The Brooks Review

Month: July 2011

  • Transparent Lithium-Ion Batteries Make Sci-Fi Gadgets a Reality

    This is cool, but it would be way cooler if they had a green meter on them that made the batteries look like they had liquid in them. Thus you can visually see the battery draining — although this is not as useful as a clear battery. ((This is why I am not in charge of such decisions.))

  • Mac OS X Lion Login Passwords Extracted With Ease

    Isn’t it fun when a new version of Mac OS X comes out and you get to learn about all these security companies that you never heard of before? Not really, but Mike Lennon reports on a possible vulnerability in 10.6 and 10.7:

    >The Mac OS vulnerability relates to user login passwords that are stored in the system memory even if the computer is locked or put into a sleep mode. Passware’s software captures live Mac computer memory over FireWire and analyzes it, extracting these passwords, a process that the company says takes just a few minutes–regardless of password strength and use of a FileVault encryption.

    So I guess a good defense would be to use a MacBook Air because it doesn’t have FireWire?

  • Kobo, WSJ Halt Direct Sales on Apple-Device Apps

    By Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg And Russell Adams reporting:
    >In a pair of moves that suggest Apple Inc. is enforcing rules for selling content on its devices, Kobo Inc., the Canadian e-book retailer, and The Wall Street Journal said Sunday they will no longer sell content directly to customers through their apps for Apple devices.

    [I doubt any of this will matter soon.](http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/features.html#newsstand)

    UPDATE: [Looks like Amazon killed their button to the Kindle Store too](http://www.macrumors.com/2011/07/25/amazons-kindle-app-updated-to-remove-direct-kindle-store-links/). Periodicals will likely go the way of the Newsstand as I alluded to above, however book apps like Kobo and Kindle — they will likely have to suffer. Still though it’s better than Apple making iBooks the only ebook reader on iOS.

  • Hide Reading List in Safari’s Bookmarks Bar

    Great tip.

  • McDonalds Wi-Fi Guide

    Classic.

  • Quote of the Day: Mike Elgan

    “For those of you under the age of 25, a magazine is a blog made out of trees”

  • Google

    Robert Scoble relaying a conversation he had with Google VP Vic Gundotra about some of the problems Google+ has right now:
    >He says it isn’t about real names. He says he isn’t using his legal name here. He says, instead, it is about having common names and removing people who spell their names in weird ways, like using upside-down characters, or who are using obviously fake names, like “god” or worse.

    I find that hard to believe. They allowed whatever name people wanted to use for email addresses — suddenly now they want them to be “real”? I forget, do advertisers like to be able to link data with real names? ((Actually I didn’t forget. They do.))

  • [SPONSOR] Brew Review

    Brew Review is an iPhone app that helps you rate and track the beers you taste in your own personal beer journal. Ratings are made from a hand picked list of qualities, so it’s easy to capture the details you want to remember, such as the flavors and aromas or the intensity of the hops and malt that you taste in your beer.

    With Brew Review, whether you’re new to the world of beer, or a seasoned pro with a wealth of beer knowledge, you’ll never forget the beers you enjoy, and more importantly, why you enjoyed them.

  • Why Google Cares if You Use Your Real Name

    Dave Winer on why Google cares if you use a *real* name for Google Plus:
    >And to give them information about what you do on the Internet, without obfuscation of pseudonyms.

    It’s about the greenbacks…

  • When Statistics Are Not Helpful

    Dave Cameron, perhaps my favorite baseball writer, informing readers of his diagnosis of Acute Myeloid Leukemia:

    >Statistics can be powerful, useful tools, and at times, they can be critical to understanding what to do. Other times, though, they’re useless, and so, for this situation, I say screw the data; I choose hope instead.

    Thoughts and prayers with you Dave.

  • What’s Going on With the Wall Street Journal and Apple?

    There is certainly something going on between the two lately. Whether Murdoch is pulling the strings or not, we can only speculate. It’s sad that in my eyes the WSJ is slowly losing credibility.

    It’s fine to report news and speculation — that’s the medias job (self-appointed as it may be) — but the timing of these reports and the type of reports they were is what concerns me.

  • Microsoft’s Online Business for the Year: Over $2.5 Billion …Lost

    Mg Siegler:

    >And then there is the biggest number of all. For the year, the Online Services Division lost .557 billion.

    He also notes that the division has been losing money for 6 years now and that the losses have been getting worse not better.

    He also notes:

    >Don’t overlook another crazy stat: Microsoft was able to decrease general and administrative expenses by 60 percent for the year, and still lost more than ever.

    That’s crazy. It’s time to cut your losses and walk away Microsoft.

  • AnandTech on FileVault Performance

    AnandTech does a nice job of breaking down the performance hits you get with FileVault. They note a 20-30% hit in performance, but I am hear to tell you that I haven’t noticed any such slow downs and some of their tests seem a bit unrealistic to me.

    Their tests are things that an average to above-average user are likely never to do. ((Unless average users open 42 reply email windows at once. I don’t think I reply to that many emails in a day.))

  • Palimpsest for iPad

    My thanks to Palimpsest for sponsoring the RSS feed for this week, be sure that thank them too by checking out the app.

    If you are a fan of long-form articles then this is the app for you. Palimpsest is a very interesting take on reading — it’s not an app that you curate, it’s an app of excellently curated long reads.

    This is an app for readers. I *am* a reader.

  • Some Additional Lion Thoughts

    One thing that is hard about writing a review for yet-to-be-released software is there are only a handful of people that have used the software and typically those people are all geeks. This means that somethings, perhaps important things, get missed or are simply lacking in ‘coverage’.

    I don’t care to read every review of Lion out there, but I feel like I didn’t do a few aspects of Lion enough justice in my initial review.

    ### FileVault

    I didn’t write a lot about FileVault in my review because I had only recently enabled it (I basically waded through the dev forum posts on FileVault 2 to make sure my computer wouldn’t melt upon enabling it before I turned it on). I have had it enabled for a while now and I have a few thoughts on it:

    1. I don’t know why you wouldn’t enable this. It is not like old FileVault as the entire disk is encrypted and this encryption is transparent to all Applications.
    2. John Siracusa has a great [overview of it](http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/13) and reiterates my above statement: “The end result is that regular users will be hard-pressed to notice any reduction in performance with encryption enabled. Based on my experience with the feature in prerelease versions of Lion, I would strongly consider enabling it on any Mac laptop I plan to travel with.” That’s Siracusa saying it, not me. I completely agree.
    3. Again, if you have a portable Mac I strongly recommend that you enable FileVault. (Perhaps one exception being people who need maximum performance and have no concern for losing or having their laptop stolen.)
    4. You can use your computer while it is encrypting, budget about half a day depending on your disk size and type (smaller SSDs will be faster, larger HDDs will be slower).

    I hated the last iteration of FileVault, but I love this version. The process is fully reversible leaving you little reason not to give FileVault a try.

    ### Automatic Termination

    On Episode 19 of the B&B Podcast I was talking with Shawn about my hatred for Launchpad. I mentioned that I thought it was poor because it would eventually lead users to using too much swap files given that the dock doesn’t show application status by default (more on this in a bit).

    What I didn’t know is that Lion actually has a protocol called Automatic Termination. This allows Lion to close down your apps that support this command in order to reclaim RAM space. For more advanced users this probably seems a touch unnerving.

    What will perhaps be more interesting is which developers choose not to support this (Yojimbo would be one I would think shouldn’t support this, ever). Though if an app supports the ‘restore’ functionality in Lion I don’t see any reason to *not* support Automatic Termination unless it is something that is only beneficial when it is running (again, Yojimbo).

    I actually think this is a huge deal and a massive change for full-fledged OSes. This is basically Apple asking users to stop worrying about managing system resources and to start treating apps on your Mac the same way that you would in iOS.

    ### Dock Dots

    So the Dock by default does not show the application status dots. My Dock only has applications that are running in it and so I keep the dots turned off (they aren’t very attractive). I would suggest that until more apps get Automatic Termination support that you should turn the dots on. After a few months turn them off as it is likely that your Mac will just be better if you trust the OS to manage your RAM allocation. Again, *likely*.

    The biggest problem I see with the Dock dots being off is that for the system to work well developers need to support auto-save, restore, and Automatic Termination all together — what could potentially make this default setting problematic is support being too slow in rolling out.

    ### Option Key

    Go crazy holding the `option` key in Lion before you click on things — there is a whole world of options and extras waiting to be discovered here.

    ### Natural Scrolling

    A lot of people seem to hate the new natural scrolling — leave it on for the next two weeks. At the end of those two weeks if you still hate it then you can turn it off. I bet after 6 days you forget all about it.

    ### More

    Shoot me an email, or an @reply on Twitter if there are any nagging questions that you have because somethings I just don’t think of mentioning.

  • Google Says It Rejected $100 Million Java Deal From Sun in Patent Trial

    The more I learn/read about this Oracle-Google spat the more I think Google stands to pay a large chunk of cash to Oracle. Right or wrong it sounds like Google stands to lose this one.

  • Americanisms: 50 of Your Most Noted Examples

    The BBC:
    >50. “I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care less” has to be the worst. Opposite meaning of what they’re trying to say. Jonathan, Birmingham

    This one drives me nuts — [Dan Benjamin](http://5by5.tv/) needs to take note of this. The rest are pretty funny (just to see what bugs those silly Brits).

  • Quote of the Day: John Gruber

    “The iPad didn’t enter the tablet market. It created the tablet market.”

  • Excellent New Slang

    MG Siegler has an awesome new term for some of the ‘individuals’ we find on the Internet.

  • 2011 MacBook Air – Early Benchmarks

    Eyeballing it the 2011 i7 MacBook Air looks about twice as fast as the top of the line 2010 MacBook Air. Damned impressive.