Magnus Edlund skriver bra om nördkulturen, och behoven att städa upp i leden. Nej, det är inte en metafor för utrensning, bara tillförsel av allmönt hyfs och basala människovärderingar.
Month: October 2014
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Ian Fleming on writing thrillers
Ian Fleming, in an essay on writing thrillers, published in 1963:
We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.
The whole thing is worth a read.
A bit of self-promotion follows. If you need more inspiration and helpful emails to reach your writing goals (you have goals, right?), do request a beta to BlankPage, an online writing app I’m a part of. Ping me on Twitter and I’ll fast-track your beta invite.
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Disney pulls Star Wars games, screws players
Disney has pulled two Star Wars games from the App Store and Google Play. Tiny Death Star and Star Wars: Assault Team are no more, no big loss if you ask me, but players of these titles are more than allowed to throw feces at the company and its decision. These titles are monetized from in-app purchases, and Disney pulling them like this makes them all but unplayable in the long run. Players who’ve invested money in gameplay are being screwed over.
This isn’t the first time such things happen, nor will it be the last. Always online, freemium based titles are available at the mercy of the publisher, which is a good a reason as ever to be wary of those types of games. In the long run, this is a problem for the App Store’s reliability.
Oh, and you should probably not trust Disney with your in-app purchases anymore. Assholes.
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Pokémon TCG hits the App Store
There’s been Pokémon apps released on the App Store before, but the recent release of Pokémon TCG, a trading card game with a lot in common with the likes of Magic: The Gathering, is probably the first who’ll actually get some fair usage. The app is free, but you’ll have to buy a bunch of cards if you want to excel in this game. Obviously.
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Century old Sherlock Holmes movie found
This is amazing. A silent movie that’s almost a century old, from 1916, featuring William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes, has been found and restored.
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The importance of Dropbox
I’ve been a paying Dropbox user since forever, and I don’t intend to stop, despite some pretty serious competition. Assuming Dropbox won’t go all evil on us, it’s a resource I want to use. I’m trusting it with the bulk of my data right now, and I have for years.
That said, I trust Apple more than I trust Dropbox. Apple entering the cloud game with iCloud Drive is great news, and my initial reaction to the announcement was, literally, ABOUT FUCKING TIME!!! That still stands, but I think Dropbox is more important than ever. The recent iCloud outages notwithstanding, I’m just not sure if Apple is ready for this. Data is important, and while an online sync and storage service isn’t a backup (seriously, backup your stuff elsewhere), the nuisance of losing data because of weird things happening is bad enough. And while I’ve yet to lose data from iCloud in any way, I have had some pretty poor syncing experiences. Granted, most of those are in third-party apps and the developers might be to blame, but still. That rarely happens with Dropbox, and when shit hits the fan, Dropbox has its versioning safety net, which I’ve been forced to use on a few occassions.
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GifBook prints GIF books
GifBook is a startup that lets you print GIFs in flipbooks, $30 for a 50 page book. Fun idea, it’ll no doubt get some press, but whether it’s a viable product or not obviously remains to be seen. GifBook is made by levels.io, who’s doing 12 startups in 12 months as an experiment.
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Beware the USB
The BadUSB hack is out, released into the wild by researchers Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson. This means that malicious types can make trouble for you just by accessing your USB ports. There is no fix for this at the moment, the problem is in the USB firmware and that’s not something that gets patched easily.
Why release something like this, especially when the original BadUSB creator Karsten Nohl chose not to? From Wired:
“The belief we have is that all of this should be public. It shouldn’t be held back. So we’re releasing everything we’ve got,” Caudill told the Derbycon audience on Friday. “This was largely inspired by the fact that [SR Labs] didn’t release their material. If you’re going to prove that there’s a flaw, you need to release the material so people can defend against it.”
The reasoning is that known exploits gets fixed faster, which is true, but with the USB hack it’s not quite a simple as releasing a system update. On the flip-side, knowing that this USB security flaw exists and is widely available will make it possible to take to proper measures to protect sensitive data from malicious people. And yes, that includes government agencies.
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Pioneer gets vergeballed
The Verge’s saying that Pioneer is ready to deliver Apple CarPlay to its NEX series of dashboard receivers. They launched something new too, AppRadio 4.
Want to know more? Well, you’re shit out of luck since Pioneer’s site’s down, most likely because of the traffic from The Verge. In other words, they got fireballed, err, vergeballed… No, let’s not delve into that trail of thought any deeper. But yay, CarPlay, right?!
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One night a week
Perry Chen writing about Dollar A Day.
It took us — a small core team working one night a week (Monday night!) — about a year to get here. David and Cassie are now staff, overseeing the nonprofit selection process, community support, and more. As Board members, Zack Sears, Tieg Zaharia, Ben Stone and I are contributing about 5–10 hours a week, sometimes more (like this launch week!), doing design, development, product, copy, and whatever else is needed.
A good example on how you can launch something without a ton of cash.
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It's not about the payment, it's about the shopping
Jason Snell replying to Tim O’Reilly’s essay on payment providers, and O’Reilly’s notion that Uber’s model is truly disruptive while Apple Pay is basically the same old wallet opening action:
To summon an Uber, O’Reilly needs to take his phone out of his pocket, launch the Uber app, and tap a few times. If those steps sound familiar, it’s because they’re not that different from how one would buy some groceries at Whole Foods using Apple Pay. The phone comes out at the start of the process, rather than the end, but it still comes out.
I agree with Jason. While the Uber experience feels new and like something from the future, it really is no different than beeping something at the teller by the exit. O’Reilly’s mixing up the payment experience with the shopping experience.
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Ebola 101
Sure, Vox is trying to get pageviews on American fear of ebola, originating from rumors of patients within US borders, but their coverage is a pretty good overview if you’re not familiar with the disease.
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One dollar every day
I really hope that this isn’t a scam.Legit not for profit, fortunately.Dollar A Day is a simple new way to discover and support amazing nonprofits. We feature one great organization every day, everyone automatically donates $1.
311 signed up users in six hours is pretty good. Check it out.
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Tech Troopers launched in beta
Odd Alice, my agency, is part of a startup called Tech Troopers, which just launched in beta. Take a look and let me know what you think. I’m sure there’ll be more about this here in the future, but that’ll have to wait until we’re out of champagne.
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Tech Troopers smyger ut
Tech Troopers, en startup Odd Alice är en del av, har nu smugit ut i beta. Ta en titt.