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Wednesday, 20 March 2013
EU still unhappy with Apple over silence on two-year warranty | Ars Technica
The EU remains unhappy with Apple when it comes to informing customers about their right to a two-year warranty on their purchases, as reported by Dow Jones Business News. EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding spoke on Tuesday about Apple’s warranty practices, pointing out that the company hasn’t been forthcoming in making customers aware that they can get free hardware repairs past Apple’s standard one-year warranty period, even after facing fines and lawsuits throughout Europe.
It’s a pity, and it’s true: most people in Europe don’t know they are covered by a 2-year warranty by law. Apple could make this very clear it they wanted to, by displaying it prominently on the Apple Online Store as well as informing customers in Apple Retail Stores when they buy a product.
It’s even more of a shame given that Apple is great at honoring this 2-year warranty period, far better than most manufacturers. Precisely yesterday, I kid you not, I went to an Apple Retail Store because the sleep button in my 16-month-old iPhone 4S was stuck, and they replaced the phone with a new one immediately, no questions asked. In 15 minutes I was in and out of the store with a new phone, just like that.
Alas, great customer service is meaningless if customers don’t know their rights. And Apple has the responsibility here to inform its customers of that right. It’s that simple.
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Friday, 15 March 2013
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Thursday, 14 March 2013
Why Gwyneth Paltrow's no-carb diet for children makes perfect sense | guardian.co.uk
For half a century we have been told to avoid saturated fat, even though there is no good evidence that fat is inherently fattening. By diligently avoiding it, we have ended up replacing whole, unprocessed foods, such as red meat and butter, with starchy carbs of the highly refined and processed sort, often containing added sugar. Net result? We’re getting fatter.
Great article.
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Friday, 1 March 2013
Open and Shut | Daring Fireball
John Gruber utterly (and in typical fashion) destroys this article from Tim Wu for The New Yorker:
Even more telling, and more damning to Wu’s use of this as a case study, is that soon after Windows 95, Apple radically opened up the Mac OS, in a use of the word “open” that Wu expressly states is what he means by the term: they licensed the OS to other PC makers to produce Mac clones. This was the most open decision — in Wu’s sense of the word open — in the entire history of Apple Computer Inc.
And it nearly bankrupted the company.
The most embarrassing thing for Wu is that his article is actually very well written. It shows that he tried very hard to present a compelling argument. The problem, as John points out, is that his thesis is, well, bullshit:
The dogmatic assumption that openness correlates to success, evidence to the contrary be damned, overcomplicates the argument. “Wu’s theory is that open should generally do better than closed, unless the closed company is run by a genius.” Take the open/closed stuff out of that premise, and you’re left with something like this: Companies run by geniuses should generally do better than those which are not. That sounds about right.
If I were Wu, I’d very much like to be hiding under a big rock just about now.
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Tuesday, 26 February 2013
The Making of Pulp Fiction: Quentin Tarantino’s and the Cast’s Retelling | Vanity Fair
And this, my friends, is why I love movies. A fun teaser:
“In comes Sam with a burger in his hand and a drink in the other hand and stinking like fast food,” says Richard Gladstein. “Me and Quentin and Lawrence were sitting on the couch, and he walked in and just started sipping that shake and biting that burger and looking at all of us. I was scared shitless. I thought that this guy was going to shoot a gun right through my head. His eyes were popping out of his head. And he just stole the part.” Lawrence Bender adds, “He was the guy you see in the movie. He said, ‘Do you think you’re going to give this part to somebody else? I’m going to blow you motherfuckers away.’ ”
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Wednesday, 30 January 2013
Here’s my position: I’m not publishing a newspaper that you’ve purchased. You walked into my house. I’m OK with you hanging around, but 100% of the rules are made by me, and 100% compliance is absolutely mandatory. You get zero say in my content. There is no Letters Page for your complaint. You can’t ask to talk to my superior, because I’m at the top of the tree – and I’m going to agree with me.
This is a great article. Social networks are chock-full of people who love telling you what you should write (and specially NOT write) about. I like where Matt stands: My house, my rules. If you don’t like what you see, you’re free to leave. Just don’t bother telling me about it: I simply do not care.
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Friday, 16 November 2012
The (un)official motto of the GOP is “personal responsibility” – so with publicly available information, let the words, names, and faces of these racists be documented so that they may be responsible for them.
This is the other face of a deeply conflicted country. Stop racism NOW.
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Thursday, 8 November 2012
Wonderful article, and so true. I’ve always felt strongly about this: the items you buy should always be the very best you can get. Period.
An interesting side effect, which I hadn’t anticipated, was that I developed a blind trust in the things I used. I trusted my lamp to be bright enough to light up the wheel well of a truck when its tire went flat, and it was. I trusted my wallet to hold cash, boarding passes, and IDs without deforming or falling apart, and it did. I trusted that my towel would dry quickly, because it was designed for travel, and it did. I trusted the zippers on my backpack to stay closed as I hiked through the night, and they did. These might seem like stupid things to worry about, but when you have trust in everything you own, you don’t have to worry about anything. It’s liberating and an amazing feeling. My life was markedly better because of it.
I will always choose quality over quantity. That means owning less stuff, which by the way is a bonus. I’ll have fewer items, meaning less clutter in my life, and the items I do get to have will always be top-notch. That’s why I have my GORUCK rucks, my Bianchi bicycle, my iPhone, you name it. It’s also why I’ve spent the last three weeks (and counting) researching indoor bike trainers, as opposed to just buying a cheap one in my local bike shop. I want to make absolutely sure that the one I end up buying is really the best for me. Would a cheaper one get the job done? Probably. Would it have the same feel, robustness, and customer service? Would it see me through 10, 15 or even more winters and still perform flawlessly? I doubt it.
Sure, it takes time and effort, and it’s usually more expensive up front to buy things this way. But it’s worth it, no doubt about it. Great things are built to last and if you choose carefully, most of the stuff you own should easily outlast you. They are final choices. That’s the code I live by. It gives me peace of mind, knowing I can rely on my things when I really need to. Knowing that they’ll always have my back.
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Friday, 19 October 2012
Tweetbot for Mac is available on the Mac App Store | Tapbots
Tweetbot is a full-featured Twitter app for the Mac based on the award-winning apps for iPhone and iPad. With retina support, sync via iCloud, and multiple column views, Tweetbot is the premier Twitter app for the Mac.
Instant buy. It may seem a bit expensive for a Twitter client but trust me, it’s worth every penny. I like how Gruber puts it:
$20 for a Twitter client? Damn straight. Screw the race to the bottom. I’m happy to pay for quality work.
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Thursday, 18 October 2012
Meet Gary, and listen to his story: the chronicles of a cyclist living in the busy roads of LA. Great blog with some wonderful stories, such as this classic passage about cars from the Orson Welles film, “The Magnificent Ambersons” (1942):
“With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization.”
And just like that, it was an instant subscribe to my RSS feed.
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Thursday, 4 October 2012
Tomorrow is Global James Bond Day:
It has been announced that October 5th, 2012 will be Global James Bond Day, a day-long series of events for 007 fans around the world.
I know I’ve been silent for a while, but this is worth posting about. I like the way Mr. Bond himself plans to celebrate:
Tomorrow is World #JamesBondDay. I will be tweeting live slipping between the sheets and slipping a few Martini’s down my neck. Join me,,,
I’ll have mine shaken, not stirred. How about you?
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Friday, 17 August 2012
Interpreting some of Twitter’s API changes | Marco.org
Marco Arment, on the “Individual Tweet” section of Twitter’s Display Guidelines, which will become Requirements in the near future:
Embedding tweets in a blog post in any way other than their dynamic embed code is effectively prohibited.
And:
I’m pretty sure this means that I can’t just display a tweet as a link and blockquote when I want to quote it here.
I don’t think that’s accurate. Guidelines are one thing, they apply to everyone, but Requirements are a different matter entirely. This is the Internet. Twitter may force these requirements upon developers who need access to their API. That’s their leverage. But the rest of the Internet doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Twitter’s requirements, and why should they? Individual tweets have public URL’s just like every other webpage. How we decide to link to these pages on our personal sites is nobody’s business but our own.
I suppose the one thing they could do is block incoming links from sites that don’t follow the requirements, but I doubt they’ll ever dare to do such a thing. For all their tough talk, Twitter needs the Internet more than the Internet needs Twitter.
So, Twitter. Thanks for the guidelines, but I’ll pass. As long as tweets are accessible via public URL’s, I will link to them however I want. If that changes one day, I’m not sure I would see much of a point in using Twitter anymore. In any case, I assure you, you will not see any of that embedded crap on this website anytime soon.
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The Real History of the @reply on Twitter | Maniacal Rage
In the wake of Twitter’s latest “Fuck You” to third-party developers, Ben Brooks points out this nice article form Garrett Murray about the origin of the @reply syntax that has now become standard practice across many places on the Internet:
I have always half-jokingly taken credit for inventing the @reply on Twitter. Or at least for starting its wide-spread use on Twitter—I got the idea from seeing people do it over at Flickr, where it had been happening for more than a year. But until today I continued to claim I was the first person to do it on Twitter.
Funnily enough, as many have pointed out, the main reason Twitter has grown so dramatically in the last few years is its incredibly active and engaging user base. They made Twitter into what it is today by coming up with the most compelling features and pushing them so hard that they ended up being officially integrated into the service.
Twitter is a unique service in that it’s a network largely built and shaped by its users. It still is, despite the recent changes, but they need to be extremely careful moving forward or they risk alienating the very same users that made them relevant in the first place.
Call me crazy, but I’d argue that if Twitter wants to keep thriving, screwing with its developer community is not the smartest way to go about it.
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Thursday, 26 July 2012
Preparing for John Siracusa’s Review of Mountain Lion | Pat Dryburgh
You cannot possibly become any more awesome than this. EVER. Don’t even try.
Via Shawn Blanc, who also stars in this epic production.
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Wednesday, 25 July 2012
The Marco.org Review of John Siracusa’s Review of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion | Marco.org
This is not a quick read, so it’s a good opportunity to try a read-later method such as Safari’s Reading List, which Apple invented completely on their own.
Simply amazing. Kudos to Marco, this just made my week.
