Linked List: August 3, 2010

Tuesday, 3 August 2010

Flickr’s New Photo Page 

I’ve been using it during the beta period, and I like it a lot.

True American Leadership 

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg:

This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

Coda Notes 1.0 

Panic’s fun, free Safari extension.

Warner Brothers Brings Back Looney Tunes 

Preview clip of a new Roadrunner-Coyote short. Looks good. Here’s a direct link to the MP4 video.

Tapbots’s Clever Solution to Allow Pastebot to Run in the Background 

Necessity, the mother of invention. (I’ve been running the beta for a few weeks; it works well.)

Thomas Hawk on Switching to a T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S From an iPhone 3GS 

He likes it overall — both the phone itself and especially T-Mobile’s Bay Area service. But here’s what it’s like to connect it to his MacBook:

Connecting the phone to my MacBook Pro is a nightmare and not at all intuitive. Here are the steps I have to take. 1. Go to the main settings menu. 2. Go to the applications submenu. 3. Go to the Development submenu. 4. Select USB debugging. 5. Select my notifications bar at the top of my phone. 6. Pull this bar down. 7. Click on the Ongoing “USB Connected.” 8. Click on Mount. I then get two drives that show up on my Mac. Both are called “No Name.” One just has two folders: movies and music. The other has a bunch more of the phone files. This process is not at all intuitive.

Most people would never get this to work.

Horace Dediu on Apple’s Cash Holdings 

Horace Dediu points out that many financial reporting services are overlooking over $20 billion in Apple’s assets:

To illustrate, the following chart shows the total cash equivalents for the company. The orange colored bars represent long-term securities. If they are excluded, an investor may conclude that Apple’s cash has been declining since 2008 when the opposite is true. The company is shifting an increasingly larger proportion of its holdings to long-term (but fully liquid) securities.

If Dediu’s Asymco isn’t on your daily-read list or in your RSS subscriptions, I highly recommend it. He’s been killing it. E.g., check out this comment he wrote yesterday, positing that today’s Android handsets are iPhone knock-offs, along the same lines as the various BlackBerry knock-offs that were popular a few years ago, like the Samsung Blackjack, Motorola Q, and HTC Dash.

Unboxing Field Notes County Fair Box Set 

Just got mine the other day. Lovely.

Hello? 

Erica Ogg, reporting for CNet, under the headline “iPhone Jailbreak Could Double as Security Hole”:

The jailbreak for the iPhone released over the weekend may have exposed a flaw in the iPhone’s mobile Safari browser.

There is no question about it — no “may”, no “could”. This is a massive security exploit, and it is in the wild.

Capo 2.0 

How can you not love an app whose slogan is “Reverse engineering rock and roll”?

Boy Genius on the BlackBerry Torch 9800 

Good hardware build quality, clunky software, and a lame screen.

Update: And here’s Michael Gartenberg’s first take.

RIM’s New BlackBerry Torch 

A touchscreen and a slide-out hardware keyboard, and a 360 × 480 display straight out of 2007.

New Yorker Cartoons Captioned With Kanye West Tweets 

I suppose it helps if you’re familiar with Kanye’s tweets, but some of these are sublime. (Via The AV Club.)

The Economist on the State of the Wintel Alliance 

Good overview of the current hurdles facing the industry’s two longest-standing titans. (They predict, matter-of-factly, that Ballmer will be “tossed out a window” if Microsoft doesn’t soon have a competitive footing in the tablet space.)