Healthy Living - Savvy Supermarket Buys

One of the things I like doing when visiting a new country or culture: go to the nearest supermarket and see what people buy for food. You learn the most amazing things when you do that. For instance:

Italian supermarkets are full of pasta ingredients. There is typically one full aisle for the pasta itself, then another aisle for tomato products, an aisle full of olive oils. The meats and produce are out of this world, even in your typical grocery store, and they seem never to sell generic produce, only seasonal types.

Quick Greasemonkey Script for Kelley Blue Book

One of the most frustrating user interfaces on the planet is that of Kelley Blue Book. It just seems to be designed around the idea of making you click as many times as possible to get to the information you need, instead of around the notion of quick access. Is that because KBB wants to maximize ad impressions?

Well, it really doesn’t matter. There is only a certain amount of clicks I will endure until I start typing URLs manually into a browser, and KBB got me there. In frustration.

2010-06-13 Alc 9 Closing Ceremonies

Compact Flash - Long Obsolete?

A few years back, I thought I’d revive my days of taking pictures and bought myself a digital SLR. Back then, they were not all the rage, mostly because they were so incredibly expensive and the pictures they shot were not much better than the point-and-shooters’. Seriously, if it hadn’t been that I was already used to SLRs and that I knew how powerful the lenses are, I would have done without.

My Ideal Phone

I am OK with my N900, but not really happy. The software is still buggy, the thing is too heavy, and the slider keyboard is useless. I do like certain things about it, tough, and that got me thinking: what would a perfect phone look like?

Form Factor

I find that the bigger the screen, the more I like a phone. Actually, it’s mostly the resolution that I like – I couldn’t live with the crappy resolution of the 3G iPhone, and the resolution of current Android devices (and of the N900) is OK. Even better, though, would be a phone with a screen that folds in the middle. A little like the current crop of eReaders, only that those tend to have two different screens (one eInk, the other LCD-type). You either flip the phone open (screens protected inside) or the screens are on the outside (one turned off until you flip the phone flat). That way you get twice the screen real estate at half the carrying size. Gotta love that!

MMS on Nokia N900/T-Mobile

OK, this is the latest on N900 and T-Mobile MMS. It works, but you have to figure out a few things. To save you the time and aggravation, here is my recipe:

1. Download and install (via Application Manager) fMMS.
2. In fMMS, go to Settings -> Internet Connection Settings
3. Get the current settings from this page (they worked for me)
4. You are ready to go

The settings (in the format used by fMMS), in case you can’t reach the page or whatever, are summarized below:

Mashups, Lady GaGa, and the Rebirth of Pop

A slightly unusual post today. I’ll talk for a change about music, even if with a firm rooting in technology.

As someone who lived through the 80s, I can say that whatever you may think of politics, economics, fashion, or architecture, you’ll have to admit that music in that decade was exciting. Sure, the 60s had the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, etc. – but the 80s had by far the best pop music. In addition, they started an explosion of musical movements and genres (rap, punk, hip hop, etc.) that came to fruition (and popularity) a lot later.

Security Matters

When I was little, I recall watching this popular science program in which Peter Ustinov popularized the theory of relativity. There was a rocket, a man on the rocket, a launch of the man and the rocket, and a transmission from the really fast man on the really fast rocket. The man on the really fast rocket saw earthlings slow down. Conversely, the earthlings saw the man talk really fast. Makes sense?

Roku Player

I was getting more and more frustrated with my Netflix account. The company was going more and more in the direction of online streaming, but you had to use Internet Explorer to watch online movies and shows.

I knew for a long time that Netflix was going to push online streaming. After all, the whole business model with the mailing of DVDs had to be hugely expensive and incredibly inefficient: you’d spend a vast portion of your revenue on simply postage, no matter what wonderful deal they had with the USPS.

Web 3.0

People have been thinking about the next generation of Web ever since Web 2.0 landed and got its incarnation in Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. No conclusive Web 3.0 road map has ever convinced me, though, so I started thinking about my own one.

I started looking at what made Web 1.0 and then Web 2.0 and decided that the trend could be extrapolated from there. The approach, I thought, should be Hegelian: every manifestation of the Web should solve a problem, create a new problem, and find its own solution in the next one.