Linked List: March 1, 2013

Friday, 1 March 2013

Spec Submission for The New Yorker’s Infographic Department 

I decided to fix the infographic that accompanied Tim Wu’s open-versus-closed piece. Think I nailed it.

iCloud’s Spam Filtering Black Hole 

Dan Moren and Lex Friedman:

Through our own rigorous testing, we’ve managed to confirm that emails containing the phrase “barely legal teen” are simply never delivered to iCloud inboxes. In fact, we found that even emails with the offending phrase contained in an attached PDF — even a zipped PDF — were blocked.

Sounds to me like an overzealous spam filter, not some sort of censorship, but the result is the same.

Name Mangler 3.0 

Great update to Many Tricks’s file renaming utility for the Mac. Great combination of power and simplicity. (And an interesting sub-story here, regarding a developer’s baseless charge of UI copying.)

The Other Google Glass Experience 

Mark Hurst:

The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them. I’ll give an easy example. Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you’ll suspect that you don’t have their undivided attention. And you can’t comfortably ask them to take the glasses off (especially when, inevitably, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally — here’s where the problems really start — you don’t know if they’re taking a video of you.

My hope is that restaurants and bars will ban them.

Chromebook Pixel Compared to MacBooks 

Another great hardware review, this one by Ian Betteridge:

The Pixel makes me feel that Google probably took one look around its own campus at the plethora of Macs people were using, despite all of them mostly using web apps, and wondered why there wasn’t a Chromebook which could tempt its own employees to ChromeOS. The Pixel is the answer to that — and also for people like me, who wants a good quality machine and are happy to pay a premium price for it. […]

But it’s also a statement about Google, too, because it says that Google can do hardware with the same attention to detail and quality that Apple does. It’s not a shot across Apple’s bows, but more putting a flag in the ground that says “Come on Cupertino, we can do hardware — you think you can do services?”

Indeed, the Chromebook Pixel seems like another bit of evidence that Google is getting better at what Apple does best faster than Apple is getting better at what Google does best.

‘Microsoft Has a Huge Chicken-and-Egg Problem’ 

Steven Frank reviews (and mostly likes) the Surface Pro.

The Web Standards Project: ‘Our Work Here Is Done’ 

A remarkably successful activist group that changed the world for the better. Bravo, and thank you.