* Posts by ari

13 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2008

Modular phone Ara to finally launch

ari

This is NOT what they promised. This is a base module with everything that makes it a phone, and some slots to add some extra stuff such as a camera or such, and possibly an extra display on the back of the phone... wow, much display, such useful, etc.

Here's a short rant I wrote on the matter:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-design-requires-breaking-laws-physics-ari-kolbeinsson

Kobo Glo HD vs Amazon Kindle Paperwhite: Which one's best?

ari

Re: Well from my experience

I feel like an idiot for not having thought of that printer filter trick. So obvious in hindsight. Thanks.

ari

Re: Interesting use of the Kobo

That is VERY interesting. Thanks for the link! Considering buying an extra Kobo now for that sort of Frankensteinery...

ari

Re: PIty. Most of the stuff I'm interested in is in PDF

Well, AC gives his Kindle Paperwhite experience, I can assure you that my experience of PDFs on the original Kobo Glo is equally bad.

Tablets are good at PDFs, e-ink devices such as the Kobo and Kindle are ONLY good at pure text. They truly excel at that, but suck at everything else. Still worth it for reading on :)

Hi-res audio folk to introduce new rules and weed out impure noises

ari

"It would be a brave person who said that HRA has no audible benefits whatsoever but..."

I am that brave person. Your home equipment can't deal with higher frequencies, neither the digital part nor the analogue part of your signal chain. If you throw a perfect HRA signal at your equipment you are likely to hear a difference but that difference will be mostly signal interference from your amplifier. The amp is simply designed to work really well for a certain band of frequencies...

Your speakers can't output these high frequencies either (and not your headphones either) and if the signal makes it to the speakers (or headphones) you'll either get interference or muddiness. You would need one or two extra tweeters specialised for higher frequencies to make HRA worth it.

Completely possible, but nobody has this equipment. I've never seen such equipment, at least.

Studios use high sampling rates and bitrates because they are working with multiple signals and suffer less signal degradation when mixing if high resolution audio is used there. After it's all been mixed together the hypothetical benefits are very, very small. And the real world benefits are nil.

Who wants SLEEP DEPRIVATION for Christmas?

ari

Re: 12 ppl

You can't. But this was probably the kind of study where participants tried all setups (normal book, kindle, probably no reading for control. I haven't read the research so I'm guessing here... But that research setup is called Repeated Measures) which increases the power quite a lot, and 12 subjects can give a surprising power if the study is correctly designed.

Of course you are right in that 12 people probably don't represent the general population, and even worse, were probably all college students. So, generalisability may be limited, but the small, quick study may be a really good start! (it would be crazy to start with hundreds of people. Expensive and unwieldy).

ari

Re: Backlight levels

Some reader apps on iOS will allow you to do this, Marvin being an example of this. Works really well!

What’s the KEYBOARD SHORTCUT for Delete?! Look in a contextual menu, fool!

ari

While it is obvious that keyboard commands are very fast if you know them the case is still that in the old world then the only people who actually managed to do anything more than type in some text and save it (or even just managed to do that) were people who were willing to spend many, many hours preparing to do their work.

Their work tended to focus on text or numbers, or a combination of text numbers and images (publish ing) and they were willing to spend the hundreds of hours required to learn their system, and most of them would then only use one or two systems.

Contrast that with today when the basic expectation is that anyone even thinking about doing anything more than restocking shelves at Tesco is expected to know how to use a word processor, spreadsheet, photo manipulation software, a desktop publishing system, and countless other software packages. Most of these people would NEVER have spent the time required to learn WordPerfect or LOTUS 1-2-3 or any other such arcane package.

OF COURSE these people are going to be inefficient and not understand what is going on underneath in the system... But they ARE getting stuff done that they would not have been able to in the "good old days"... (and I put the air quotes in on purpose)

ari

Re: Text editting

Can we then agree that vi is catastrophically efficient? i.e. really efficient up until the point that it really isn't efficient at all for the next few weeks... ;)

World's only flyable WWII Lancaster bombers meet in Lincs

ari

mmmmm warbirds

It would be utterly amazing to see two Lancs fly in formation...might make me cry a little.

I've seen a few warbirds fly, but last sunday I finally got to see a Spitfire fly, do a little fake dogfight, flybys, and other light stunts.

It was so BEAUTIFUL! I felt like I was ten years old again just gazing into the rainy sky and grinning.

My faves have to be the Mossie, Spifire, Lanc, Beufighter....and so on

Anyways, Vulture central should definitely post stories such as this one!

Apple MacBook

ari
Coat

Drop all antiquated ports, please

....but keep firewire.

Seriously, FW is in many ways superior to USB.

Most higher end amateur and and almost all pro audio gear (audio interfaces) are FW for a simple reason. USB doesn't ensure timing of packets transferred making it useless for audio work of any real quality. For me it doesn't really matter that much right now, but the next device on my shopping list is a FW audio interface. FW uses a different way of buffering which keeps the stream more even ensuring more accuracy.

FW also has a higher sustained data rate, again largely due to buffering methods. This makes a HUGE difference to everyone studying or playing around with audio or video.

Plus target disk mode is pretty neat.

Please guys, just ONE FW port.

I don't particularly like the reflective screen either, but doesn't bug me too bad. I don't always agree with their business or design decisions, but their design is still in general light years ahead of their competitors. Usability wise their hardware is the best I've used and OS X knocks anything else out of the water (any full OS for personal computers, that is) even with all its flaws.

Or as I sometimes put it, OS X is the least crappy OS on the market.

Mine's the one with all pockets stuffed full of Apple products

Apple recalls iPhone 3G power adaptors

ari

Not a non story

As a mac user (not a complete fanboi but prefer doing my daily work on my mac, less hassle. Also a WinXP, Win2003server, Solaris, Ubuntu... you get the picture)

Something like this is a serious issue and must be corrected. We all know that apple can bit a tad annoying regarding non-dangerous flaws, but they are pretty responsive on stuff like this.

As for the other iPhone issues, I have a iPhone3g and have not had any serious issues, did experience a few dropped calls but firmware upgrades have solved my problems. Only complaint would be battery life, but I knew that beforehand.

As for apple fanbois and apple haters. Really, grow up, all of you. They are just another company selling their idea of how things should be done. It won't suit everyone or every task but seems pretty good for many tasks.

This tendency of making hardware and software into religions is not constructive and silly. Zealotry in any direction is stupid and destructive (that goes for you too Linux fanbois)

Mitsubishi electric car to get Iceland test run in 2009

ari
Stop

Bottled water?

WTF does the price of bottled water have to do with it?

Nobody in Iceland would buy that crap as the whole country is full of natural springs an easy to get boreholes down to cold water level. Then you just bore a bit deeper and get hot water as well.

Lonely planet guide book not just wrong (fuel price) but also pointless.