{"id":2187,"date":"2011-11-06T12:29:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-06T19:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2187"},"modified":"2011-11-06T12:29:00","modified_gmt":"2011-11-06T19:29:00","slug":"odd-lots-172","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2187","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=3822\" target=\"_blank\">ESR on Canonical&#8217;s Unity interface<\/a>. What He Said. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Interfaces, yeah. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/articles\/technology\/technology\/2011\/11\/iphone_touchscreens_tarnish_the_legacy_of_steve_jobs.single.html\" target=\"_blank\">Here&#8217;s a thoughtful take on touchscreen interfaces<\/a> that&#8217;s worth hearing. I have a (now ancient) iPod and consider the clickwheel brilliant. I didn&#8217;t know it was becoming extinct.<\/li>\n<li>Last night <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/erbo111\" target=\"_blank\">Eric Bowersox<\/a> showed me how he took a stock Nook Color and rebooted it from a MicroSD card into stock Android Gingerbread packaged by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cyanogenmod.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Cyanogen<\/a>. Eric downloaded the OS and installed it on a card himself (he&#8217;s a hardware guy <em>par excellance<\/em>), but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pcworld.com\/article\/241589\/the_easy_way_to_turn_your_nook_color_into_an_android_tablet.html\" target=\"_blank\">you can actually buy a MicroSD card with alternate Android distros like Cynamogen preinstalled<\/a>. Just pop the card into the corner pocket of your Nook Colo and reboot. These include <a href=\"http:\/\/n2acards.com\/home\" target=\"_blank\">N2A<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rootmynookcolor.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">RootMyNookColor<\/a>. I&#8217;d sure like a Xoom 2, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.csmonitor.com\/Innovation\/Horizons\/2011\/1103\/Motorola-Xoom-2-set-to-launch-sorta\" target=\"_blank\">when we&#8217;re going to see it in the US is unclear<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>If <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gadgets\/news\/2011\/11\/nook-tablet-rumor-round-up-dual-core-cpu-unfortunate-battery-life.ars\" target=\"_blank\">the upcoming dual-core Nook Tablet&#8217;s<\/a> screen is big enough to render technical PDFs well, I&#8217;d be sorely tempted&#8211;especially if Cyanogen and the like will boot it into stock Android. (I would like an 8&#8243; display, though.)<\/li>\n<li>Many have sent me the link to <a href=\"http:\/\/prog21.dadgum.com\/116.html\" target=\"_blank\">Things That Turbo Pascal 3.0 Is Smaller Than<\/a>. It&#8217;s actually a lot simpler than that: <em>Turbo Pascal 3.0 is smaller than just about any executable file that does anything useful on a modern OS<\/em>. How small? Under 40K. K, not M. You know, that letter we almost never use anymore.<\/li>\n<li>Steve Ballmer evidently didn&#8217;t blow Microsoft&#8217;s chances to compete in the tablet marketplace all by himself. Oh, no. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.itworld.com\/mobile-wireless\/219051\/ballmer-didnt-kill-tablets-microsoft-truth-much-worse\" target=\"_blank\">He Had Help<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/opensource.com\/life\/11\/11\/drm-graveyard-brief-history-digital-rights-management-music\" target=\"_blank\">Here&#8217;s a list of failed DRM schemes<\/a>. Every one of them helped turn paying users into pirates, and accomplished nothing useful beyond stroking content industry gigaegos. DRM stinks.<\/li>\n<li>To an extent, I agree with this article: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/articles\/life\/drink\/2011\/11\/why_you_should_be_drinking_cheap_wine.html\" target=\"_blank\">Cheap wine is not necessarily better than more expensive wine<\/a>. That said, the very cheapest wines are not as good as wines in the $6-$10 range. Gallo in particular has disappointed me.<\/li>\n<li>There are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/USB-Scent-Flower-Purple-Lavender\/dp\/B004FOHH2Q\/\" target=\"_blank\">USB air fresheners<\/a>. I&#8217;m not kidding. If DRM stinks, is this the answer?<\/li>\n<li>FUNEX? S,VFX. FUNEM? S,VFM. OK. LFMNX.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ESR on Canonical&#8217;s Unity interface. What He Said. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.) Interfaces, yeah. Here&#8217;s a thoughtful take on touchscreen interfaces that&#8217;s worth hearing. I have a (now ancient) iPod and consider the clickwheel brilliant. I didn&#8217;t know it was becoming extinct. Last night Eric Bowersox showed me how he took a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[15,43,90,14,13],"class_list":["post-2187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-hardware","tag-humor","tag-pascal","tag-software","tag-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}