Lately I’ve seen my Chrome memory usage go through the roof while on the Google Reader site. 1.5G of memory is not uncommon. Finally tracked down this bug in the product forums: “Waiting for plusone.google.com” which pointed to the new Plus 1 buttons as the culprit, with the solution being to add this filter to your Adblock+ filter list:
plusone.google.com/u/0/_/+1/fastbutton
It aired on TV the other night, now online: THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (3D) - 4 MINUTE SUPER PREVIEW. Can’t wait.
The story is that some scum sucking dirtbags who deserve more than a few swift kicks to the nuts stole the iPad of woman with cerebral palsy. The happy follow up is that not only is one of them under arrest, but also Vancouver is full of awesome people looking to help after seeing the story.
Then someone showed up at our Burnaby studios and dropped off $450 in cash - no questions asked. They did not wait around to identify themselves. A short time later they came back with another $50, fearing the original $450 would not be enough.
In yet another twist to the story, the same person came back again, this time with a brand new iPad and case. However, when reporter Aaron Mcarthur went to give Cassie her new iPad, she had already received one.
CBC also has a take on the story, with more details. Careful watching the second video though, it may cause you to roll a tear (a big manly tear in my case, least anyone wonder) or two.
Did I mention fuck the scumbag cowards who did this? If not, I will again.
Speaking of Android, there’s an All New Evernote 4.0 for Android. Looks great, congrats to the Evernote people for another great looking release!
Looking a little like a response to the recent Bing updates, Google has Introduced the Knowledge Graph, which augments search results with meta data and information related to the search.
With the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your query, so we can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for that particular thing. For example, if you’re looking for Marie Curie, you’ll see when she was born and died, but you’ll also get details on her education and scientific discoveries:
The video dives deeper in and shows how they are trying to understand what you mean when you search and display more relevant information to you. This is basically an extension of what they do already (ie: displaying the answer to 2+2) but putting that into a side panel based on information they’ve gathered from other people’s searches. A bit like how Siri is supposed to work, giving you answers, not search results (again what Bing is using as a differentiating factor between their search and google).
Looking forward to this rolling out.
Congrats to my buddy Deesa for putting out the official London 2012 Join In App for Android. Other mobile apps for the London 2012 Olympics are available from their mobile app page.
The Oatmeal: Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived.
Epic.
Cool look at Rethinking the iPhone’s App Switcher over at The Verge.
Hat tip Brooks.
Diablo Effin’ III is out, just in case you’re wondering why productivity is suddenly zero and a lot of folks are taking sick days recently. Development of the game started in 2001 so this is pretty much a milestone. We’re not talking Duke Nukem Forever numbers here, but still pretty impressive.
Everything I’ve heard about the game is it’s pretty damn good, so head over to the official Diablo 3 site and get yourself a copy.
Nice tweaks from the Google maps team: Quickly access your home and work locations in Google Maps.
This is a bit of a rant, but after reading the last reply to the bug #2939 Blocking does not work properly on MSN I’ve really almost had it with Linux and the Open Source folks.
The short story is this. Using the default IM client in Ubuntu (arguably one of, if not the, most popular Linux distribution) you cannot block contacts. This is a bug that’s been around since (at least) 2007 and the last reply (a year ago) to the bug was “Patches welcome”.
I appreciate that this is free software. I understand that I can get the source and fix it myself. But if you’re a “real company” making a linux distro you’d think that after 5 years someone would have done something more than “patches welcome.
The scenario is this. Every morning I put my IM client online. Immediately I get 3-5 messages of “hey hows it going” or “I’m bored, what are you up to” from randomhotchick7452@hotmail.com like addresses. I go to the contact menu, select block, and close the window. Sometimes the contact is already blocked. The next day, or the next time I go online, I get the same messages, from the same (or similar) contacts. I block them all. It does nothing.
A while back I tracked this down to a bug in libpurple, the core IM library used by Pidgin and Empathy, the core IM clients used under Linux.
There’s Bug 551911, reported 2008, last update a few days ago (2012-05-07) with someone with the same issue. There’s also Ticket 2939, reported 2007, reporting a similar issue, with the last update being 12 months ago with this update:
Changed 12 months ago by salinasv milestone set to Plugin Suggested Discarding messages form a blacklist can be done in a plugin. If you prefer a privacy option, “Patches welcome”.
Most of the replies regarding the issue in both bugs seem to be either:
- “[othertool/library] doesn’t implement this so we can’t yet”
- “Doing this right is hard and there’s incomplete documentation, results, etc”
I don’t have this problem on any IM I use on the Mac or Windows. I appreciate that it’s hard to get it right, but the end result is that the end user (me) is getting spam, getting annoyed, and my overall Linux desktop experience is diminished by this. I echo the sentiment of a comment from 13 months ago by “cydon”:
Seriously now, I appreciate very much the effort open source developers put into programs with no compensation whatsoever but this has been ignored for 4 years. I have been waiting for this to be fixed for 3. The only reason I was not impatient is that I very rarely use the block function. So, the question is this. Are you ever going to fix this or will I have to (regrettably) change my client? To hell with winks, handwritten messages and voice clips. We are talking about basic functionality here that creates huge privacy problems when its not implemented and you only find out when you test it. Are you serious about creating a client for the MSN as well or not?
The…. “challenge” that open source software has, and has always had, is that doing things like implementing contact blocking isn’t sexy. Making an IM whiteboard is sexy. Voice chat is sexy. Implementing a complete new desktop paradigm is sexy. Squashing bugs isn’t. Making the whole new desktop paradigm more usable isn’t.
I love linux, I really do, I’ve been a user since 1993 and an advocate of the “Year of The Linux Desktop”, but it seems more apparent that lately Linux is doing what the Mac did in the 90’s when Apple stopped innovating and let Windows beat them. Linux was equal, if not ahead, of the Mac and Windows desktops in terms of features, speed, usability, and other areas up until the GNOME 2 timeframe, but then it wallowed in a world of looking like a really great rip off of the Windows 95/98 look and feel when the rest of the world moved on. Linux advocates (and I put myself in this category) seem to have an aversion to looking at or using anything but, perhaps because it looks far cooler to laugh at “Micro$loth” and “CrApple” than it is to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, someone else has a better system than [Insert your Favorite Thing Here].
I’ve heard Linux advocates proudly proclaim “I’ve never even seen MacOS” right after telling you that it’s crap. It’s this same attitude that I believe is holding Linux back from the desktop (ignoring of course that Linux is Android and Android is used by a ton of people, probably more than Linux on the desktop). I’m not saying that Linux desktop developers should blindly follow Windows and Mac desktops, but ignoring them completely, or worse ignoring what makes them popular (ie: attention to detail, easy developer tools to use, etc). It’s not all like this, Ubuntu’s desktop has definitely borrowed from MacOS with some of their UI elements, and they’ve also gone a completely different direction with Unity, which I give them full kudos for doing something different, same as I do for Microsoft for going their own direction with Windows Phone.
Anyway, long rant which is a roundabout way of saying “gosh I really wish I could block MSN spam on my Linux desktop”.
How Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2.
Taken from the Studio Stories series included on the Blu-ray versions of Toy Story 1 & 2, here’s a short story about how Toy Story 2 was almost erased before the film could be rendered for theaters.
“Oops”.
Would not want to be in charge of IT for Pixar.
You a programmer and want to help others? Hit giving.github.com and check out what they’re doing there.
are you a charity, scientist or engineer in need of programming help? are you a programmer who wants to spend just five minutes helping make the world a better place?
Perian posts end of life notice:
t’s been one of the best and most useful tools I have had access to and invariably the first thing I reinstall after any upgrade. And now, according to a statement by its devs, it’s reaching the end of the road.
Sad, but awesome that they are posting all the code to github or google code. They also have a nice list of alternatives on their site.
Proving it’s not just the Android community that can move fast and hack in cool stuff, the Octopus keyboard team has added BlackBerry 10′s predictive text keyboard to iOS with a jailbreak tweak. Obviously not for anyone keeping their phone “pure”, but the demo video makes me re-consider.
Nice tip for Ubuntu 12.04: How To Remove Media Players From The Ubuntu Sound Menu. Definitely a handy tip to keep Rhythmbox out of there if you’re an Amarok guy!
Saving this for later: How to Tell if Your Tech Salary is Fair.
Dropbox announced some details of Dropquest II: The Future is Now:
Many of you were around for last year’s Dropquest, where we sent y’all on a magical journey through Dropbox and the interwebs. Wordokus were solved, music puzzles were deciphered, origami cranes were folded, and dragons were slain. All in all, nearly half a million Dropquesters were rewarded for their craftiness, skill, and effort. That was well over a year ago, and since then we’ve been holding our cards and toiling away to craft a Dropquest successor worthy of the first.
Great post on Why I don’t have comments on my site from Marco, Apple Cult-Member and instapaper author.
In my past I’m pretty sure I posted more than one of these types of vitriol spitting comments, probably directed towards “Micro$loth har har”, so I can only look down my nose so much. Not sure if I’m also a cult member or maybe I’ve just grown up and have realized that Mac is good for some things, Linux is good for some things, and Windows is good for some things.
Better to talk about something that’ll cause people less stress, like religion or the pro-choice/pro-life debate. Or Vi vs Emacs.
Scoop (well, rumor) from 9to5 Mac: iOS 6: Apple drops Google Maps, debuts in-house ‘Maps’ with incredible 3D mode.
Unsure how I feel about this, a lot of people use Google Maps and are used to how it feels and reacts, and how to work well with it. While the “3D Mode” looks great, comparing the two images at the head of the article, I find the one on the left (the original) far more usable than the 3D (very nice looking) version (granted, it’s a mockup anyway).
Guess we’ll hear more about this (or not) in June at WWDC.
The Verge goes through the The best stylus for iPad and gets a nice list of hits and misses. I finally decided on the Wacom CS100K Bamboo
“The emotions of life in advertising as told through gifs.”
Via Shawn Blanc.
Details of The ‘New’ Bing. Nothing seems changed for me. Either it’s not out yet , rolling out, or (once again), non-US users are getting the shaft. Kudos to microsoft for this, though I don’t see anyone switching from Google to Bing because of this.
Update: Ah I just got a notice about this, but it would like to post to Facebook on my behalf. Not sure if I’m comfortable with Bing posting my searches to facebook….
Your friend Arcterex just searched Bing.com for “big boobed dinosaur costume rentals for sex parties in New York” and got 18 search results! Click here to search on Bing too!
Declining the permissions gave me an internal error. Awesome.
Been waiting for this: Adobe Brings Photoshop Lightroom 4 to Mac App Store (app store link). Of course, you lose the cross-platform ability (I think), though if the software needs a license key, that should work for a windows machine as well (permitted by the license I believe).
Speaking of adobe, Continuing a proud tradition of user hostility is the story of installing CS6.
Update: The Brooks Review confirms that you only are licensed for Mac, not dual. Something to think about.
Google Maps for Android updated to version 6.7. Looks great!
The awesome site Ars Technica reveals version 7.0. Great look, kudos to the team.
Make Your Car Sound Like A Race Car, via iPhone in Canada.
Ever wish you owned an exotic supercar? Now you can with XLR8! Pronounced as “accelerate”, XLR8 is a super cool iOS app from 2XL Games that makes your car sound like an exotic supercar as you drive (via FSM). The universal app for iPhone / iPod touch and iPad uses your device’s GPS and accelerometer to track your speed, braking, and cornering and convert that data into the sounds of a gas-guzzling V-8 through the speakers of your car (requires audio connection). The app even lets you unlock engine sounds produced by Ferrari, Lamborghini, a NASCAR vehicle, and a Ford GT40 via in-app purchases.
I know it’s completely useless, but I’m so tempted to spend the $0.99 on this.
Confused a bit by today’s XKCD (Every Major’s Terrible)?? Clicked the link but just couldn’t imaging the words sung to that tunr? Check out the song sung over on Youtube by the talented David Dalrymple.
… thus prompting the question of If VLC can ship a free DVD player, why can’t Microsoft? over on ZDNet.
“Microsoft says the cost of DVD playback adds up to several dollars,” the argument goes. “But I can download the VLC player for Windows and get DVD playback for free. How come VLC can do it and Microsoft can’t?” Welcome to the wonderful world of software licensing, where today we get to see a real-world example of the differences between commercial software and free software published under an open source license.
A good look at the why’s, and yet the answer still infuriates me. If you really care about Microsoft justifying this stupid decision, you can read their (lengthy and mostly unreadable) [FAQ response] (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/04/q-amp-a-dvd-playback-and-windows-media-center-in-windows-8.aspx).
As a side note, both MacOS and Linux come with DVD playing software installed by default.
New(er) download of the Microsoft Camera Codec Pack to view supported RAW images within the Explorer. Not great new functionality if you’re a photographer and using Lightroom or Bridge or the like, still good to see it’s available for 64bit now as well.
How To Cut Your Linux PC’s Boot Time in Half With E4rat, via How-To Geek.
Anyone else brave enough to try this?
Interesting post on ZDNet on how little adoption the new .xxx TLD has gotten. You’d think that these would be now a hotbed of porn, but it seems that only about 133,000 adult domains were registered under .xx, and of those only 27,555 are actually developed. I know that 28k is a lot, but compared to the rest of the domain world, that’s nothing. Expected for something like a .bob or .arcterex domain, but .xxx?
Remember that cardboard camera from IKEA that was floating around not that long ago? Well, someone wrote up a Review of it.
Ok, I admit I’m biased towards the Photoshop world for my image manipulation, but this Cage tool screencast of the new tool in GIMP 2.8 looks pretty awesome. Hard to describe, so I’ve embedded it below.
Congrats to the GIMP team for their release of GIMP 2.8, the result of three years of work on the GNU Image Manipulation Program, a shining star of the open source world.
GIMP 2.8 is the result of three years of hard work and collaborative development. This version of GIMP is equipped with a wealth of new features, including some highly requested ones. Keep reading to find out exactly what GIMP 2.8 has to offer you in areas such as the user interface, tools, and plug-ins.
Lots of great improvements, I can’t wait to have at this!
If this was a pre-release of a hot new gadget, or a version 1.0 release this is acceptable. Using a beta or alpha of software I’ve done messy hacks like this before and would agree with Edd Bott and his assertion this is clever. But this is a Phone OS from one of the largest tech companies in the world. This is a Phone OS that has been out since November 2010. That’s a year and a half and I have to ask:
- There’s no way to backup already?
- If so, this is an acceptable ugly hack created by the community. However, even from day one the iPhone had a backup (I believe, if not it was shortly thereafter)[1].
[1] There was also a dark time in there when the iPhone backup was horrible, slow to the point of taking something like 15 minutes to complete. But it was there, and I think the procedure linked would take longer than 15 minutes.
Wow, RIM has got themselves in the news a bunch this week. First claiming responsibility for the “Wake up” stunt, then releasing news about BlackBerry OS 10 (impressions here), and now they have said To Developers: We’ll Make Sure Your App Earns At Least $10K In Its First Year. Techcrunch says it like it is:
Translation: the apps can’t completely suck. Sorry fart app devs, that means you.
It’s a good proposition for a company desperate to get high quality apps like those on iOS and Android, because I think that good apps do matter (just look at the flack that Microsoft has gotten over the crappy Metro apps included with Windows 8 Dev and Consumer previews). However the question really is, who is going to hitch their wagon to that sinking ship?
The Dark Knight Rises - Official Trailer #3. Have I mentioned how excited I am for this movie?
5 signs that you should hire a programmer on the spot over at the More Than Coding blog.
Good stuff there, both for prospective employees and employers.
Todays The Joy of Tech comic pretty much perfectly sums up my thoughts on the Apple is avoiding paying billions in taxes story that “broke” this weekend. Seriously, I’m pretty sure that every big company (Microsoft, Google, et all) all do exactly this, but somehow putting “Apple” in the headline makes it something that lasted for more than a day on the internet.
The Apple response is a good read.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like that companies making BILLIONS of dollars every quarter avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes, but I make deductions on my taxes, and do my best to avoid paying anything extra, so why shouldn’t they? The argument of “if Apple had to pay an extra 40 billion in taxes, they wouldn’t be able to employ the 50,000 people that they do now”. I think it’s fine to get all high and mighty, but until you go to the CRA or IRS or whatever and say “no sir, please let me pay the maximum taxes possible” and not “can I deduct my cat as a dependant”, you can’t complain too much, as this is just a difference in scale (and that companies with a lot of money can afford to hire accountants who know all the tricks).
A Prometheus Extended International Trailer has been released.
Have I said how excited I am for this movie?
Awesome infographic that my designer (and developer friends) will surely enjoy. Love the ‘what they fear’ section as well :)
The Google “Maps Cube” game was released a couple of days ago. Looks super sexy, unfortunately it seems to not recognize Chrome on Linux as a “supported” platform (yet webGL works just fine on it).
Ah well, I guess Google just doesn’t love Linux at all :(
Ars asks Does “Mastered for iTunes” matter to music? and then goes deep into exactly what it means.
JWZ found the most amazing glass bottomed bathroom you’ll see today.
James over at RainGeek has the FanExpo Vancouver Gallery Part 2 gallery online. You can find part 1 here.
The Bad
- Thunderbird still takes up 50% of the CPU doing nothing? - Check
- Alt-tab behaviour between multip-desktops even worse than before? - Check
- Random crashes of core system components (unity-music-lens, desktop notifications, sound)? - Check
- Default music player still has the user adding podcasts by XML feed? - Check
- Default music player doesn’t save position in a file? - Check
The Ugly
- Unity dock menu still has odd, unefined behaviour? - Check
- Unity Dash even worse a UI disaster than before (doesn’t save search between modes, icons and defaults ? - Check
- Potential security flaws like showing what you have running in the dock and any tool tips exposed when the password prompt dialog goes up still there? - Check
The Good
- Unity Dash seems faster. Maybe.
- Haven’t hit the “HUD” key accidentally
- Refreshed look and feel
- Ubuntu software center (app store) not a horrible slow beast!
- Newly added apps go into the dock (a la MacOS).
- My keyboard’s multimedia keys actually work! (We’ll see how long this lasts though).
- New desktop notifications do look nice, though you still can’t close them like with growl on MacOS
- My Skype icon has moved to my main desktop menu bar now (good yes, though I don’t understand why it’d move from one or the other).
Long story short, and bitching aside, this is still a good OS update and a lot of the issues that I found with the previous verions of the post-gnome2-era desktop have been resolved, but the desktop is still plagued with UI issues, odd bugs and a lack of general polish (amidst the lot of great polish that has been given) to areas that would stop me from being able to give this to a non-linux user and being confident they’d figure it out.
Ubuntu has released the latest version of it’s mainstay operating system, [version 12.04 “Precise Pangolin”] to the world. This has the third (and from everything I’ve read, greatly improved) version of the “Unity” user interface. This is also an LTS (Long Term Support) release which will be supported until April of 2017.
You can read the press releases for the desktop or server versions (neither of which mention the release by name interestingly), take a tour using their sweet web UI mockup of the distro or heck, just go and download it right now. Iloveubuntu.net has a review based on the final release.
Virtual Apollo Guidence Computer, a collection of scans, documents, etc from the NASA space program.
Here you’ll find a collection of all the AGC, AGS, LVDC, and Gemini spacecraft computer documentation and software that I’ve managed to find whilst working on Virtual AGC.
Amazing resource. Via this reddit thread. Debugging something like this would have been a bitch.
Looking for something tasty? Testing your immunity to heart attacks? Or maybe have a death wish? Check out the new pizza topping made from cheeseburgers that Pizza Hut Middle East Debuted.
Plain old stuffed crust? That’s so last decade — at least according to Domino’s Pizza. Earlier this year, the chain rolled out a line of “Stuffed Cheesy Bread” that’s full of “cheese, cheese, and more cheese.” In fact, the breads — which come in Spinach and Feta, Bacon and Jalapeño, and plain Cheese — contain as much cheese as an entire medium pizza.
Seriously, that looks like something you get on your way to the electric chair. The greese would probably help conductivity as well.
Thanks to Bryan for passing this on.