I don’t think this is my strongest ever entry to a PhotoFriday challenge, but I do think that this old typewriter fits the theme of “Minimalist.” I am mainly referring to the minimalism of the picture itself, the almost monochrome look and the simplicity of it all. But you could also consider that by using a typewriter rather than a word processor you’d be keeping things simple and minimalist.

• Why you should join the war on paying for hotel Wi-Fi – This has always bugged me, even when I’m not paying with my own money. Why should I pay the equivalent of a months home broadband for one evening if surfing?
• All Languages Have A Common Root? – “Atkinson said the world’s 6000 languages descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early southern African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago.”

This weeks PhotoFriday challenge is “Lines.” I have a lot of pictures that have lines in them but fairly few where it’s the most prominent feature. My first choice of image was of my old, broken MacBook hard-disk but then I realised that I had already used it for a PhotoFriday last year! So I switched to the above picture, taken in the Tokyo Forum.

When I initially thought about this weeks PhotoFriday theme, “Ride,” my mind first went to cycling. Only I couldn’t find an image that showed bikes in motion which seemed to defeat the point. So, instead, I went for this picture that I took while riding on the Tokyo subway. (It might be a bit of a stretch but I really like this picture!)

• Average App Store Review Times – Displays the average app review time by pattern-matching tweets. Clever. (Currently around seven days, apparently.)
• Osborne! – Nice article about the Osborne-1 and the man behind it.

For this weeks PhotoFriday, “Elaborate,” I wanted to show something with lots of tiny details. Not just a picture of something that has lots of small details, but an image that shows and makes it clear that the details that are visible are only the tip of the iceberg. There were a few that kind of worked, including pictures of the Tokyo Forum, dancing at this years Chinese New Year and some details on a building in New York, but I thought this image of the ceiling of the Natural History Museum in Vienna caught it better.

• ‘Useless’ Is A Loaded Word – “In almost any life situation where you need to get something out of another person, being a dick is never the right method to go about it. Using loaded words like ‘useless’ or ‘worthless’ is being a dick. We will listen to your feedback and thank you for it, but unless it is some urgent issue that will affect every user, it’s most likely getting shoved to the bottom of the pile in favor of doing things to make the friendly customers happy.”
• Don’t blame inflation for all the price rises – Summary: food and gadgets are cheaper, entertainment is considerably more expensive.
• We should stop running away from radiation – “A sea-change is needed in our attitude to radiation, starting with education and public information.”

I want to like ebooks, I really do.

I like that the Kindle is smaller than a real paperback but can store dozens, hundreds even, of novels. I like that you can lose the hardware device and just download the books again. I like that I can read the same book on my iPhone as well as my iPad. It doesn’t even bother me that there’s no physical product. I’m not going to re-read most of my books yet they continue to take up the limited space in my London flat.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Mother Nature.” I wanted to do something a little better than a pretty landscape or a beautiful landscape. Sure, they’re both by mother nature but I don’t think that’s all there is. I wanted to show the creation and the power and, to a certain extent, how little control we have over the whole process. Iceland is about as good as it gets for that kind of thing, with the volcanos and geysers. We didn’t see any volcanos when we were there — which would have fitted the theme even better — but this is an image at Geysir. It’s dark and miserable, even at 11.30, in December but it’s still spectacular.

Most developers of iOS applications have a love-hate relationship with the main interface with Apple.

No, let me re-phrase that.

Most developers of iOS applications hate iTunes Connect, the main impediment to a good relationship with Apple.

To be fair it has improved since it opened in mid-2008. One of those improvements has been the inclusion of crash reports. A crash report, in case you’re not a developer, is something that iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads write out when an application crashes. It includes all kinds of useful information, including some, but not all, of the internal state of the application in question. It’s very, very useful for diagnosing problems.