This one is definitely filed away under Weekend Fun! Kudos to Mozilla foundation, though a bit sad that it doesn’t play on iPad (and some other browsers) yet.
Today I want to reflect on Zen of iOS and overall Apple philosophy. But first, there’s a disturbance in the force that I must deal with. My overall tranquility has been compromised, and by Apple Genius Bar employees, no less.
This famous ship sailed the seven seas for years and years. It rode the waves up and down, and often seemed like it will capsize, but it managed to survive. The ship’s crew has long lost hope of finding the promised land, depressingly they pressed on, forgetting why they embarked on this voyage to begin with. And worse yet, their captain lost all hope as well, misguidedly he just stood on the lookout, blankly staring onto the endless sea
My son and I went through rather painful ordeal with this Event 11 that Windows quietly generates. It took us few weeks to fully work out why Windows suddenly started hanging, misbehaving or even crashing with blue screen. Now that I feel it is fully resolved, I thought I’d share my conclusion (and the process) – hopefully it will help few others out there who are struggling with this. Ridiculously, many people are likely affected by this issue, but unless they open Event Viewer and search for this event id 11, they will not realize that hanging is not “normal” behavior, even for Windows! OS seems to silently recover from this problem 10 to 60 seconds later, which is really strange in my book – considering that user isn’t even alerted to this serious atapi error.
It is that time again – time to decide how much credit we should allot to our users, versus how much we should “protect the user from him/her self”. Ah, the eternal dilemma – but wait, Apple to the rescue? Didn’t they pioneer the “we know what you want better than you do” model?
Short post – more of a call to arms, to discuss burning point for many people today. That is, What Platform to choose to purchase this iconic Steve Jobs biography eBook. I am completely at a loss – what could have been price war between heavyweights in this category, turned into a paralyzing situation for consumers (like me) preventing our purchase completely. My interpretation is that Publisher insisted on same pricing across all platforms! What Gives?
I fondly call my wife lately Commodity Investor, as she loves to scout out best deals on eBay. In fact, I would easily bet that we are in their top 10% of customers list, and let’s just leave it at that. So why is it that they allow themselves to continuously upset us?
Sitting in Starbucks, where I seldom go, and reflecting on my nearly ended "night on the town". With many activities going on today, I ended up in Downtown Atlanta all alone with 3 hours to burn. First stop – Foursquare – where I did find people congregating on few fun activities. Alas, numbers were ridiculously small – versus what seemed a Car-and-Human apocalypse happening around me. We are probably under 1 in 100,000 checking-in on Foursquare. Are they checking-in on Facebook? Perhaps Google+, which has rather refreshing public posts with location feature. Nope, seems like not even via Yelp. Two conclusions – we need a better way of sharing "hotspot" information. While we all value our privacy – I think there is a way to keep that and yet share major "outings". But here is even bigger kicker – information segregation is a killer right now. Sure Foodspotting will tell you they have API, and they managed to hook up with ScoutMob even now. Heck, but it is yet another App and hence Silo in a way, locking in my photo of wonderful Frappe there. This will only continue to grow, as barrier to entry becomes smaller and smaller. Facebook is leading the pack with the most users right now – yet their Check-in features are rather pathetic. Worse yet, most users don’t know about them at all. I think we need to scrap our check-in approach and instead replace with:
I managed to get out to Dragon*Con this year, but it ended up short and unpleasant experience. Granted, my planning was poor (read: non-existent). After repeatedly asking my family about it in the past few weeks, I got a very clear and solid NO from all other family members. Not wanting to hang out alone, I decided to not go this year.
While earlier in a week I read (just like many of you) that HP is getting out of Tablet (and most PC / Mobile Hardware) business, I only reflected on how that will change landscape of our mighty Industry. Instead, I should have been pondering what will HP decide to do with hundreds of thousands of HP Touchpads out there in supply chain!
Just a quick post regarding the Software Industry drama unraveling here, here and here. Quick recap: Google is upset with “patent trolls” extracting fees from Android manufacturers via Patents. This ends up costing device manufacturers, and probably ends up making more money for Microsoft than they make from their Windows Mobile 7 sales!
I spent last two days working hard on setting my youngest son up with his own dedicated desktop PC. What is interesting, is that his prime gripe about his earlier system was that it couldn’t run Minecraft properly, especially with some add-ons!
First, this is a response to a blog post here (via Techmeme). If you are too lazy to read it, here’s an executive summary: Google is saying they will delete 2 years worth of email and all other Google Account data for 10 years old Alex (Who is naturally crying now). All because he is under 13, which they just now learned about.
My children are participating in summer classes this year, and ran into this issue. Looks like Polar site has a little trouble with latest and greatest Internet Explorer 9 – so here is very easy fix: Compatibility Mode. Internet Explorer 9 can “behave” like previous IE, simply by triggering compatibility soon as soon as you arrive on healthyschools.net site.
That is what my daughter exclaimed, after learning that we purchased Kobo eReader from Borders and mishearing the name. She came to this natural conclusion after seeing that our new device prefers ePUB books to feed it’s appetite for content!
Forgive the loud title of this post, but I promise that it is totally relevant! For the past few weeks I have tremendously enjoyed several audio-books from my local library. Our local Gwinnett county library had Digital Downloads for a long time via OverDrive Media Console. However, the big breakthrough is my discovering that they are offering iPhone App!
Yesterday, while reading an article on USA Today, my eyes gazed over to prominently displayed “News Stories” on the right side of the page. Clicking through seems to reach respectable site, apparently presenting TV affiliated news site, complete with anchor photos, videos and long authentic looking article.
As I drove home from the office today, I was bombarded by an unusual amount of Android Billboard Advertisements. What is most interesting is that Google did Not pay for any of it, as far as I know! Majority were paid by Samsung, making sure everyone hears about their new Galaxy Tab.