Author: Ben Brooks

I never thought I would want to stick something like this on my desk or any other piece of furniture — so when these came out I dismissed them. Then my wife and I moved and we each got new nightstands — nightstands that had no way to keep our charger cables on the top.

After weeks of have to fish around the floor to plugin my phone and then try to discern in the dark if I had a hold of the iPad or iPhone charger, well I broke down a bought these. This is easily in the top 10 of best things I have bought for $10 or less.

They just work perfectly, no really.

So if you notice that you have a cable that keeps dropping to the floor when you want it on your desk, or wherever, do yourself a favor and order these.

(They also come in other colors, [like white](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B004K2YBQI/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20).)

This is really interesting to me, because even though I hate skeuomorphic tricks — well — I prefer the iBooks style pagination in Instapaper. It just feels right to me. Scrolling is too tedious and the fast pagination is too fast and disorienting. I like the iBooks page flip — oddly enough.

Paul Smalera:

>It’s easy to believe that Facebook can stay in control of the Web in perpetuity by acquiring tech’s prettiest young things. But remember that a decade ago, Google looked like the substrate of the Internet. Nearly everything about the way we surfed flowed through Google. Now, not so much. While Google is far from toppled, a tectonic shift has created new land masses in the ocean, where previously there was only misty horizon.

Google was in trouble the minute TV ads started showing their Facebook URLs instead of their web address. Companies now say: “find us on Facebook” and that’s bad for Google because Facebook has its own search box free of Google ads.

Joe Simnacher and Terry Box:

>In 1962, Mr. Shelby created the first Shelby Cobra, borrowing British Ace Bristol sports car bodies and mating them to Ford V-8 engines in his Venice, Calif., garage. The Shelby Cobras finished first and second in a race held around the Dodger Stadium parking lot. The race prompted Ford to sponsor his project.

That car was a game changer.

Great little app from 5by5 that allows you to listen to the live stream and get push alerts when your favorite show is starting.

I’ve been using it for a while, and it’s a great way of listening to great podcasts do go get it.

Dustin Curtis looked into that Forbes article that claims the HBO’s president, Eric Kessler said the Internet was a “temporary phenomenon” and here’s what he found:
>It’s so unbelievable that I went to the primary source, a 40 minute video interview with Mr. Kessler, which draws a fascinating picture of HBO’s business strategy. After listening to the entire interview twice, I could not pinpoint where Kessler actually said “temporary phenomenon.”

It turns out what HBO’s president, Eric Kessler said was more along the lines that he thinks the Internet is big, but it can’t replace the deal they have going right now with cable. Which makes sense.

So good job with the Linkbait Forbes.

A new $8,000 digital camera from Leica that only shoots in B&W. Yep, you read that right.

So: why? Well take a look at the images posted on this link, they are shot at ISO 6400 and ISO 10,000 and yet they have very low noise compared to most other cameras.

That’s why.

Also the B&W looks excellent, cool camera — just wish it was in my price range.

In my [Evernote post the other day](https://brooksreview.net/2012/05/evernote-end-game/) I mentioned that Evernote should strive to be more like [Drafts](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drafts/id502385074?mt=8) for note capture — turns out someone already has a Drafts like app for Evernote. (Buyer beware: I haven’t tried this app at all.)

Dan Miller:

> So if you swipe up on the dash, you get an em dash. Swipe up on the dollar sign and you get the cents symbol. One thing I like is that this is one way to get smart quotation marks.

I had no clue.

Yes, none of these icons will make sense to my daughter if she stops to try and figure what each picture is, but it also won’t matter. All that really matters is that people know that a floppy disk picture means `save` — so while us “old people” may be the only ones that have seen the real life objects these icons depict, it doesn’t matter as long as people know what they mean.

Still, interesting to think about.

It’s $149 in the Mac App Store and it is *the* RAW photo editor that I use. Aperture is nice, but Lightroom is great. I have only been on version 4 for a little while, but it is a nice upgrade. Lightroom is still the absolute best tool to use for reducing noise in your images — hands down.

One important note (that I didn’t know) is that buying the Mac App Store version only grants you a license to use it on a Mac, whereas buying the downloadable version from Adobe (same price) grants you a license to use it on Mac or Windows. So if you like to use Macs and *have* to use Windows, this is something to think about.

Update: [Jim Dalrymple notes some more caveats](http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/05/10/lightroom-4-available-on-mac-app-store-with-caveats/) with Lightroom 4 in the Mac App Store — so many I would recommend that you buy it from Adobe’s website instead.

A very eye-opening post by Dustin Curtis on how to properly scale images for use on the web by ‘pixel-fitting’. His examples are great and this is a must read for anyone who puts graphics on the web.

Looks great and I think it is really neat that Amazon is wanting offices in downtown Seattle instead of moving out of the city core — which I am sure would be cheaper.

A fantastic post that asks what journalism really is today, and if defining journalism matters anymore. The post is a must read and there are so many good bits to quote that I have to limit myself to just this one:

>The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against.

Michael Lopp:
>This is about how these two universes should collide and that means what I’m really talking about is gamification. There’s a reason I didn’t mention this until paragraph 17 because there are a lot of folks who think gamification means pulling the worst aspects out of games and shoving them into an application. It’s not. Don’t think of gamification as anything other than clever strategies to motivate someone to learn so they can have fun being productive.

Great point, and one that I hadn’t thought of when we talk about gamification. The type of gamification that Lopp is referring to sounds fantastic, but rare.