July 2010
65 posts
On Aviation
It’s easy to be cynical about commercial aviation. Long check-in times result in hours and hours to kill in the cultural wasteland of an airport shopping mall. Endless security procedures. Hopping barefoot through full-body scanners so a stranger can examine your genitals by remote control. Awful food. Global warming! Lost baggage. All the marvellous sights and smells of humanity crammed...
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Replies to comments left on my breakfast pic
Fuiru: I don’t like black pudding actually, plus it wasn’t offered on the smaller of the two breakfasts on the menu.
Heatherwis: OF COURSE!
Rascouët: some place in Bristol airport’s international departures lounge.
It was a damned good breakfast.
“A Kind Of Magic” by Queen in some...
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“Rumors circulating the internet of a fan stabbing another attendee in the eye...”
– Blood-soaked Harry Potter t-shirts notwithstanding, a dude is under arrest for assault with a deadly weapon after striking his buddy in the face with a pen at Comic-Con this year. (via jimray)
My English teacher in high school had a simple rule: if you threw a pen, you were sent to the dean. He’d...
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xPad
Eee Pad. PalmPad. LePad.
It’s apparently official: Apple have all the imagination.
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More on location-based privacy-breaching data...
Yesterday, I wrote:
There is some promising research (I cannot locate citations at the moment, sadly) where academics have mined these sort of anonymised datasets and found out surprisingly deep information about the users
Janice contacted me to say that location privacy was part of her PhD research and to link me to this post on Bruce Schneier’s blog:
Philippe Golle and Kurt Partridge...
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Apple clarifies what it does with GPS logged data... →
From ITWorld:
In a 13-page reply to questions posed by Representative Ed Markey from Massachusetts and Congressman Joe Barton from Texas, Apple said it collects GPS data daily from iPhones running OS 3.2 or iOS 4. The phones collect the GPS data and encrypt it before sending it back to Apple every 12 hours via Wi-Fi. Attached to the GPS data is a random identification number generated by...
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Windows Phone 7: Don't bother with this disaster →
Galen Gruman reporting on Window Phone 7 for Infoworld:
Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money. It’s a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with. Microsoft should kill it before it ships and admit that it’s out of the mobile game for good.
Ouch. This Dilbert seems even more relevant now.
“We are working really hard and we can’t run really faster. There are cars in the...”
– Steve Jobs on Apple’s corporate culture during yesterday’s press conference. Maybe I’m just lazy Eurotrash, but whenever I read stuff like this I find myself deeply, deeply put off the idea of working in the American tech sector. This doesn’t sound admirable to me. It sounds...
Catholics angry as church puts female ordination... →
The Guardian:
It was meant to be the document that put a lid on the clerical sex abuse scandals that have swept the Roman Catholic world. But instead of quelling fury from within and without the church, the Vatican stoked the anger of liberal Catholics and women’s groups by including a provision in its revised decree that made the “attempted ordination” of women one of the...
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Whoopi Goldberg's poor judgment skills
Whoopi Goldberg on The View, 2010-07-13:
I know Mel [Gibson], and I know he’s not a racist…He may be a bonehead. I can’t sit and say that he’s a racist, having spent time with him in my house with my kids.
Mel is not a racist. He may say racist things, but he’s not a racist. Sure, sure, he hates the Jews, but racist? No— that’s just crazy.
Whoopi Goldberg on The View, 2009-09-28:
I know...
College Students: Get a FREE Amazon PRIME account...
shoesonwrong:
sblaufuss:
yayaa:
Just sign up using your .edu addy.
One of the benefits is having FREE 2-day shipping.
Free 2-day shipping AND severely discounted 1-day shipping.
AND free release-day delivery for applicable items. I already have Prime and am ineligible for this and I’m still so happy right now!
Two day shipping! Wow. Meanwhile, back in the Old Country, Amazon Prime has...
The Vista: a proposal for the SI unit for failure
Like the Farad, the Vista is an overly large unit for everyday use. Should you hit a patch of black ice and skid your car into a busload of nuns, you might say “I’ve had an awful day, it’s at least 600 milliVistas of fail”. NASA smearing the Mars lander across the surface of the planet after confusing metres and feet scores 3 kiloVista. Stubbing your toe getting out of the...
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“It looks like the iPhone 4 might be [Apple’s] Vista, and I’m okay...”
– Microsoft’s COO Kevin Turner talking to Computerworld. What I mostly take away from this quote is that even Microsoft’s board of directors use Vista as a yardstick or shorthand for failure.
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Your application has been approved and the VISA...
sistaflapjack:
Watch out UK BECAUSE HERE I COME!!!!
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Defeated the UK Borders Agency in paperwork-to-paperwork combat.
Fucking YES. My girl is COMING HOME!
When Social Media goes wrong: Gillian McKeith... →
I wanted to write something up about this myself but I won’t have time tonight; instead I’m going to link to this very thorough writeup by David Naylor.
The summary, to whet your appetite: Gillian McKeith, famous quack (her of You Are What You Eat and the owl-on-speed eyes) called Ben Goldacre (science journalist par excellence) a liar on Twitter. She also become embroiled in a number...
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Consumer Reports "can't recommend the iPhone 4"... →
They did some formal testing in a radio isolation chamber with a calibrated emission source and replicated (video) a serious drop in reception quality when a finger or hand covers the lower left side of the phone. They also report that a thick layer of insulation (duct tape, in their testing) mitigates the problem.
For such a well-regarded body as Consumer Reports to take such a strong position...
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Kitchen Myths debunked →
Some good stuff in here.
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bananacasts:
chartier:
“If you do not use a body-worn accessory supplied or approved by Motorola, keep the mobile device and its antenna at least 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) from your body when transmitting.”
— Droid X User Guide
Oh, no, alert the tech press! This is big news! The gall! The gall!
This text will have come from the “warning, cell phones might cause cancer” bit of...