Next week, I’m turning off my iPhone for a year.
Ok, that was a dramatic lede. Forgive me. In reality, I’m giving my almost-new iPhone 5 to my lovely wife — trading it in for a Motorola W385.
And no, that’s not another forgettable Android phone from Moto. It’s a flip phone. You know, the kind with physical buttons and stuff.
Longtime readers will know that I’ve done this once before. Here’s what I wrote back in 2010:
dozeo is a young and innovative team of developers and online media experts from Stuttgart, Germany. Together we are excited about redefining videoconferencing and providing a hassle-free solution for people to meet online and communicate live and interactively with each other.
dozeo represents a new kind of social video conferencing. It combines powerful features into an intuitive and stylish design that can easily withstand a comparison with the established online conferencing tools.
It’s almost Christmas Shopping Season, and you should know what that means — the Tools & Toys Christmas Catalog is back. If you’re shopping for the pickiest of gadget geeks, software aficionados, snowboard junkies, music lovers, writers, coffee nuts, or all around collectors of fine paraphernalia, save yourself some hassle and check out what Shawn’s put together.
If you aren’t subscribed to the RSS feed, you should be. Each day, Shawn and I work to pick out awesome items for sale on the Internet. There’s a little something for everyone.
Sam Byford:
Steven Sinofsky, the Microsoft executive in charge of Windows, has left the company. Julie Larson-Green is to assume control of Windows software and hardware engineering, and CFO Tami Reller will be in charge of the Windows business. The changes are effective immediately, and no reason was given for Sinofsky’s departure.
A couple of things come to mind.
First, is this a sign that Ballmer is unhappy with Windows 8? If so, why didn’t he step in sooner.
In college, I used a Newton 2100 with keyboard in class to take notes. True story.
via @splorp
Kontra:
Obviously, no new platform as far-reaching as Siri comes without issues and risks. It also doesn’t help that the two commercial online successes Apple has had, iTunes and App Store, were done in another era of technology and still contain vestiges of many operational shortcomings. More recent efforts such as MobileMe, Ping, Game Center, iCloud, iTunes Match, Passbook, etc., have been less than stellar. Regardless, Siri stands as a monumental opportunity both for Apple as a transactional money machine and for its users as a new paradigm of discovery and task completion more approachable than any we’ve seen to date. In the end, Siri is Apple’s game to lose.
What the hell is wrong with people?
My buddy PJ just got some good news:
So, the cancer seems to be gone. For now, at least, it looks like we’ve won the battle. It caught us off-guard with its first sneak attack, and took a part of my body as a trophy, but we fought back hard.
PJ — like my son — will undergo regular scans and blood work for the rest of his life. Once cancer is present, it can come back meaner and uglier than before. We’ve had many of Josiah’s “little friends” lose the second or third round to the disease.
Sam Biddle:
The web is great for volume, but for the deep touch, you still need to act like an actual human being. You need to actually hear someone’s voice—or at least pull a long, private email out of them. We’re all insecure, finite monkeys who don’t want to admit weakness and fragility in a place where thousands of people can read it. That’s normal. It’s not normal to expect someone to put forth their panic, storm anxiety, fear, and general angst on Facebook. We put the people we want to be on Facebook, not the people we are. And sometimes those people are generally terrified of a storm—or something else—and not doing fine. You’ll never know unless you truly ask.
Sean Hollister:
50 years ago, President John F. Kennedy told the United States that man would go to the moon. Soon, another American president may announce that the same celestial body will serve as a waypoint for manned space exploration. The Verge has learned that NASA intends to deploy a robotic lunar rover on the Moon in 2017 to search for water and other resources necessary for space travel, and that NASA may have secured support from the White House for an actual manned outpost — a space station — floating above the far side of the moon.
Robin Sloan:
For me, the iPhone had become a toxic compulsion. It had completed its invasion and occupation of my interstitial time — all those minutes riding the train, waiting in line, that used to be such fertile territory for daydreaming and storymaking. So I canceled my AT&T plan and switched to a bare-bones Nokia on a pay-as-you-go plan.
And sure enough: in the months since the liberation of my interstitial time, I’ve been daydreaming more, jotting down scraps of stories again.