This is my sole attempt at ringtone composition. The Sony Ericsson T616 phone had a little-known ringtone editor built in, where you could build a sequence out of a variety of musical snippets, each a couple seconds long.
On a long car ride a couple years ago, I attempted to make the most annoying ringtone possible. Here’s the original MIDI file, seventeen seconds long. Ugh! the ringtone
A neatly concise, even-handed summary about jailbreaking an iPhone, covering both the advantages and disadvantages, free of axegrinding. This would be the tl;dr version of anything I could say on the matter, if I were to jailbreak my iPhone, which I probably won’t. [via Tom Boutell]
Pekar was, as the cliche goes, a complex man of contradictions. Famed for his self-portrait as a cranky, anonymous everyman. Widely-respected as a legitimizer of comics and pioneer in autobiographical comics, all of which he made in collaboration with a variety of artists. Pekar was one of the standard-bearers of the blue-collar intelligentsia, which has a long low-key tradition in America and especially in the Rust Belt where he spent his life. Fans of his comics are probably not aware of the many essays and reviews he’d written about music, politics, and literature, while his literary readers probably considered his comics a quirky attention-getting sideline, at best. He’s missed already.
Interprets Flash files entirely in Javascript. Not only a remarkable accomplishment in its own right, but also because it’s primarily one person’s work. One of a couple similar projects I’m aware of, but this one seems to have the most traction.
It’s also interesting to speculate why Adobe isn’t attempting anything like this, or why they’re so closed-lipped about it if they are.
Very pretty and pleasing to look at, but why can’t it show me today’s date entirely? Aggressive styling becomes a low-grade irritation when routine information is obfuscated, even where the full message is easy to guess.
(Update: Luke Wroblewski considers this in more detail, via Daring Fireball)
The iPhone’s touch screen works by conducting a small electronic charge through your fingertip; most gloves that are effective insulators from the cold are also pretty good at electrical isolation, so you have to take your glove off and your hand gets cold.
South Koreans have solved the cold-weather iPhone problem: Buy a particular brand of mini sausage that’s approximately the same shape and conductivity of a human finger.
Clusterflock has a concise summary of the iPhone sausage finger. The Google-translated article leaves us with this thought: “Maekseubong tagitcheung and this just fits the iPhone user base, while the poisonous celebrity, Max is on the stick.”
While they’re at it, why not use “fudge”, “darn”, and “shucks” instead of replacing the offending words with hash symbols?
I’m filing this under “ZDNet Imitates The Onion”.
I wish security vulnerabilities were the only reason why people should stop using Internet Explorer 6. Web developers have been campaigning steadily and conducting user outreach for many years to instigate upgrades. IE 6 support inflates web development budgets (because of the added work necessary to support an outlier platform), results in websites that aren’t as good and useful as they could be (because of client demands for full feature parity across all supported browsers), and a host of entrenched attitudes regarding web design that should have been shaken loose six or eight years ago. Unfortunately, as a web developer working on contracts I rarely have the option of arbitrarily cutting off IE 6 users, and currently most IE 6 users are themselves unable to upgrade.
This evening I wondered whether the four-conductor iPhone headsets (headphone plus microphone) could be used as conventional headphones on my computer, nevermind the mic. As it turns out, they not only work on Apple’s laptops, the mic does as well, as does the play/pause clicker. Now you can use Skype without taking off your earphones. (They’re also compatible with almost all of Apple’s iPods.)
Apple’s own documentation is sparse bordering on nonexistent. Product descriptions for their iPhone headsets only mention iPods. The most Apple has written about this is on page 25 of a PDF of the MacBook Pro user’s guide: “Audio out port: Connect external speakers, headphones (including iPhone), or digital audio equipment.“
If you haven’t got a compatible laptop, you can make an adaptor that splits into Mic In and Stereo Out plugs, or buy one.
The caption notes: “Peggy Bacon of Bondi, one of a troupe of girls who did pyramid stands on the beach, does a backflip for the photographer.” For whatever reason, this fails to dissipate the sense of strangeness in the picture.
What a wonderful photo.