Linked List: January 22, 2010

Friday, 22 January 2010

Google’s Nexus One Won’t Transcribe Curse Words Via Speech-to-Text 

I can confirm that swear words all appear as “####” in the transcription. So if you say “That’s fucking bullshit”, it’ll be transcribed as “That’s #### ####.”

‘Get Some Balls’ 

This nicely sums up my feelings on health care reform here in the U.S. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

TheNextTrain 

My thanks to TheNextTrain for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. TheNextTrain is an iPhone app for commuter rail passengers. It has offline train schedules for rail systems in 16 regions across the U.S. and Canada, including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco — along with maps for most of them. Completely replaces the need to carry paper train schedules.

TheNextTrain is available on the App Store for just $4.99.

What Analysts Should Ask Apple During Their Finance Call 

Excellent, must-read piece by MDJ’s Matt Deatherage, reprinted at Macworld:

Analysts: you may only get one shot at asking questions, so I’m here to help you with the do’s and don’ts of the conference call. I don’t have all the answers, but I haven’t missed one of these calls in nearly 14 years, so I have some experience. Our interests are temporarily aligned here—we all want more information from Apple, without spooking the executives so they run away from your questions. Here’s the basic map for the January 2010 conference call.

Canvas? 

After looking at the paint-splattered invitation design, a few DF readers have emailed me with the same idea Cabel Sasser tweeted on Monday:

Regarding the Apple invite, and just throwing this out there: what if it’s called “Canvas”?

Even without considering the invitation design, I love this name. It looks good, it sounds good, and it evokes the right feelings and ideas: thin, light, clean, crisp, blank, the thing great artwork is made upon. It’s a perfect name.

The Downside to the Kindle’s Free 3G Wireless 

From Amazon’s Kindle Development Kit terms:

Active content will be available to customers in the Kindle Store later this year. Your active content can be priced three ways:

  • Free — Active content applications that are smaller than 1MB and use less than 100 KB/user/month of wireless data may be offered at no charge to customers. Amazon will pay the wireless costs associated with delivery and maintenance.

  • One-time Purchase — Customers will be charged once when purchasing active content. Content must have nominal (less than 100 KB/user/month) ongoing wireless usage.

  • Monthly Subscription — Customers will be charged once per month for active content.

So for free and one-time-charge apps, there’s a monthly limit of 100 kilobytes of bandwidth. Go over that and the developer has to start paying the bill. As point of reference for just how small 100 KB is, the Daring Fireball RSS feed at this moment is 115 KB. With gzip compression, it shrinks to 36 KB. So even with compression, a free or one-time-charge Kindle app could only download the DF RSS feed twice per month without going over.