Published on
February 23, 2010 in
Personal.
I wrongly assume that my “normal” friends (i.e. non-geeks) see most of what I encounter on the Internet. I forget that they’re unlikely to spend nigh on ten hours a day connected. They are probably not subscribed to Gruber nor Kottke and neither do they typically use Twitter.
If you’re not drinking from the firehose then perhaps it isn’t unsurprising that some things will pass you by. I am by no means attempting to claim that I see everything worth seeing on the Internet every single day. To do so would be impossible – even the professionals miss a lot of things first time around.
However, that’s not to say that my friends who largely live offline aren’t interested in some of the wonderful stuff that’s out there. Most won’t “get” XKCD but when I received an email last week pointing me toward the epic Two Gentlemen of Lebowski that I first saw at the start of the year, I realised that it’s my responsibility to bring these things to the fore in my role as “the geeky one” of the group.
To this end, I plan on using my Tumblr account to share interesting clips and articles that I encounter and keep this here blog for longer pieces and the occasional rant.
Here in Edinburgh, the nighttime temperatures are still well below freezing point, giving motorists a thick frost to scrape off their windscreens in the morning. The “thin ice” warning signs along the Union canal are almost obsolete: the patches of ice that do remain would struggle to support the weight of light waterfowl, nevermind that of a car.
I’m aware that this time last year the UK was still recovering from crippling snowstorms that paralysed the country. Indeed, the weather achieved what even the Blitz didn’t and stopped the bus services in London.
Nevertheless, I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that Spring is just around the corner. It’s almost light when I get up on the morning and almost still light when I leave the office. On average, Spring is arriving 11 days earlier than it did 35 years ago.
Published on
February 17, 2010 in
Personal.
No sooner do I write a post about making yourself a target for robbery than along comes a dedicated domain to highlight online privacy and the dangers on broadcasting your location to all and sundry: pleaserobme.com.
Despite being an avid user, personally I find the Foursquare tweets hugely annoying. I also only accept friend requests on the service from people I actually know – mind you, I do exactly the same on Facebook: Amber MacArthur notwithstanding, I’ve had a beer with every single one of the people in my friend list.
I did dally with geotagging my tweets for a while. This allowed me (or anyone else for that matter) to paste my Twitter RSS feed into a Google maps search in order to see where I was tweeting from – just out of sheer curiosity you understand. The results were pretty much as I expected: various pubs, the office and home. I’ve since stopped geotagging and have deleted all of the data – which, to their credit, Twitter make extremely easy to do.
I do wonder though: exactly how much more likely are you to be a victim of burglary if you broadcast your location? How many criminals are sat just watching Twitter on their (invariably stolen) iPhone, just waiting for someone nearby to announce via Foursquare that they’ve left their house? Isn’t it far likelier that an opportunistic thief will see you leave home and jimmy your back door open or smash a window?
Published on
February 8, 2010 in
Personal.
No, not me. I would very seriously recommend that you don’t attempt robbing me.
That phrase is what I think must go through every bag-snatchers stupid little mind when they see people – and I’m talking almost exclusively about women – carrying their bags with the handles in the crook of their arm, their forearm conveniently positioned horizontally to allow the bag to be slipped off with great ease as the thief runs past.
Aren’t people advised to not make it easy for criminals any more?
As already noted, like any impending new Apple product, the iPad was hyped to the max before its launch and it would have taken something special to live up to the speculation. Like a lot of people, I was expecting an all-singing, all-dancing super-device – an OLED-based display with tactile feedback, front and rear facing video cameras and facial recognition. Given that this was supposed to be the saviour of the print industry I was expecting a multimode LED/e-ink screen at the very least.
But these bleeding-edge technologies don’t come cheap – certainly not for $499. I thought it interesting that there are actually two devices: one wifi only, clearly targeted at home use and another slightly more expensive 3G-equipped mobile version.
The speculation on the technology gave rise to a rumoured $1,000 price point. If the iPad was basically a keyboardless MacBook Air replete with the aforementioned display then I would say you could safely double that and halve the battery life.
Shares in AAPL started to slide when the product was initially announced but when the pricing was revealed the market cap grew by $5bn. I’m not suggesting for a second that Apple had anything to do with this. Besides, thing have since reverted to post-announcement form and shares fell 4% the next day.
It has slowly dawned on me that this device is brilliant for the market that it’s
aimed at: namely people who consume more than they produce. It is not meant as a replacement for the laptop but more for casual browsing, emailing and a low-margin front-end for purchasing content from the Apple Store.
Apple made $15.6bn revenue in the first quarter, has $35bn in cash at the bank and no debt.
While not a loss-leader per se, Apple simply don’t need initial sales of the iPad to make them money.
