Ken Newquist's Blog at Lafayette College
Posts about technology, including tips, tricks, and hacks.
The problem with Siri is that she’s just too … friendly. GLaDOS (of Portal 2 fame), with her constant barrage of sarcasm and derision, would mix things up nicely. Of course, she’d also try to kill you, but hey, all great advances in technology come with a few drawbacks.
I’ve posted some thoughts on IE9 and HTML5 to the ITS Blog.
Netflix has a blog post up discussing their distributed approach to using Amazon’s AWS service, and how they weathered its April 2011 outage. It’s a good read, especially for anyone whose interested in scaling up their apps for use with AWS.
I got an iPhone in December and I almost immediately dropped it. Shaken by that experience, I got an Otter case that has a rubber grip around the sides and back, as well as a reinforced shell that wraps around the outside of my phone. It makes my phone look like the Hummer of iPhones, … Read more
The latest edition of the ITS Coffee Break is available for download. In Episode #66, Courtney Bentley and I talk WordPress, digital magazines, and the end of the social bookmarking site Delicious. Get the podcast.
Everyone hates those boring, black-text-on-white-background PowerPoint presentations whose talking points are more like mini-dissertations. This Google Docs presentation stomps those kinds of basic, excruciatingly boring slideshows into oblivion. It’s amazing to think that everything — including the animations — was done through a Google Doc. Engadget: Google Docs presentation makes PowerPoint weep, beg for mercy
The Evolutionary Void is the third in Peter F. Hamilton’s Void series. The series takes place few hundred years after the events of Pandora’s Star/Judas Unchained. In it, the Greater Commonwealth — an expansive human civilization that’s spread through much of the galaxy — and its Artificial Intelligence allies find themselves attempting to deal with a faction of humanity hellbent on evolving the species into “post-physical existence” … whether the rest of us want it or not.
Safari’s a decent web web browser, but I miss having Chrome and Firefox on the iPad. Switch isn’t one of the mainstream browsers, but is an alternative. It’s claim to fame is that it lets you have multiple user accounts, so three different people can use the same iPad but have their own bookmarks, preferences, … Read more
Viget Labs, the folks who did the redesign of Lafayette’s web site, has a good post about using the iPad as a note-taking tool. They run down the pros and cons of the various note-taking apps on the device, including Notes, Simplenote, Evernote, Soundpaper and Penultimate. I’ve personally been using Pages for note-taking. It … Read more