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mano veikla ir atradimai internete

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March 27 2012

App Store updates

Firstly, read Wil Shipley’s piece on this. It’s great, and the issue is very real. Remember Tweetie 2? Here’s a MacWorld article from 2009 about the same “no paid upgrades” policy.

What I want to share is a couple of screenshots I took more than a year ago. iPhone screenshot makes it especially clear that paid upgrades is (or was) being worked on.

However, as with many things with Apple, developers probably won’t be able to do upgrade pricing before Apple itself needs that.

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March 07 2012

The new iPad

For me, the most mind-blowing thing wasn’t the retina display, or 4G LTE, or even iPhoto (although it was far better than I expected). It was the name of the new iPad.

Simply “The new iPad”. Everyone naturally expected that it will be called iPad 3. Then there were predictions that it will carry HD moniker. Turns out, neither is true. Apple never, ever mentioned the name of the new iPad.

The new iPad

Again, simple The new iPad

Or you can just go all Cmd+F’ing on the pages. iPad’s name is nowhere to be found.

“Have you seen the new iPad yet?”

“Apple’s newly released iPad”

That is absolutely amazing. When competitors compete for the craziest name, Apple drops out of the whole game. Their well-established release pattern makes it immediately clear which iPad is being talked about. And they can still refer to this particular generation as “iPad, 3rd gen.”, if there is a need (and I am sure tech journalists will still call it iPad 3, even though Apple never called it this way).

Just as with no-words logo, Apple pushes the boundaries with what is possible in branding.

And here’s a prediction: the next iPhone will simply be “The new iPhone”.

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February 06 2012

Temporary

This tumblr shall serve as a temporary space for my writing, while I do the following:

Decide what blogging platform to use
Install or implement it.
Add support for MarsEdit (quite important, I like this tool)
Design the blog
Hope that I do not change my mind about 1. before completing the design.

Knowing my technical requirements (blog system must be absolutely reliable, preferably static, should support both text posts and links, maybe even post-specific stylesheets, so on and so forth), this will take a while.

This playground is to begin exploring my voice, what and how I want to write; how often, about what topics, and to whom; using what tools and having what requirements for content.

Let’s see how this goes.

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January 30 2012

My review of ‘Midnight in Paris’ on Letterboxd

A lovely film, funny, with unique characters and plenty of awkward-hilarious moments. Haven’t seen many Allen films, but that’s how I imagined them.

However, there’s one big problem. Pretty much the whole movie is about one idea: that the present times are not satisfying or interesting, but it is foolish to chase after the past, after the long-gone golden age. That’s it. Everything else in the plot is a rather simplistic, clear and direct reveal of this idea. Enjoyable and fun, yet still very simplistic. The set up is very obvious, the development is without twists, and the ending was totally cheesy.

So expect many great moments and a few laughs - but don’t expect a great movie or an interesting story.

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Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong

So too will a somewhat related phenomenon, the spacing effect, first described by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. “If you study and then you wait, tests show that the longer you wait, the more you will have forgotten,” says Bjork. That’s obvious — over time, you forget. But here’s the cool part: If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned after this second study session.

Bjork explains it this way: “When we access things from our memory, we do more than reveal it’s there. It’s not like a playback. What we retrieve becomes more retrievable in the future. Provided the retrieval succeeds, the more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is.”

Note that there’s a trick implied by “provided the retrieval succeeds”: You should space your study sessions so that the information you learned in the first session remains just barely retrievable. Then, the more you have to work to pull it from the soup of your mind, the more this second study session will reinforce your learning. If you study again too soon, it’s too easy.

Something entirely new to me. Not the best tip for preparing for exam the night before, but great for long-term learning.

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September 23 2011

Cover

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July 02 2011

New tumblr app is so good, I just have to post something.

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June 20 2011

“ ICANN has .cheezburger ? #protolol ”

— codepo8

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May 13 2011

Tastiest Lazzania I’ve Eaten (Taken with instagram)

Reposted by

immortalman

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April 25 2011

More swamp (Taken with Instagram at Bakanauskas swamp)

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Sunny swamp (Taken with Instagram at Bakanauskas swamp)

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March 02 2011

Play fullscreen

Cable Car Ride in San Francisco

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January 12 2011

“ Ok, this was just the best comment I've ever read on reddit: www.reddit.com/... ”

— brokep

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January 03 2011

Play fullscreen

Turnabout Jazz Soul - Track 8 - Godot - The Fragrance of Dark Coffee

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December 17 2010

The idea of a Human Library first emerged in Copenhagen about a decade ago, as a way to break down prejudice by bringing people of different backgrounds together for one-on-one conversation. The Toronto Public Library held its first Human Library event at five branches on Nov. 6, attracting more than 200 users who checked out the likes of a police officer, a comedian, a sex-worker-turned-club-owner, a model and a survivor of cancer, homelessness and poverty. They’re all volunteers whose lives would make good reading, but even better one-on-one chatting. The library is considering make the program long-term, so a supply of human books will be regularly available to readers.

I had once an opportunity to attend such “human library”. It’s a brilliant experience — I hope this idea spreads around.

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December 15 2010

Play fullscreen

Henry in 3D

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December 01 2010

minimalmac:

Reeder for Mac – Public Beta

Even though it is still in beta, if you have need for any RSS reader on the Mac, I’d check out this one. It’s as wonderful as it’s iPhone and iPad counterparts and the first non-Apple app that I’m aware of to take on the new design direction Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) is heading in.

Just started using and love it already. It’s simple, keeps same shortcuts as Google Reader, and has elegant solution for opening pages. Also, it’s simple.

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November 30 2010

Spiral Path of a Blindfolded Man

Schaeffer, an American zoologist, observed that an amoeba placed on a cylindrical surface always moved in a spiral path around the cylinder. To further study spiral movement, Schaeffer blindfolded a right-handed friend and instructed him to walk a straight line across a country field. Schaeffer plotted his friend’s track, which described a clockwise spiral form until the blindfolded man happened to stumble on a tree stump.

I love how spiral gets smaller and smaller as walker gets tired or something.