World clock, packed full of stats

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A configurable world clock, with statistics like births, deaths, each divided into various categories, and lots more.

How and why to defragment your hard drive

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Good tutorial. Two takeaways:

  1. Never defragment your SSD. You’ll only shorten its lifespan.
  2. Defrag your non-SSD hard drive once a year or so. Be sure to back it up first.

Can HTC’s billionaire chairwoman bail out a sinking ship?

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Can Cher Wang, billionaire co-founder of HTC, keep them from following in the footsteps of other beleaguered smartphone manufacturers? She faces a tough putt.

My favorite part of the article:

It’s worth noting that the 55-year-old, Berkeley-educated Wang personally managed HTC’S relationship with Microsoft during the time when its phones primarily used the Windows Mobile operating system. “Once a year,” the Times noted in its profile, “she flies to Seattle and meets with Bill Gates and Steven A. Ballmer, the company’s chief executive.”

The last mobile-phone chief with close ties to Microsoft was Nokia’s Stephen Elop, who recently presided over the sale of the Finnish firm’s handset business to Microsoft. With Wang taking the helm, will HTC find itself similarly drawn into Microsoft’s orbit?

Great Neil Young story

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Graham Nash tells the story of how, back in 1972, Neil Young played him his brand new album Harvest. Fantastic way to demo your music. More barn!

Google’s iron grip on Android

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Back in November 2007, Google had zero share of the mobile market. They watched the original iPhone rollout and could see it was going to be a game changer. To protect their search turf, Google released the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

In that era, Google had nothing, so any adoption—any shred of market share—was welcome. Google decided to give Android away for free and use it as a trojan horse for Google services. The thinking went that if Google Search was one day locked out of the iPhone, people would stop using Google Search on the desktop. Android was the “moat” around the Google Search “castle”—it would exist to protect Google’s online properties in the mobile world.

Fast forward to today, and Android owns a significant market share. But a true open-source Android means other companies can release their own versions of Android (à la Amazon with the Kindle Fire) with Google getting none of that particular revenue stream.

The linked article digs into that problem, shows one example of Google’s move from an open source proponent to an ambitious protector of market share. Interesting read.

Heineken unleashes The Sub

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Hold onto your beard, JimD.

Manufactured by Krups, The Sub is, in Newson’s words, “a giant pressurised vessel” and “a male-oriented object made of anodized aluminium.” Consumers can purchase what they’re calling “Torps,” metal cylinders filled with brew, that they then load into The Sub like a torpedo into a firing tube. But instead of sinking an enemy U-Boat, The Sub then chills the beer down to two degrees Celsius, which is four degress colder, Heinken reckons, than your ‘fridge can get it.

Why I love hockey

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I love the open net at the end of a game, when just about anyone can score a goal from any position. Watch for the slow motion clock countdown at the end.

Ebay’s Omidyar follows Bezos in reinventing journalism

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The news industry is going through some tough times. Newspaper after newspaper is folding or being subsumed by a goliath. Independent news bureaus are shutting down, forcing the news to flow through the keyboards of untrained citizen journalists. People are getting their news from the net, and that news is not being vetted in any formal way.

Amidst all this chaos comes opportunity. Jeff Bezos stepped in and bought the Washington Post. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar was also approached by the Washington Post. Though he declined the purchase, Omidyar is committing a good portion of his fortune to reinventing journalism from the ground up.

His first step was to build a partnership with Glenn Greenwald, from The Guardian.

When they finally were able to talk, Omidyar learned that Greenwald, his collaborator Laura Poitras, and The Nation magazine’s Jeremy Scahill had been planning to form their own journalism venture. Their ideas and Omidyar’s ideas tracked so well with each other that on October 5 they decided to “join forces” (his term.) This is the news that leaked yesterday. But there is more.

Omidyar believes that if independent, ferocious, investigative journalism isn’t brought to the attention of general audiences it can never have the effect that actually creates a check on power. Therefore the new entity — they have a name but they’re not releasing it, so I will just call it NewCo — will have to serve the interest of all kinds of news consumers. It cannot be a niche product. It will have to cover sports, business, entertainment, technology: everything that users demand.

At the core of Newco will be a different plan for how to build a large news organization. It resembles what I called in an earlier post “the personal franchise model” in news. You start with individual journalists who have their own reputations, deep subject matter expertise, clear points of view, an independent and outsider spirit, a dedicated online following, and their own way of working. The idea is to attract these people to NewCo, or find young journalists capable of working in this way, and then support them well.

I have high hopes for these folks. This is important work.

Supreme Court decision could force patent trolls to have skin in the game

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It has long been a patent troll strategy to carpet bomb little companies with lawsuits. The cost of defending against the suit is much larger than the money at stake, so the little companies invariably cave. A key to this strategy is the fact that there is little cost to the patent troll if they lose a case. Currently, if the patent troll does lose a case, they just walk away, they have no obligation to pay the winner’s attorneys fees, which can be substantial.

This may be about to change.

The Supreme Court announced this month that it would hear two appeals of decisions by the federal appeals court that oversees all patent cases. In each case, the company that was sued for patent infringement won on the merits but did not prevail in having its legal fees paid by the losing party.

The court will decide whether to make it much easier for victors in patent suits to force their opponents to pay their legal fees. If it does so — and patent watchers generally assume that the court would not have agreed to hear the appeals if at least some justices were not sympathetic to the companies being sued — that could make it much more expensive to file a frivolous suit, and perhaps scare patent holders away from filing meritorious suits. Losing such a suit could conceivably bankrupt a small company if it was forced to pay the other side’s legal bills, which can run into the millions of dollars.

This could have huge implications. At the very least, it would force a patent troll to think twice before filing an industry-wide suit. If they lose, they risk everything.

The soup to nuts of iOS photo sharing

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This article covers a lot and does it well. If you like to share photos and are not already an expert at the process, take a read.

Apple Inc., bashed and thriving

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I get all the Apple bashing, I really do. Blogs need eyeballs, pundits gotta predict stuff, doom and gloom sells papers. But that Apple bashing is tiring to read and saps the credibility of those who write it.

The linked article is Mike Wehner’s take on the question, “Is Apple thriving?” Short answer, yes.

LIST: The 25 most suspenseful films ever made

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I love lists. Love stepping through them, one at a time, especially with friends, arguing and discussing what’s been left out, what doesn’t belong, and what is in the wrong place.

As is usually the case, this list is not mine. In fact, I definitely don’t agree with a number of these choices. That is what makes this so much fun for me. C’mon, Jaws at #17? That’s insane. I think Jaws should be right up there in the top 3 at least.

One thing I love about lists like this is the new movies I encountered here. My Netflix queue has some terrific new entries. What’s your choice for the most suspenseful film ever made?

Some of the most powerful photographs ever taken

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You’ve likely seen some of these, but most of these were new to me. Carve out a few minutes to dig through this page. Incredible collection of powerful, moving images.

Complete restaurant automation

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We’ve all seen sushi restaurants where they put the food on a conveyor belt, you pick off what you like. But this restaurant takes that process to the next level.

So much to see in this video. Special orders on some sort of tablet. Looks like an iPad power plug, but where’s the home button? Is that an iPad?

Got to love the game you can play if you deposit 5 dishes at the end. Motivation to eat more, motivation to clean after yourself.

On quitting background apps

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Kirk McElhearn argues that quitting an app might not speed up your iOS device, but it might make a difference to your battery life.

There is definitely room for improvement in the information Apple presents on background apps. As is, all you get is binary information, a scrolling list of apps that are running, in some form or another. At the very least, some kind of indicator that tells you that the background app is partaking in some battery sucking activity would be useful.

Puzzles

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Some daily brain tickling puzzles. Enjoy…

The Twitter story

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From doodle to IPO, from first CEO Jack Dorsey to Evan Williams and then former stand-up coming Dick Costolo, Twitter is a great story. Terrific read.

Reddit running in the red

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Reddit has 70 million page views per month. That’s a heady number. Someone somewhere is thinking of ways to turn this into big money.

I can’t help but wonder if Reddit will turn the corner and become a revenue pursuing entity, or keep their sights on providing the service they provide so well. A classic moment in a company’s life. Wonder which way they will turn.

Machine learning and sentence sentiment

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Siri does a lot. But most of what Siri picks up follows some well defined rules.

“Siri, remind me to pick up some milk on the way home.”

There are primary and secondary verbs, as well as words that represent objects and locations. But this type of analysis is the tip of the iceberg in terms of natural language understanding.

A team at Stanford is working on the problem of neural analysis of sentiment.

During the summer the scientists started from a dataset of roughly 12,000 movie review sentences. They split these sentences into phrases, using automated techniques to “parse” groups of words into grammatical units of meaning. The result was 214,000 phrases and sentences. Each of these was read by three humans, who evaluated these expressions for intensity of like or dislike.

Computer scientists call this labeling the data.

Using the Stanford team’s NaSent algorithm, the machine “studied” this labeled data the way a student might study a grammar text.

Or, to be more accurate, the Deep Learning system assigned each labeled expression a set of mathematical attributes. Computer scientists call these numerical descriptions “feature representations.” They are roughly analogous to the concepts and definitions we understand as human beings.

This kind of analysis will move the ball forward, help make natural language systems like Siri much more sophisticated. Fascinating stuff.

Got an original iPhone new in a box? Save it!

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There’s an emerging collectible market for new-in-a-box versions of the original iPhone 2g. I wonder where those units are coming from. Who buys an iPhone and doesn’t immediately use it? Visionaries, that’s who!

Apple Campus 2 approval press conference

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The mayor of Cupertino and Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer spoke glowingly about the new campus. Amazing to me that Apple got this done with so little friction. The press conference really made 3 things clear. Apple loves Cupertino, Cupertino loves Apple, and everyone involved reveres Steve Jobs.

95 percent of custom apps developed by businesses are written for Apple devices

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The headline says it all. Businesses are investing in the Apple ecosystem, building far more custom apps for iOS than Android.

As a developer, I think no small part of this trend is due to the ease of developing for iOS as compared to Android, as well as the lack of fragmentation device-wise.

Nanigans reports Facebook ads generate significantly more profit on iOS than Android

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Nanigans is an ad engine used by companies such as eBay, Zynga, and T-Mobile to advertise on Facebook. Though this article is based on a single report, this is a report worth paying attention to.

In their report, it was noted that, “For the first three quarters of 2013, RPC [revenue per click] on iOS averaged 6.1 times higher than Android and ROI [return on investment] on iOS averaged 17.9 times higher than Android.”

Why the huge difference? iPhone users represent a larger percentage of smartphone web traffic, and spend more money as a group.

Speaking to Businessweek about the mobile industry, Mr. Cook said, “There’s always a large junk part of the market. We’re not in the junk business … There’s a segment of the market that really wants a product that does a lot for them, [emphasis added] and I want to compete like crazy for those customers. I’m not going to lose sleep over that other market, because it’s just not who we are.”

This sounds like arrogance, but it’s really shrewd business. What Mr. Cook is telling us, in other words, is that Apple designs its products for people who aren’t buying bottom of the barrel smartphones. Apple implicitly designs its phones for people who can and do spend money.

NFL considers Netflix for Thursday Night Football package

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Interesting speculation that the NFL is considering bringing in a streaming partner such as Netflix or Google Play for a Thursday Night Football package. That would be a huge move, with lots of obstacles to overcome.

One point to note is that DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket agreement expires at the end of the 2014-2015 season, so now would be the time to reshuffle the deck. I would love to see an online component to the NFL. I wonder if anyone at Apple is pursuing a relationship with the NFL.

To me, this is another sign of the slow transition from the network television broadcasting model to the inevitable internet based model. Very interesting.