My wife and I went to the Sukho Thai foot spa at High Street Phoenix last week. They hand you an iPad to view their catalogue. Guess what form it was available as?
If you thought an interactive custom app, think again. It was just a photo slideshow. So much for the iPad coolness factor.
The 90 min spa session itself covered foot massage followed by head, neck and back massage, and was quite refreshing though.
Author: Aditya
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iPad as a glorified photo viewer
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Interesting links (weekly)
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Draw a curve & have Google find query terms matching a similar search frequency
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Do E-Readers Cause Eye Strain? – NYTimes.com
So, it’s more important to give your eyes a break every 20 min or so, than to bother about e-ink & LCD displays.
“The new LCDs don’t affect your eyes,” Mr. Taussig said. “Today’s screens update every eight milliseconds, whereas the human eye is moving at a speed between 10 and 30 milliseconds.” -
Chrome 13 on Windows & Safari 5 on Mac OS X
Firefox 6 remains a decent performer on Windows too
IE9 has its strengths on some hardware accelerated stuff, while Opera is an erratic performer – poor memory management & javascript conformance, but decent page load reliability. -
Falser Words Were Never Spoken – NYTimes.com
“But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all. “
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The Elusive Big Idea – NYTimes.com
“This isn’t to say that the successors of Rosenberg, Rawls and Keynes don’t exist, only that if they do, they are not likely to get traction in a culture that has so little use for ideas, especially big, exciting, dangerous ones, and that’s true whether the ideas come from academics or others who are not part of elite organizations and who challenge the conventional wisdom. All thinkers are victims of information glut, and the ideas of today’s thinkers are also victims of that glut.”
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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Steve Jobs’s Patents – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com
Quite a varied bunch including the iPod, iPhone & the likes. Also include the notorious hockey puck mouse.
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Coconut Chutney: The Chetan Bhagat Plot Generator
I haven’t read any of his books yet, but the ones generated by this do seem really interesting. Then again they are only 1-2 para summaries.
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namebench – Open-source DNS Benchmark Utility – Google Project Hosting
Handy little tool to benchmark the DNS servers locally & thus choose the best one
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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Key points:
– You could actually use a TV as the monitor
– The function of the scroll lock key was a mystery even then
– BASIC (stored in the ROM) came before DOS
– Esc, Alt + Del was the reboot combo
And from the review in a nutshell:
“This is probably the most professionally put-together system I have seen. The only thing missing at the moment is a wide selection of packages, but I rather feel that the whole world and its grandmother will be frantically trying to fill that particular gap.”
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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How to Add a Snooze Button to Gmail, No Extensions Required
Making use of Google Apps Script functionality in Google Docs to snooze mails in Gmail
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Psychological Self-Help – new – Table of Contents
Quite a lot of reading material
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The Cult That Is Destroying America – NYTimes.com
The case against centrism from Paul Krugman
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Innovative Audio – Receiver Shootout
A comparison of the sound quality between a couple of vintage a/v receivers from 1978-80 to a modern one. The vintage ones still have it in them for pure sound quality.
Old is gold stills rings true even after all the “innovations” over the years. -
You Can’t Keep Your Secrets From Twitter | Fast Company
Very interesting study on tweets to find correlation between the user & their demographic
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The Best Self-Help Book of All Time
A candid take on self help books by a person who read 340 of them in a 2 year period. The only book he finds useful is Richard Wiseman’s “59 seconds”. One thing interesting about the amazon links to the books in his reviews is that they are affiliate ones…
Quote: “Here’s the thing. Self-help books are written to sell, not to help.” -
John T. Reed’s analysis of Robert T. Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad
A really long long piece
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The case of the 500-mile email
A very interesting story that shows why things shouldn’t be taken at face value
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One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the remote SMTP server. Some experimentation established that on this particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.
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Adds RAW support to Windows Photo Gallery & Explorer on Windows Vista & 7
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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Ten reasons to avoid Google’s IPO
An oldie from before the Google IPO in 2004, that seems hilarious in the current scheme of things, especially with gems like:
“Look at Google’s competition: Yahoo, Amazon, and soon Microsoft. All three know more about their customers than Google, because all three have many years of portal experience. And Microsoft owns your desktop. Can Google compete?”
“Google has excellent brand recognition, but how much more saturation of the mass media can we expect before journalists get sick of it?” – Going by the recent hype over G+, the saturation doesn’t seem to have set in even after 8 years.-
Yahoo is trying too hard to monetize their new search engine, but apart from this they’ve already shown that their technology is as good as Google’s.
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Google has excellent brand recognition, but how much more saturation of the mass media can we expect before journalists get sick of it?
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personalized search is the Next Big Thing
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Look at Google’s competition: Yahoo, Amazon, and soon Microsoft. All three know more about their customers than Google, because all three have many years of portal experience. And Microsoft owns your desktop. Can Google compete?
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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10 best (unknown) open source projects | ITworld
Quite a variety – from ebook organizers to toxicology testers
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The science of fanboyism – The Tech Report
Quite a lot of stats to back it with…
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Inside RIM: An exclusive look at the rise and fall of the company that made smartphones smart
Quite a bit like the railroad vs road transition. Underestimate the customer at your own peril.
“You’d hear Mike Lazaridis unequivocally state time and time again that BlackBerry smartphones would never have MP3 players or cameras in them because it just does not make sense when the company’s primary customers were the government and enterprise.”
“RIM would be proud of the fact that someone would only use 1MB of data in a month in 2005”-
You’d hear Mike Lazaridis unequivocally state time and time again that BlackBerry smartphones would never have MP3 players or cameras in them because it just does not make sense when the company’s primary customers were the government and enterprise.
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A BlackBerry with a name is ridiculous.
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There was no three-year plan at RIM.” RIM would be proud of the fact that someone would only use 1MB of data in a month in 2005
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In the corporate world, especially at large companies, the senior executives would buy a BlackBerry as soon as it came out. They would then give their old devices to employees beneath them, and these BlackBerry phones would eventually make their way down through the corporation. This isn’t the case anymore, and now those people that used to receive the hand-me-down BlackBerry devices are asking for shiny new phones.
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“When you hear Mike talk about the latest and greatest, it’s been the same thing for ten years: security, battery performance, and network performance
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the data network fees paid to RIM were definitely the number one cause of heartburn from carriers, and a big point of contention.
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STANFORD Magazine: July/August 2011 > Features > Stanford Prison Experiment
A look back at the experiment by its participants. Interesting insights.
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Monkey Business: Can A Monkey License Its Copyrights To A News Agency? | Techdirt
A pretty interesting case – if a monkey clicks some photographs, who owns the copyright & what can be termed as fair use?
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Op-Ed Columnist – The Bankruptcy Boys – NYTimes.com
If you thought 9/11 was a catastrophe for the US, think again – the deficit is going to be a much bigger & longer term problem. The beast is starving but not getting any thinner.
“Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they’re adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they’re still not willing to do that.”-
The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed “starving the beast” during the Reagan years. The idea — propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol — was basically that sympathetic politicians should engage in a game of bait and switch. Rather than proposing unpopular spending cuts, Republicans would push through popular tax cuts, with the deliberate intention of worsening the government’s fiscal position. Spending cuts could then be sold as a necessity rather than a choice, the only way to eliminate an unsustainable budget deficit.
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Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they’re adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they’re still not willing to do that.
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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Google, Microsoft and Apple — Global Nerdy
That’s hitting the nail on the head
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Windows Firewall with Advanced Security (Guide for Vista) – Wilders Security Forums
A very handy guide to setup advanced options on the Windows firewall – should apply to Windows 7 as well
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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A handy site that tells you whether your email has been breached by recent exploits
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Download free customized ribbons – Excel – Office.com
“The Favorites tab was created by using customer feedback on the commands used most frequently in Microsoft Office programs. You can use these customized ribbons as is or as a starting point to personalize the ribbon the way that you want it.”
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Pretty much a version of “The wolf & the mastiff” as the author himself puts it –
“If doing a startup is like rolling a boulder up a hill, then working at Goldman Sachs is like rolling it down the hill: you just have to stay out of the way of the boulder”
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