The Brooks Review

Category: Links

  • Accountant Hiring Simplified

    Great tips, be sure that you need an accountant though. Most people can get by with someone who just takes care of the tax prep at the end of the year, asking them questions along the way. For most freelancers I would guess that spending an hour a week in your accounting software of choice will be sufficient – giving the necessary information to a tax accountant when the time comes.

  • What’s the Best Way to Block a Number from Calling My Cellphone?

    Great suggestions – my solution to blocking telemarketers and exes is to add them all to one contact, aptly named “Ignore”. I also set that contact to have a custom ringtone that is nothing but silence.

  • iPhone4 Retina Wallpaper Pack

    Some of the best and most beautiful iPhone wallpapers you can get. (nice desktop wallpapers too)

  • Skyhook Will Take the Location Battle to Court

    Stacey Higginbotham:

    As opposed to deep information on a person that a service like Foursquare can provide, Skyhook can offer a breadth of information about an entire city’s movements. Morgan claims he has information on 100 million users and can get it regardless of the app they might use.

    Does the above concern anyone else?

  • China Plans Huge Buses That Can Drive Over Cars

    If you don’t think that is cool, then I don’t get you.

  • Coming Soon to Pastebot: Music in the Background

    Tapbots:

    We are going to take option #1 so you’ll have to select a song to play if you want Pastebot to run in the background. All you need to do is add a short silent audio clip to your library and use that. After all, silence is golden and nobody can prevent you from listening to nothing if you choose.

    Very clever.

  • Verizon Denies Tethering and Hotspot Features to Droid Customers

    Priya Ganapati:

    If the hardware is capable of tethering and acting as a hotspot when running rooted firmware, why can’t it do that with the stock firmware?

    A Motorola spokesperson says, “The original Droid by Motorola was not offered with a mobile hotspot feature and will not be upgradable for that feature in the future,” she says. “Our newer devices, such as the Droid X, are enabled for mobile hotspot.”

    That is weak.

  • Research In Motion Brings the Torch to AT&T

    Jenna Wortham:

    Research In Motion has a lot riding on the release of the Torch. The company has been losing market share and mindshare to Apple and Google, as more users clamor for the iPhone and smartphones powered by Android, Google’s mobile operating system.

    They are giving mobile users just what they want a Blackberry with a physical keyboard on AT&T. Wait.

  • iPad Reader Pulse Teams Up With Posterous To Make You A News Aggregator

    Neat idea, but I don’t see it being that big of a hit. Basically it allows you to create a link log out of Posterous posts, problem is not that many good blogs are on Posterous – they should have tried to get Tumblr.

  • Sessions for Safari

    Very cool extension to save your session state (all your open tabs) in Safari 5.
    [via Jim Ray]

  • The iPad is so much simpler, yet it is extremely complex

    Minimal:

    Tablet PCs, on the other hand, have had all the size and weight of conventional laptops, with all the software of regular laptops, but without the human interface devices to make them useful.

    Spot on.

  • Hidden features of Google

    How awesome is this, I had no clue:

    I like, but rarely remember to use, the synonym operator.

    Search for “~auto loan” will find info for both the word auto and its synonyms: truck, car, etc.

  • Letter From Silicon Valley: Doing the Math on Android vs. Apple

    Fred Vogelstein:

    Here’s the math: I think we can all agree that Apple is selling iPhones at a rate of 4 million a month. Add the 1 million iPads/month Apple is selling and another 1.85 million/month as a guestimate for iPod Touch sales and you get … wait for it …  6.85 million iOS devices a month, or 42 percent more than Android. Apple doesn’t consistently provide iPod Touch numbers, but over the years it has provided enough data to make an educated guess.

    I don’t disagree with the math here, but I do disagree with the iPad being in this category. I would say you need to include the iPod touch, but that the iPad should be considered a portable computer not a phone, likewise for any Android tablets (like the monstrous new Dell Phone/Tablet).

  • RIM Said to Plan Tablet for November to Take on Apple’s IPad

    Hugo Miller:

    Pricing for the device will be in line with the iPad, which starts at $499, the person said. RIM is focused on reaping additional profits from the tablet effort, rather than competing on price to sell a large number of devices, the person said.

    Something tells me that there will be someone ‘reaping additional profits’ and that someone is not RIM.

  • Porn Industry Aroused by iPhone FaceTime

    Nothing ground breaking being reported here, and we all saw this one coming I think. However take a look at the picture that they use for the article – hilarious.

  • Android Wallpaper Apps Developer Responds

    The developer:

    I also collected device id,phone number and subscriber id, it has no relationship with user data.

    But why collect the phone number?

  • Joshua Topolsky Reviews the Magic Trackpad

    Joshua Topolsky:

    There isn’t anything truly magical, revolutionary, or groundbreaking about the Magic Trackpad. It’s not the first of its kind, and it doesn’t turn our current computing paradigms on their ear. It’s an excellent device for those who prefer touch input to mouse or trackball, and it’s a solidly built piece of gear that will compliment the uncluttered workspaces of lots of geeks out there. But it’s not a game changer or the death knell for our modern day method of interacting with our PCs as some have speculated. In all, at the $69 price tag it’s difficult to call something like this a must-have — it’s a niche product for a niche user.

    I am still going to get one, I am guessing that it will be perfect for my home office.

  • 70 Billion Pixels Budapest – The largest photo on Earth

    Worth installing Microsoft Silverlight for, also zoom in.

  • Clive Thompson on the Death of the Phone Call

    Clive Thompson:

    We’re moving, in other words, toward a fascinating cultural transition: the death of the telephone call. This shift is particularly stark among the young. Some college students I know go days without talking into their smartphones at all. I was recently hanging out with a twentysomething entrepreneur who fumbled around for 30 seconds trying to find the option that actually let him dial someone.

    I bet that if it was not for my current job I would make one phone call every other day – the rest I currently make are all for work.

  • Missing Antenna Videos on Apples Site

    MG Seigler:

    As you can see on this page, the videos are nowhere to be found. Instead, the page now only shows the overview of the antenna design and test labs. A search of Apple’s website brings up a few of the landing pages where the videos used to be — here’s the Droid X one, for example — but now those just redirect to the antenna design page as well. Odd.

    That is odd.