What problems does Google Wave solve?
A good, if limited, introduction to Google Wave. [via waxylinks]
The lesson of the Sidekick failure
… You aren’t in control of your data if you can’t easily and frequently make useful backups onto your own computer and your own media.
I recognize that it’s hypocritical for me to say this, as the lead developer of Tumblr, which does not yet offer an automated feature for users to download backups of their blog content. So I took some time this week and started to write one. I’m happy to announce that Tumblr will be releasing an easy backup tool in the coming weeks. (I will also make an easy backup feature for Instapaper shortly.)…
Nice! Would be ideal if it comes as a single zip file with Tumblr name and date by default, such as rdotm-20091016-1142.zip
Sublime Text: The text editor you'll fall in love with
A new Windows text editor with clever original features and a graceful UI. Never thought I’d write those words. I’m particularly intrigued by the “minimap” — a zoomed-out view of the entire file.
I use TextEdit (Mac equivalent of Notepad) in plain-text mode for just about everything I do that involves words. If I were on Windows I would give this a shot. The features look tasty.
I really can’t overstate how much I love macros.
#preparing the new RRR website
With Windows 7, PC users will at last have a strong, modern successor to the sturdy and familiar, but aged, Windows XP, which is still the most popular version of Windows, despite having come out in 2001. … While XP works well for many people, it is relatively weak in areas such as security, networking and other features more important today than when XP was designed around 1999.
Walt Mossberg: A Windows to Help You Forget
Think about that for a minute.
Windows is the most popular desktop operating system by a long shot, and Windows XP, most of which was designed and written ten years ago, is the most popular version. In other words, most computer users are running 10-year-old technology.
To most computer users, overall industry progress has seemed stagnant for nearly a decade…
Way to go, Microsoft.
Good old Verizon
But Verizon knows what it wants, and it it definitely doesn’t want to be in the situation AT&T is in today with iPhone owners: reduced to a dumb pipe with very little device branding, no lock-in, no customer loyalty, little to no revenue share from phone-based content sales, and only negative press resulting from the relationship.
I agree with Marco’s assessment of what we can expect from Verizon. The above paragraph made me feel a little sorry for Verizon (and for AT&T) - it ain’t fun having the brand sucked out of you.
On the other hand, they never did anything good with it. Or rather, Verizon is known for good coverage, but hell if I can think of any Verizon “product” anyone gives half a crap about. They’re good at being a dumb pipe. They’re dumb at everything else.
Despite its superior network, I left Verizon years ago because of (1) crappy phones made infinitely worse by Verizon’s software lock-down and (2) nickel-and-dime service charges.
I remember buying a nicer Samsung in 2005 that (finally!) held MP3s only to discover Verizon had disabled the audio functionality and replaced most of the menus with options to buy apps and ringtones. Apps like Tetris cost $3-$5 per month. What a joke.
Vocoding with a piano
This is cool and freaky: using a piano to generate human speech. The video is a must watch.
UPDATE: here’s a YouTube video with a translation of the German VO.
[via waxylinks]
Perhaps Google’s stiffest competition in the immediate future isn’t Bing and Yahoo, but rather it’s the likes of Wikipedia, Twitter, and Facebook. Just as we no longer search for the news (24 of the top 25 newspapers have shown record declines in circulation), in the future we will no longer search for products and services; rather they will find us via social media.
Is Google a Social Media Company? (via Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet)
I hope not. That sounds awful.
Fortunately, I think this is one of those new-media thought extrapolations where we’re so far into the clouds that we can’t even see reality anymore.
I’m sure products and services (or “brands”, as they like to call themselves) will continue trying to find us on social networks. That doesn’t mean that we’ll welcome them in many contexts. People are already annoyed that they can’t rant about their local cable monopoly’s awful service on Twitter without receiving a cheerful but useless reply from a PR drone with the frustratingly false implication they can do something to improve their employer’s mediocrity.
When you tell your friends that you’re having coffee at Aroma, the last thing you want is to get an at-reply from Starbucks asking you to try their location across the street. When you congratulate your friends for their new baby on Facebook, you don’t want Pampers to auto-message you (or them) about the great features on their new diapers.
Meanwhile, if you search Google for coffee or baby announcements, the chances are much better that you’re interested in seeing commercial offers — or at least won’t be interrupted and offended by them.
Social media, by design, resides in a similar context as socializing in real life. “Brands” can’t interrupt us in the social context without being awkward and unwanted. Imagine the mood if your new father-in-law followed your grandfather’s war story during Thanksgiving dinner with a pitch for his Amway energy drinks and a great investment opportunity for everyone at the table.
Commercial interaction just doesn’t work in that context, and I doubt that it ever could.
NYC 311 iPhone App with Location Sharing
Starting today, New Yorkers can submit select quality-of-life complaints – with an option to attach pictures – to 311 via their iPhones. New Yorkers are already able to report complaints to 311 through mobile web browsers. The new, free iPhone application will streamline the process by allowing New Yorkers to report complaints to 311 using a program that identifies the user, determines the specific location of the condition reported using GPS technology, and allows easy uploads of photos. Going forward, this functionality will be expanded to other mobile phones, and enhanced so that any New Yorker can check the status of previously-reported issues.
Laptop battery myths
TUAW ends this article about laptop batteries with this trainwreck of “advice”:
Never leave the machine plugged in all the time. Laptops are meant to be portable. Using it as a desktop that never runs on the battery will destroy your battery life.
Cycles are your friend. Never letting the battery complete a cycle will greatly diminish your run-time. Try to avoid charging the battery unless it’s drained past 30%. Any time the battery drains past 50% and charges more than 50% counts as a cycle. The farther you let it drain before the charge - the better its overall health will remain.
30 cycles in a year is not a good thing. ;)
Let the battery drain completely a few times a week.
Never let it sit for long periods of time without use. Batteries need to be loved or else they won’t love you.
All of these tips are incorrect for the lithium-ion (and, more recently, lithium-polymer) batteries that are used in nearly every laptop manufactured in the last decade.
The “memory effect”, or the need to “refresh” or “deep-cycle” the battery by completely discharging before recharging, is stale knowledge from the time of NiCad and NiMH batteries. Lithium-ion batteries don’t suffer from the memory effect.
It’s also not bad to leave your laptop plugged in. In fact, it’s a good thing to keep it plugged in whenever you don’t need to be running on battery power.
Here’s how lithium-ion batteries actually behave.
Due to their chemistry, their capacity slowly diminishes with age. Laptop batteries usually lose most of their useful capacity 2-3 years after manufacture (not initial use). The new lithium-polymer batteries in the MacBook Air and unibody MacBooks (only the non-removable ones) claim to have improved this, but it’s too early to tell if these claims have merit. Assume that most laptop batteries will need to be replaced after a few years.
If you use the laptop on battery power a lot, the battery lifespan will be shortened. This “wearing out” effect is much less severe than with older battery technologies, but is still present. This is why you should plug it in if it’s convenient.
When plugged in, the battery is not in use. The laptop’s power circuitry bypasses the battery unless it’s needed. Depending on how smart the charger is, it may occasionally poll and “top off” the battery if its charge decreases to a certain threshold below 100%, but this is rarely needed in practice.
If the battery is not in use, it will slowly lose its charge due to all rechargeable batteries’ tendency to slowly self-discharge. Lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries have the lowest self-discharge rates of any common battery technology, estimated at less than 1% per month and difficult to distinguish from the loss of capacity with age.
In reality, if your laptop is closed, the battery slowly discharges with time because it’s not really “off”. A small amount of continuous power is needed to preserve the RAM’s state during sleep. It’s not the battery wearing out — it’s being used, but much more slowly than when the computer’s in use.
When Apple decides whether a battery is defective or has been worn out normally, the “special utility” they run is System Profiler. You can run it, too. Check the Power section, and it’ll tell you your battery’s cycle count, the intended capacity at manufacture, and how much capacity per cycle remains. Apple technicians compare the cycle count to the capacity loss. If your battery has lost a lot of capacity in its first year but hasn’t performed enough cycles to reasonably correlate to the capacity loss, they’ll replace it under warranty.
