iPad EULA leaked

This device is provided without warranty of any kind as to reliability, accuracy, existence or otherwise or fitness for any particular purpose and Apple Inc. specifically does not warrant, guarantee, imply or make any representations as to its merchantability for any particular purpose and furthermore shall have no liability for or responsibility to you or any other person, entity or deity with respect of any loss or damage whatsoever caused by this device or object or by any attemps to destroy it by hammering it against a wall or dropping it into a deep well or any other means whatsoever and moreover asserts that you indicate your acceptance of this agreement or any other agreement that may be substituted at any time by coming within five miles of the product or observing it through large telescopes or by any other means because you are such an easily cowed moron who will happily accept arrogant and unilateral conditions on a piece of highly priced garbage that you would not dream of accepting on a bag of dog biscuits and is used solely at your own risk.

Admittedly this is not the iPad's end-user license agreement but that of a fictitious personal organizer from Terry Pratchett's The Truth, and the real EULA might not even have been written yet, but I'm guessing this is pretty close.

Just In: Tasty Food Keeps You Thin

While roaming the web for news bits on the health-care reform debate in the US (which can be hysterically funny or very sad, often simultaneously) I stumbled upon a report on various health care statistics in OECD countries.

For me the most interesting part of this report was the last graph, which charts obesity levels across countries. These seem to inverse-correlate perfectly with how good I find the food there. The thinnest countries are those with either superb meat and produce (Switzerland), awesome cuisine (France), or both (Japan). The fattest are those where good food seems rare and wicked expensive (the UK and US).

Obviously this is just my own perception, but how great would it be if there was some general law hidden in there, so that each time you had a really good meal, you could tell yourself that in all likelihood it must also have been really healthy?

Black Holes are Kewwwwl

Scientists at the Israel Institute of Technology managed to create an acoustic black hole. This is pretty neat in and of itself, but the real value lies in prompting Wired to make all those lists of things they want to throw at it ;-)

For web browsers, the future is now

Author's note: I just uncovered a draft of this post, which was written during Safari 4's public beta. It was almost finished, but for some reason I had forgotten all about it. Since it is just as (ir)relevant today as it was then, I'm publishing it now.

Yesterday I read this in a mail from Agile Web Solutions, makers of the beloved 1Password:

Last week Apple released a new Beta of Safari 4 and I’m blown away by how great it is! While it will take some time to get used to the new tabs, I’m very excited about the new features, especially the ability to resize images when zooming the page.

It seems every other year or so I hear someone gushing about how their favourite browser's new version sports some amazing innovative new feature, and each time it's something Opera has had since the nineties. There must be some kind of fundamental law at work here, and I am sure careful analysis of Opera's changelog would yield an accurate timetable of future "innovations" in other browsers. Obviously, "careful research" is way too much work for me, but this being a blog I am allowed to just make it all up. So today, I proudly present you with the future of web browsers:

2010

• Safari now seamlessly saves open tabs on exit and restores them on restart


• In Firefox, cmd-z reopens just-closed tabs

2011

• At Macworld, Apple announces Safari will support mouse gestures "in a future version"


• Firefox drops the "you are about to close x open tabs" dialog box


• The major browsers finally figure out the right implementation of History-Back on sites that use POST requests

2012

• Internet Explorer 9 has a "downloads" window that is not entirely useless


• Safari now remembers which filetypes to open (and with which application) and which filetypes to save (and where)


• Firefox finds a way to save passwords without making them readable by anyone who happens to walk by the computer

2013

• All major browsers now support unified full-text search of bookmarks, history and the web, all from the address field


• Internet Explorer gets keyboard navigation so good that using a mouse at all is entirely optional


• Firefox gets auto-fill that works with more than one account per site


• History in Safari becomes vaguely usable

2014

• IE's new popup blocker gives you more than .6 seconds to react when you *do* want a popup to open


• Firefox now requires only three clicks to download all links from a web page (eg. an ftp index page)


• Safari offers bookmarks syncing across computers. For free.

And finally, circa 2029

• Mozilla presents Firefox 17, the first version to require less than a dozen plug-ins to be any good

Here comes another bubble

A youtube video asks me to blog about it and I just oblige without thinking twice. There goes my free will I guess.

Ten Signs You Want to Be a "Serious" Photographer

I know those "Ten Things" lists can get pretty lame, but I couldn't find any like this one, and I thought it would be an easy way to conclusively prove to my esteemed readers that I am, indeed, slightly mad.

1. You have a special B&H wishlist just for camera bags.


2. You chose your whole camera system in a week and never looked back, but four years later you're still looking for the right tripod.


3. You sort national parks in preferred visiting order.


4. During holidays, you get up three hours earlier than on working days.


5. You don't understand why anyone would buy a car when they could get a 600/4.0 for the same price.


6. You don't see anything ridiculous in staying in the exact same spot for forty minutes waiting for the light to improve.


7. You consider anyone who doesn't know about adjustment layers technologically illiterate.


8. You think of your laptop mainly as a Portable Storage Device.


9. You refer to your travel companions as "interesting compositional elements".


10. And, last but not least, you get really sick of hearing "Wow. You must have a really good camera".

SQL coated raisins

(Disclaimer : non-programmers probably won't find this funny. You've been warned.)

I'm a big fan of The Daily WTF in general and I find their Pop-up Potpourri especially funny, but this one is in a class of its own :



:)