Category: General Tech

Simplenote for iPad

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I’ve become a huge fan of Simplenote over the last 6 months. It pained me that they didn’t have an iPad app available at launch.

Well, today they’ve announced Simplenote for iPad, and I am happy to say the app was worth the wait.

It works just like Apple’s Notes app, but the UI is far, far cleaner. I’m not sure there is anything else the designers could have taken out. In landscape mode, a list of notes is shown down the side, and in portrait mode, the entire screen becomes a note. It is perfect in its simplicity.

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Shield Laws, Stolen Property and Gizmodo

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A Brief Journalism Lesson

In place since 1972’s Branzburg v. Hayes Supreme Court case, shield laws are in place to keep journalists from being legally obligated to expose their sources in court. This is from the court’s finding in the case:

The First Amendment does not relieve a newspaper reporter of the obligation that all citizens have to respond to a grand jury subpoena and answer questions relevant to a criminal investigation, and therefore the Amendment does not afford him a constitutional testimonial privilege for an agreement he makes to conceal facts relevant to a grand jury’s investigation of a crime or to conceal the criminal conduct of his source or evidence thereof

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Nick Denton Raises the Journalist Question

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Gawker CEO Nick Denton has chimed in on Twitter about the police raid on Jason Chen’s house:

Do bloggers count as journalists? I guess we’ll find out.

The bigger question is “Did Gawker break the law?” If the answer is yes, then it doesn’t matter if bloggers have the same rights as butchers, really. Stolen property is stolen property, no matter whose hands end up on it. Denton’s question is a straw man, nothing more.

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Police Search Jason Chen’s Home

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Gizmodo:

Last Friday night, California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team entered editor Jason Chen’s home without him present, seizing four computers and two servers. They did so using a warrant by Judge of Superior Court of San Mateo. According to Gaby Darbyshire, COO of Gawker Media LLC, the search warrant to remove these computers was invalid under section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code.

I would go with the judge’s interpretation of the law over that of the COO of Gawker’s.

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Sony Floppy Disk Production to Halt in 2011

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Wired’s Charlie Sorrel:

Fully 12 years after the original G3 iMac dropped support for the 3.5-inch floppy disk, Sony has finally decided to stop making them. The reason is a lack of demand. The surprise is that it took so long.

If you still rely on the massive 1.44MB of space to move files quickly around between far-flung computers, don’t worry: Sony will keep the production lines running until March 2011, giving you a year to stockpile the things. You won’t be alone. Apparently, “lack of demand” is somewhat relative, and Sony sold a jaw-dropping 12 million floppies in Japan during 2009.

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Stock vs. Product

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Kottke:

In 2001, a PowerBook G4 would have set you back $3500. Suppose instead that you had purchased $3500 in Apple stock instead of the computer…that stock would now be worth about $110,000. Even an original iPod’s worth in AAPL ($399) would be worth almost $12,000 today.

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20 Years of Hubble

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Matt Ford at Ars Technica:

In the 20 years since it has seen near total failure and has brought back some of the most important and astounding images humankind has even seen of the Universe. In celebration of Hubble’s 20 years of service, Nobel Intent has a taken a moment to look back at some of the most significant images that the flying observatory has brought us.

Stunning.

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