February 2011
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Mill St Betelgeuse
“Belgian Tripels are a style of strong golden ales traditionally produced by vocational (Trappist) monks. Our Betelgeuse has pear, peach, apple, citrus, clove and bubble gum notes and starts out sweet but finishes quite dry. At 8.5% alc/vol it is devilishly strong and a star in our family.”
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Mill St Coffee Porter
“A wonderfully sinful blend of Balzac’s own dark-roasted coffee, brewed to perfection with a full-bodied traditional porter.”
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Simplified iOS purchasing?
Has anybody else noticed that trying to buy content directly on iOS can be somewhat of a headache?
Now, perhaps I’m alone in my obsession with using secure passwords, but it seems the iTunes Store is starting to enforce password complexity for all users. Further, I think that anybody who uses a low-security password for an online service that has their credit card and/or bank account attached to it is insane.
I have no problem trying to type in a complex password on a real, physical keyboard when I’m at my computer, however it can be more of a nuisance with an iOS device, particularly when you just want to download a quick song or app from the Store while you’re on-the-go.
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Mill St Stock Ale
“Mill St Stock Ale is a golden export-style ale made from only malt and hops, with no fillers or adjuncts. The malt’s natural sweetness is perfectly balanced by the bitterness derives from the hops.”
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Victoria's First Day in the Snow
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"Life goes by pretty fast..."
“Life goes by pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
In Honour of John Hughes’ birthday, here’s a great little mashup of his 80’s teen angst movies.
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Mill St Organic
“Mill St Original Organic Lager is a pure, refreshing, European style beer. Batch-crafted from the finest organic ingredients, it takes 2 to 3 times longer to brew than ordinary beer. Light and crisp, it is cold-aged for five smooth weeks, creating a creamy, soft palette with a distinctively clean finish.”
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Thin and stylish cell phones?
Amazing how the Moto RAZR was once the standard for thin and stylish cell phones.
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Don't say you don't have enough time...
Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”
— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
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The iPhone on a network that actually works...
Om rejoins team iPhone. FWIW, in the few days it has been out, I’ve heard the same basic story a handful of times already about the Verizon iPhone.
The moral? The iPhone is hands down the best device when it’s on a network that actually works.
In other words, iPhone users in the U.S. are now able to experience what those of us in other countries have known all along. ;)
Every time I travel south of the border I’m amazed just how bad AT&T’s service truly is. Some of us like to complain about how much we pay for cellular data here in the Great White North, but the fact is that I get consistent 5mbps data throughput on Rogers and have never had a dropped call.
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Mill St Lemon Tea Beer
A remarkable wheat beer infused with a blend of orange pekoe and Earl Grey teas…
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Yelp, OpenTable and Canada
Yelp is available in Canada.
OpenTable is available in Canada.
Both services, separately, work great (in Toronto at least) as do their respective iOS apps.
So what puzzles me is why Yelp’s OpenTable integration is not available in Canada…
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Leaving WordPress: Tumblr and Disqus to the rescue
Years ago I set up a WordPress blog on my own self-hosted server, based in part on the naive idea that I was going to write enough to make a self-hosted blog worthwhile. This was also back in the day when blogging platforms were limited to either client-side web-page building solutions like iWeb or full CMS systems like WordPress.
In fact, I had begun my little blog experiment using Apple’s fledgling iWeb application and the service then known as .Mac. However, I quickly discovered that solution was untenable for serious content for various reasons, not the least of which was that iWeb 1.0 had a nasty habit of attempting to preserve a WYSIWYG presentation by rendering any non-web-font text as a giant PNG file. After writing a lengthy post on Bluetooth Proximity Detection that received links from several other sites, readers started pointing out to me that they couldn’t copy-and-paste the code snippets I had put in, as the entire article was a single giant image (eek!).
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It's not vaporware if you actually ship...
[Glenn Fleischman] addressing criticism that Apple gets a “free pass” from press regarding its pre-announcements of the iPhone (six months early) and iPad (three months):
Smartphone makers spent 6 months laughing at Apple and the last 42 months catching up. Likewise, the iPad entered a vacuum in which no tablet had succeeded before except in niche markets.
Apple gets a pass on pre-announcements for one very simple reason: They deliver.
It’s not vaporware when you actually ship a product.
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Skype or FaceTime for TV?
So an update to Skype appeared in the App Store today apparently increasing the range of devices that iPhone (and iPod touch) users can carry on video conversations with. The big thing seems to be the ability to chat with folks on Skype for TV. As an added bonus, Skype 3.0.1 no longer simply crashes-on-launch with iOS 4.3.
I saw Skype for TV being demoed by companies such as Panasonic while I was at CES, and while it’s an interesting concept, I’m wondering if it’s one of these things that will ever see any meaningful mass-market adoption, or if it will simply fall into the category of yet-another-thing-that-nobody-needs-built-into-their-TV.
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...and now back to you, Tumblr
I’ve had an old self-hosted Wordpress blog for about five years now that I’ve made about a half-dozen posts on and otherwise neglected. Last year I started to look at Posterous and Tumblr as nice, in-between blogging services. I signed up for both, but for reasons I can’t quite remember, I started using Posterous more, I think mostly because I found the post-by-email idea to be somewhat appealing, and liked its clean design.
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Rick's Rant: Snow Day
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Special Report: Snow in Toronto