Which is all to say that the first eighty minutes of Toy Story 3 make up as funny, rousing, surprising, and exciting an adventure as you’re likely to see all year. And it’s also to say that nothing in those first eighty minutes prepared me for the final fifteen minutes, which I spent bawling, as did every moviegoer around me. The tears streamed down my face as they had not since… well, since I saw Up. And then before that, the only time I cried at a movie was during… well, it was during Monsters, Inc. And so I wasn’t precisely surprised to have my waterworks turned on by a bunch of fucking toys, but still.
Category: General Tech
On the Comments Thing
John Gruber has addressed (once again) why his ever-popular site Daring Fireball doesn’t have comments:
What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.
[…]
Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches. DF is a curated conversation, to be sure, but that’s the whole premise.
MiFi Gets Added to an iPad
The hack isn’t super complex, but it will require a little work (including soldering). You can’t just plug the MiFi in, unfortunately, but this hacker figured out all the little quirks and fixed them fairly easily. He hooked the MiFi up directly to the iPad’s battery for power, removed the power button (which turns the MiFi off after 30 minutes of inactivity) and replaced it with his own, small on/off switch, accessible from the SIM card slot. You’ll also have to remove half of the speaker set within the iPad to fit the oddly-shapped MiFi in.
Up Close with Apple’s Retina Display
Robert Scoble snagged this photo of the new iPhone’s display with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II during Apple’s hands-on event at WWDC last week. It looks amazing — be sure to view the original 5616 x 3744 shot.
Another Gem from Austin Leeds
A week and a half ago, I published a piece titled “ AMD-Powered Mac Clones? Give Me a Break” in response to an article by Austin Leeds speculating Apple could benefit from building Mac clones in partnership with AMD.
I got some interesting feedback on my article. Several readers were upset about me “attacking another blogger.” I want to be clear — I wasn’t attacking Mr. Leeds. I was simply breaking down his argument, piece by piece, to show just how wrong it was.
It’s Still Glass, Guys
On the new iPhone, the glass basically sits on top of the aluminum frame. On the old iphone, it was recessed and protected by a chrome bezel.
We have a full iPhone 4 (minus the circuit board), here at our shop and decided to do a little drop test. This drop was performed from 3.5 ft up. Mind you that these parts ARE original apple parts. Laser etched and all. The iPhone 4 did survive 2 drops, as expected, but on the 3rd drop there was a loud POP, and yet again, shattered glass.
Apple Bans AdMob from Mobile Apps
Peter Kafka, on Section 3.3.9 of the iOS SDK Agreement:
It appears as if Apple may still be limiting its biggest potential rival–Google’s AdMob. Note the language about only allowing “independent” ad-serving companies to collect data: “For example, an advertising service provider owned by or affiliated with a developer or distributor of mobile devices, mobile operating systems or development environments other than Apple would not qualify as independent.”
Here’s some text from Section 3.3.9 itself:
AT&T Leak Exposes 114,000 iPad Owners
The breach, which comes just weeks after an Apple employee lost an iPhone prototype in a bar, exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It even appears that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s information was compromised.
WTF is HTML5
Safari Reader
HTML5 on an Apple Newton
D’Arcy Norman, on visiting Apple’s “HTML5 Showcase” on an Apple Newton:
The content displayed just fine, as best as could be handled by a 15 year old handheld computer. Sure, some of the bells and whistles are missing. But the site is usable.
Standards, especially ones that support graceful degradation of presentation by devices at runtime, ensure we have access to our content long after it’s built, on devices we didn’t have in mind when we built it.
AMD-Powered Mac Clones? Give Me a Break
Austin Leeds published a piece titled “Apple, AMD, and the Potential for New Mac Clones” over at Low End Mac today, and as soon as I read the title, I sent it to Instapaper. I just finished reading his article, and boy, I want some of whatever he took before coming up with it.
Let’s break this down, mind-blowing bit by mind-blowing bit.
With Apple rumored to be in the midst of talks with AMD, the possibility of AMD-powered Macs is very real, if far off. Let’s face it - Intel’s chips are becoming more the staple of cheap, hot PCs than AMD’s pricier and cooler offerings.