The Brooks Review

Month: May 2012

  • The Wrong Reasons

    Mike Masnick on all the Internet privacy legislation:

    >It’s bizarre and troubling that no one in the federal government seems willing to provide a real justification for any of these bills others than “oooooh, it’s scary out there on the internet!!”

  • Samsung’s Niche

    The Macalope:

    >Samsung has something for every niche need. Well, except the niche for the best all-around smartphone with a terrific user experience. That was taken by another company.

  • iOS App Success

    Fantastic post by Chris Foresman looking at the App Store and the success that a select few developers have had. Spoiler: being in the top charts is where the money is.

  • Adam Yauch • 1964-2012

    The Beastie Boys official site on the passing of Adam Yauch:

    >Born in Brooklyn, New York, Yauch taught himself to play bass in high school, forming a band for his 17th birthday party that would later become known the world over as Beastie Boys.

  • Agile Tortoise

    My thanks to Agile Tortoise for sponsoring this week’s RSS Feed to promote the excellent Drafts app for iPhone. It’s one of those apps that immediately clear out room in your iPhone dock for — at least I did.

    It’s $0.99, and that’s about $20 too cheap.

  • Ski Safari

    I love this game because it’s fun and you can play it with one hand (the baby is often in the other). Can’t quite get to Kottke’s high score, yet.

  • FBI: We Need Wiretap-Ready Web Sites

    Declan McCullagh:
    >The FBI general counsel’s office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.

    The argument seems to be that as people make the move to digital communication tools, away from telephones, that the FBI cannot monitor those tools. Since the FBI has access to monitor telephones, they only think it natural to ask for these backdoors to be built in.

    I see where they are coming from, it’s just that it is completely wrong headed.

    “Luckily” it looks like there is a loophole:

    >The requirements apply only if a threshold of a certain number of users is exceeded, according to a second person briefed on it.

    There’s a business opportunity: create an secure email service that users must pay for that stays below that threshold. I mean it’s not like terrorists or your general “bad guy” would use such unmonitored services.

    Basically this law allows the government to monitor stupid criminals, but not the really smart ones that pose the most damage.

  • Jenna Wortham: What I Read

    Adam Clark Estes profiles Jenna Wortham on how she goes about news consumption during the day:
    >I avoiding spending a lot of time in my inbox — it’s the equivalent quicksand — so instead, I keep an eye on the emails to address anything urgent that comes in and make a list of people to reply to via email during a late-afternoon coffee break or before bed at the end of the night. My best sources know that text and DM are the easiest and most surefire ways to get in touch and get a response.

    It’s also fascinating how huge Twitter his to her daily routine — me, I’m still an RSS guy.

  • What Retail Is Hired to Do: Apple vs. IKEA

    Horace Dediu and Dirk Schmidt:
    >Apple offers a place where people can discover and get answers about technology without the pressure of making a purchase. The job is to simplify that which is complex for a price premium.

    Well said. Going to an Apple store is like no other store experience that most people have had. Not only are the staff friendly, but [they trust you](https://brooksreview.net/2011/12/trust-respect/).

  • Mariano Rivera Out for Season With Torn ACL

    I’m not a Yankees fan, but you’d be [hard pressed to find a baseball fan that doesn’t enjoy](http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/poll-the-most-respected-athlete-of-all-time/) watching Rivera work, just look at his stats as reported by Dave Cameron:
    >Among relievers with at least 500 career innings, Rivera’s 2.05 ERA is easily the best ever.

    Let’s hope this isn’t the end of a spectacular career.

  • iPad Keyboard Prototype [Video]

    This video has been making the rounds. It shows an *improved* method for selecting text on the iPad. I think it looks really neat, but the call for Apple to add it as a feature is pretty misguided if you ask me.

    If you think about iOS — this would be a very poor feature for the general iOS user base. The reasons are the same as why Apple doesn’t make the multi-touch app switching gestures readily public, it’s not discoverable or memorable for normal users.

    Imagine what would happen if a user slid two fingers along the keyboard accidentally and then started typing. Oops. While this system is certainly better than what is currently on iOS, it would also lead to much user confusion. That alone is reason enough to not add it in iOS.

  • Updated Thoughts on the Panasonic GX1

    [When I purchased and reviewed the Panasonic GX1](https://brooksreview.net/2012/03/gx1/), I left out one crucial reason behind my decision for buying this particular camera: I knew I had a baby girl on the way. I wanted a camera that was small enough to hold in one hand and snap a picture ((Yes I can shoot my Canon 5D one handed, but it’s less than ideal to do so.)) , yet high enough quality to not make me regret leaving behind my dSLR.

    Asleep on Mom.

    I also wanted a camera that could take excellent pictures at high ISO, relatively quietly, so that I could snap those precious “sleeping baby” photos.

    That was a huge factor in my choosing the GX1.

    Even without a baby, I have found the GX1 to be a phenomenal camera, one that has seriously made me consider selling off my Canon 5D and the lenses that go along with it — just maybe not quite yet.

    When my daughter was born I almost immediately started snapping images with the GX1, my wife uses it too. It’s been a fantastic camera for us.

    Sloane with Grandpa.

    I was worried that the 20mm might be too limiting for indoor shots of a baby, but it’s turned out to be perfect — and thank goodness it is an f/1.7 lens, because low-light shooting is all I seem to do any more.

    Which brings me to ISO and noise. I don’t think I have shot many pictures below ISO 1600 with the GX1 since Sloane came along. In fact I have gone up to 6400 and beyond more than a few times. While 6400 isn’t as clean as I dream that it should be, it’s still a good enough picture that I can be happy looking at it.

    Also a quick noise reduction in Lightroom yields very satisfactory results ((The noise reduction engine in Lightroom is the primary reason I use Lightroom over Aperture.)) .


    I simply cannot say enough good things about the GX1. It has been rock solid. Battery life has been fantastic. The quality is excellent. The noise control is very good.

    I truly love this camera.

    Sloane with Mom.

    I did notice right away that with a baby around, I needed a strap on the camera so that I can attend to her when she needs me, without trying to find a good spot to set the camera down at.

    At [Justin Blanton’s recommendation](http://hypertext.net/2012/04/dsptch) I ordered both the [wrist strap](http://www.dsptch.com/collections/wrist/products/camera-wrist-strap-black) and [sling strap](http://www.dsptch.com/collections/sling/products/camera-sling-strap-black) from DSPTCH and have been quite happy with them. The way that both clip on to the camera makes it really easy to switch to the wrist strap when at home and the sling strap when out and about.

    My wife and I tend to leave the GX1 on the coffee table in the living room, and even though it is a longer reach than our iPhones, we tend to go for the GX1 first when we want to shoot a photo. And that right there perfectly sums up why I am so happy with the GX1: I choose it over the more readily available iPhone camera every chance I get.


  • London Aerial on Vimeo

    There’s something about this footage, especially the night footage, that looks so much like CG to me. I don’t know if that is the styling applied in this video, or a credit to how far CG has come, but it is bugging me.

  • The B&B Podcast #59: Pen Pal Podcast

    Shawn talks about a new Samsung phone that was announced and that will be outdated by the time it ships, we “debate” about the Paul Miller leaving the internet “sensation”, and lastly we talk about when and how to link to KickStarter projects.

  • Quote of the Day: Harry Marks

    “The answer is simple, young one – because common sense doesn’t get page views.”

  • The Decline and Fall of ‘Draw Something’

    So Draw Something’s usage has fallen off a cliff and Zynga looks to have over paid for the company. But it should also be noted that Zynga took a gamble on this acquisition.

    Had Draw Something continued to grow then Draw Something would be worth considerably more — and Zynga would have bought it at a bargain. But Zynga knew this *could* happen, they likely just thought it wouldn’t happen this fast.

    On a personal note: it’s hard to feel bad for the company that gave the world FarmVille.

  • How the Blind Are Reinventing the iPhone

    A simply amazing story about the power that the blind are finding with the iPhone and third-party apps. While I read this story I had one thought that kept popping in my head: how the hell do they keep their phones charged?

    I often use Google maps to drive from point to point and doing that eats the battery, now imagine you have to keep it on all the time otherwise you might get lost, that’s just scary to think about.

    A while back I posted about how I didn’t like the concept of indoor mapping using shoppers with WiFi, but I hadn’t thought of the power of such technology for the blind, luckily some one has:

    >”One of the biggest concerns of the blind community is finding their way around independently,” he says. “You can find an address, but what if you get someplace and you have nobody to help you find your way around the building?” His solution, still in the works, will attempt to sketch a map of the building based on previous routes taken within, and the strength of the wireless signals bouncing from the different sources. It’ll also take into consideration the pace and number of steps a person takes from one point to the next. If a blind person were to arrive to a hotel, he’d only need to be shown to his room once. The iPhone will remember the way for him, and navigate him back and forth from the room to the lobby.

    That’s fantastic.

  • Assessing the Disturbing FCC Report on Google’s Street View Program

    Farhad Manjoo:
    >I’ve long trusted and admired Google. I use its services to store and organize my most personal data, including my email, contacts, bookmarks, Web history, and calendar. The Street View scandal hasn’t destroyed my trust in the company, but after reading the report, I no longer trust it implicitly.

    In my mind that is the worst statement someone can make about a company like Google. For users to use Google services they simply must trust the company — you just end up storing too much data there to not trust a cloud company of Google’s reach.

    Manjoo continues:

    >Even in the best-case scenario, someone at Google thought it would be a good idea to insert code that spies on the world, and no one else noticed. It doesn’t inspire my confidence that, a far as anyone from the outside can tell, anything has happened to the people who perpetrated this.

    >How do we know some similar rogue program isn’t operating in Gmail, Chrome, or Android?

    Great question.

  • ImageOptim

    Fantastic little app, I had been using SmushIt before — this is way easier.

    [via Gruber]

  • The Self-Cleaning, Glare-Free Glass That Doesn’t Fog Up

    *The Week*:
    > MIT researchers have unveiled a new technique that “virtually eliminates reflections, producing glass that is almost unrecognizable because of its absence of glare.

    I’ve heard about this project before and it really seems like something that Ive should be all over — and not just for iOS devices, for all Apple devices. Glare is about the nastiest, ugliest, reality that plagues Apple devices today so it seems very likely that Apple would be all over this type of product.