The phone game This is a brilliant idea – during meals with friends, everyone puts their phone on the table face down, and the first one to check theirs pays the bill. I'm absolutely as guilty of this as anyone else, but I am increasingly of the view that basically, phones are for when you are alone, and that checking them in company, outside of when you have received a text or call is Not On. Hypocritical, maybe, but I'd like to be better, and will attempt to do better this year.
Dirty 30s! – The Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot Lester Dent sold a lot of books in his day. Writing a series of modern day stories that ultimately follow this formula might be fun. 10 or 12 would make a nicely publishable volume, too.
Paypal orders destruction of antique violin I'm not sure what to say. This feels very like something that ought to be a crime – the seller had an authenticated antique violin, worth $2,500, and sold it. The buyer disputed the purchase. Paypal required proof of destruction before they would refund money. Buyer destroys antique, seller is now out both an antique violin *and* the money. Surely Paypal could be held to be complicit in a theft, here?
Waldo Jaquith – On the impracticality of a cheeseburger. One of those things that no-one stops to think about. We think about how the world changes in ways that make things that were impossible into possible, but we don't think about the ways that we are given new ways to combine the already-possible. A century ago, we had tomatoes, lettuce, beef, cheese and bread, but it's not until recently that we could combine them with any kind of practicality.
Researcher’s Video Shows Secret Software on Millions of Phones Logging Everything | Threat Level | Wired.com Got an Android phone? Or a Nokia, or a Blackberry? Then you may find that third parties are watching, or at least have the option to watch, most of what you do on it, inlcuding what is supposed to be secure communication. Bad news: at the moment, your solution appears to be to root the phone, which is well beyond most people's knowledge or ability. At the very least, until you know whether you're affected, I wouldn't log into anything that requires you to type a password on your phone.
Little Printer | BERG Cloud There are a bunch of things that interest me about this. The physicalisation of internet-sourced data. The just-enough and just-in-time approach. The social angle. And most of all, the suggestion that this is the first of a range of tools to bring the virtual and physical closer together. I want one, and I want the developer documentation for this "bergcloud" or which they speak, because I imagine I can have fun with them.
Ugh. God. Why Is Apple Making Everything Look Like an Ugly Wild West? I could not agree more. I utterly loathe the currently look of iCal, and aside from the creepy intrusiveness which is my real reason for not using it, I would be very unlikely to use Find My Friends, either, just because it's so fucking ugly. I've never liked the yellow notes app, or stickies, or the page turn in ibooks, either.
Google Analytics A Potential Threat to Anonymous Bloggers – Waxy.org Useful set of thought on how it might be possible to deal with abusive commenters, even if they're trying to hide. (Also, a warning to those who have a legitimate reason to blog anonymously: you may not be as anonymous as you think.)