Category: Random Acts of Technology (Page 3 of 3)

Best Apple links of the day

January 18, 2013 / Jared Cash

I came across a decent number of good articles today about Apple, all of which are worth a read, even if you don’t like Apple. Why? Because if you’re the type of person that expends any amount of energy repeating the misinformation that passes for journalism these days, it’s important to know when you’ve been had.

So, in no particular order, the best reads of the day are:

‘Every empire crumbles’ from John Moltz’s Very Nice Website

Swallowed whole from The Macalope over at Macworld

How Apple Is Destroying Android From The Inside Out (and why it’s difficult to see) from Kate MacKenzie over at Mac360

Of Myths and Market Share from Michael J. Tomlin’s obviouslogicÂ (my personal favorite of the day)

Apple Investors ‘Dissatisfied’ With Life? from CNBC (this is a video, not an article), courtesy of MacDailyNews, which has transcribed key paragraphs from the video (if you prefer to read)

I was directed to most of the articles above byÂ Daring Fireball and The Loop. I highly recommend reading both sites daily.

RetroforceGO! Podcast Archive

January 18, 2013 / Jared Cash

RetroforceGO! was a podcast from Destructoid that talked about classic video games. It ran for several years and to date remains my favorite podcast of all time. Unfortunately, the Destructoid website didn’t exactly do a very complete job of keeping the episodes online and available. Fortunately, I saved every episode on my computer long after I had listened to them.

I’m not the first person to put up an archive of the show, but I did put the entire contents online a couple years ago so that I could publish a link to them on here for others to download, in case they were looking for a specific episode or just wanted to listen to the podcast again or for the first time. I had always meant to set them up with an RSS feed for those that wanted to “re-subscribe” to it and get it into their preferred podcast player, but I never got around to it. So anyway, here they are in all their downloadable glory. When I have free time, I’ll try to come back in here and link to each individual episode, but for now I’m just going to present you with a link to the folder where they’re contained. If you want a more detailed download option, then I suggest you check out Wasted Seconds’ own archive of the podcast. They’ve also got links to a torrent to grab all of them at once.

RetroforceGO! podcast archive

Qualcomm’s CES keynote: The perfect shitstorm of crazy

January 9, 2013 / Jared Cash

Qualcomm’s insane CES 2013 keynote in pictures and tweets

Honestly, it’s like when Steve Jobs died, necromancers from every tech company on the planet worked together to trap his soul on this plane and then tore it into pieces, passing them from company to company, binding them with dark magicks in a vain attempt to capture the Apple keynote for themselves. And this abomination is what happens when more than one Jobsoul is brought into proximity with each other. The warping of reality can’t sustain the dark energies as the strain to coerce a fractured genius into bestowing its greatness on something unworthy is simply flung outward into reality around it.

If you want to witness the entirety of the most frakked up thing to ever come out of CES (or if you just want to see what it looks like when a hellspawn is birthed upon an unsuspecting populace), you can watch the whole thing here.

UPDATE: After having watched the first 30 minutes of the video, I’ve come away with a few realizations. 1) Steve Ballmer is every bit as crazy as before and he looks like a reptile. Specifically, a raptor of some sort that has grown too old and fat to hunt anymore. 2) The CEO of Qualcomm, Paul Jacobs, looks like he just ate my family, thinks it’s funny, and is failing big time to hide it from me.

Android Malware: Still a thing

August 9, 2012 / Jared Cash

So yesterday, I was reading an absolutely ridiculous article over at BusinessInsider wherein the author (Kevin Smith, but not that Kevin Smith) detailed his decision to switch to Android if the next iPhone didn’t have specific features. Never mind the fact that at this point, it’s too late for Apple to even consider his features and that he’s not important enough to warrant Apple seeking his approval. Hilariously,Â he referred to it as the iPhone 5, even though there’s no precedent to indicate Apple will even call it that. Maybe he’ll stay in limbo forever waiting for a phone to be released that doesn’t exist.

Anyway, while perusing the comments on the article, I came across this doozy from oneÂ @Julie2aT:

Please oh please tell me of one virus that Android has? Oh, you’re talking about malware for installing applications from un-trusted sources? Only fools would ever download applications from third parties (I’m talking outside of Play Store, Amazon, SliderME)… the nerve of some people.

I tried to respond in the comments, but BusinessInsider’s website appears to be broken (so, it’s notÂ just their authors) and comments would never post from any browser on my Mac or even Internet Explorer on a PC. So, rather than give up, I’ve decided to post my reply here for your entertainment (and hopefully, so @Julie2aT can see it).

——-

Actually, malware has been a problem with Google’s own marketplace for some time:

From March 2, 2011: Android Market Apps Hit With Malware
(more info on this one: The Mother Of All Android Malware Has Arrived: Stolen Apps Released To The Market That Root Your Phone, Steal Your Data, And Open Backdoor)

“Sure, but Google has already resolved that,” you say. “That was over a year ago. It’s not like it’s happened since.”

My mistake. I must have misunderstood this article several months later.

From June 13, 2011: Google pulls more malware from Android Market

“Well, yeah, but that’s still over a year ago,” you retort. “What about something from THIS year?”

Okay. From January 16, 2012: Fake Angry Birds Game spreading Malware from Android Market

“Ugh. Whatever. Google has obviously fixed the problem, if the last one you’ve got is from more than half-a-year ago.”

Sure. You’re probably right. Oh, waitâ€¦

From August 6, 2012: More Android malware sprouting up amidst 2012 Olympics

“Oh, please. That was a whole three days ago. Surelyâ€¦”

I rest my case.

Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, and you

June 11, 2012 / Jared Cash

So I managed to get hold of a Motorola Droid 2 Global EXTRA SUPER COWBOY FUN TIMES Edition (as I’m to understand it is called in Japan) to tool around with. I spent the last four days or do trying to put Ice Cream Sandwich on it, which requires it to be rooted and poked and prodded and violated. That was actually the fun part.

Rooting the device was easy, once I found instructions that actually worked. But, the instructions for installing Cyanogen Mod 9 (which is Ice Cream Sandwich) didn’t work at all and I got pretty frustrated. Eventually, I discovered more instructions and managed to get it installed.

So, after spending four days with Android 2.2 (Froyo? Really?) and 2.3 (Gingerbread at least sounds better) which were very similar, despite color palettes that were in direct opposition to one another, I get into Ice Cream Sandwich and immediately run into an issue that is indicative of Android’s problem as a whole.

For 2.2 and 2.3, when connecting to a wi-fi network, the “Connect” button is on the left and the “Cancel” button is on the right (which, is the opposite of Macs and iPhones and unintuitive to begin with). In ICS, they’ve decided to join the rest of the world and place the “Connect” button on the right. Of course, this makes sense everywhere else, but in four days I’ve been “trained” by the OS to look for the confirmation button on the left. So now, I click on the wrong button when trying to doâ€¦ well, everything.

Anyway, it was a small thing, but I felt it was a prime example of Android’s usability issues. It may seem like Android has finally figured out the smart way to do things and they’re simply correcting a previous mistake. And that would be a reason for praise, if it weren’t for the fact that ICS is only installed on 7.1 percent of Android devices six months after it has launched.

Oh, and (of course) the color palette has changed yet again.

UPDATE: I hadn’t listened to any of the ringtones on the device before updating to ICS, so I don’t know if it’s Google’s, Motorola’s, or Cyanogen’s fault, but these ringtones are awful. Thank the Maker I’m not using this as an actual phone.

GrandCentral now Google Voice: i.e. AWESOME

March 12, 2009 / Jared Cash

No, really. Google Voice is awesome. At least, if you like the concept of GrandCentral, which I did and is why I signed up for it. But even better is that Google finally made some changes to it and they rock.

Let me start from the beginning. GrandCentral is a website that lets you choose a phone number to give to friends, family, coworkers, evil overlords, what-have-you. When those people call said number, it rings all the phones you own: your house phone, work phone, cell phone, even the pay phone outside your house if you so choose. If you answer from any of the phones you’ve listed, the call is routed to that specific phone. But, it goes one step further. If you don’t WANT to be bothered, you can listen in on voicemails to try and cut down on your telemarketing pain, block specific phone numbers and even schedule all UNKNOWN numbers to be blocked straight up. Then, voice messages are stored on the server for you to peruse at your convenience and even call back by clicking the call button and selecting which of your phones you’d like the call to be directed to, effectively masking your actual number inside of the GrandCentral number.

Enter Google, whom upon seeing this awesome service said, “WANT!” and snatched it up. They sat on it for a while, not making any changes until just recently when they announced Google Voice. The basic tenets of the service remain unchanged, however there are some spiffy new features. First and foremost is the option to have your voice messages transcribed and then e-mailed to you so you never have to log into the website to check your messages. This feature alone made me drool over the service. But I was made even happier when I discovered that I can log into the site (from my desktop or my iPhone) and send and receive SMS messages from my Google Voice number. And they are all archived online.

Needless to say, I’d love to see an iPhone app that combines all of these features into one place to use wherever I am. And if background notification ever comes to the iPhone, I can effectively rid myself of paid text messages. Thank you, Google. Now merge with Apple so that all of these features can become native to the iPhone. I’ll die happy.