I felt compelled to post this, lest I become known as one Apple’s payroll. Here’s the thing, is Apple supposed to stop its employees from making apps? Tell them what apps they can and can’t make? Could you imagine how pissed people would be if Apple employees had to follow different rules than the rest of us?

    This guy is selling crappy joke applications and probably not making much money from it, oh and he happens to work at Apple. Where the hell is the story here?

    Wired:

    Still, it comes off as hypocritical that a director of the App Store sells apps that some might call inappropriate, said Ben Kahle, developer of Me So Holy, a satiric religious app that Apple rejected in mid-2009 for containing “objectionable material.” Kahle said after he re-submitted the app to the store, an Apple employee called him and said Me So Holy would “never” be approved.

    Ok fine I guess that is odd, but he was doing it before he got to Apple. I mean what are people supposed to go back through their lives and delete everything they did that goes against their new companies policy? This is crap journalism Wired, crap.

  • Manage Pixels, not Monitors

    Clay Johnson (who is quickly becoming my new favorite blogger):

    Remember: the key to having strong focus is the elimination of distraction. While a lot of space has its plusses, too much space is only creating room for more distractions. Having your mail, twitter, and IMs pop up in one monitor while you truly work in another is just giving your distractions equal ground to what you’re working on. Even having relatively static things up in extra screen space is a distraction. A todo list in a second monitor is nothing but a constant reminder of other things you could be working on other than the task at hand. Keeping anything up other than what you’re working on is a great way to keep yourself distracted from doing the important stuff you don’t want to do.

  • A News Reader Wish List

    If you love news then I don’t have to tell you that the best way (currently) to stay updated is still with RSS feeds. With RSS feeds you need something to pull them down for you, my guess is that you probably use Google Reader, with a smaller subset using something like Newsgator/NetNewsWire, and a minuscule percentage of you using Shaun Inman’s Fever°. I used to be a huge Fever° fan, until I realized just how poor it was at mobile usage. I currently use Google Reader through NetNewsWire on my Mac and Reeder on my iPhone/iPad. It is a great client and gets me through the news fast – one problem though, it could be a lot better. In fact news readers as a whole can and should be a lot better than they are.

    I am not talking about Flipboard, or making news on the web look like a newspaper or magazine, that’s not what I want. What I want is something that is smart, something that just doesn’t pull down the RSS item, but actually does something with it.

    My Thoughts:

    • Auto-categorizing on an item to item basis should be a standard feature. Currently I lump my various subscriptions in general folders (e.g. Tech, Design, Humor) so that if needed I can jump to just one topic. The problem though is that often the topics are not relevant for every story, in order to be relevant all the time we need to categorize on an item to item basis, something impractical and not possible to do with todays software.

      I do have a solution though: tags. Most bloggers tag all of their posts with keywords so that readers can click on those tags to see more of the same. I say that RSS readers should start grabbing those tags and using them to create ‘auto-groupings’ that allow me to see every new item that is talking about iPads and iPhones for example. This seems so simple, yet we still don’t have it.

    • Alerts for known topics of interest, should be another standard feature. Think of this much like Google Alerts, except for just your news items. I would set one up to alert me whenever a post comes in that has the word ‘breaking’ in the title, the program would then send a Growl notification to let me know.

    • Fever like scale to see what is being talked about. Fever currently has a scale that tells you the temperature of certain news items, the problem is that the algorithm (to my knowledge) works off of seeing how many people are linking to a particular item, which is a less than accurate way of seeing what is being talked about.

      A better way would be to see what tags, and keywords people are using in titles to see what they are really talking about. Such a system should then be able to cull these items together a present them as a one stop look at everything on that topic (this would have been great during the iPhone 4 antenna hubbub).

    • Instapaper and Twitter integration are a must, we already have this in most news readers but it is so important I think it needs to be said again.

    • Built in summarization. This is the key, the one thing that would make life so much better. Have you ever used the ‘summarize’ feature built into Mac OS X? It is great, you can take a thousand word post and bring it down to 3 descriptive lines that tell you what the post is really about. I have no clue how it works, but it is damn accurate.

      Why then if this service is built into a Mac already, is it not being used to give us a better idea of what the post is really about. I would like to see the article title as it was written and then a two sentence summarized blurb (done by the computer) below it, that way I know if this is something I really want and need to read.

    Let’s Build It

    Calling smart programmers and developers, time to start building an easier way for people to consume blogs and news on the internet. Someone wake up Brent Simmons.