The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • PlayStation Network Breach

    The PlayStation Blog:
    >Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained.

    But, *you know*, keep bitching about that iPhone location database that is store locally on your iPhone — we are going to sort out if someone *actually* stole your identity or not.

  • Marco Arment on Weather Apps

    Marco Arment:
    >I’d like to know if it’s going to be noticeably humid or dry, but only if that humidity level is unusual for the season and region.

    Me too. Marco lays out some really good points and there is a reason I didn’t go into Weather apps on the iPad, it is just a much more difficult device to layout weather information on. Most weather apps on the iPad just make things bigger, instead of actually trying to figure out how to use the extra space.

    Marco’s points on giving you the data only when it is relevant is spot on. We simply don’t need to see dials and gadgets for information that is, essentially, irrelevant (such as a wind speed of 0).

  • “How to beat Apple”

    Jason Kottke on how to beat Apple:
    >Openness and secrecy. Competitors should take a page from Apple’s playbook here and be open about stuff that will give you a competitive advantage and shut the hell up about everything else. Open is not always better.

    His entire post is excellent.

  • Windows Phone 7 Location Data Storage

    It is interesting that Microsoft went on the offensive to detail how Windows Phone 7 stores location data and it honestly looks like they have a decent system in place. One thing that is noted though is that this data is not stored on the phone. I know many will think that is a good thing, but I think it is terrible. You want that type of data stored on a device that is within your control, preferably encrypted.

    Do you really trust Microsoft to store your location data for you?

  • Just In: Sitting All Day is Still Really Bad

    Patti Neighmond on workers who sit all day:

    >”Those who were sitting more were substantially more likely to die,” Blair says.
    >Specifically, he found that men who reported more than 23 hours a week of sedentary activity had a 64 percent greater risk of dying from heart disease than those who reported less than 11 hours a week of sedentary activity. And many of these men routinely exercised. Blair says scientists are just beginning to learn about the risks of a mostly sedentary day.

    I read a similar article in the [New York Times a while back](https://brooksreview.net/2010/07/the-men-who-stare-at-screens/) and made the decision that I needed to stand. I now stand all day M-Thursday while I am at my office. The rest of the time I try to move about as best as I can, it’s worth it to me. ((I do prefer to sit in a nice comfy chair, but I also prefer to live — or so I assume.))

  • iPhone Knowledge

    Alexis Madrigal on his iPhone:
    >This thing remembers more about where I’ve been and what I’ve said than I do, and I’m damn sure I don’t want it falling into anyone’s hands.

    It’s pretty impressive what tools like Lantern can rebuild about your life with physical access to your phone. Impressive and scary.

  • iOS Notification is Fundamentally Flawed

    Nik Fletcher makes some great points about why the iOS notification system is flawed in general, not just for the tech obsessed bloggers out there.

  • Black Screen of Death

    If you are Microsoft and you decide that, in order to remove negativity from your OS, you are getting rid of the infamous “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD) — so you change it into a black screen, which you can also abbreviate BSOD. Meaning you have changed nothing. Come on.

  • “Oh yes they do.”

    In an email response allegedly from Steve Jobs, responding to the statement that a user may switch to a Droid because it won’t track his location:

    > Oh yes they do. We don’t track anyone. The info circulating around is false.

    That’s a great statement. We know that Android users are tracked as well, but to say that information surrounding the very obviously existing location database is ‘false’, is just odd.

    [Updated: 4.25.11 at 8:53 AM]

    It has occurred to me that he could be responding to whether or not Apple is using that data, but I think the strong argument being made on the web is: “why”.

  • Design Is Not the Goal

    Francisco Inchauste:

    >Content has always been king, until we forgot about it when some shiny device came out and designers went crazy with the pixels. Even if you can raise millions and build up a ton of hype for your startup, people will soon discover whether or not the content is all that, or just not there. When you forget to design a purposeful experience, you’re guaranteed to launch vaporware.

  • Rinse

    Real Networks:

    >Rinse is the smartest way to seamlessly organize and repair your iTunes music library. We’re powered by an intelligent online database which finds what you need without searching or typing.

    A lot of people having been giving Real crap for creating an Adobe Air application that does something many other people can do for free, all while charging $39 for the privilege. They are right, a lot of the “features” of this app are utter crap. Except one, finding and removing duplicate tracks. You can find them easily in iTunes, but I have over 1300 duplicates, which means I manually have to remove that many — I don’t have that much patience or time.

    So I bought Rinse and let it go through my library to find the duplicates, guess what? It worked, and from what I can tell it did exactly what I have been trying to do for over a year now: get rid of a mass amount of duplicates with one push of the button. Good times.

    As for the other features: they seem to be hit and miss. Worth the $39 dollars to me though. (I know you think I am crazy for saying that, but I had two libraries that I merged which have lots of duplicates on them.)

  • Cranking

    This is the first thing you should read this weekend and the last thing you should read before Monday. This is Merlin Mann and the written word at its best.

    Merlin, if you are reading, thank you.

  • Topolsky on The iPhone 5

    Joshua Topolsky over at This Is My Next is reporting on a mock up of the next iPhone based on his sources. Look at that mock-up and think about what is being rumored here. Then ask yourself, how does a phone that thin, or even as thin as the iPad 2, have respectable battery life and include the power hunger global CDMA/GSM chipset and retina display as well as something at least as powerful as the A4 chip?

    Color me skeptical on this one.

  • B&B Podcast Episode 9: Glass Half Empty

    Shawn and I discuss News.me and RSS feeds and how news curation is a hot area right now.

    Huge thanks to our sponsors United Camera and Tommy Schaefer — be sure to listen to see how you can win an hour of free tech support.

  • Your New Car, Laser Powered (Kinda)

    You know that to propel your car you are basically blowing up gasoline in your engine right? Well currently that is being done with a spark plug (or glow plug in the case of diesel) and it is (apparently) not the most efficient method. What is more efficient is firing lasers at the explosive mix — sounds cool.

    Better yet if I read this article right there are two benefits to replacing spark plugs with laser guns ((Not really laser guns, but hey these things show lasers so am I that far off?)) :

    1. Better fuel efficiency.
    2. More power.

    Number two is what interests me.

  • Ross Miller Reviews a Dual Screen Laptop

    Ross Miller:
    >The top screen should be easy to comprehend—it’s a touchscreen Windows 7 device, meaning one in every three icons will be larger than usual while the rest of the menus will remain tiny as can be.

    He also notes that it has a mind blowing 2 hour battery life. If you are interested in a dual-screen smartphone be sure to hit the link as he also reviews the Echo. Count me out on both.

  • The Economics of Dropbox

    Michael Woloszynowicz taking a look at what it would cost to run Dropbox for a month:
    >Adding all this up gives us a cost in the range of $3.1M – $5.8M per month. So what can we infer from these numbers? First off, working with these same assumptions (less payroll costs) we can determine that a single full 2GB free account costs the company around 25 cents/month, while our low case account (with 433MB used) costs about 11 cents/month (see note 1). The most important thing to consider is how many paid Pro 50 accounts they would need to cover their costs.

    That’s pretty crazy, yet this last bit is really interesting:

    >The final thing to consider is that Dropbox’s total funding is in the $7.2M – $10M range. Given the high burn rate of $3.1M – $5.8M per month, Dropbox must have a good base of paid users already as they wouldn’t be able to survive on outside financing alone.

  • Shawn Blanc on News.me

    Shawn Blanc discussing the trends evident in News.me (a new iPad app):
    >I think it’s obvious that this is the direction things are going with news — as readers we want to know what our friends are interested in and what they are reading.

    Shawn goes on to talk about the second trend of supporting the sites we read. Both are good points, but it’s not an accurate description of News.me, nor is it an accurate description of Flipboard. Shawn later states two things he likes most about News.me, the first is:

    >Our desire to curate our own news feeds via our social networks.

    That’s the crux of the problem with Flipboard and News.me for, well, me. My Twitter feed is anything BUT a curation of anything I want to read. What links people post on Twitter aren’t always read by me and are certainly not liked by me universally — same with every other Twitter user, we tend to follow more people than we actually care to follow. That’s where these apps fail for me every time.

    Shawn’s right, I do want to see what my friends are reading — more importantly I want to see what they are reading AND liking. That’s why linked lists are important to me and that’s why Instapaper’s ‘Like’ sharing is so damned sweet. When I look through what my friends on Instapaper are liking I know two things to be true:

    1. They read the article.
    2. They liked the article.

    That’s what I really want to know, and that’s precisely what News.me and Flipboard always fails to tell me. These apps tell me what my friends *see* — not what they recommend. I see a lot of news articles everyday (537 RSS feeds daily at last count), nobody wants to see all the crap that I see — yet that’s the implication of these algorithms.

  • Gruber on the Location Tracking Log

    John Gruber on the “consolidated.db” location-tracking log:
    >I don’t have a definitive answer, but my little-birdie-informed understanding is that consolidated.db acts as a cache for location data, and that historical data should be getting culled but isn’t, either due to a bug or, more likely, an oversight. I.e. someone wrote the code to cache location data but never wrote code to cull non-recent entries from the cache, so that a database that’s meant to serve as a cache of your recent location data is instead a persistent log of your location history. I’d wager this gets fixed in the next iOS update.

    I would also wager this is one of those fixes that if the press lets go of it by next week, Apple will never mention the fix (by way of press release or event).

  • Dropbox on Employee Access to User Data

    Drew and Arash on the Dropbox Blog:

    >Some concerns have been raised about our Help Center article and other statements that discuss employee access to user data. We agree that we could have provided more details and we will be updating these to make them more clear. Like most major online services, we have a small number of employees who must be able to access user data when legally required to do so. But that’s the exception, not the rule. We have strict policy and technical access controls that prohibit employee access except in these rare circumstances. In addition, we employ a number of physical and electronic security measures to protect user information from unauthorized access.

    That sounds great, but it’s far too short of an answer. Is this like setting off a nuke — where two people need to turn two different keys to make it happen? If not, why not? That’s what I want to know.