- Yummy Version 1.0.3 – New minor release of Yummy, my Delicious.com client for iPhone. Fix for something that took me two weeks to track down, an annoying edge condition I found when editing bookmarks under certain conditions and a problem that Apple rejected the original binary for.
- Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard – Sounds almost plausible…
- Travel time to major cities: A global map of Accessibility – Fascinating.
Tag: Travel
According to my dictionary, “Disorder,” this weeks PhotoFriday theme, means “the disruption of peaceful and law-abiding behaviour.” This image of central Hanoi in Vietnam shows locals on scooters blaring their horns (lack of peace) and zipping all over the road in a display that should be illegal even if it isn’t. There were certainly worse displays of disorder and chaos on Vietnamese roads but I value my life!
- Market Yourself An iParadigm – “The part I love the most is that the people making the ‘just market your app!’ comment have no real idea how much effective marketing costs. Oh sure, you can go far on viral and word-of-mouth marketing, but it all pales in comparison to even a small banner graphic in the App Store.” Making your application visible is hard.
- Matthew Alexander on Torture – Nice examples of why torture doesn’t work. Worth reading the linked articles.
- Robbery suspect left his address – “Chicago police have arrested a man who allegedly robbed a bank using a threatening note written on the back of his own pay cheque.” Brilliant.
- Reliving Cuba’s revolution – Interesting to see this on “film.” They wouldn’t let us take cameras up there when I visited in 2004. (Plenty of other pictures of Cuba on ZX81.org.uk though!)
- What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting – “Once one understands that a text message travels wirelessly as a stowaway within a control channel, one sees the carriers’ pricing plans in an entirely new light.” I worked on text messaging software back in the late nineties and, at least for GSM, is absolutely true.
- Internet sites could be given ‘cinema-style age ratings’, Culture Secretary says – “Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, [Andy Burnham, British Culture Secretary confirms].” The government still seems not to understand how the internet works. If implemented, this will basically result in a system that’s easy to circumvent and is paid for with higher ISP connection fees. We all lose.
- Happy Birthday Earthrise – “Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Isn’t that something…” Still very much awe-inspiring even forty years later.
- Fearless: Apple’s Macworld Expo exit is part of its DNA – “In Apple’s estimation, the best time to kill off a successful product or brand is ‘as soon as possible.’ Dropping a winner means creating a new winner to replace it, and that’s exactly what Apple has decided it must do to be successful: create great new products again and again.”
- If programming languages were religions… – Apparently I’m into Voodoo and Taoism…
This slightly understated image, taken around dusk, is one of my favourites from my trip to Egypt last year. At first glance it’s just a sunset taken over a “generic” city, but a more comprehensive look reveals the pyramids, meaning that it must be Cairo.
Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Black.” I’m entry number 226.
Photography is all about light, which makes this weeks PhotoFriday challenge rather challenging, “Black” being the absence of light. The best I’ve been able to do is this silhouette picture, taken in Oslo, Norway.
There’s a story about this image. I went to Norway shortly after buying my first SLR and, since I knew that I was going to be there for a while, decided to experiment with a few different kinds of film (this being Ilford XP2). I thought the contrast here worked well and was pretty pleased with the result.
It was all part of the November Plan. Head out of the country for a weekend for no apparent reason, with little research beforehand and no expectations. It’s a great way to travel, even if to say that I planned it that way is an exaggeration.
This year I went to Portugal’s capital city, Lisbon. After the grim summer and recent return to Greenwich Mean Time, I craved some sun and a little warmth. Sure, I wasn’t going to be wilting in the heat on the Atlantic coast but it was a good few degrees warmer than London, with sun forecast and much longer daylight hours. That I’d never made it to Portugal before was a bonus.
It all started ten thirteen years ago. In November 1998 I went with a friend to Amsterdam, and now every November since I have spent at least a few days out of the country.
For the record, those trips were:
- Amsterdam, The Netherlands (1998)
- Abu Dhabi, UAE (1999)
- Thailand (2000)
- Oslo, Norway (2001)
- Malta (2002)
- Charlotte, NC, USA (2003)
- Cuba (2004)
- Brussels, Belgium (2005)
- Lille, France (2006)
- Jordan and Egypt (2007)
- Lisbon, Portugal (2008)
- Vienna, Austria (2009)
- Amsterdam and Den Haag, The Netherlands (2010)
It never started as a challenge and you can’t deliberately start a tradition, but I’m keen to keep this one going for as long as I can. Even if it is a little silly.
After fretting about my level of fitness and my ability to do the cycling less than a week ago it’s odd that I am now feeling sad that today is the last on a bike. And there’s not even much in the way of difficult terrain. It’s 46km mainly on good cycle paths and a little on roads.
The plan is to cycle from Pirna, stop for lunch in Dresden and spend the night, the last in Germany before heading back to Prague, in Meißen, a town famed for, well, we’ll get to that soon enough.