10K:
Marcos Kirsch at the Finish in 53:12.
Pace 8:34 min/Mile.
Time of Arrival: 8:56:49.
Shlomit Kirsch at the Finish in 56:41.
Pace 9:07 min/Mile.
Time of Arrival: 9:00:19.
On your mark
Bajofondo at SXSW 2013
I’m not one to make excuses, but my SXSW 2013 posts have been delayed due to unforeseen hard drive issues. However, I was watching a video of Bajofondo’s concert at Auditorium Shores this year, and lo-and-behold, there’s the back of my big head wearing my Rayados hat.
Sadly that’s an older hat. The newer one (as seen at ACL 2012) was lost in Indonesia.
The iPad is 3 years old
Time flies.
This is what I said back when it was announced. I underestimated how much laptop usage time would be replaced by iPad usage time.
If you want to see what professional technology reporters, analysts, etc. said at the time, then check out this post by Asymco. It’s eye-opening. Summary: iPad is an overpriced, underpowered, crippled disappointment that will bankrupt Apple.
In reality, the iPad turned Apple into the biggest and most profitable computer maker in the world, destroyed the horrendous netbook market, forced Google to clone it, and MS to completely redesign the Windows UI for touch and start making their own hardware.
Shows you how much faith you should put in the opinion of “experts”.
Today’s quote(s): Alan Kay
Four classics for the price of one:
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it”
“Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born”
“If you don’t fail at least 90 percent of the time, you’re not aiming high enough.”
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”
Source: TIME.com
Who’s Alan Kay you ask? Wikipedia.
Matzolah
I pride myself of having introduced my family in Mexico to Quinoa as a Kosher for Passover food. The only way to top it would be to bring more innovative unleavened goods.
So I bought a case (not a can, but a full case) of Matzolah, Kosherfest’s award for Best New Passover Product of 2012. It tastes really good, like granola, but without the pesky side effects of being good for you or helping your stomach digest food. We’ll see what the reaction is.
Pebble Review
Moi pre-ordered the famous Pebble watch on Kickstarter. It was supposed to arrive in December… it finally did in March. Since he lives in Mexico, he ordered to my house, which means I get to test drive it. Here are my quick observations.
PAN
Quick observation: We have WANs (Wide-Area Networks, as in cell phone networks or the Internet) and LANs (Local-Area Networks, as in your WiFi network). I first read about PANs (Personal-Area network) a long time ago: a bunch of devices you wear communicating with each other. Honestly I thought it was a utopian futuristic pipe dream.
The future kind of snuck up on us, even though Bluetooth has been around for a long time. I have a smartphone in my pocket, wirelessly connected to my Bluetooth headset on my head. And now a watch that communicates with the phone. Some people use other devices: heart rate monitors, little Nike+ shoe thingies… it’s crazy, it actually happened.
Design
The watch looks good in the same way a decent but cheap watch does. A little bigger than I’d like but my wrists are smaller than average. The buttons are big (good) but squishy (bad). The monochrome screen is low-resolution but readable enough. Animation is choppy. You can more or less tell what tradeoffs they had to make in order to have decent (~7 days) battery life. You recharge with a special cable that uses magnets to attach to the watch. All in all it’s good looking enough.
Functionality
Pebble promises all sorts of apps. Too bad they aren’t out yet. Today this is all you can do:
- Change the watch face from many downloadable ones (use the iPhone app).
- See what song is playing on your phone.
- Control the music.
- See some notifications like text messages from your phone.
Basic things like a stopwatch are still missing. The promised apps better come soon.
Conclusion
I don’t wear a watch, and the Pebble doesn’t provide enough cool things to change that. If there was something really cool then things would be different: RunKeeper integration, lap counter for swimming, or some super cool thing I haven’t thought of.
I decided to Moi can keep his watch.
One last thing
Nothing is for free. Usually by the end of the work day my phone still has 30% or so battery charge. On my Pebble test day I did not use my phone much more than the usual. But at the end of the work day my battery was all but dead.
RIP Google Reader
Long time The MKX® readers know that I’m a huge fan of Google Reader. What can I say, I’m a news junkie. Some things have changed though:
- In 2011, Google redesigned (read: crippled) Google Reader in order to better shove Google+ down our throats. Among other things, they removed link sharing. I now use Delicious exclusively for that purpose. (Hint: You can subscribe to the RSS feed of my Delicious. I subscribe to a few friends this way)
- While I used to use the Google Reader website directly, I no longer do that. Now I use an app called Reeder (on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac) that synchronizes to my Google Reader account. So Google Reader is no longer an RSS client for me, just a synchronization service.
Yesterday, Google announced they are shutting the service down on July 1st. Is this a personal disaster? No, for the two reasons given above.
While I understand that companies cannot give something away for free without getting anything in return (hint: it costs money to provide these sort of services), I fully expected Google to start inserting “sponsored” items into our news feeds. After all, one would think knowledge about RSS subscriptions is an advertiser’s dream: they know what we subscribe to, which is another way of saying they know what we take an active interest in spending our time reading about because we are interested in it.
I fully expect a clone to emerge anytime soon and I expect to migrate my 242 subscriptions (that’s two hundred and forty two!) with me. Heck, now that others will be able to compete in this area, we may even get improved RSS services!
SXSW Create
The second annual SXSW Create brings together local and international members of the SXSW community to share disruptive creations, innovative tools and unique fabrication methods.
I was a little underwhelmed for the most part. Much smaller than the Dorkbot back in 2006. But one fundamental thing changed since then that makes everything today cooler: 3D printers. Below, some photos, videos and observations.
This is the Leap Motion Controller. It’s a little box that can track all your fingers in space. They started preorders last year and it looked so cool on the videos that of course I ordered one. Well, they are shipping in May, and I finally saw it in person. Useful for me? Unsure. Cool? As hell.
This is a demo of the MaKey Makey. Plug it in to turn almost anything into sort of a sensor. Here they are demoing a fruit piano. Kinda cute.
The star, in my opinion: 3D Printing. That was the Makerbot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer, slowly but surely building some little figurines from melted plastic filament. This stuff is amazing. It sells for $2,199, which sounds like a lot. But think of this: when I was a kid, I wanted a color flatbed scanner really bad. But they cost around $2,199. Now they cost less than $100. See what I mean? This stuff is going to be everywhere!
SXSW Gaming Expo
I used to be a serious gamer. I beat hundreds of games back in the day. I even came in second place in a 2004 FIFA Soccer tournament. But that was then. Now, my gaming friends are no longer around, and I got tired of getting mercilessly beaten by little kids when online gaming got big. So I pretty much stopped.
But that’s not enough to keep me from the SXSW Gaming Expo! Of course, the number one obvious thing is that gaming has largely shifted away from consoles and PCs towards iPhones, Android phones, and iPads. Some photos below.
Attention: you either A) Bring a big machine (DSLR camera) to take good photos or B) Bring a small machine (smartphone) to take shitty photos. You do not bring a big machine to take shitty photos.
