Tag: Technology Posts

I’ve been using Leopard now for around 3 months, and to be honest, I’m really not impressed at all. It’s an extremely buggy OS with a bunch of mediocre improvements, many of which I haven’t really found a use for. Spaces? I actually thought these would be cool, but I just haven’t been able to find a good use for them. In fact, I find myself accidentally switching between spaces from time to time thanks to how heavily I rely on the control and option keys for other things. Stacks is another completely useless feature, mainly because you can’t really see enough icons. Plus, it’s generally a stupid idea to present multiple conflicting UI designs (the box in stacks and the curvy expandy thing) for the same feature, especially if you switch between them from time to time. I am currently on the 10.5.1 update of Leopard, which is basically […]

Apple just announced an ultra-think notebook computer called the Air. Photo by Gnackgnackgranck on Flickr Looks pretty cool, but it doesn’t have a DVD drive, and is sealed shut like a big iPod. Based on my experiences with my Macbook Pro and Leopard, I think I’m definitely pulling myself out of the “early-adopter” crowd with Apple and waiting a while this round to see what happens.

I have, for the last few years, had an idea about something I’ve wanted to do involving technology. I was talking to Boris about this a while ago, and I’m pretty certain this actually has a real name and has been done many times before in various cities. But for now, I’m just going to describe what would happen, and we’ll decide an official name later (until of course Boris wakes up in whatever country he is in and chimes in). The idea is that over the course of one full weekend (that is, starting Friday at 7pm until Sunday at midnight) you get a team of people together to develop a product/service/technology completely from scratch. In my head I am thinking that it would be basically a weekend-long sleepover involving donated beer, good people, music, and tons of know how on various aspects of the web world and technology. […]

About four years ago, the push for new television technologies first emerged, supported primarily by advances in LCD and plasma technology. Many of these new televisions supported high definition (HD) content, at least in the traditional 720p variety. While Europe is ahead of North America in this regard, we have slowly been migrating most of our North American television services to digital, and in most cases, HD. I believe the US has a target date of around 2013 to be completely digital. HD content looks, quite simply, amazing. Which is why Hollywood has spent the last few years humming and hawing over what to do about HD content distribution. The problem of course, in their eyes, is that HD content piracy has the potential to undermine further industry revenue sources. The solution, at least in Hollywood’s eyes, is multifaceted, involving both software and hardware anti-piracy mechanisms. Most people making television […]

Lately I’ve been noticing a ton of problems over in Facebook land. First of all, alot of the searches seem to return inconsistent results. Sometimes certain friends will appear, and another times they don’t. It seems to be entirely random, but it’s kind of a pain in the ass once you cross over a 100 friends or more. Local gastown-walking-guru Rod Bruno has also had his account randomly deleted several times now, with no apparent explanation. Also, from time to time when I try to login I get the “your user account is down for maintenance” message, and then told to try again later. Maybe this is happening to the users above when they temporarily do not show up in searches. I’m surprised they don’t seem to schedule these things late at night so as not to disrupt usage. In terms of the developer APIs, Facebook is changing many of […]

In 1977, the same year I was born, NASA launched the Voyager 1 spacecraft with a mission to explore our solar system. It is still operational, and is located some 9.3 billion miles from the sun. At that distance, light (including radio waves) takes nearly 14 hours to reach our planet. By comparison, light from the sun takes about 8 minutes to get to earth. 17 years later, as voyager passed beyond the edge of our solar system, engineers at NASA turned the Voyager 1 spacecraft around, pointed it towards earth, and took a few shots of our planet. This is one of them. We’re that little speck on the right. Pretty humbling. In that same year, Dr. Carl Sagan, an astronomer, gave a talk where he first presented this rare photo of Earth. Here’s what he said. We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you […]

Last night while watching TV with my dad, I decided to slowly hack together the start of a new game for Facebook. Inspired recently by The Oregon Trail on there, I thought I’d put another good game from my youth up, namely Lemonade. There’s already one on Facebook that mimics the old version (although, it’s basically a wrapper for a website that already has it), but I have some ideas that will sort of bring the game into the modern age, including a mobile component. To be honest, the mathematics behind it all has proven rather interesting. I want the game to be challenging, without easy loopholes to win, and to that end I’ve spent a lot of time mulling over the math in my head. For example, having a weather forecast is fairly useless unless it mimics the approximate success rates of forecasts that we normally have. To that […]

Check them out. I have to grab a cab so can’t write now.

Friday afternoon I logged into my myspace account after a long absence and, after debating about it for about 3 seconds, deleted my account entirely. It’s not like it caused me any headache or anything, but I just don’t use it really at all anymore and don’t have time to maintain that and my facebook account. So, after searching around for a while, I managed to find the “Delete Account” button and forever put it into the trash. Anyone else actually still use myspace, or has everyone migrated to Facebook now? Also, a few people have been tracking my new blog entries with twitter – if you have twitter, you can add me by somehow visiting here -> http://twitter.com/duanestorey

JetBlue is about to launch a beta Airbus 320 plane that features in flight wireless. Pretty cool. Check it out here. In a welcome first for domestic airlines, JetBlue will be rolling out free in-flight Yahoo IM and email services to passengers packing WiFi-equipped devices, starting aboard its new “BetaBlue” Airbus A320. Once this test-bed passenger jet reaches 10,000 feet, an in-plane network with three in-ceiling access points is activated, allowing most any wireless gadget with a Flash-enabled browser to view specialized versions of either Yahoo Messenger or Mail through a universal landing page. What’s more, owners of certain BlackBerry handsets like the 8820 or Curve 8320 can keep feeding their addictions non-stop thanks to an agreement between JetBlue and RIM.