The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • Wizards of Bullshit

    David Heinemeier Hansson on the idea that Zuckerberg is now really rich:
    >Now anyone with an iota of critical thinking would perhaps question whether a stock purchase of 0.01% is representative for the worth of the company at large, but not Forbes. They simply accept this fantasy 1:3000 transformation as fact and serves it up as the foundation of an article that then goes on to place Zuckerberg as the 3rd riches techie in the world.

    [See also this post of mine from January](https://brooksreview.net/2011/01/worth/).

  • Why Lithium-Ion Batteries Die So Young

    Josie Garthwaite:
    >Over the course of years, the lithium-ion battery that once powered your machine for hours (days, even!) will gradually lose its capacity to hold a charge. Eventually you’ll give in, maybe curse Steve Jobs and then buy a new battery, if not a whole new gadget.

    That sentence bugs me a lot because Apple only uses these batteries in a few devices: iPhones and iPods. ((They do sell massive quantitates of these devices though.)) The rest of Apple’s battery powered devices use the newer lithium-polymer batteries. In the battery world lithium-ion was a massive step forward, flawed, but worth the trade offs.

    Admittedly I don’t know a ton about lithium-polymer batteries, but from what I read over on the ever questionable [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-polymer_battery), these batteries are an extension of lithium-ion batteries that do two things better:

    1. More cycles before the battery wears down.
    2. Less discharge while sitting unused.

    This is why new MacBook Airs, for example, can hold their charge on ‘standby’ for a month at a time. This is also likely why Apple seals these batteries out of the customers reach:

    >The major risk factor is the volatility. When punctured, Li-Po batteries react quickly by smoking and causing large fires.

    So there’s that.

  • Replacing the Human Concierge

    Jane L. Levere:

    >Still, the question remains whether digital concierges can ever equal their human counterparts. Henry Harteveldt, travel analyst for Forrester Research, said he did not think they would. “Nothing will ever replace a face-to-face concierge,” he said. “A guest visiting a city for the first time will have a lot of questions and will need to have interaction with a concierge.”

    This strikes me as something that an encyclopedia salesperson must have said. Speaking of — where’s my [Britannica](http://www.britannica.com/)?

  • Flexiglass

    I [posted yesterday about Moom](https://brooksreview.net/2011/06/moom/) and how it makes use of the damned green button again. Cody Fink has a great review of yet another app in this category called Flexiglass.

    What piques my interest about this app is the ‘real zoom’ option that makes the green button just throw the window to fullscreen (I can hear former Windows users rejoicing now). It also has some multi-touch gesture support, which looks neat.

    I don’t use these apps enough to try and switch from Moom now, but it does look pretty nice. ((Bonus points for having a better name than Moom too, though that isn’t that hard.))

  • New Sony VAIO Z: Packs Thunderbolt

    Alas it is not of the Mini DisplayPort variety. I have two majors concerns with Thunderbolt:

    1. That it won’t be adopted by the PC market, leading to a Mac only product that is very good, but has incredibly high-priced peripherals. (Think Firewire 800 here.)
    2. That if it is adopted everyone will use some slight variation of the product so that, essentially, we are back to number one.

    Number two is the route Sony is taking, this is not good for anyone — they should have just used the Mini DisplayPort standard and took advantage of all the cool looking products that will be coming out for the Macs. ((I should note for those wondering that as far as I know the Mini DisplayPort is Apple technology that they are still licensing for free to anyone who wants to use it.)) Too bad.

  • OopsieFocus

    Shawn Blanc:
    >When launched, the OopsieFocus script will check to see if OmniFocus is running. If OmniFocus is running then the script does nothing and OmniFocus brings up the Quick Entry Pane for you just as it should. If OmniFocus is not running then the script will automatically launch the app and bring up the Quick Entry Pane.

    This really is a great script, Shawn let me be privy to a ‘beta’ copy of it a while back and I have been using it flawlessly with Keyboard Maestro ever since. I can’t remember the last time I hit the OmniFocus quick entry shortcut and **didn’t** see the pane pop open — great work.

  • Dropbox Being Sued

    I’m not big on the “sue, sue” approach Americans take with things, but in this case I think it may be the best course of action. Dropbox doesn’t seem to think what happened was anything more than a “bug” or a fluke. I for one am not convinced that they truly think this is *that* serious. Hopefully this is the smack over the head that they need.

  • Crazy Tumblr Traffic

    MG Siegler:
    >Last Thursday, Tumblr hit 400 million pageviews for the day, Karp tells us. It’s close to 5,000 pageviews a second, he notes.

    That’s just crazy — hard to blame them for uptime issues when they are trying to handle that much traffic. ((Not to worry, I will find a way to blame them. [Also don’t take me too seriously with this footnote.]))

  • Best Buy’s Music Cloud Service

    Bit late on this one. But it’s another crippled and doomed to fail from the outset offering much like Google’s.

  • Downgrading Skype and Silver Lake to ‘Evil’

    Some more information has come to light about Skype firing executives before the Microsoft acquisition completes — all of this makes every involved party (on the Skype side) sound pretty terrible.

  • Dropbox Breach: Fewer Than 100 Accounts Affected, but One Person Actively Exploited Security Hole

    Jason Kincaid:
    >First, the good news: the scale of the attack affected “fewer than a hundred accounts” out of Dropbox’s 25 million total users. But according to the letter, those accounts were all accessed by a single individual. In other words, these weren’t accidental logins due to typos — someone discovered the hole and actively used it to access files that were not theirs. That’s obviously very alarming.

    TechCrunch also has a supposed email that Dropbox is sending the affected users. It’s nice that the CEO is willing to call these users and that they set up free credit monitoring — still this should not have happened.

    What’s more alarming is that someone actually purposefully started accessing other user accounts, I just don’t buy that Dropbox “knows” exactly how many accounts were accessed.

  • Truer Words

    Justin Blanton laying the smack down:

    >While on the topic, if you’re not using 1Password (or similar)—and you can afford it—then you’re an idiot. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but there just isn’t any excuse.

    No excuse.

  • The B&B Podcast – Episode 16: Our Longest Episode Ever

    >Shawn and Ben discuss backing up, wireless networking speeds and the celebration of keeping an iPhone for more than a year. They also touch on iPhone 5 rumors, the Nokia N9, HP Touchpad and Shawn’s struggle to find a good Netflix app.

    Big thanks to our sponsors: [Pulp](http://acrylicapps.com/pulp/mac/) and [InVision](http://invisionapp.com/).

  • Tweed

    A big thanks to [LithiumCorp](http://lithiumcorp.com/) for sponsoring this weeks’ RSS feed to promote their great iPad app: Tweed. Tweed is part of a new class of apps that I am starting to see trickling out, that take something we are all very familiar with (in this case Twitter) and transform the way we use the service (as a curated list of links in this case). Tweed is also a great way to introduce new Twitter users to Twitter itself — less updates about coffee and more updates in the form of excellent links that can be read right away, personally I think this is a great way to help people see the value in Twitter.

    Be sure to check out Tweed in the [App Store](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tweed/id435667186?mt=8), it is priced at $2.99 for a limited time.

  • Verizon LTE MiFi Benchmarks

    Bare Feats:
    >However, the LTE MiFi not only maintained essentially the same download speeds but the upload speed jumped to 11,974Kbps — or faster than the Comcast 50Mbps cable upload speed in our lab!

    From the sounds of it, this is one hell of a mobile broadband device.

  • The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace

    Felix Gillette nicely sums up Myspace circa late-2008/early-2009:

    >Myspace was becoming Detroit.

    This isn’t a knock against Detroit, but it epitomizes the problem that Myspace faced: the influential people — the ones that could change things — were leaving en masse.

  • Screenstagram

    Great new screensaver:
    >Screenstagram displays photos from Instagram. It can show you your friends’ photos or photos from the Instagram popular feed, which contains highly rated photos from across the Instagram community.

  • FTC to Serve Google With Subpoenas in Broad Antitrust Probe

    Thomas Catan:
    >The new inquiry, by contrast, will examine fundamental issues relating to Google’s core search-advertising business, said people familiar with the matter. The business is the source of most of Google’s revenue. The issues include whether Google—which accounts for around two-thirds of Internet searches in the U.S. and more abroad—unfairly channels users to its own growing network of services at the expense of rival providers.

    This will likely result in bad news for Google, yes the courts have made it harder since the Microsoft anti-trust days, but if you think the FTC can’t find at least a few instances where Google abused their monopoly — well you would be wrong.

  • The Eleventh App

    David Barnard responding to [this post](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2959-ten-apps-is-all-i-need) from David Heinemeier Hansson:
    >If we took a poll of all iOS users and asked for a list of the eleven absolutely essential, can’t live without apps I bet we’d end up with at least a thousand different types of apps.

    He makes a great point that adds to what I was [saying](https://brooksreview.net/2011/06/dhh-apps/) very nicely.

  • Nevada Passes Law Authorizing Driverless Cars

    I imagine that one could devise a pretty clever self-driving car that, under normal circumstances, is better than many drivers I see on the road. What I can’t imagine is that mixing these cars with the erratic drivers that are *currently* on the road would be good at all.

    The problem isn’t that the driver can’t override the system — they can — the issue I have is that most people interested in this wouldn’t be paying attention at all.

    #### And

    The biggest challenge for these cars is whether they can “foresee” impending crashes. Meaning when I drive down a residential street on a nice day I keep an eye out for kids playing that may suddenly go running after a loose ball, how could a car do that? No matter how advanced sometimes you just can’t beat the human eye. Because the first time a ‘driverless’ car kills a kid in an accident that a human could have avoided — well that’s the end of the dream.