Using a Laptop as a Personal Heater
Feeling cold and lazy?
Try firing up a browser tab or two with a heavy Flash application. That will get your laptop good and hot, then just hold it against yourself.* Now you don’t have to stand up to adjust the heat or grab a blanket!
My 2011 MacBook Air runs a little too efficiently for this trick. Kind of makes me miss my first gen Air… That old bastard was a furnace. It didn’t run well, but damn it, it was great on cold Winter nights.
*Don’t scorch yourself. You’ve been warned. I accept no responsibility for the stupidity of other’s.
Support Rock Vibe on Kickstarter!
Rock Vibe is basically Rock Band for the blind. A player attaches peripherals to her/his arms, and the devices vibrate when the player needs to strike a corresponding note. It’s a brilliant way to make a modern video game playable for the visually impaired.
The creators of Rock Vibe need money to get this project off the ground, as building hardware isn’t exactly a cheap endeavor. So far they’ve raised about $15,000 on Kickstarter (an incredibly cool crowd-funding site, if you haven’t seen it). Unfortunately they have not yet reached their goal of $32,000, and they only have three days left.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that one of the creators of Rock Vibe is a woman named Rupinder Dhillon who is the sister of a good friend. That doesn’t take away from how cool her project is. Hardware/ software combinations like Rock Vibe will help blind gamers now, but I have no doubt that their concept has the potential to heighten the gaming experiences of sighted gamers in the future.
The Rules of Mobile App Design (Presentation Slides)
Last week I had the honor of presenting to the NJ Mobile Meetup group. NJ Mobile is a collection of about 300 mobile technology enthusiasts that I co-organize. While I’ve been one of the groups organizers for quite some time, this was the first time that I actually spoke at an event. Much to my delight the presentation, which was partially based on my blog post The Rules of Mobile App Design, was very well-received.
My goal was to record the presentation and slides and post a video, but I’ve been experiences some technical difficulties of the crashing variety whenever I try to record my screen and voice at the same time. So here are the slides, and I hope to add the full video presentation soon:
Rules_of_Mobile_App_Design (PDF)
Mac OS X Lion Tip: Adding & Removing Spaces
In OS X, Spaces allows you to have multiple desktops running on the same machine.
For example, I like to have one desktop running a browser and my Twitter app, another running a word processor, and a third that has my to do list app, sometimes another depending on what I’m working on. They keep me focused.
In OS X Snow Leopard, setting up spaces was easy and obvious. There was a section in System Preferences called “Spaces.” It couldn’t get more clear.
OS X Lion is another story.
The controls for Spaces in Lion are actually very intuitive if you know where to look… But if you don’t know, it is very difficult to find. I put together a very brief screencast demonstrating how to add & remove spaces in Lion.
A very special thanks to Jason Lisnak for helping me figure out both how to add spaces, and that QuickTime allows for screencasting.
Know Your Digital Rights
Police are becoming digitally bold, and asking to search the phones of citizens during traffic stops. As with anything, it’s important to know your rights. The EFF put together a one page card detailing the rights of American citizens as they pertain to your digital devices.
EFF – Tips for Talking to the Police
OSX Lion – “Natural Scroll” is Anything but Natural
Dear Apple,
“Natural Scrolling?” That’s really what you’re calling this shit? Natural scrolling?
Natural scrolling is about as natural as a deep-fried twinkie on a styrofoam plate, and fuck you for even trying to spin this stupidity.
Natural scrolling should be called “inverted scrolling” on a laptop or desktop. Sure it may be natural on a touchscreen to pull content in the opposite direction, but in case you didn’t notice, none of the devices that run Lion have touchscreens (at the moment).
Defaulting such an obnoxious and useless feature really diminishes the magic of using my new MacBook Air. Sure it’s easy to turn off, but why bother hassling me with it at all.
Cordially,
David
PS – The new MacBook Air is quite nice.
Stuxnet: A Weaponized Computer Virus
Stuxnet is a super-virus that debilitated Iranian nuclear enrichment by destroying their centrifuges. The virus accomplished this by making the centrifuges spin out of control while telling the monitoring systems that everything was functioning properly. It was genius, and it worked, but that’s just the middle of the story.
The beginning is a total mystery. We have no clue who actually made the Stuxnet. The US, Israel, China, Russia, a company, some other organization, or some combination of forces are all plausible as many groups have an interest in keeping Iran nuke-free.
The end of the story is unwritten. What will become of Stuxnet is anyone’s guess.
This short video by Patrick Clair brilliantly breaks down the most relevant information about the Stuxnet story.
Our media organizations and governments are freaking-out about hacktivists, leaked passwords, and web-vandalism, but I promise you that Stuxnet is far more interesting and dangerous.
Stuxnet accomplished a good thing in delaying Iranian nuclear enrichment, but I suspect that the longterm ramifications will be much more grey.
