The Brooks Review

Month: June 2014

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  • Pepper-spray Bullet Firing Drones

    Leo Kelion: Desert Wolf’s website states that its Skunk octacopter drone is fitted with four high-capacity paintball barrels, each capable of firing up to 20 bullets per second. In addition to pepper-spray ammunition, the firm says it can also be armed with dye-marker balls and solid plastic balls. The machine can carry up to 4,000…

  • Google Launches Drive For Work With Unlimited Storage For $10/Month

    Frederic Lardinois: It also launched Drive for Work, a new version of Drive and Google apps for businesses that comes with a number of extra security features. The one feature most users will notice first, however, is that Drive for Work doesn’t have any storage limitations. There’s a bunch of other, actually, great features too.…

  • Google I/O 2014 in Tweets

    I didn’t watch the 14 hour Google Keynote today, nor have I read a single thing about it. Nope, just followed along with comments on Twitter. So, in chronological order, here is the Google I/O keynote recap: @justin: “We can’t hear Google, but they can see us. #io14” @moltz: “Look at this email interface. It…

  • Announcing the Brooks Review Podcast

    Almost a year ago I polled readers of this site to see what they might want to see me do more of, and less of. The overwhelming response I got was: we want a podcast (again). I heard you, and I started working on a podcast, and then in August of 2013 I dropped the…

  • Amazon’s Terrible Marketing

    I wasn’t much excited about Amazon’s new ‘Fire Phone’, because I’ve actually used a Kindle Fire and I know the reality of the situation. What’s always far more interesting to me is the way Amazon markets new products, because overall Amazon does a pretty shitty job at marketing products. Yes, they have a great website…

  • Withings Activité

    Fascinating new smart watch from Withings. It looks like a traditional analog watch, but contains all sorts of tech. For $390 it’s not cheap, but it also doesn’t look terrible — so there’s that. The site is terrible as it hijacks your scrolling, but the highlights are: Step tracking (it says distance too, but color…

  • Moving Back to OmniFocus

    When OmniFocus 2 came out, I switched back to it from Flow. I hadn’t been using any betas, or anything of that ilk. I had been using Flow, as I’ve documented here on this site. But, as it tends to happen in life, I had been getting increasingly busy. So busy that I was overwhelmed…

  • Idea for a WordPress Plugin: Blogger Honesty

    Here’s a free idea for anyone who wants to whip this up: a new plugin for WordPress which shows readers the revisions made to a post. I’ve always wanted something like this, but the two plugins that currently exist aren’t up to snuff (and one is dead it looks like as it’s been two years…

  • New Sensors Will Scoop Up Data in Chicago

    David Heinzmann: “Almost any data that starts with an individual is going to be identifiable,” Cate said. When tracking activity from mobile phones, “you actually collect the traffic. You may not care about the fact that it’s personally identifiable. It’s still going to be personally identifiable.” King, the Harvard sociologist and data expert, agreed that…

  • The Case That Might Cripple Facebook

    Henry Farrell: If the ECJ rules that Safe Harbor is invalid, what next? Potential near-disaster for big U.S. e-commerce firms like Facebook, Google and Microsoft, which are heavily exposed to European markets, and rely on European citizens’ personal data. The death of Safe Harbor would mean that they were not able to legally export personal…

  • Microsoft Ups Free Onedrive Storage

    Mark Hachman: Today, OneDrive comes with seven gigabytes of free storage, and Office 365 comes with 20 gigabytes of OneDrive storage. As of today, that’s changed: Microsoft will increase the free quota to 15 Gbytes, and OneDrive subscribers will receive a whopping 1 terabyte with their subscription. The changes will roll out over the next…

  • Owning the Experience Is Key to Apple’s Customer Satisfaction

    John Moltz for Macworld: In the Windows and Android worlds, ownership of the experience is a filthy scrum of competing interests. Very good post looking at why Apple wants to own the key, the core, things that you use their devices for.

  • Quote of the Day: Garrett Murray

    “You’re confusing our mutual parental status as a license to act like a fucking asshole.” – Garrett Murray

  • Podcasting, Networks, and Audience Building

    A month ago, Marco Arment made the ill-advised statement ((Ill-advised because it required more words to clarify.)) saying: Podcast networks are a lot like blog networks. (Remember them?) When the medium is young and everything’s difficult, it helps to band together with a large entity to pool resources on tools, hosting, ad sales, and staffing.…

  • Quote of the Day: John Moltz

    “Blackberry still exists. Which is kind of where their bar for success is right now.” – John Moltz

  • Fire Phone – The Weekly Briefly

    I joined Shawn Blanc this week on his ‘Weekly Briefly’ podcast to talk Fire Phone. Not like phones that catch fire, or anything, but you know that Amazon jobber. Shawn had JetPens as a sponsor, and there’s a link to get a free pen that Shawn loves if you spend $25 there. I can’t comment…

  • My Favorite Device

    Everyday I interact with, use, carry, and yell at an immense amount of devices. Most of these devices have either been directly purchased by me, selected by me, or something of that ilk — I’ve had a hand in them being in my hand. I don’t always make the best picks, but I usually know…

  • LB6 Action: Keyboard Maestro Macros

    Manfred has whipped up a LaunchBar action for browsing your Keyboard Maestro macros: The action lists all macros available in the current context. Convenient access to the macros is possible just by browsing the Keyboard Maestro application (using the right arrow or space key). Return triggers the selected macro. Needless to say: The list of…

  • LaunchBar 6.0.1

    New feature: Case Conversions (UPPERCASE, lowercase, Titlecase, CamelCase, dromedaryCase, spinal-case, Train-Case, snake_case, SNAKE_CASE) I’ve always kept Keyboard Maestro actions for doing this, but that’s a very nice addition.

  • Privacy Implications of Amazon’s Fire Phone

    John Koetsier over at VentureBeat is a little over the top in his writing about the Fire Phone, but this is a good point about the FireFly feature: And then you’re transmitting all those pictures and sound files to the grandaddy and global leader in connected cloud technology, the company that pretty much invented what…