There are a few DRM, third-party-vendor lock-in, and other monopolistic and otherwise consumer-hostile reasons. But no good reasons.
Discuss.
Apple's dock connector: Threat? or Menace?
There is no sane reason for the dock connector to be anything other than micro-USB.
83 Comments
Tags: computers, conspiracies, corporations, firstperson, mac, phones
ICK ST
This is no simple jigsaw-puzzle fail. No amount of rotation of swapping of tiles fixes this, so how did it happen? Actually I'm not sure the font size is the same, either.
Hey, you can see it on Street View too!
Tags: sf
"Charging not supported" my ass
Dear Lazyweb,
My iPhone's dock connector appears to have gotten gunked up, and because Jobs is a profit-chiseling cockmuncher, this means that it keeps going into "Charging is not supported with this accessory" mode (still able to sync, but won't charge). It works about 10% of the time when I plug it into my dock and about 70% of the time when I plug it into the cable directly.
I can't see any obvious gunk. I've tried canned air; nothing. I've tried cutting down a pencil eraser so that it fits in the hole and scraping; that may have helped a little, but not much. Any other suggestions?
Update: I still don't know what went wrong, but they gave me a new phone!
Tags: computers, conspiracies, firstperson, lazyweb, phones
Facebook Connect comments RSS feed, finally.
I just wrote this: fbcomments.pl.
If you are using "Facebook Connect" to add a Facebook comments box on your web site, Facebook gives you no way to be notified when someone has posted a new comment -- I guess you are expected to just go and hit reload on each of your pages that accepts comments to see when a new one has arrived? Seriously?
So, this script uses the Facebook API to create an RSS feed of recent comments posted on your site via your Facebook Application. Run it from cron.
Likewise, it can generate a feed of comments posted to a "page" on Facebook itself, another thing for which they provide no RSS-based notifications.
Also, if you authorize your application to have full read-access to your personal Facebook account (which might not be a good idea, depending) then this script can generate a feed of any photos that your friends have posted -- which I wanted since, for no sane reason, photos are omitted from the RSS feeds that Facebook does provide.
Enjoy...
PS: Facebook API: "You are lost in a twisty maze of Perl generating Javascript generating not-quite-SQL beneath not-quite-OAuth. To generate RSS. You have been eaten by a Grue."
See also: Mirroring Twitter onto Facebook, plus bells, whistles.
Update, Jul 2012: I no longer use Facebook Connect, so I don't need this for its original purpose; but in the intervening years, I had been using it to convert my Facebook stream to an RSS feed. Then of course Facebook went and deprecated the API that I was using so I rewrote that part as facebook-rss.pl.
Tags: computers, dnalounge, firstperson, lazyweb, www
@dnalounge calendar CSS tweaks
I've made some changes to the CSS on the calendar to (try to) make the layout look prettier in various sizes of windows and phones. Please take a look and let me know if it screws up (or even just looks ugly) in your browser or on your device. Try out various window and font sizes.
Basically there are three layouts now -- 4, 3 and 2 columns -- depending on how wide the window is, by using @media selectors. I tested this in Safari, Firefox, Opera and Opera Mobile on OSX, and on iPhone and iPad, but I'm not totally sure that measuring "max-width" in "em" is a portable thing to do.
What the fashionable gargoyle is wearing this season
LooxcieIt's a bluetooth headset with a 640x240 f2.8 video camera with a five hour buffer. It sounds like you have to manually turn it on to record, but it continuously fills a thirty second buffer, so when you hit record, it starts recording 30 seconds ago, like Tivo.
No iPhone support yet.
Tags: phones, robots, the future
