sangsara.net

  • MacHeist 4 ends today

    MacHeist 4 ends today. The annual bundle has gotten bigger and better — just US$29 for a ton of apps and services worth 20 times more — but they’ve struggled to reach the minimum target of 25,000. That was how many needed to be sold before the premium bonus apps became unlocked for everyone. After 8 days into the 10-day window, they gave up and opened them anyway. Now they’ve finally crossed the mark (26,053 at time of writing) with hours left to go.

    There’s probably a longer article in here about why this is the case. Bundles like these used to make a much bigger splash, and I remember a period where Groupon-like daily deal sites for Mac applications were like… daily deal sites for free iOS applications. I guess that’s where the attention has gone now, and much of the spending intent has followed the growth in mobile platforms. Prices there are generally lower too, and I wonder if this means independent Mac apps have to start charging less, or more, to keep profits up.

    Anyway, I highly recommend you look into MacHeist while it’s available. 25% of the money goes to charity, and you get a 15-month subscription to Evernote Premium as part of it. I usually pay US$45/year for Evernote and find it immensely useful as a place to store all the webpages I see and want to have searchable, shopping and reading lists, wholesale documents for safekeeping, and snippets of data in an offline notebook whenever I go on a trip. It’s essentially a digitized version of your memory for sanity. There are also great games like Braid, Bioshock 2, and the episodic adventures of Sam & Max, Jurassic Park, and Strong Bad, from developer Telltale Games. That’s like… a hundred hours of gameplay.

    One great utility was added this morning: Bartender. It’s not a cocktail recipes app, the world hardly needs more of those, but a tool that sits in your Mac’s menu bar and subsumes all the other menu bar items into it. I’ve greatly cleaned up the visual clutter on mine (made somewhat worse by recent versions of OS X preferring to show menu bar icons in monochrome only), moving things like Bluetooth status, Volume, Dropbox, and my Jawbone status monitor into Bartender’s “bar menu”. Good stuff, and normally sells for US$15.

  • Ashes out to sea

    Today we got on a little boat and went out halfway to Pulau Ubin, to release the ashes of four grandparents and great-grandparents. I am assured we had the necessary permits for this. Two of the oldest (from way before my time) were recently exhumed from a cemetery that was being decommissioned and reclaimed, and we’ve had the urns about for a few years, in anticipation of this moment. In the end, it was a drama-free affair that was over before sentiment could occur to anyone. Before he began, the man handling everything asked us, in Mandarin, if there was anything we wanted to say to them. But what can you say?

    As a person still alive, the idea of being dispersed to nowhere in particular seems strange. I think I would like to be kept around the house when my time comes. I’m not fond of the sea, or swimming. On top of the holographic quantum fiber modem would be fine.

  • The Round Down, 8 Weeks In

    I started The Round Down on a bit of a whim two months ago, armed only with the conviction of knowing that I’d long wanted to do an email newsletter of human-approved articles and links for like-minded people. The idea of writing/commissioning original content for such a vehicle was definitely on my mind, but seemed secondary and much harder to get started with, and getting started was priority one.

    Getting YJ Soon and David Liu onboard to share editorial and news gathering duties, with David focusing on games (check out his gaming podcast, Staring at Screens), has made it possible to keep up.

    Eight weeks and as many issues is enough time to get settled. We noticed an unconscious trend towards quantity, and the last few that went out had a touch too many things to look at. The initial goal was a small and unintimidating selection of links for weekend reading, nothing that feels like work, and we will be trying hard to steer that course from now on.

    Thanks for supporting this project (no one has unsubscribed, yet) and if you would like to sign up to receive it every weekend, it’s free at TheRoundDown.com.

  • iPhone 5 Camera Comparison vs. Ricoh GR Digital III

    The new iPhone 5 features an improved camera, mainly in the area of image signal processing in the A6 chip, which reportedly allows it to do intelligent sharpening, noise removal, and pixel binning for low-light situations. The lens elements have also been rearranged, resulting in a slightly different field of vision from the iPhone 4S. There’s also the new sapphire crystal lens cover which resists scratches — unfortunately, I already have a tiny speck of dust on the inside of mine, which I’ll have to get them to clean at some point.

    I’m more interested in seeing how the iPhone 5 competes with other point and shoot cameras than with the iPhone 4S. Here are two scenes taken with the Ricoh GR Digital III (my review here), a high-end compact comparable to Panasonic’s LUMIX LX3/5/7 series, and Canon’s S90/95/100 cameras.

    The photos below are direct from camera and have not been fixed or enhanced. The GRD III is something of a prosumer camera, and if handled correctly, i.e. with manual controls and lots of fiddling, is capable of some great results. For parity with the iPhone 5, these photos were taken in fully automatic mode, letting the camera figure things out.

    Ricoh GRD 3

    I had to take this shot twice because the Ricoh chose a very shallow focus, directed on the leaves in the middle, which left the stone duck and foreground leaves blurred out. It’s a little underexposed, but the larger sensor gives some beautiful detail to the fern.

    iPhone 5

    The iPhone 5 analyzed the same scene, and chose to keep a relatively deep focus for a usable shot the first time around. The photo is also noticeably warmer (pleasant, but perhaps inaccurate) and brighter. This photo is good to go without any editing, which is how most users want it. No problems with sharpness in the details.

    Ricoh GRD 3

    The GRD had trouble focusing again, and ended up with a spot in the middle (above and to the right of her nose), which keeps the dog’s legs in focus but not the face. Although what fine details that were in focus got captured with a good amount of clarity, the photo is pretty dull and boring on the whole. Your aunt would not consider this a keeper without a trip to iPhoto.

    iPhone 5

    Again, brighter and warmer. I don’t think the iPhone makes everything warmer, only in shade and indoor lighting conditions. None of the daylight shots I’ve seen so far look overly warm. Sharpness is consistent across all areas of interest, and noise is acceptable for ISO 400. Fine fur details are not as well resolved as in the GRD photo, but this may be down to JPEG compression. Using an app that allows setting lower JPEG compression, such as 645 Pro, may compensate for this.

    For most purposes, I can’t see why the iPhone 5 wouldn’t be an adequate camera replacement. In terms of straight-from-the-camera usability, these photos are astounding compared to the GRD III, which used to cost in the region of USD$500-600 (it has now been replaced by the GRD IV model).

    I’ve gone on a few trips where I ended up taking all or most of my photos on an iPhone 4/4S, with few regrets. Focusing on the 4S was a little touchy, and it tended to take photos before focus had fully locked, if you hit the button too soon; this seems to work the way it should on the iPhone 5.

  • Why Can’t Twitter Be Like Foursquare?

    Turf Geography Club

    I never thought little ol’ Foursquare could lead the way for Twitter, but their approach to the third-party access and monetization problem shows more class and understanding. For the past few weeks now, instead of investing in a user experience that users would choose, Twitter’s stated solution has been to make their apps the only ones in town.

    Thanks to a tweet from @tarngerine today, I discovered Turf Geography Club, a location-based iPhone game built atop Foursquare’s place database, with additional Monopoly-like mechanics for upgrading and defending your property. It stands out from all the other “check-in and own this location” type apps by taking a flat-out fun (as opposed to a utility) approach: retro 16-bit style graphics, a Wes Anderson-inspired aesthetic (evident in the name, video trailer, and writing), bears, compasses, illustrated logbooks, and nonsensical references to an eternal struggle between man and nature.

    What I liked was how I could suddenly start using Turf as my Foursquare client of choice, checking in as I usually do, but also playing this separate, app-specific metagame at the same time. Likewise, I can choose to use Path to document my movements with friends, and share a subset of those actions to Foursquare, for my other contacts to see them. Or I could document something private in Day One, the journaling app, and still check in to Foursquare from there where the location made sense (publicly, without sharing the contents of my journal entry).

    Whatever you think of Foursquare and the people who use it, you can’t deny that this is what everyone would love Twitter to continue being, and what the company seems bent on defying: a confident social platform open to innovative ways of being used.

    Foursquare recently updated their mobile apps in a big way, taking focus away from previous key features such as Mayorships, and emphasizing discovery and recommendations instead. The Foursquare app is now really good at showing you things of interest nearby, in categories such as food, shopping, and sightseeing, based on recommendations from other users. I can’t get those in Path or Turf, but my one-way actions in those apps feed back into the enrichment of Foursquare. That’s reason enough for me to keep the Foursquare app on my phone in addition to all the other ones that offer check-in functionality.

    Twitter’s mobile apps also do a couple of things that third-party apps aren’t allowed to. It shows interactions that your friends have had on the service: tweets they’ve liked, people they’ve recently started following, and it shows supposedly personalized things of interest: local trending topics, and popular links being shared. The latter is where their advertising monetization is meant to happen, and it’s something that no one loves because it’s often dead wrong about what we want to see.

    Imagine if Foursquare’s app showed you places you would never go, or check-ins from people you didn’t know or like. What would be the value in that? Instead, contextual intelligence and expert data mining help Foursquare stay valuable and interesting to users when they want to explore, while their availability to third party apps keeps users active and in the equation. The people at Twitter can’t go wrong throwing everything behind the creation of that value, in the interests of long-term viability, instead of shutting down the future of their service that may come from apps like Turf.

  • Learning about email newsletters the hard way, week 2

    Issue 2 of The Round Down is out, but I had to abandon the TinyLetter service at the very last minute when it flagged the finished newsletter as containing spam, and refused to send it out until a human on their team could verify it wasn’t. That simply doesn’t work for our weekend publishing schedule, so I decided that relationship was over.

    Although TinyLetter was acquired by Mailchimp, it doesn’t seem to share tools and services with its larger parent, which is honestly the only game in town if you want to do full-featured newsletters for no money down. I’m betting on it being more reliable and letting us do neat things like submit posts by email. Issue #2 went out without getting caught in a spam filter, so that’s a start.

    TinyLetter provides a front page for your newsletter, but Mailchimp does not. I’m now using a custom domain + Tumblr for that, and that’s where old issues will go too. http://therounddown.com

    One thing I wish I’d caught: a link that got corrupted in the Markdown to HTML conversion, that I forgot to fix. Rushing to set up Mailchimp and Tumblr over lunch didn’t allow time for a final check. With all other web publishing being of the instant and editable sort, and this being my first go at using email like this, it was something of a surprise that I couldn’t just reach out and edit it afterwards. Hard to keep a print production mentality when you’re writing in Google Docs.

    Subscribe to The Round Down by email.

  • Slava’s Snowshow, Singapore

    Snow storm, Slava's Snow Show.
    Snowstorm finale, Instagrammed from my iPhone

    My girlfriend and I attended last night’s performance of the award-winning Slava’s Snowshow (now on till the 9th of September, at the Marina Bay Sands theaters), which isn’t easily described because it has clowns, but isn’t really for kids; its narrative has no binding logic, but it says a lot without words; there’s snow, as promised, but really it’s about dreams, playacting, physical comedy, scenes of profound Godot-esque surrealism (as you’d expect from Russian clowns) , departures, alienation, and (I got the sense of this) having fun by being lost.

    The Times of London called it “a theatre classic of the 20th century”, and its creator, Slava Polunin, was formerly of the Cirque du Soleil where he served as a clown-in-chief of sorts.

    I don’t want to spoil it too much, but as long as you’re sitting in the stalls, you can’t escape being immersed in its key scenes. The performers regularly break the fourth wall (does this apply to the stage?), multiple objects and effects break free from the front and rush to the back of the hall, creating for adults a sense of wonderment that evokes memories of childhood play.

    Even at around 80 minutes, it’s all over a little too quickly. I wish I’d paid a little more attention to the details, and the use of music (which was excellent, and the hall handled acoustics well). It’s something I can definitely see myself going for again someday, somewhere else in the world.

    There’s about a week and a half to go, and tickets are still available. Try the link below for the Marina Bay Sands’ website.

    Event info

    Photo credit: Marina Bay Sands

  • The Round Down: Issue 1

    I was at Facebook’s local office earlier this week and saw a poster to the effect of “It’s better to launch than to be perfect”. Now, I can think of many examples where this approach is just dangerous, but naturally it’s different when a capable company like Facebook says it (when was the last time the site went down for a day?). For a while now, I’ve had the idea of putting out a catch-up newsletter on weekends. Somehow, I started drafting one up this week. Call it a beta. Do subscribe here, and we’ll see if this thing gets anywhere near perfect.

    Thanks to YJ Soon for his kind assistance with this issue.

    ★☆ THE ROUND DOWN ☆★

    “A Condescending Publication for Those Who Slept Through the Week”

    Issue #1 v2

    Tech

    Apple vs. Samsung
    The patent trial of the year saw closing comments from both sides this week, and although a verdict in the somewhat esoteric case was not expected to be reached by a jury of nine regular people in just 3 days, that’s exactly what happened: in Apple’s favor. Samsung will now appeal the $1bn damages owed for their “slavish copying” of the iPhone’s software, hardware, and trade dress design.

    Jury Awards $1 Billion to Apple in Samsung Patent Case

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    From the If-You-Can’t-Beat-‘Em Dept
    Smartphones have all but replaced the traditional digital camera for most consumers, and Nikon’s latest compact camera got the memo. Powered by the Android Gingerbread OS, with a large touchscreen on the rear, it’s really a modern mobile device with better optics. Or, given Android’s openness, a camera that’s just as likely as you to pick up an infection on holiday.

    Nikon Launches Its First “Smartphamera,” the Nikon Coolpix S800c With Android OS

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    We Save Photos on Our PCs, But Not Blog Posts
    Have you gone all-in on the personal cloud? Surely the thought of all your stuff just vanishing has crossed your mind. Dave “Father of RSS” Winer reminds us that blogs, too, are impermanent. If you love what you post, don’t rely on a Google or WordPress to pay your publishing fees forever. It’s good advice, take it from someone who has Posterous sites circling the sink. The newly-refreshed Squarespace.com looks like a good option.

    The Web is Socialist, But It’s Not a Family

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    Culture

    Do You Know Where Pop Music Comes From?
    Those sticky summery earworms: you’ll still hear them everywhere, but now they’re being chosen and propelled into the charts by Facebooking young ‘uns as much as the suits from Big Radio. We’ll spare you the obligatory Call Me Maybe pun.

    The New Rise of a Summer Hit: Tweet It Maybe

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    YouTube Pick

    Dayum! A Tasty Burger Review in Song
    Speaking of summer hits, the Gregory Brothers’ “Dayum” is another instant left-of-mainstream classic in the tradition of their “Double Rainbow Song”. This video takes an enthusiastic burger review (shot in the parking lot of a Five Guys) and turns it into an anthem for double-cheese supersizing.

    OH MY DAYUM

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    Top Tweets

    @danielpunkass: Apple celebrates $1 Billion award from Samsung by misplacing it in $100 Billion pile.

    @FrescoJesus: MY FACE!!! WHAT HAPPENED TO MY FACE!!!!!! (Context)

    @thewaveparticle: When I was little, I asked what my dad did at the office. He tried to explain, but I couldn’t understand him. Now, the tables are turned.

    @om: Random observation: if you have to use the phrase “quadrant” to describe your policies, you are no longer a consumer company. (Context)

    @willowbl00: I like to shout “have you tried polyamory” at the screen during love-dramas.

    =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

    Wood for the Read Later Fire

    You’ll Never Be Chinese — Prospect Magazine

    Death and taxes. You know how the saying goes. I’d like to add a third certainty: you’ll never become Chinese, no matter how hard you try, or want to, or think you ought to. I wanted to be Chinese, once. I don’t mean I wanted to wear a silk jacket and cotton slippers, or a Mao suit and cap and dye my hair black and proclaim that blowing your nose in a handkerchief is disgusting. I wanted China to be the place where I made a career and lived my life. For the past 16 years it has been precisely that. But now I will be leaving.

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    THE END.

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