The Brooks Review

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Leica Sofort 2June 13, 2024
Grand Seiko SBGX261February 23, 2023
Casio Duro MDV-106 Re-ReviewDecember 15, 2022

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  • 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…

    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.

    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.

  • Quote of the Day: Mike Lee

    “So busy bitching about iPhone location logs I forgot to check in on Foursquare.” — Mike Lee

    “So busy bitching about iPhone location logs I forgot to check in on Foursquare.”

  • Turning Left

    Breaking habits.

    As humans we have the tendency to fall into routines — routines which can become rather boring — more importantly routines that give us little reason to “Think Differently”. We drive the same route to and from each place, we work at the same desk, at the same computer, at the same chair. We stare at the same colors, wearing the same seven outfits — which often consist of just a few colors. We have the same conversations with different people, and different conversations with the same people.

    It’s all habit and habit is boring.

    I am prone to falling prey to habits, just the same as everyone else. When I catch myself stuck in a habit — stuck in a routine — I pull myself back into the interesting world of spontaneous. I buy a shirt or a pair of pants that don’t blend with the rest of my clothes — that don’t fit the preconceived image of me that I store locked away in my brain. Most importantly, to me and to my life, I change up the routes I drive.

    I turn left where I would normally turn right. So what if it adds fifteen minutes to my drive, those are going to be fifteen interesting minutes. You are going to pass things you don’t normally see and in turn you are going to excite parts of your mind that we rarely use any more — the parts that help us to navigate.

    I drive 45 minutes to work and 45 minutes home from work, four days a week, every week. I drive countless other places during everyday of every week to go to places like: buildings I manage, drug store, liquor store, grocery store, take-out, bank, restaurants, bars — the usual places for any 28 year old guy living in Seattle. What I try to do — much to the annoyance of my wife — is to occasionally take the road less traveled.

    The fastest way for me to get to work is to turn left, then right, right again, merge onto I5, take the exit, turn right, right again, right yet again, then left and left. I’m there. Some days I turn in the opposite direction or take different exit, somedays my life is a little different.

    I won’t sit here and tell you that on those days I am better at my job, or that I am even happier. I won’t tell you that I get any real meaning out of changing how I get from point X to point Y — but I do know that it doesn’t hurt me. Sure, it takes me an extra 5 minutes to get somewhere — big deal.

    If “variety is the spice of life” then turning left where you turn right is anything but bland.

    People often ask me how I think of topics to write about, or how I find the motivation to do “so much”. The truth is: much of the ideas I come up with are arrived at while I am driving somewhere — and I can’t help but think that, in some small way, this is because I turned left where I should have turned right.

  • 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.

    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.

    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.

  • Quick Takes on Five Apps #10

    This is the tenth [installment](https://brooksreview.net/tag/quick/) of the Quick Takes series, where I look at five apps and tell you my thoughts on them. ### [World War](http://www.storm8.com/games/world-war/) (iPhone) ### This is a game that, from the icon and splash screen, makes you think that you are getting a first person shooter. Then you get into the…

    This is the tenth [installment](https://brooksreview.net/tag/quick/) of the Quick Takes series, where I look at five apps and tell you my thoughts on them.

    ### [World War](http://www.storm8.com/games/world-war/) (iPhone) ###

    This is a game that, from the icon and splash screen, makes you think that you are getting a first person shooter. Then you get into the actual game and you think you are playing something more akin to Risk. Except that there is no description for what this game is and overall it is just not that great. It can be addictive if you have friends that you can form an ‘alliance’ with, but you can’t discover that in app. Leaving you to type in these random alliance codes. Overall I’d pass on this game. The game play is a lot of automatic button pushing with a slight amount of strategy applied to what you “spend” your fake money on (unless you use in-app purchase to turn your real money into fake money).

    ### [Evernote](http://www.evernote.com/) (iPhone) ###

    It’s been a long time since I last used Evernote (Aug 2009), but after seeing how far the mobile app has come I decided to give it another try. While it’s really not for me (text files FTW), Evernote has done a fantastic job revamping their mobile offering. If I was someone who took a lot of pictures of text (white boards, labels, papers) then I don’t think there really is a better option than Evernote. It is much quicker and much better looking (aside from the icon) than past versions. Worth a look if you left Evernote because of the poor mobile offering back in 2009 — I really like the Loren Brichter styling on the new note entry fields.

    ### [Flight Track Pro](http://www.mobiata.com/apps/flighttrackpro-iphone) (iPhone) ###

    This is an oldy, but goody. I have been using it for quite some time now and you can’t beat this app for tracking your flights (or those of people you are picking up from the airport). The best feature: the ding-dong sound it makes when sending you push notifications, love that identical to that ‘fasten-seatbelt’ chime you hear on the plane. I have found that the data for when the flight landed (not the time it will land, but whether it is landed already) is always wrong. Always.

    ### [Easy Release](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/easy-release/id360835268?mt=8) (iOS Universal) ###

    If you are a photographer that ever needs to get a model release or location/property release — you might want to give this a look. It’s not the best UI, in fact it really sucks. But it gets the job done without paper. Both people can sign on the device and have a pdf emailed to them. I can’t speak to how strong the contract is from a legal perspective — but this app has saved my butt quite a few times when I forgot to bring a model release with me. I also like that the models info is saved in the app for quick creation of a new release when needed. Good stuff. (Again the icon and app itself needs a lot of love from a designer.)

    ### [Mactracker](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mactracker/id430255202?mt=12) (Mac) ###

    Did you know that the Macintosh Centris 660AV was released July of 1993 for a price of $2,300 and weighed in at 14lbs? I didn’t either, but Mactracker does. Sure you can get some of this info from Wikipedia, but having it all in one place for every Apple product is quite awesome. It’s also a free app so you really can’t go wrong. A great thing to play with is the timeline view to see what Apple launched on a year by year basis. Neat stuff to play with, especially if you write about Apple.

    *If you liked this installment be sure to check out the other [installments](https://brooksreview.net/tag/quick/).*

  • “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…

    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…

    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…

    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.)

  • Quote of the Day: @WillFerrell

    “Facebook is like jail, you sit around and waste time, you write on walls and you get poked by people you don’t know.” — @WillFerrell (a parody account)

    “Facebook is like jail, you sit around and waste time, you write on walls and you get poked by people you don’t know.”
    — @WillFerrell (a parody account)

  • 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.

    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…

    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.

    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.

  • Butcher’d Twitter-Tweetdeck Analysis

    Mike Butcher wrote this article for TechCrunch and the entire article makes no sense. I also couldn’t disagree more. Let’s take a look, shall we? Butcher on the importance of Tweetdeck’s users: >But as any journalist or social media expert will tell you, these are power users, producing many of the most influential content. Indeed…

    Mike Butcher wrote this article for TechCrunch and the entire article makes no sense. I also couldn’t disagree more. Let’s take a look, shall we?

    Butcher on the importance of Tweetdeck’s users:

    >But as any journalist or social media expert will tell you, these are power users, producing many of the most influential content. Indeed Cornell University and Yahoo! Research found that a tiny minority of users – around .05% of the site’s population or 20,000 elite users – are generating around half of all the Tweets. These are divided into celebrities, media, organisations (such as Google) and blogs.

    What Cornell and Yahoo! didn’t say is that these users are using Tweetdeck, apparently though we are just to assume that since the two sentences were put next to each other. Also, where’s the citation on either of those statements… but I digress.

    So apparently Twitter is good because of the people that use Tweetdeck — sorry but I am not buying it. Twitter is not good because it has celebrities tweeting — if that’s what you think makes Twitter “good”, then I would strongly suggest that you don’t, in fact, understand Twitter.

    Here’s Butcher’s opening salvo — his argument for Twitter to buy Tweetdeck:

    >The question is this: What is it worth to Twitter to keep Tweetdeck out of Bill Gross’ hands? For in Tweetdeck lies the balance of power in the Twitter eco-system.

    In other words the argument he is trying to make is that Tweetdeck is the most important 20% of the all Twitter users. That simply is not true. I took a look at the people I follow and the tools they use to tweet — the only ones on Tweetdeck are Windows users that I follow. If those people disappeared from my Tweet stream I would not know as much about the Mariners as I currently do, and I would be lost on the current tiredness of some of my favorite celebrities. That would be a bummer, but it actually would probably make Twitter *more* useful for me. For *me*, though, just *me*. ((Oh, and everyone else who needs less crap in their lives.))

    >So if Uber becomes the owner of Tweetdeck, the most valuable 20% of the audience would not be owned by Twitter.

    That makes no sense — Butcher is arguing that Ubermedia would be able to hold a “.44 magnum” to Twitter’s head. That’s just stupid, here’s how a scenario would actually play out if Uber bought Tweetdeck and tried to strong arm Twitter:

    Uber: We are serving our own ads in Tweetdeck now.
    Twitter: That’s against the rules and we will lock you out of Twitter if you do so.
    Uber: Then we will create our own network and force Tweetdeck users to use that network. Do you really want to loose 20% of your user base?
    Twitter: (laughing)
    Uber: We are very serious. WE own Tweetdeck.
    Twitter: We just launched a native Windows client that doesn’t run off Adobe Air and looks beautiful, designed by Loren Brichter, heard of him? Have a great day.
    Uber: Shit.

    That’s a more likely scenario, but why? That’s easy — celebrities and “social media experts” (read: marketers) aren’t going to waste their time spamming each other with Tweets. They want access to their fans and their customers — they get that access with the “other 80%” of Twitter users. Proof: ask MySpace how well their service worked out for them when the only people left were no-name bands…yep.

    >If Uber buys Tweetdeck, Twitter can eviscerate their business by shutting Uber off (and a large swathe of their top users). Or they come to a deal, based on Uber’s terms.

    Yeah right. What’s more valuable in the Twitter ecosystem: 100 followers that are all “power users”, or 10,000,000 followers that are regular people?

    I think you get the point.

    The bottom line is that Twitter is valuable because:

    1. Popular, influential people use it.
    2. A ton of regular people also use it.
    3. People in point 1 can connect to people in point 2.
    4. People in point 2 can connect to people in point 1.

    The popularity **and** scale of the service is what makes it good, not any one subset of users. To make a rival service that stands any chance of survival would need both the influential users **and** the 180 million other users.

  • 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…

    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.

  • Quote of the Day: John Gruber

    “These aren’t “beta” tablets. They’re bad tablets.” — John Gruber

    “These aren’t “beta” tablets. They’re bad tablets.”

  • 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…

    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…

    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…

    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.