July 2011
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A Settled Purpose
“I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.”
— Benjamin Disraeli
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Time is an Illusion...
“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
— Douglas Adams
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The world is changing at a furious pitch
“To start announcing your own preferences for old values when your world is collapsing and everything is changing at a furious pitch: this is not the act of a serious person. It is frivolous, fatuous. If you were to knock on the door of one of these critics and say “Sir, there are flames leaping out of your roof, your house is burning,” under these conditions he would then say to you, “That’s a very interesting point of view. Personally, I couldn’t disagree with you more.”
That’s all these critics are saying. Their house is burning and they’re saying, “Don’t you have any sense of values, simply telling people about fire when you should be thinking about the serious content, the noble works of the mind?”
Marshall McLuhan (via Quote and Comment)
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Disk Encryption in OS X Lion
So apparently you can encrypt external hard drives in Lion, however unlike enabling FileVault on the primary partition, it seems you need to actually reformat them to do so.
Note also that the disk needs to use a GPT rather than MBR, and Lion converts it to Core Storage in the process.
It’s also kind of cool that when you mount it, Lion allows you to store the encryption password in your Keychain (in the same manner as for encrypted disk images), allowing you to effectively use the drives seamlessly with your home Mac while still keeping them safely encrypted should anybody else get their hands on them.
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Reality is merely an illusion...
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
— Albert Einstein
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Reality Check
A 2048 by 1536 iPad at $499 (or even $599) would blow away the displays on every Mac computer Apple makes, except—arguably—a $1,699 27” iMac or a Mac with the $999 27” LED Cinema Display.
— Jeremy Horwitz, iLounge, Reality Check - A 2048x1536 iPad 2 Screen Would Trump Macs, HDTVs + Unicorns
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The "4" does not stand for "4G"
Shocking — a large percentage of people with the iPhone 4 think the “4” stands for “4G”. And they’re perfectly happy thinking that.
People point to 4G being the next way Android trumps iPhone. I don’t buy it. Months after we’ve seen the first devices, 4G remains largely a buzzword. Limited coverage and often mediocre speeds hamper it. Worse, it remains a total battery hog. The people I know with 4G phones usually leave the 4G off.
And then there’s AT&T’s bullshit where HSPA+ is technically “4G”.
Long story short, do I expect the iPhone 5 to support actual 4G? No, I do not. Next year.
Good points. It’s also worth considering that for what most people use their iPhones for, 3G speeds are more than adequate. Anything more is just diminishing returns.
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Once we believe in ourselves...
Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
— e. e. cummings
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Let us obsess about what is best for the end user...
Let’s obsess about what is best for the end user. We often make product decisions based on strategic alignment, partner requests or even legal advice — the end user doesn’t care.
— Open letter to BlackBerry bosses: Senior RIM exec tells all as company crumbles around him
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iOS is a "feature"?
Interesting to see Apple iOS noted as a feature right alongside things like 4G and Wi-Fi in this survey question.
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The mobile "war" is an illusion
The thesis that one dominant platform wins the mobile “war” is naive.
— Horace Deidu, The Post-PC Era Will Be a Multi-Platform Era
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It is more important that innocence be protected...
It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.
— John Adams, via Daring Fireball Linked List
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Canada Day Beer
Innis & Gunn Canada Day 2011 Edition Scottish Oak Aged Beer