November 6th, 2011:
- ESR on Canonical’s Unity interface. What He Said. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Interfaces, yeah. Here’s a thoughtful take on touchscreen interfaces that’s worth hearing. I have a (now ancient) iPod and consider the clickwheel brilliant. I didn’t know it was becoming extinct.
- Last night Eric Bowersox showed me how he took a stock Nook Color and rebooted it from a MicroSD card into stock Android Gingerbread packaged by Cyanogen. Eric downloaded the OS and installed it on a card himself (he’s a hardware guy par excellance), but you can actually buy a MicroSD card with alternate Android distros like Cynamogen preinstalled. Just pop the card into the corner pocket of your Nook Colo and reboot. These include N2A and RootMyNookColor. I’d sure like a Xoom 2, but when we’re going to see it in the US is unclear.
- If the upcoming dual-core Nook Tablet’s screen is big enough to render technical PDFs well, I’d be sorely tempted–especially if Cyanogen and the like will boot it into stock Android. (I would like an 8″ display, though.)
- Many have sent me the link to Things That Turbo Pascal 3.0 Is Smaller Than. It’s actually a lot simpler than that: Turbo Pascal 3.0 is smaller than just about any executable file that does anything useful on a modern OS. How small? Under 40K. K, not M. You know, that letter we almost never use anymore.
- Steve Ballmer evidently didn’t blow Microsoft’s chances to compete in the tablet marketplace all by himself. Oh, no. He Had Help.
- Here’s a list of failed DRM schemes. Every one of them helped turn paying users into pirates, and accomplished nothing useful beyond stroking content industry gigaegos. DRM stinks.
- To an extent, I agree with this article: Cheap wine is not necessarily better than more expensive wine. That said, the very cheapest wines are not as good as wines in the $6-$10 range. Gallo in particular has disappointed me.
- There are USB air fresheners. I’m not kidding. If DRM stinks, is this the answer?
- FUNEX? S,VFX. FUNEM? S,VFM. OK. LFMNX.