Computer

Using everytrail for iphone: the app shows for this particular trip 33km in 1 hour and 19 minutes with a resulting average speed of 25km/h.

The same trip displayed on everytrail.com is 1 hour and 46 minutes long, however, which makes for an average speed of 18.6 km/h.

I have paused the tracking after having arrived at destination, then resumed for the return trip. I think that everytrail.com does not understand the timecodes in the gpx file.

I am wondering about the next iPad. What is available now is certainly enticing and must be a joy for light computing / intense internet reading. I do have limited budget, however, and think that probably the iPhone 4 is a better way to spend my money. But I look at the iPad and keep thinking that it could be a photographer’s ideal machine; if only it had a straight usb port to connect a camera (if I travel light, I certainly do care about bringing yet another little piece of plastic).

[iPad and crufty interfaces](http://web.archive.org/web/20051107101903/http:// mpt.phrasewise.com/stories/storyReader$374)

Why the iPad is a potentially groundbreaking platform, despite the accusations of being ‘only a large iPhone’.

Just read this old piece written in 2003 by a (very smart) tech blogger; it’s about user interface defects as heritage of early computer hardware limitations, such as the presence of save and quit commands.

Step back to 2010, and guess what is the only computing platform that does not have any save and quit commands ? Correct, it’s the iPad.

Ho appena scaricato flock, il nuovo “social browser” sviluppato sulla base di Firefox/Mozilla, e sono davvero senza parole: integrazione totale tra web browsing, blogging e photoblogging !

No more Safari or Firefox ?

Sembrerebbe il destino di Flock… peccato che tutti i browser basati su Mozilla siano un po’ troppo pesanti per il mio vecchio iBook G3 (che continuo a usare per scrivere, mentre il macmini e’ diventato un mediamulo).

Questo era tanto tempo fa… adesso (agosto 2006) uso con gran piacere Camino; nonostante abbia un iMac intel e quindi potrei usare tranquillamente anche un browser piu’ pesante, preferisco avere un browser che faccia il browser e il resto lo faccio online.

Lots of sites nowadays offer digital music as .ape or .flac files; what’s wrong with mp3s ?

I should include a technical note here together with a bit of history, but since I’m not the most qualified for this sort of thing I’ll keep it short and simple: mp3 is a format that stores music in compressed format, therefore with some quality degradation (high compression=high degradation=low quality music=small file); wav/aiff is the format that is used for audio CDs, highest quality, uncompressed, large files (size ratio is 10:1 for CD-quality files versus mp3 files). So a bunch of people came up with some new formats for digital music, such as ape and flac. These are lossless compression formats – which means that they have exactly the same quality of the input CD music, but they’re half the size. So if you don’t want to trade on quality, go for ape/flac.

Some time ago I stumbled upon this thing, the Getting Things Done thing, aka GTD. How do you wanna call it ? A geekish obsession ? A lifestyle idea for nerds ?

Anyway, the Hipster PDA post was pretty cool (and fun to read). I have experienced myself the pleasure of having a toy like a palm (used to have the transparent Palm IIIe, upgraded with a IIIx motherboard, then switched to a Sony Clie), only to realize it was a useless and timewasting piece of equipment, and switched back to post-it notes and my trusty old mobile (6310i) to keep the phone numbers and passwords.