Linked List: September 4, 2009

Friday, 4 September 2009

Amazon Returns Deleted Kindle Books ★

CNN:

Yesterday Amazon emailed customers affected by the mass deletion and offered them a free, and no doubt properly licensed, copy of any book they lost, or the option of a check for $30.

This is why I like Amazon.

In Praise of the Sci-Fi Corridor ★

Martin Anderson:

Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they’re so utilitarian by nature - really they’re just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are ‘sold’ to viewers, movie magic is close at hand.

(Via Andy Baio.)

Trivia Wars ★

My thanks to Zephyr Creative for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Trivia Wars, their $1 iPhone trivia game. It has a nice interface, tough questions, and, best of all, supports multiplayer gameplay over Bluetooth.

PMC Charity Fund Raising: Bundle Builder ★

Seth Dillingham is selling bundles of great Mac and iPhone apps, with the proceeds going directly to a great charity.

TidBITS: More Hidden Refinements in Snow Leopard ★

Nice list of Snow Leopard details from Jeff Carlson.

Loopt Now Optionally Updates Your Location Continually ★

This is interesting. Via a deal with AT&T, Loopt — a location-based social networking service — can now track and update the location of your iPhone even when the Loopt app isn’t running.

To be clear, this does not — repeat, not — mean that the Loopt iPhone app is able to run in the background on your iPhone. Headlines like this one at Silicon Alley Insider are bound to confuse people. This is a server-to-server system between Loopt and AT&T.

Update: It’s worth pointing out that the service is not free. You get a 14-day trial, and after that, it’s a $4 per month addition to your AT&T bill.

iPhone Owners Aren’t New Year’s Resolution Gym Members ★

Love this analogy from Michael Mulvey, regarding AT&T’s inability to handle the traffic from iPhone owners:

AT&T was happy to sign up as many iPhone customers as they could. Their mentality was probably very similar to gyms who sign up as many people as they can in January when everyone makes their New Year’s Resolution to lose weight. Gym are packed the first few months after January but then there’s a drop-off in attendance, because people tend to slack off, so even though the gym might ‘overbook’ their spaces, it’s only being used by a fraction of the members.

Kottke on the Unthrill of Upgrading Apple Kit ★

Jason Kottke on upgrading to a new MacBook Pro and iPhone 3GS:

Which is where the potential difficulty for Apple comes in. From a superficial perspective, my old MBP and new MBP felt exactly the same… same OS, same desktop wallpaper, same Dock, all my same files in their same folders, etc. Same deal with the iPhone except moreso… the iPhone is almost entirely software and that was nearly identical. And re: Snow Leopard, I haven’t noticed any changes at all aside from the aforementioned absent plug-ins.

So, just having paid thousands of dollars for new hardware and software, I have what feels like my same old stuff.