Chuck Norris 'Facts'
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This site is absolutely hilarious (or so I thought): Chuck Norris Facts
New Yahoo Go = So What?
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I read several announcements today about the new Yahoo Go service. After searching endlessly for an actual URL that linked to the offering, I finally found one. I'm sure I won't be the first or last to say that the offering should have been called 'Yahoo No Go'. The computer portion of it is not currently available and will be PC only, the 'TV' portion of it is also a PC app (and also not available). Ah, the mobile portion is available for Nokia series 60 phones — I'm in luck, I have a Nokia 6620 that fits the bill.
I download the ~1.7MB app and install in on my 6620 with great interest after having seen the screen shots and read the hyperbole from the CES announcement. The ygo.sis file expands to take nearly 4MB of phone and memory card space, then goes on to download another app for connections. After the initialization, I try out the apps. One by one, I grew less and less impressed. Yahoo Go, it turns out, is just 4MB of bloat that does nothing more than start the WAP browser on the phone (which wants you to login to Yahoo again!) to display the services that are already available to you through the Yahoo mobile site. Accessing the Yahoo mobile site directly using the Opera series 60 browser provides a much better user experience that this. What a total crock. Hell, Cingular's J2ME IM application kicks the crap out of this thing (even as a single tasker). Google's J2ME Maps implementation makes Yahoo's effort look like the brown stuff in the bottom of a college dorm fridge.
I then went about removing this craplet from my phone, but, guess, what? As part of the removal process, it wants to 'phone home' to Yahoo and waste more bandwidth before it will remove itself (shades of Microsoft). It's no wonder that Yahoo recommends that you allow the app to connect whenever it wants to (versus letting you know that it want to make a connection). I finally had to go into the Nokia AppManager and delete the various pieces of it manually.
Based on this experience, Yawnhoo needs to try harder and put out something useful (other than hype).
High Tech Road Reflectors
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Mavromatic has an article about a company that has created road reflectors that are capable of measuring a vehicles speed and using a built in camera, capture the license plate number (and presumably issue you a ticket).
I just wonder how well these things would do in a climate that regularly requires snow removal (and potentially inadvertent camera/detector removal).
Macworld Expo Speculation
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Not surprisingly, ThinkSecret has some interesting speculation regarding what Apple might announce at Macworld Expo next week. Seems that they believe that there will be a 'media-savvy' Mac mini and a content distribution system.
In an effort to appease media companies wary of the security of digital rights management technology, Apple's new technology will deliver content such that it never actually resides on the user's hard drive. Content purchased will be automatically made available on a user's iDisk, which Front Row 2.0 will tap into. When the user wishes to play the content, robust caching technology — for which Apple previously received a patent — will serve it to the user's computer as fast as their Internet connection can handle. The system will also likely support downloading the video content to supported iPods but at no time will it ever actually be stored on a computer's hard drive.
Some of this squares with Apple bumping up the .Mac iDisk bandwidth cap to 1 terabyte per month (then removing that notation from the .Mac status screen). There was also the recent announcement of a podcasting server being made available in the Education market.
One thing is certain, the hype, rumor and speculation will only continue to heat up regarding the Macworld Expo announcements.
technorati tags: apple, mac, macworld, dotmac, podcasting
Guy Kawasaki Blog
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Guy Kawasaki has a blog now. 'What's a Guy Kawasaki?' you ask — well, just read the blog to find out.
I have enjoyed Guy's books in the past with Rules for Revolutionaries, Selling the Dream and The Macintosh Way being three of my favorites. The blog promises to be just as rewarding — I found the Mantras versus Missions post to be spot on.
Evil Lottery Practical Joke
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Some 'friends' of this guy thought it would be fun to record on Tivo the previous days winning lottery draw, then buy a ticket with the winning numbers and show him the recorded draw as the current winning one. Needless to say he gets more than a little excited (quite a bit of profanity used).
ReminderFeed
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If you spend entirely too much time (how could that be?) keeping up with things in your feedreader of choice, you might find the services of reminderfeed to be valuable. Basically, you set a date, time and description, then use the subscribe buttons to have your feed-based reminder delivered to you.
You could always use this in conjunction with alerts function at Yahoo to have this reminder delivered via SMS to you mobile phone. Perhaps that will be a option directly from reminderfeed in the future.
How To Tell The Difference...
Running In the Rain
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The BBC have an interesting article titled “Do you get less wet if you run in the rain?”. The article delves into the 'serious' mathematics and physics to consider in answering the question. I won't spoil the conclusion — read the article.
However, I did appreciate one of the post comments which reminded me of my Intelligence and Effectiveness rant from the other day:
Alternatively, ignore the maths and get an umbrella.
Adding The New Feed Icons
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Microsoft has agreed to use the feed icon found in Mozilla (aka more MS Innovation). Here are the 'new' feed icons. This post really doesn't serve any other purpose that to allow me to upload the icons so that now I can link to them in blogger.
If you prefer your feed icons all pixel twiddled in a thousand different ways (and available in EPS, SVG, PSD, PDF, PNG, JPG, and GIF formats), then FeedIcons is the place for you.