April 2012
4 posts
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Movie Review | The Avengers (2012) →
My review of The Avengers. It’s lengthy, but I wanted to do a good job of explaining what I did not like about a movie that is almost universally loved. I hope I succeeded.
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“The Riddle of the Dinosaur” by Bert Leston Taylor
I was reading The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins and came across this wonderful poem by Bert Leston Taylor in one of its footnotes. Here’s what Dawkins has to say about it, followed by the poem itself:
It is a a little-known fact that some dinosaurs had a ganglion in the pelvis, which was so large (at least relative to the brain in the head) as almost to...
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The Disconnect Between Free Will and Divine...
One of my father’s favourite couplets goes like this:
कर्म किये जा फल की चिंता मत कर ऐ इंसान,
कर्म अच्छा करेगा फल देगा भगवान्।
Translation:
Keep working and don’t worry about results. If you do good deeds, god will reward you with a positive outcome.
This is often combined with the note that human beings are free to do whatever they please, that we enjoy free will. It’s only the results...
March 2012
1 post
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OS X’s AirDrop Needs a Better Workflow
Apple’s desktop operating system OS X Lion has a great file-sharing feature called AirDrop that makes it a breeze to send files across to Macs in your vicinity. It is one of the best examples of Apple taking something that is inherently complicated and re-imagining it in a way that your average user can make sense of it.
However, the feature has a flawed workflow that often makes it a poorer...
December 2011
1 post
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Movie Review | A Wednesday (2008)
A friend from Twitter listed A Wednesday as one of his favourite Bollywood movies, so I figured I’d give it a try, hoping to see it change my impression of the industry. I don’t think it did much in that regard.
It’s the sort of Bollywood movie that tries to portray itself as better than it actually is. It’s the kind of movie that bores you throughout and then adds an uplifting speech at the...
September 2011
2 posts
7 tags
Why I am not paranoid about privacy on Facebook... →
When Apple was embroiled in the iPhone location-tracking controversy earlier this year, just reading the articles written on the subject made me chuckle. As if Apple had anything to gain from knowing your location! What were people afraid of anyway? That the company was going to send sales reps after its Windows-using customers while they were sitting in a park and try to sell them on a Mac?
...
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“If you believe in god, and he turns out to exist then you obviously have made a...”
– Blaise Pascal (via shrenique)
In 2020, there will be a massive earthquake for an hour and all living things walking on land and swimming in the oceans will die. Only avian species will survive. If you want to survive, you need to start bending to the ground and whisper “please teach me how to fly”...
July 2011
1 post
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“It’s hard to find an example of how Apple’s security policies and practices have...”
– John Siracusa (Apple OS X Lion: the Ars Technica review)
June 2011
3 posts
1 tag
And That’s That.
Today marks the closing of Caramel Cloud and Notificant.
As anyone who has tried to contact me through my Caramel Cloud email address and the company’s Twitter account knows, I have been unresponsive for the past month. That’s because I have been spending most of my time attending to a new business in the offline world and some of it writing for Macworld and have not found the time to answer...
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How Much Security Is Too Much Security?
Banks in India—and, I suppose, all over the world—are obsessed with security, as well they should be. Unfortunately, however, most of the restrictions and checks they put in place in the name of security not only make banking inconvenient, they actually make it less safe.
HDFC Bank, for instance, forces you to change the online banking password for your current account (and maybe other types of...
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May 2011
2 posts
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Comprehensive Guide to Configuring Apple iPhone or...
Apple is known for providing the complete solution. The iPhone ships with the SIM card inserted and, for the carriers that are officially supported by Apple in various countries around the world, the carrier settings preconfigured. In India, before the advent of 3G, you could purchase a factory unlocked iPhone from one of the countries where it was available (Australia, China (Hong Kong), New...
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In Which I Make No Apologies for Calling Bullshit... →
nikf:
Ever since the launch of the eBook reader, the publishing industry has been scrambling to understand the move to digital media. Unlike the music and movie industries, who’ve constantly embraced (however begrudgingly) new technologies, the publishing industry hasn’t had the constant push of new…
Nik Fletcher clearly agrees with me.
April 2011
4 posts
4 tags
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Unveiling My Media Library →
I have a truly gargantuan library of movies and TV shows on my Mac. Now, at long last, you can take a peek at it.
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The Tire Iron and the Tamale →
During a roadside breakdown, who didn’t stop, and who did.
The most heartwarming thing you will be reading this week.
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The Pricing Scam of Digital Media: Looting in...
I just purchased a book with a price of $40 in USA for $6 on an online bookstore in India. Those are savings of 85%! This is why I find the non-regionalised prices of digital media absolutely unfair. A Kindle book that costs $10 in USA should cost no more than $2.30 in India and an App Store app that costs $2 in USA should cost $0.45 in India. And the prices should be listed on these online...
March 2011
8 posts
7 tags
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“Why I Wouldn’t Want to be Sachin” by Nipun Dixit
Here’s a man standing on the third man boundary in the last over of a World Cup match. The bowler just has to bowl sensibly to win this game. What the man at the boundary sees is four rank balls bowled without any sense of focus or planning. India loses yet again in circumstances where he has done just about everything right.
He does not cry. He does not show any emotion. He keeps his head down...
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connect.me →
We’re not YASN — we’re a better way for you to manage your connections and a better way for online communities to discover and connect to each other.
Apparently, it’s going to be the next big thing in social networking. And if you sign up using the link above, they’ll shower me with gold and riches from Nigeria. So go do it. I may invite you to my mansion when I become insanely wealthy. No...
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“Why I Am an Atheist” by Bhagat Singh
nāstika:
From Wikipedia:
Bhagat Singh was an Indian freedom fighter, considered to be one of the most influential revolutionaries of the Indian independence movement.
…
While in a condemned cell in 1931, he wrote a pamphlet entitled Why I am an Atheist in which he discusses and advocates the philosophy of atheism. This pamphlet was a result of some criticism by fellow revolutionaries on his...
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15 Most Popular Autocorrects from February 2011 →
Slightly NSFW but, holy cow, is this hilarious! I was HOWLING with laughter!
(via Jason Snell)
February 2011
15 posts
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“This is the most important medical discovery since our cavemen ancestors first...”
– Rohan Ramakrishnan, Cracked
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“Why do you access some settings by tapping a bottom-strip icon, and the rest of...”
– David Pogue, The New York Times
Ouch!
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Try and try until you succeed.
Greetings from a customer whom Dell treats like a piece of shit and who has therefore decided to reciprocate in kind.
Try and try until you succeed.
No thanks to you for thoroughly screwing me over. I do not look forward to hearing from you.
On 23-Feb-2011, at 12:59 PM, BABITHA_Raghunath@DELLTEAM.com wrote:
Greetings from Dell.
I tried to reach you on : XXXXXXXXXX, on 23rd Feb 2011....
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“It’s notable that throughout all her years of eating stainless steel, Daalman...”
– S. Fero, Cracked
I love me some Cracked humour.
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Apple’s Three Laws of Developers
yourhead:
A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.
A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
— I. Developer
Painfully true. And it has always been this way with...
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Dell’s SEVENTH monitor replacement is a dusty,...
After I made a video about it and wrote about my wretched and ongoing experience with Dell the last time on reddit, the post garnered immediate and significant attention and shot to the top of the front page within a couple of hours and stayed there for several hours after that. Thank you to all of you who voted for that story and left me your comments and advice. It strengthened my resolve not to...
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Nokia CEO Stephen Elop rallies troops in brutally... →
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop admits what anti-Apple trolls never would. Bravo, sir! Admission is the first step to recovery.
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An amusing discussion on my reddit thread
A (possibly racist) reddit user: How can you afford such an expensive monitor? That’s like tens of thousands in Indian currency, right?
Another reddit user: Pro tip: There are rich Indians too.
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Dell sent me six replacements for my defective... →
My continuing Dell saga is now posted on the venerable reddit.
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Marco.org: Ode to the App Review team →
marco:
I wasn’t always a fan of Apple’s requirement that all App Store submissions be reviewed by a fairly opaque process before release, which often led to confusing or unfair rejections.
But over the last year, I’ve grown to appreciate app review and the immense staff it must take to operate at its…
I’ve been meaning to write something of this nature myself but I could never have done...
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January 2011
4 posts
3 tags
“Whatever happens, for the next two or three years, Apple is in terrific shape....”
– Alan Deutschman
“How Steve Jobs ‘Out-Japanned’ Japan” by Jeff Yang for SF Gate
(via Daring Fireball)
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Introducing Notificant! →
Anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Notificant is a nifty little app that makes sure you always remember what you want to.
With scheduled notifications that sync via the cloud and can be fired on any Mac of your choosing, Notificant is the notification assistant you never knew you wanted.
I have launched my software company Caramel Cloud and our first web service and Mac application...
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“Steve Jobs’s greatest gift to the company, I suspect, is that his enthusiasm is...”
– John Gruber (Daring Fireball)
December 2010
5 posts
2 tags
“Girls who post self-portraits and say ‘I look ugly’ should know that we all know...”
– Kelly Oxford
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“My Argument With God” by Ricky Gervais →
How I went from Jesus-loving Christian to fun-loving infidel…in one afternoon.
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“When faced with two choices, simply toss a coin. It works not because it settles...”
– Couldn’t not reblog. (via goobimama)
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