Interesting look at the rebranding of HP. Some of the “futuristic” pictures in this spread crack me up though (e.g. still showing printers and wires).
Year: 2011
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Time’s Non-Award-Award
*Time* magazine is not what it used to be. This is only further proven by today’s [announcement](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102132_2102373-1,00.html) that the “Person of the Year” award was going to: The Protester. Could *Time* being any less decisive?
Not to squash the importance of the protesting that is happening around the world, but even with all these important protests happening *Time* still failed to pick which protest is *the* protest.
[Matt Alexander](http://www.one37.net/blog/2011/12/14/times-person-of-the-year-the-protestor.html) is spot on:
>The inclusion of the Occupy movements across the United States in the same article as the bloody overthrow of Gaddafi? Seems a bit much.
That’s certainly a bit arrogant on *Time’s* part, but what bugs me more is awarding something titled “Person of the Year” ((Formerly Man of the Year)) to something that is decidedly *not* a person.
This of course is not [unprecedented](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year) for *Time*. The first instance of this was in 1950 when “The American fighting man” was awarded the Person of the Year title — specifically honoring troops in the Korean War.
In total (including this year) *Time* has awarded the “Person of the Year” title to 13 things that are not a singular person as the title of the award would have you believe.
More interestingly the spread of these non-person awards is pretty wide between 1950 and 1993 — only occurring 9 times in that 43 year span. Since 2002 *Time* has honored a non-person 4 times with the award, in only a span of 9 years. Back to back in 2002 and 2003 even.
I don’t particularly care about the award and who gets it, but I do think that *Time* has a history of fucking up the award. All the proof you need is the 1938 award to Adolf Hitler. I don’t care what the context was. Because it was followed in 1939 by Stalin. If you still want to argue President George W. Bush was awarded it twice.
Most importantly shouldn’t this award be awarded to something that fits the title — you know — an actual person?
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Quote of the Day: John Gruber
“On the other hand, that’s the advantage of software over hardware. You can omit an essential feature and then hustle to get it into your first major update. Good luck adding volume buttons to your Kindle Fire.” -
‘Things I don’t like about Twitter 4 for IOS’
Really good and well reasoned analysis of the Twitter 4 app changes. I especially like the general problems that are laid out surrounding Twitter trying to integrate user hacks as official methods.
[via DF] -
A Quick Carrier IQ Translation
Andrew Coward, the Carrier IQ’s VP of marketing in an interview with a site:
> As we went and did a deep dive into our technology to prove to consumers that there is nothing untoward in it, we found a bug. We found that if an SMS was sent simultaneously while a user is on the phone, the SMS would be captured by our software. Obviously, this is something that doesn’t happen very often, but we discovered that it could happen, and we caught it. Now, that information was never used. It wasn’t decoded. It sat on a server in encoded format, and no one could really get to it.
Translation: “It’s not our fault that we shot you. We just happened to be holding a loaded gun, which just happened to be pointing at you, which just accidentally went off. Don’t worry we put the gun down and wiped it clean of our finger prints.”
Meaning: Chill, it was an accident.
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‘Use the Kindle Fire as a Creative Device’
I totally thought this was going to be a guide showing what you could prop up ((iPad)) or open ((Oven door.)) with the Kindle Fire — I was way off.
I also assume this “guide” lacks all screenshots because:
a) It’s hard to do that with the Fire and;
b) Screenshots would further turn you away from a Fire. -
FAA Approves iPads in the Cockpit
Jason D. O’Grady reporting an FAA/American Airlines (it’s not clear which) statement:
>On Friday, American Airlines is the first airline in the world to be fully FAA approved to use iPads during all phases of flight.That’s great, so if I fly AA I never have to shut off *my* iPad, right? RIGHT?
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Amazon Item of the Week: The Best Screwdriver You Can Buy
Most of you probably don’t know that for every summer in high school and college I worked for my father’s commercial construction company doing manual labor and carpentry. It was a great job that gave me a great skill set, but more importantly I learned about what tools were crap and what tools were great.
Most tools on a carpenters tool belt start at $20 and when you think about how many they carry it is easy to see how fast that all adds up — so carpenters are prone to buying the best they can afford so that it lasts a really long time.
One of the best tools I was every introduced to was this Klein screwdriver.
Usually I would say run away from these types of multi-bit screwdrivers, but not this time. I own four of them. Yes, four. I bought my first one back in 2003 and I still have it and use it.
I beat things in place with the back of it and have never had an issue. I keep one in my car, one at my desk, one in both of my tool bags. This is something that really everyone should own — it is truly fantastic.
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Capturing the Speed of Light on Camera
Paul Sawers reporting:
>“We have built a virtual, slow-motion camera where we can see photons – light particles – moving through space”, says Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor at MIT Media Lab. “Now you have seen pictures of a bullet through an apple. But photons move about a million times faster than bullets. This camera can see the photons – or bullets of light – traveling through space.”>So, what could this technology be used for? “Such a camera may be useful in medical imaging, or in industrial or scientific use”, adds Raskar. “And in the future…maybe even for consumer photography.”
It *could* be used for those things. But it *should* be used for better slow-mo high-def water balloon popping videos.
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FOSS Patents on Three Accusations Against Apple
Florian Mueller does a great job breaking down three complaints about Apple’s patent enforcement cases and what the real complaints about them are. Interestingly he notes that Apple is not alone in enforcing patents in this way — not that this makes it “right”.
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Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act
Lucy Madison:
>According the FCC, the new law will require that “commercials have the same average volume as the programs they accompany” and will establish “simple, practical ways for stations and [multichannel video program distributors] MVPDs to demonstrate their compliance with the rules.”Nice, but giving them a year to implement it? Come on.
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Shh This Is a Test
Andrea Chang:
>Verizon Wireless sent an emergency alert via text to wireless customers in Middlesex, Monmouth and Ocean counties warning of a "civil emergency" and telling people to "take shelter now," according to the Associated Press. The message was intended to be a test but wasn’t labeled as such, the company later said. The alert reportedly started a chain reaction across a wide swatch of central New Jersey, prompting a high volume of 911 calls.You gotta love the non-statement Verizon made too. Idiots.
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Apple Softens Stance to Lure Mobile Ads
Emily Steel and Jessica E. Vascellaro for the Wall Street Journal reporting on Apple’s iAd program:
>Having originally asked marketers to commit to spend at least $1 million—an amount later dropped to $500,000—Apple is now discussing ad deals with a minimum commitment of just $400,000, according to a person familiar with the matter.This is the same problem that I see with Twitter’s income model. By saying that you have to cough up $400k you are significantly limiting the pool of potential advertisers.
I am not saying that there should be no minimum commitment, but it seems much to high. My best guess as to why: high quality ads and less clients for Apple to have to interface with.
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WordPress 3.3 “Sonny”
Nice update as always. I clicked the update button this morning and it was done before I had time to worry if the site was properly backed up. Funny, I remember years ago everything breaking with every update — I haven’t had that happen in the time I have been writing here.
Kudos to the WordPress team for making such an easy to use/install/update product.
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Amazon’s Jungle Logic
Richard Russo doesn’t like the fact that Amazon encouraged people to price shop at bookstores to get credit on Amazon.com:
>Like just about everybody I’ve talked to about it, I first attributed Amazon’s price-comparison app to arrogance and malevolence, but there’s also something bizarrely clumsy and wrong-footed about it. Critics may appear weak today, but they may not be tomorrow, and if the wind shifts, Amazon’s ham-fisted strategy has the potential to morph into a genuine Occupy Amazon movement.I get the argument, but it is incredibly one sided. Yes buying solely from Amazon and using local bookstores to gain insight into what you may like is shady at best. But with the increasing amount of Kindle readers out there — what are these people to do? Should they buy a physical book and ditch their beloved Kindles, iPads, Nooks, Android XX?
There’s no doubt that Amazon sells books cheaper than bookstores and that they can probably get those books to you the next day (sometimes the same day) for a very low cost. Certainly you can make the argument to support and buy local, but that idea completely fails once you start talking about ebooks.
Barnes & Noble knows this.
Your local bookstore? They’ve stuck their head in the sand proclaiming: paper is better.
Paper is dead — you just don’t know it yet.
And I haven’t even mentioned the self-published authors that Amazon is helping to launch…
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TextMate 2.0 Alpha
Boom. ((*Finally* — amiright?))
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‘The Problem Is in the Name’
Thord Daniel Hedengren refuting my [anti-styli sentiment](https://brooksreview.net/2011/12/arment-cosmonaut/):
>Or to put it this way, the iPad styluses are more like felt pens and have very little in common with whatever you got with your old smartphone, your Nintendo DS, or your old school table PC.I get the argument for using a stylus with the iPad — I truly do. My actual problem though is that the iPad wasn’t made for such an input and as hard as app developers, and stylus makers, try they can’t force a stylus to seem integral on the iPad.
Marco Arment was most accurate with his description of the stylus problem is [his review](http://www.marco.org/2011/12/12/the-cosmonaut-stylus-review) of the Cosmonaut:
>Most styli with the traditional shape encourage you to hold them the same way you’d hold a pen: firmly and close to the tip. This often causes your hand to inadvertently rest on the screen, confusing the input to the app and often resulting in errors. The Cosmonaut’s size and shape encourage you to hold it the same way you’d hold a dry-erase marker when writing on a whiteboard: further up the barrel, with a loose grip, and with your hand floating far above the screen.
That’s what intrigues me about the Cosmonaut, but in the end I doubt I would be happy with it. I don’t see a stylus of any kind being any more accurate than my finger unless I can also rest my hand on the screen while I doodle.
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iPhones vs. The Police
Caleb Crain pens a fantastic post for *The New Yorker* talking about the relationship that we have with the police. Really fascinating.
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‘Effort over Ease’
Vlad Savov reviewing the Xoom 2 for *The Verge*:
>One of the odder moments in that Super Bowl Xoom advert was the scene where the iconoclast with the Xoom tablet opted to walk up the stairs while all the conformists rode the escalator alongside him. Well, that’s the experience of using a Honeycomb tablet in a nutshell. You’re choosing effort over ease, grind over grace.