rarelyneeded

Cons: Does not show date in home screen icon. No, badge hacks do not count.

Sidenote: It’s crazy why the current date is displayed only in Calendar.app icon and lock screen. Why not at least in notification center?

I only started using Macs in the System 7 era. But this is still very cool.

Finally, a reason for Newsstand.app to exist

I’ve been hiding the iOS Newsstand.app on the very last of my iPhone screens, just because I cannot shove it into an Apple folder (where I put all of the unnecessary-for-me-yet-impossible-to-delete apps such as Stocks).

So yesterday Marco Arment released his New Thing, The Magazine, a Newsstand publification about technology. I do recommend you to check it out, based on the first issue it’s golden.

Which means no more hiding in the back, Newsstand.

Amazon released new vending machines

Marco Arment on the new Kindle Fires:
> Who’s going to care if a vending machine shows ads?

Sure, nothing wrong with that! I personally hate ads, but I certainly can see most people opting to save a couple of bucks on the list price.

The Innovations of Internet Explorer

Nicholas C. Zakas:

It seems funny to look back at the browser that has become a “bad guy” of the Internet and see that we wouldn’t be where we are today without it.

Yep.

Jeff Vogel on storytelling in games

Jeff Vogel’s role-playing games have always had a special place in my gamer heart. In this 20-min video he explains the process behind creating the backbone of his games, the storyline. Intriguing.

I’ve been playing the guitar (both electric and acoustic) for quite a while now. Come to think about it, I think it’s over 10 years when I bought my first guitar, a horrible Jackson/Charvel superstrat with an awful Floyd Rose-type tremolo. I’ve been playing ever since, but sometimes weeks if not months have passed by without me even touching my guitars. My level as a guitarist is nowhere near where it should be considering the amount of years. I really struggle with leads/solos and my chord strumming is erratic.

For the last year or so, however, there’s been a noticeable growth in my guitar-slinging skills, as we started a (cover) band with a couple of my colleagues. We rehearse weekly and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me as a guitarist! Seriously, the best way of learning to play is to play with friends. In our band the only one who really can play is the drummer, and I tend to think that having a good drummer who stays in time really helps me to keep nmy strumming in time as well.

Anyway, that’s a long introduction to the beef of this post. Yesterday I happened to stumble upon a YouTube video about pinch harmonics, a skill I don’t yet master. Even though the quality of the video is sub-par, the content was great, and through that video I ended up on the website of the guy behind that video, justinguitar.com. He has a lot of great stuff there, just by watching (a good deal of) the videos there I learned more on music theory and guitar playing in general than I have learned in the past 10 years combined. Time well spent.

But just watching videos or reading about theory doesn’t help you to ace those soloes. Time to rehearse!

Malware seems to be a real problem for Android

Kaspersky Labs:

Over the three-month period, the company found more than 14,900 new malicious programs targeting the platform.

Every now and then the geek in me rises it’s head and quietly whispers “Sick of that springboard? There are alternatives to iOS, you know!” to my ear. Then I see news like this and realize I’m not switching anywhere anytime soon.

Also, note to self: blog about vendor lock-in and Apple.

Finally a good use for Excel macros

Victor Jakubiuk:

NitroBird – a Twitter client for Excel – using Python, tweepy and DataNitro.

OK, so perhaps not a “good” use, and actually it’s not even using Excel macros but Python — but it’s a cool hack nonetheless.

Is it time for password-less login?

Even though I solve the password problem with 1Password, I can easily see what a wonderful idea this might be for the not-so-computer-savvy people.

Especially since OpenID’s an incomprehensible mess and OAuth is failing too.