As far as cheap thrills go, Smule’s Ocarina application for the iPhone ranks pretty highly. To play a note one blows into the phone’s microphone and touches a combination of the screen’s four hotspots.
I read the notes off the screen as I played. Lots of other Zelda songs have also been written up by the application’s community but ‘The Song of Time’ is one of the easiest to play.
This is an email from Facebook. After I switched my language settings it started sending me mixed language emails.
And this is a terrific feature that I just noticed. I’m probably way behind the curve. Clicking the button downloads an ICS file which contains all the events invitation and opens with your favourite calendar program.
I saw Star Trek this last Friday at the Providence IMAX cinema as part of Brown’s Ivy Film Festival (that’s right; free, early and huge) and I can confirm that the lens flare was indeed ridiculous – but only distractingly so once or twice. My only other qualm with the movie centres around some frankly distracting attempts at comic relief. Apart from that the movie was exactly what I’d been hoping for, that is to say a re-imagination that holds true to the original whist modernizing it and being a genuinely good self standing film. It has also, as will become very clear to any trekkie at a certain juncture of the film, thrown the door wide open for sequels and franchise extensions.
The casting was great. Kirk’s character shone through without Shatner and Zachary Quinto succeeded in being more than a Vulcan Sylar mirror. It was also nice to see Simon Pegg play a slightly different character for once. Expect a film with plenty of nods to its origins, within and outside of its characters.
My hopes for Star Trek as a whole have been restored. See this film. I award 8 out of 10 possible nerve pinches.
A few of days ago I rehashed the privacy-security debate with a couple of friends. We were talking at least tangentially about the privacy rights of politicians and those in the public eye. The conversation culminated with one of us asking, with the caveat that he understood that it was desirable, how the idea of a right to privacy evolved in the first place. I think this is a rather interesting question. Continue reading
I'm a helpful soul. Stroke me.
My blind reliance on Google Maps sent me on a 2 hour wild goose chase in the pouring rain this week. I was searching for an engraver in Providence RI to add a name to a hip flask graduation gift for a member of my fencing team. I eventually found an address and a phone number, online but via a friend, and gave the owner of ‘Impressions’ engraving a call. She offered me her address but i turned it down as i was in a rush and believed i already had it.
On the plus side, i found out that it is possible to edit locations in Google Maps, however if you change the address by too large a distance it is not immediately updated. I wonder how Google sorts fraudulent updates from good ones?
So i guess the moral of this story is that nothing is more authoritative about a business than the person who stands to make money from it.
@alexmuller recently blogged about the misuse of twitter hashtags. You should read his post. In it he argues that people overuse hashtags on twitter. I agree that that they are often overused, but I believe that this is only occurring when people tag a tweet with a tag which has little to do with the tweet’s actual content. Alex holds that most of the time when someone tags a word in a tweet that could be accurately searched for anyway, it is a misuse of the #hashtag convention.
I first wrote this post as a reply to his blog post, but it was a bit longer than I intended and I have written nothing here in the recent past.
I disagree with him for two main reasons.
Firstly, good twitter clients make hash tags into links to a twitter search for the hash tagged word. Tweet deck is a good example (and if you haven’t migrated to it from Twitterrific yet, you should at least try it). This is obviously a convenience factor, and an easy way of directing people to an existing conversation on a topic. Remember that the @ tag started as a user meme which was eventually incorporated into the actual service.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, hashtags are usually how people show that the mentioned tag is the main point of their tweet. So, even if the search function would give the same result, a hashtag allows me to quickly see that a word is not just mentioned in passing.
Tangentially, hashtags have now become a meme/convention. To not use them is to allow your message to be lost in the unsearched ether as there are now plenty of tools which search for only #hashtags – especially notably hashtags.org. Whether or not you like that this has happened, it is now the case. It seems silly to ignore it.
Does anyone else have an opinion?
Over the course of a few days I have played around with installing the public beta of Windows 7 on my mid-2007 edition MacBook Pro, and making it work in VMware Fusion. I had some issues along the way and had to do a fair amount of research to resolve them.
To begin with, I tried using Apple’s Boot Camp Assistant to split my hard disk into my regular partition for OS X and a 25 gigabyte windows partition. I had done this without issue before when dual booting with Windows XP (I’ve never owned a machine running Vista). However this time it failed. Boot Camp told me sternly that I could not create the partition because there were ‘files which could not be moved’. This basically meant that there was not enough contiguous free space on my drive to create the large partition I requested, and the files were too large to be moved. This occurs because OS X automatically defragments your hard drive unless it encounters files larger than 20 mb. So over the course of one and a half years of use, my computer’s drive became too fragmented to partition. Continue reading
The blogosphere has recently fallen in praise at the feet of a new application currently released in its beta stage, called Spotify. I too am excited about this application, it has some very nice perks.
But, enough of that. Let’s put this thing to the test.
Because there is no way for me to scientifically test this application in any reasonable amount of time I am simply going to pit Spotify against my 20 most listened to artists in the past 3 months according to my last.fm. This is an interesting test for me because I download most of my music from illegitimate (but brilliant) sources. (In fact I download all of it, but I also buy cds and visit concerts if I enjoy the music.) Perhaps if a service such as Spotify allowed me to properly ‘test’ music, I would be less inclined to download it. I want to see if Spotify would have been a reasonable substitute for illegal downloading by seeing what percentage of the music I have enjoyed most recently could have been streamed on their service. Continue reading
A visualization of my relationship with AT&T
I got my phone bill a couple of days ago. I’ve known since I first took the time to read the text message AT&T sent me concerning data roaming charges outside of the USA. That was after about a week of casual but cautious Internet use. I had reason to be cautious, I had heard that friends who’s iphones were purchased in the UK (tied to O2) were paying a whole £3 per megabyte of data downloaded outside of the country. I assumed that America’s iphone distributor, AT&T would have similarly outrageous prices.
How naïve I was.
As it turns out, and as I should have read much more closely, AT&T extorts you for 1.95 cent per kilobyte of transfer. KILOBYTE. There are 1024 of those in a megabyte. Google tells me that 1024 * 0.0195 = 19.96800. I was paying almost $20 per megabyte of data transfer. As of this moment that apparently equates to £13.36.
AT&T extorts you for 4.45 times as much as its British counterpart for data transfer abroad. And let’s not even bother rehashing the swindle that is American text rates.
My phone bill for the month is $258.46 of which $136.65 corresponds to my approximately 5.5 megabytes of total transfer. With the cost of a week’s cautious emailing and twittering so high, I can safely conclude that the Internet is indeed serious business.
The main introductory Computer Science course at Brown is CS015, an introduction to object orientated programming. It is a Java course aimed both at those with limited and those with no java and programming experience. CS017 is the equivalent course for those who have done a fair amount of programming before.
The lecturer for the course is Andy Van Dam who holds a highly esteemed position within both the Brown and the US Computer Science communities. More information about Andy is scattered across the net, but suffice to say he is a good lecturer.