It’s been 3 months since I landed in Singapore and more than anything else, I’ve loved the company of the folks who hang out at HackerspaceSG. Last Saturday we got together for a GeekCamp Singapore—and it was great. Taking a slight divergence from Web Design/Development, this time I focussed my entire talk on usability and usability feedback mechanisms. I’ve updated my slides with the relevant links (do let me know if I missed anything ) and you can now download them from here.
I had a great time and I hope everyone else did too!
“In another ruling, the Copyright Office approved the circumvention of copy-control technology on DVDs, but only in such limited circumstances as educational use, documentary filmmaking and making other types of noncommercial videos.”
- via Twice
Yes, jailbreaking phones is now legal. But the above ruling is much more interesting to me. However, I am not able to figure out if this applies to the music/audio content on the DVD’s as well? It will be interesting to see how this effects Youtube/Facebook service.
So, it does sound that the “The Grey Video” is good to go, but what about the “The Grey Album“?
(Thanks @stephanfeb for pointer to the awesome album!)
I had a plan. I took a detour. I now own a Macbook Pro. (Macbook Pro 15″ 2.66GHz i7 with 4GB RAM)
First impressions:
- Love the way it looks and feels
- Keyboard is marvelous. Soft and yet gives really good feedback. The backlight works great as well
- After initial reservation, I love the new trackpad. The smooth iphone like scrolling is just fantastic!
- Not sure about the glossy screen. I end up turning up the brightness in order to see past the reflections
- Battery life hasn’t been that impressive. Gives me about 4-5hrs I think. It hasn’t given me the “ph, wow! you still have some juice left” moment, yet.
- Performance has been fine, again, don’t feel like there’s a big jump from the old Macbook Pro I was using. Don’t feel any difference in the app launch times, or data transfer. I haven’t run any CPU intensive apps yet though.
- The base gets really heated sometimes. Way more than the older Macbook Pro. Especially on the left side. I hate this about laptops.
When I say, I don’t feel a big difference what I mean is that although it might be a faster when you measure using a stop watch, but it doesn’t make me feel so. It’s too early to complain about it though. I should say, it hasn’t given me any kind of problems whatsoever. But, it definitely hasn’t made me feel like, lets say, how I felt when I first installed 2GB of memory after using 512MB, back in 2004.
Happy with it. Hope it can work as a desktop machine for my photo-editing needs when I need it to. Looking at my current plans and some new developments, that won’t happen anytime soon. I might be city hopping for a fair bit of this year – hence the decision to buy a laptop, instead of the iMac.
So, in reply to mi amigo, Roberto Mateu, this won’t change the initial plan to use specialized tools for specific tasks. The Macbook Pro is solving my new-big problem (a portable workstation), which is what a laptop is supposed to do. As for the iPad, lets see how this changes things and we’ll get back to that in a bit.
From John Gruber:
I detected one other veiled insult against Google during the event — Jobs’s emphasis during the multitasking segment about how seriously Apple values the privacy of iPhone users, with regard to data and location information. In the way that the standard knock against Apple is that they maintain too much control over the App Store, the standard knock against Google is that they don’t value user privacy. Jobs’s message: You can trust Apple.
No matter what Apple says, or tries to sell this as; individuals all around the world are going to be tracked. People are going to let their locations be known to all kinds of 3rd party applications to extract relevant information (vs just a subset of the data, as is the current scenario) from the gazillions of terabytes of data on the internet.
Commercial apps will make your life a little bit easier in exchange for tracking you where you are. Constantly. That’s the carrot, for the bunny. The question is: how many will stay out of the system?
This comes from an earlier discussion with some friends which started with the statement, “I hate countries where you can’t even get insurance if you don’t have a credit card. Credit card’s track you everywhere you go & everything you do”. The conversation ended when we figured there are still places where you can survive without a bank account, for instance, India. It’ll be VERY inconvenient. The social defaults are being changed and other people around you, expect you to have credit information, bank accounts etc etc. So even if you have the choice, would you do it? Because, this inevitably translates into struggling against the system/ surviving outside the system or eventually – fighting the system.
So, is this system going to fail or is this just a precursor to being totally fine with having a tracking personal ID chip installed in your arms just so that you do not have to buy a metro ticket in rush hour?
Published on: April 12th, 2010
Posted in As it goes
