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Links December 2012

Steven Johnson gave an interesting TED talk about where good ideas come from [1]. He starts by attributing coffee replacing alcohol as a standard drink for some good ideas and then moves on to how ideas develop.

Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel gave an interesting and amusing TED talk about the ngram analysis of […]

Returning the Aldi Tablet

I have decided to return the 7″ Android tablet I bought from Aldi last week [1]. I still think that the tablet isn’t all bad, but the main problem I had is the short battery life. The battery can be entirely exhausted in less than an hour’s use. Another problem is the fact that most […]

Ingress

Today Google sent me an invite for Ingress – their latest augmented reality game [1]. The fact that they sent me the invitation while the Google Play store page for Ingress [2] tells me that it’s not available in my country (Australia) is interesting. Google obviously aren’t using their Big Brother powers effectively!

The way […]

Cheap Android Tablet from Aldi

I’ve just bought a 7″ Onix tablet from Aldi. It runs Android 4.0.4, has a 1GHz Cortex A8 CPU, 512M of RAM, 16G of flash storage, and a 800*480 display. They are selling rapidly and I don’t know how long they will last – probably you could get a returned one next week if […]

Recruiting at a LUG Meeting

I’m at the main meeting of Linux Users of Victoria (my local LUG). A couple of recruiting agents from Interpro [1] are here and have been working the crowd, one of them is on each side of the room and it seems that their plan is to speak to every person at the meeting and […]

Links November 2012

Julian Treasure gave an informative TED talk about The 4 Ways Sound Affects US [1]. Among other things he claims that open plan offices reduce productivity by 66%! He suggests that people who work in such offices wear headphones and play bird-songs.

Naked Capitalism has an interesting interview between John Cusack and Jonathan Turley about […]

Geeky Jeans

It’s likely that most people make things like comfort, style, and price the main criteria when purchasing clothes. But there are other things that can be more important such as the ability to fit a phone in the pocket.

My last pair of jeans was from Rivers (one of the more affordable Australian clothing stores […]

Rape Apology and LCA 2011

After a lecture at LCA 2011 included some inappropriate slides there was a long discussion on several mailing lists about the issues related to this. In February 2011 I wrote a blog post debunking some of the bogus arguments in question [1]. Of course the matter didn’t end there, at LCA 2012 I was drawn […]

Links October 2012

The F Word has an informative post about men commenting on Feminist blogs [1]. Most of it applies to any situation where a member of a powerful group comments on an issue related to a minority group. Near the end they say: I’ll also paraphrase and flesh out the most useful piece of advice I […]

Google mod_pagespeed

I’ve just downloaded and installed the Debian AMD64 package of the Google Apache Pagespeed module [1].

To see if it worked I used the Google PageSpeed insights tool which gave my blog a rating of 93% (and 88% for mobile) [2].

After installing mod_pagespeed I received the same scores. So it appears that Pagespeed isn’t […]