I recently uploaded a clip of my baby rolling over with some rocky background music on Facebook, and this copyright notice is what I get. The clip is less than a minute long and is only visible to friends. What is the world coming to? We can’t even share a private video clip with friends without it being scanned for copyright violations?
It’s time to shop around for a new social network.
Facebook Copyright Notice
I purchased an Apple Mini Displayport to VGA adapter as a Christmas present for my sister this year. Turns out, the adapter doesn’t work with her 2012 MacBook Pro, it causes the computer to “beach ball” or hang until it’s unplugged. I did some Googling and it seems this is a fairly common problem with the new MacBook Pros, and there is apparently no solution, it just seems to work or it doesn’t. Why doesn’t an Apple adapter work with an Apple notebook? Oh the wonderful world of proprietary hardware.
I recently needed something to drive a couple of in wall speakers, and I wanted to do it cheap. At first I spliced some wires and used my computer sub-woofer, that worked pretty well, but I didn’t like how it sounded. I guess the sub-woofer was doing it’s job, it was pumping out bass while sending bass-less audio to the speakers. The only problem was I don’t think it had enough juice to run the speakers, it normally runs tiny speakers, so it was a lot of bass with just a little music. And if I turn the bass down, it just sounded bad.
After a bit of searching I found the Lepai LP-2020A+ on Amazon. I wasn’t sure at first because it was so cheap (~$20), but I decided to go for it after reading some of the 500+ reviews. Many of the reviews say the construction is a bit cheap but it works and sounds surprising good. It’s a $20 amp, I’m not expecting anything high end here.
This little amp did not disappoint, it ran my speakers fine with normal sounding audio, and the 20w per channel output is more than enough. I’m no audiophile, so I can’t comment on the quality, but it’s definitely better than when I ran it with my sub-woofer. I guess not everything cheap and Made in China is junk, and this little mini amp proves it.
Lepai LP-2020A
Looks like whoever coined the term “cloud” for Internet storage and hosting should have named it “fort” or something. Apparently people think the cloud is affected by the weather. These folks must be worried about Isaac in more ways than one.
Personally, I wouldn’t trust the cloud with all my files. Sure, I store some files on Dropbox. But definitely not all my personal files. As anecdotal evidence, the cloud storage provider where I put my photos just changed it’s terms and they now charges per gigabyte to store the original photos, else everything will get scaled down. This is a paid service, mind you. I paid for this service so I can store my original photo files in the cloud for safe keeping. I guess now I’ll have to buy another external hard drive as a secondary backup.
Use the cloud, but don’t trust the cloud, that’s my recommendation.
Well, this definitely came out of no where. Google’s Marissa Mayer is going to Yahoo as their new chief executive. I guess the rumors of Ms. Mayer’s diminished role at Google after the reorganization is for real. As a career move, it’s not a particularly good one, Yahoo’s dead and there’s no fixing it now. At best the industry will see her trying her best but Yahoo is beyond resuscitation, at worst she’ll be seen as putting the final nail in Yahoo’s coffin. But I guess it doesn’t matter, after the Google IPO Ms. Mayer’s got more money than she can spend in 20 live times, so I guess she just want to try being the top dog for once. Let’s see how this plays out. Yahoo’s actually got some pretty good technology, it’s just been managed extremely poorly.
I’m a bit disappointed with the Macbook refresh. No retina displays for the whole line, just for their new high end model. On the other hand, I’m glad they didn’t change the whole line, because I still want a DVD drive. The new retina display model is DVD drive free, just like the Air. I was really hoping they keep the base Macbook Pro on Sandy Bridge but make it quad-core. Well, I guess dual-core Ivy Bridge w/ USB3 is good enough.
Apple officially announced iOS 6 at today’s WWDC 2012. There’s lots of fancy features and everyone is excited. Then they dropped the bomb, the original iPad will not be supported. They will support the iPhone 3GS, but not the original iPad. I’m pretty sure the original iPad specs are better than the 3GS. This just screams to me like an artificial limit to force people like me, who are perfectly happy with the original iPad, to upgrade. No chance, I’m definitely not rich enough to keep up with Apple. I guess I’ll be sticking with my original iPad on iOS 5 for the foreseeable future.
I was looking at Windows Azure as a PHP cloud hosting solution recently, and decided to give it a try as it looks pretty straight forward. (The 90 day free trial is very tempting!) Unfortunately, I couldn’t even get started, since the SDK would not install. It appears Vista Home Basic (which I have) and XP is not supported. I figure that’s because of the environment emulation for local testing, so decided to try to do a test app and deploy it without local testing. Well, the joke’s on me, that’s a no go either. The scaffolding from the PHP SDK worked fine, but packaging required the Azure SDK that wouldn’t install. I give up!
So thank you Microsoft for saving me from Windows Azure.
Seriously, Facebook is going to buy Instagram for $1 Billion! Yes, with a capital B! I can’t believe they are paying so much for a niche service, and one that Facebook can easily make obsolete overnight. If Facebook adds a few photo filters to their iOS and Android apps, they will pretty much put Instagram out of business, there’s just no more reason to use it. So it seems Facebook just bought themselves a bunch of photo filters for $1 Billion.
Personally, I don’t know anyone who uses Instagram, all photos in my circle of friends are mainly Facebook with a dash of Google+.
A quick craigslist search shows that there are a ton of people trying to sell new iPads (3/HD/?) for $100+ over retail. It’s kind of silly considering you can still easily walk into a store and buy one. I knew this “new” iPad isn’t going to sell out when I was still able to order one online for March 16th delivery 2 days after the announcement. Anyone willing to pay $100+ over retail for an iPad probably already pre-ordered one. No, I didn’t actually order one, my iPad 1 is still working fine.
