Yearly Archives: 2012

World’s coolest staircases

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Yahoo! Travel:

While staircases are fundamentally a means to get from one point to another, they become cool—and worth seeking out—when the form is made at least as important as the function. Whether in shops, museums, or the great outdoors, the staircases we’ve found are inspiring works of public art and provide interesting perspective on a destination.

Even us lazy guys would enjoy taking some of these stairs.

Canadian hotel offers amnesty to thieves

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Gadling:

In honor of its upcoming 100-year anniversary, the Château Laurier Hotel in Ottawa is offering an amnesty for anyone who has pilfered something from the hotel over the last century. The historic, castle-like hotel in the Canadian capital has already received more than 60 items from people all over North America.“The amnesty part means there are no questions asked,” said Deneen Perrin, the hotel’s director of public relations. “It doesn’t matter whether your grandmother took a silver spoon and put it in her purse or if someone’s parents maybe worked in the hotel and took something, we’ll take it back.”

Shows how nice Canadians are.

Home of the unofficial SXSW music torrent files

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The (unofficial) SXSW Torrents:

This torrent includes all the tracks that could be previewed on the SXSW website for SXSW 2012 as of March 6, 2012. This year’s collection includes 1,219 files totaling 7.52GB. Torrents for 2005-2011 are also available.

Would you like a buttload of free (and legal) music, from (mostly) undiscovered bands? These torrent files are your ticket.

Tether for iPhone goes HTML5

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Tether’s new version for the iPhone is purely based on HTML5 and creates a completely wireless connection over AdHoc. This circumvents the need of buying the application directly from Apple’s App Store and allows any iPhone or iPad with a … Continued

Game developers eye the iPad

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Reuters:

Apple Inc’s faster and sharper-looking new iPad is drawing the notice of the traditional video game industry, as developers are envisioning games for it that have more in common with the visceral 3D shooter “Call of Duty” than “FarmVille.”

This could be a huge market for Apple. Instead of coming straight at it, Apple is outflanking everyone — the next year or so will be very interesting.

More on ranking the rumors

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The Atlantic Wire posted its own roundup of iPad rumors and how sites did in calling the features.

Sidekick 4.0 [Sponsor]

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Sidekick is a stealth little Mac app that automatically updates laptop settings based on where you are. It takes care of annoying tasks so you can focus on what you need to do.

By controlling a huge variety of settings, Sidekick makes your laptop more secure, efficient, portable, and personalized. It can automatically change your default printer, connect to a server, run a command in Terminal, lock the keychain, change the system location…the list goes on. Visit the Sidekick website to learn more.

Try Sidekick 4.0 for free. It’s super powerful and very easy to use.

Use the coupon code THELOOP to save 20% on Sidekick.

JailbreakCon

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Matt Brian:

Commencing on September 29 at the South San Francisco Conference Center in California, JailbreakCon welcomes back many of the speakers that travelled from the US to London last year, including Cydia creator and prominent Jailbreak activist Jay “Saurik” Freeman, members of the Chronic Dev Team and Barrel tweak creator Aaron Ash.

Jonathan Ive on making new Apple products

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Q: What are your goals when setting out to build a new product?A: Our goals are very simple — to design and make better products. If we can’t make something that is better, we won’t do it.

And that, in a nutshell, is what Apple’s competition doesn’t get.

Why a developer would drop Android

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For one, we’re in the middle of production on another game, and can’t simply drop everything to implement this because Google finally delivered on a year-old promise. And secondly, as I mentioned on Twitter, our Android apps aren’t making money.

Winning.

[Via DF]

When Steve Jobs met Andy Warhol

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In his diary, Warhol later wrote, “I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one [a Macintosh], but I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’”

Scroll down the page to No. 11 on the list.

Code of conduct proposed for content aggregators

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New York Times: The Curator’s Code will use a symbol resembling a sideways S to express that a piece of content came directly from another source, and a different figure — a curved arrowlike symbol — to signal what is … Continued

Rumor report: How accurate is your favorite site?

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All told, STAR went through almost a thousand rumor stories over the past six months.

The only problem I have with this is including Mac Rumors and AppleInsider.I know that sounds strange, but you expect to see rumors on those sites. They report and aggregate rumor stories for us, which is they’re whole model.

What I’m more interested in is the sites that publish rumors that don’t say they are rumor sites.

Still, fascinating findings.

Gowalla shuts down

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Location check-in service (and Foursquare competitor) Gowalla has shut down, three months after its acquisition by Facebook.

Steve Jobs approached CBS for Apple TV content

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Hollywood Reporter:

CBS CEO Leslie Moonves said Saturday that he was approached about a year ago by Steve Jobs to provide content for Apple’s long-rumored television service but he declined to participate.Moonves told a conference audience that he met with Jobs, the late Apple CEO, and heard a pitch for what was billed as a subscription content service, but ultimately he said he wasn’t interested in providing CBS shows or films to the venture.

iPad pre-orders sold out, demand ‘off the charts’ says Apple

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“Customer response to the new iPad has been off the charts and the quantity available for pre-order has been purchased,” Apple said in a statement. “Customers can continue to order online and receive an estimated delivery date.”

So much for the people that said it wouldn’t sell.

IfAlarm – a smarter alarm

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Digital Nomad:

IfAlarm is the first ever alarm to set alarms not just by times but by real world conditions.If Alarms are set like they’re said: * “If it’s a beautiful day wake me at sunrise.” * “If I slept at least 6 hours wake me shortly after.” * “If it’s been raining wake me around 7, otherwise wake me at 8.” * “If it’s been snowing and it’s a clear day wake me at sunrise, otherwise don’t wake me at all.”IfAlarm keeps track of the details while asleep, and intelligently wakes up when asked, in plain English. Set alarms to wake early to avoid bad traffic, to go for a morning stroll, a dawn surf, to be the first on the mountain if there’s fresh powder, or sleep in till the last minute if really needed.

As someone who works at home, I don’t get up at a set time each day. It changes according to the time I went to bed and what I have planned for the following day. So I’m always changing my iPad’s alarm clock Wake Time. IfAlarm isn’t a complete solution but it adds some very interesting configurability.

Beards are meant to intimidate other men

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It’s possible, notes a researcher, that beards are meant not to attract women, but to “fend off other males.” Perhaps that makes sense: Males described the bearded men as older and tougher.

Women love the beard.

Lost Type

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This is cool. Find a font you like and then pay what you want to use it.