Matt Buchanan
Google Drive, Finally Finally (Finally)
It's about time Google put out something people can love again.
Matt Buchanan
A Tale Of Two Smartphones
The most interesting about Apple and Samsung effectively the two biggest smartphone sellers in the world — they collected 91 percent of the profits of all cellphone makers last quarter — is that they are nearly polar opposites: Apple makes one phone; Samsung dozens. Apple is held up as a beacon of taste; Samsung can be quite tacky. I'm not quite sure what the moral of the story is, though.
Matt Buchanan
If The New York Times Was A Giant Twitter Stream
If you redesigned The New York Times front page for the Twitter set, this is what it would look like: The Times Wire. A feed of basically everything the Times publishes, It's just as overwhelming as a Twitter stream, updated nearly every minute. The difference is you know most of it is actually worth reading. (via)
Matt Buchanan
An External Drive Worth Buying
It's a generally terrible time to buy a hard drive, since we're in between USB 2.0 and 3.0 and Thunderbolt is generally verrrry expensive, even considering how fast it is. But when you need backup, you need backup. Wirecutter's pick for now is Seagate's FreeAgent GoFlex Desk.
Matt Buchanan
About That Screen That's Better Than The iPad's
I've written effusively about Pixel Qi and its displays, which promise all the good things about bright LCDs and reflective E-Ink combined in a single display. (Imagine an iPad with a Kindle-like reading mode. Game-changing.) But you'll note they've not made it into a device you currently use. So while I want to be excited at their claim "we can match or exceed the image quality of the screen on the iPad 3," I'm mostly just wondering where the Pixel Qi revolution has been.
Matt Buchanan
Why The Word "Pivot" Should Die
I liked the word pivot. And then Silicon Valley got a hold of it.
Matt Buchanan
The Death Of Real Conversation, Part 7,181
With new technologies like smartphones and Facebooks come new old things to lament losing — "human relationships" and "face-to-face conversation" being favorites, which MIT professor Sherry Turkle mourn here. It's sort of true: I almost never turn to John, plant my lips next to his ear and tell him I love him anymore — because he's always wearing headphones — I just IM emoji and wonder if he knows how I really feel.
Matt Buchanan
Tweetbombing And The Ethics Of Attention
A bunch of nerds thought they'd help solve hunger in Africa by tweetbombing a bunch of celebrities to bring attention to the problem. It turns out, there are issues with Twitter activism and that line of thought! And not just because it turned ghastly for BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin. (via)
Matt Buchanan
This Is Going To Be A Series, We Suspect
The hardware business ain't easy. Another hardware/platform company bites the dust: Chumby, formerly maker of the most adorable, uh, Wi-Fi widget ball around.
Matt Buchanan
The Sunday Night DVR Dilemma Is Stupid
Why are we still trapped by the limits of our TiVos? There's no reason anymore that we can't watch whatever, whenever.
Matt Buchanan
In Defense Of Skeuomorphism
Hating skeuomorphic interfaces is somewhat in vogue at the moment. Tobias Ahlin takes the opposite tack: "Skeuomorphism is about communicating and reinforcing feelings – getting an application to become a memorable experience, not just a tool. It’s about communicating the purpose of a UI, not only the functions it enables."
Matt Buchanan
The Worst Bug In The World
At least, when you're crammed into a subway car with 4,000 other people trying to ignore the smell of farts.
Matt Buchanan
Against Editorial Cartoons — And For Charts, Galleries And Listicles
Farhad Manjoo on why the Pulitzer committee should "honor slide shows, infographics, and listicles" rather than focusing exclusively on editorial cartoons, which "remain stuck in the static, space-constrained, caricaturist mind-set of newsprint."
Matt Buchanan
A List Of Gadgets Not To Buy Right Now
In tech, just about as important as a list of things to buy is a list of things not to buy. Something else I would add to this list: Android tablets. Because you should not buy them until they are good. That might be a longer wait than anything else on this list, though.
Matt Buchanan
When We Can Throw Our Keys And Wallets Away Forever
I can't wait to never carry a wallet and keys ever again. This AT&T project is one way that might happen.
Matt Buchanan
"We Are All Radioactive"
My friend Lisa Katayama is working on a documentary about a group of surfers working to rebuild Japan after last year's tsunami. It's called "We Are All Radioactive," and it's a really important project about the relationship between humans, nature and technology. Episode 3 is online, and the project could use some more funding to reach their goal.
Matt Buchanan
How This Ugly Thing Might Fix Even Uglier Car Navigation Systems
In-car navigation systems can suck. This thing might be one of the solutions.
Matt Buchanan
FaceTime Bringing Us Face-To-Face With The Worst Aspects Of Humanity
"Roughly a quarter of the 100 face-lift patients [surgeon Dr. Robert K. Sigal] has a year cited the way they look on webcams as a reason for going under the knife, he said, including his own wife."
Matt Buchanan
The Carriers' Manufactured Spectrum Apocalypse
Remember when AT&T was holding its own customers hostage to try to make the case for that doomed T-Mobile merger? It was all about the looming spectrum crisis — that they're running out of radio waves to carry calls and data. Brian X. Chen lucidly explains the carriers' interest in maintaining that model: They "haven’t advocated for the newer technologies because they want to retain their monopolies."
Matt Buchanan
How To Turn Multitouch Trackpads Into Actually Good Videogame Controllers
An essay by Tim Rogers from a few months ago that I was re-reading which sets out to define how a multitouch trackpad could be an excellent game controller, if somebody just tried.
Matt Buchanan
