Websinal Archives
November 9, 2010
When Apple released their new MacBook Air last month, the industry was surprised (but not too surprised) to see that they didn’t ship with Adobe Flash Player pre-installed. Macs, along with nearly every other PC, had shipped standard with Flash pre-installed for well over a decade. Apple has been at odds with Adobe (specifically regarding Flash) lately, so while it was a significant move, it wasn’t completely unwarranted.
Once the Airs were out in the wild, a few tech bloggers and reviewers decided to test how performance changed after they installed Flash. The results were pretty shocking: amongst other things, the battery life dropped by as much as 2 hours once Flash was installed and used regularly. Two hours!
The technical details of why or how that happens are beyond the scope of this post. But those details weren’t specific to the MacBook Air. Meaning that theoretically, any Mac would have a better battery life without Flash installed. The only reason that this was suddenly discovered with the MacBook Airs was because Flash is quite a bit easier to install than to efficiently uninstall, so having a laptop that shipped as a clean slate made doing those benchmarks much easier.
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Posted in Websinal | Adobe | Apple | Flash | HTML5 | iPad | iPhone | Web Development
June 28, 2010
Today marks the 22nd consecutive day that I’ve written 750 (or more) words at 750words.com. And I would like to officially encourage you to try the site out as well.
What is it? Basically, 750words.com presents a blank canvas for you to do a daily mind dump. It it a journal? A blog? A free-association experiment? Yes.
Everybody uses it differently, and their use often varies day to day. Some people sit down, start typing, and don’t stop until they have 750 words with no plan or structure whatsoever. Some people use it as more of a personal journal.
My entries tend to be a cross between a journal and a mind dump. I usually type out what’s at the forefront of my mind that day, and in so doing, I usually get a better grasp on it myself, and it becomes easier to articulate should I talk or write about it later. I don’t worry about making sure everything makes sense or ties together. I’m just trying to get it out of my head and onto (digital) paper.
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Posted in Websinal | Applications | Blogging | Journaling | Statistics | Writing
November 25, 2009
A long, long time ago – in 1993 – AT&T ran a campaign called You Will, that showcased a few visions of where they predicted telecommunications would be in the next 10-15 years. And wouldn’t you know it, they were pretty danged close on most of it.
My friend Molly sent me the link, and I found it absolutely captivating. I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards.
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Posted in Websinal | AT&T | Commercials | Future | Mobile | Technology | The 90s | The Internet
October 29, 2009
Friend, entrepreneur, and well of sarcastic wit, Jacob Morse recently introduced me to a sleek little free Mac app called I Love Stars. It has a single, minimal purpose and that is to help you rate your iTunes library.
I know of very few iTunes users that have taken the time to rate their library, and even fewer that know the merits of doing it. The main benefits of having your library rated are in the making of Smart Playlists and Party Shuffles. Both create playlists based on various criteria; one such criteria being song rating. For instance, if you were suddenly hit with the urge to listen to some good jazz (some GOOD jazz), you could create a Smart Playlist of only music in the Jazz genre with a rating of 4.5 or more stars. Boom. Done. Consider yourself well-jazzed.
But of course, this only works if your library is rated. Otherwise, you would either have to manually create that playlist or just skip through the playlist when a sub-good song came on. Lame.
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Posted in Websinal | Applications | Free | I Love Stars | iTunes | Mac | Music | Ratings
September 13, 2009
Have you ever noticed how when you leave a comment on a blog, it displays a boring, generic gray head next to your comment instead of the gorgeous, colorful picture of Webby McGee next to the comment he posted before yours? Well, it’s because Webby has a Gravatar, and you don’t. Be jealous. But don’t just let that jealousy burn within you; use it to fuel your retribution.
You need to get a Gravatar of your own.
Gravatars (or Globally Recognized Avatars) are exactly what their extremely vague name implies. They are avatars or profile pictures that work across multiple blogs; and they make them more beautiful. To put it simply, you create a Gravatar account, tie it your email address, and upload an image of yourself. From that point on, anytime you leave a comment on a Gravatar-enabled blog using that email address, your comment will have your beautiful image instead of the boring generic one. It’ll even roll back out to any comment you’ve posted in the past.
“So just how many blogs are ‘Gravatar-enabled’?”, you ask? Well, Gravatars have been integrated into nearly every major blogging platform (WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type, etc); they’re ubiquitous on the web. There’s a very good chance that every single blog you frequent supports Gravatars.
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Posted in Websinal | Blogging | Commenting | Gravatar | Wordpress
September 9, 2009
Nope, you’re not mistaken. Your RSS reader isn’t lying to you, though I’m surprised you’re able to see anything through all the cobwebs that have probably accumulated over this pane in Google Reader. But yes there is, in fact, new content on Cabeeb.com. And if you’ve followed your curiosity to actually navigate to http://cabeeb.com, you’ll hopefully notice that content isn’t the only thing that’s new.
This blog has been horrifically overdue for a jump-start for far too long now. I can’t imagine anyone disputing that my blogging report card this past year is one giant F-. Why, I even had the audacity to “relaunch” with a new design a little less than a year ago. Since then, I’ve posted three (3) full blog posts, and possibly a dozen aside updates. I should be ashamed of myself, and as luck would have it, I am.
Fortunately, as luck would further have it, I’m not too ashamed to admit my mistakes and move past them. And in this case, moving past them looks a whole heck of a lot like what you’re seeing right now.
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Posted in Websinal | Blogging | Eliss | iPhone | Phoenix | Relaunch | Web Design | Web Development
