The gaming of social media platforms
I've been thinking a lot about ethics and technology, and drawing some initial conclusions about what the future holds…
The Phone Stack
This is a fantastic concept: The Phone Stack, and I’m in 100% It works like this: as you arrive, each person places their phone facedown in the center of the table. … As the meal goes on, you’ll hear various texts and emails arriving… and you’ll do absolutely nothing. You’ll face temptation—maybe even a few involuntary reaches toward the middle of the table—but you’ll be bound by the single, all-important rule of the phone stack. Whoever picks up their phone is footing the bill.
Google URLs in Safari browser history
Over there is a snapshot of my Safari browser history. The highlights in blue are “webpages” I’ve opened from a page of Google search results. Which, for a browser history menu, doesn’t work at all! (For the record, that top google URL points to this, the next one down is this, and the next one is this.) How am I supposed to find a webpage in my history from that?! Why is the history even there if not to go back and find stuff?!
Shhhh…
I’ve spent the last two days building my new Mac Pro. I won’t bore you with the details, suffice to say it’s pretty snappy. Since I’ve paid for good quality parts like Hitachi 3TB HDs and OWC RAM, I thought I should really put my new machine’s innards through their paces with Diglloyd’s MemoryTester software: MemoryTester is a 64-bit application designed to “stress test” your Mac, particularly memory. Some highlights: Use MemoryTester on a new computer to “burn in” your computer and make sure your memory, CPU, motherboard and cooling systems are all functioning properly under load.
No Flash
Prelude I’ve recently reinstalled the OS and all software on my MacBook Air. This time I’m going to really try and not install Flash Player. Last time I did this, I eventually folded and installed it, even after trying ClickToFlash. It was simply easier to have Flash Player installed and not deal with clicking all over the place. Indeed, my new setup has me manually loading any flash pages into Google Chrome which is even less easy (Chrome has a built-in Flash Player of its own).
Google+ Hangout
Yesterday, some friends and I got together to give the new Google+’s video chat service Hangout a crack. It worked very very well. I needed to install a plugin for Safari before I could use the service, but it downloaded and installed quickly, and without having to restart the machine or the browser. I imagine this is built into Chrome. It was easy to start a ‘hangout’, easy to join one, easy to invite someone (who’s browser crashed and had to be invited back in.
iCloud, iOS 5, Lion, and the simple life
I pretty much watched the whole WWDC keynote by Apple the other day. I skipped most of the demos because I understood what they were about to show (and the full keynote went for almost two hours). Overall, it was pretty impressive. The vision is grand. As Gruber put it (about something else Apple-related): “Make no little plans“. Apple certainly have not made little plans for the way we’ll be working on our Macs, and no doubt, on all computing devices in the near future.
The boat’s a rockin’
Houston, we’re having a problem. Is that how they said it? Please bear with me while I sort out what’s going on with the site. Currently, it looks like the home page works, but the rest doesn’t. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to jump back aboard this rockin’ boat. Is that an iceberg? Update It was not an iceberg, but Kirk, who came to my rescue with, as he put it, a “very quick fix”. Champion. Seems to be up and running now.
Unknown waters
Sometime in the next few days or week, I’ll be changing my website hosting over from MediaTemple to DreamHost. So, the site might go down for a bit, or it might not. It could go down for a while. Who knows? I certainly don’t — changing over a full WordPress site is not my forte. Either is exporting and reinstalling MySQL databases, or editing wp-config.php files. The reason for the move is simply a financial one. I signed up for a special gift card for a year’s worth of MediaTemple hosting for about $100, but the current price for the standard hosting is $20 per month.