Samsung announces a speaker dock with vacuum tubes.

So awesome and going right to my gadgets board on Pinterest (No, Pinterest is not just for moms).

Jim Darymple reacting to my plea for publishers to not make iPad magazines with giant PNGs for pages:

Magazine publishers that use giant PNG images just don’t give a shit about their customers.

Not only do publishers not care, but they’re just being plain lazy.
The iPad is an opportunity for publishers to create truly new, unique and engaging reading (and watching and interactive) experiences.
By no means is it the only way, but just look at what Apple has created with iBooks Author and the inspiration for iBooks Author, Al Gore’s Our Choice book-app.

FishbowlNY: Magazines Look Terrible on The New iPad

Over the past several days, complaints about how bad magazines look on the iPad have been rolling in. The reason, according to Mashable, is that the older magazine apps simply weren’t built to handle the new iPad’s high resolution “retina display,” so everything looks blurry.

How about publishers stop making their magazines a big, fucking stack of PNGs and start to use actual text. The kind of text you can select and copy and paste. And look up in in-app dictionaries.
People are complaining about how much bandwidth their new Retina display iPads are using. While it’s true the new iPad requires higher resolution graphics, developers also have to find ways to make their applications as efficient as possible.
Update: Steve Wright from Future Publishing emailed me to let me know his company does not make iPad magazines from stacks of big-ass images. Seems their magazine Tap! does things the right way.

NYTimes: Hello, Cruel World

17% of our sample of Drew University’s Class of 2011 is unemployed. 39% have full-time jobs, including six who have both full- and part-time jobs. 35% of students who are employed part time have two or more jobs. 74% of students who are interning are unpaid. 22% of students are in graduate school. 34% of jobs involve food service, retail, customer service, clerical or unskilled work.

It’s a much different world than the one I graduated into back in 1999.

MacRumors reports Samsung’s VP for Design is offended by Apple’s allegations of copying.
Well, I’m offended at Samsung’s VP for Design being offended.
Remember Asia is where they embrace Shanzai.

Shanzhai (Chinese: ±±ÂØ®; pinyin: shƒÅnzh√†i; alternatively spelt shanzai or shan zhai) refers to Chinese imitation and pirated brands and goods, particularly electronics. Literally “mountain village” or “mountain stronghold”, the term refers to the mountain stockades of regional warlords or bandits, far away from official control. “Shanzhai” can also be stretched to refer to people who are lookalikes, low-quality or improved goods, as well as things done in parody.

Yes, I know Shanzai is Chinese and Samsung is a Korean company, but the practice of imitating others products is pervasive across all of Asia.

From Electronista:

HP’s 2012 shareholder meeting on Wednesday saw Apple become a centerpiece of its conversation. During the question and answer session, most questions centered around why HP was not more like its fellow Southern Bay Area counterpart, which had a tenfold larger market worth even though it spent less on research and development. When asked if she had a vision like the late Steve Jobs, CEO Meg Whitman argued that the company had to place more bets on “disruptive” innovation like Apple, creating categories or fundamentally changing them instead of the mostly “evolutionary” approach HP used.

Sure, HP just needs to be disruptive like Apple.
And I just need to be musical like Thom York to be a great musician.
Easy.

While we’re on the topic, this was recommended to me via Twitter from @JoshuaTheory.
Fun track. Feliz Viernes.

This is awesome and nuts.
Jason Bognacki hacked a 1920’s folding camera onto his Canon 5D:

The resulting photos from his mutant camera are incredible.
via Laughing Squid

From GigaOM:

If 80 percent of new data created is going to be unstructured, where is all that data coming from? It’s coming from consumers’ activities online and it requires real-time processing, said Continuuity’s Todd Papaionnou at Structure:Data on Wednesday.

Papaionnou calls this unstructured data “digital exhaust,” everything consumers do on a daily basis — clicks, tweets, searches, Facebook posts. Companies can use it to offer more customized experiences for consumers online – content and deal targeting, advertising and sentiment analysis — but they have to process it first.

Let’s get something clear.
The words and images you find on this site are daily exhaust.
And they’re fucking structured.

How bout this.
At a recent demo of Windows 8, Microsoft’s tablet froze.
Ah, Microsoft. You never let me down. I can always count on you to let me down.
Now if you recall, Microsoft did not create a separate mobile OS like Apple did with iOS. Windows 8 was made for both desktops and tablets, so it’s only fitting they share all the bugs of the desktop world with their new tablets.
It’s only fair.

Reuters: Dell sees room to challenge Apple in tablets

Asked whether he envied Apple’s ability to produce such coveted objects, Felice [Dell’s chief commercial officer] said: “We come at the market in a different way … We are predominantly a company that has a great eye on the commercial customer who also wants to be a consumer.”

What the does that even mean?
If I were Dell I wouldtake the money they were going to use to produce an iPad competitor, and instead give the money back to Dell shareholders.
Couldn’t resist.

Black Hockey Jesus gets self-referential:

I want to pause here and clear a space to allow the post to become aware that, before now, it was merely a post about wanting to write a post; however, it just entered the quirky new realm of being meat-meta blogging, aware of itself as blogging about blogging about blogging and, if we had some really good pot, we could infinitely regress into an abyss of metalicousness where we might vomit or have an orgy or some other signifier that revealed us as bloggers on the fringe, man.

shoot&scribe on how Steve Jobs cracked the innovation code:

Apple’s growth has been astronomical because Steve Jobs has, in effect, solved the Innovator’s Dilemma. Apparently, during his hiatus at Next, he read the Innovator’s Dilemma and cited it as one of the most important books he ever read.

Essentially it turns around Apple’s complete willingness to destroy its own revenues. It built a phone that destroyed it’s major source of revenue, the iPod. It built Macbook Airs that have now disrupted another major source of revenue, their Macbook Pros. It built the iPad, which is already beginning to disrupt the Macbook itself.

If you dig innovation and disruption but haven’t read The Innovator’s Dilemma or know about Clayton Christensen, get on it.

Co.Design: Science Says Creativity And Dishonesty Go Hand-In-Hand

A recent article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology makes the claim that creativity walks hand in hand with loose ethics. Francesca Gino of Harvard University and Dan Ariely of Duke University conducted a series of experiments, in which they asked subjects to complete various ethically ambiguous tasks. The result: Not only do naturally creative people cheat more than uncreative people, subjects cajoled into thinking outside of the box become cheaters, too. This suggests that the creative process isn’t just tied to dishonest behavior; it actually enables it–troubling news at a time when the corporate world treats innovation as an impeachable moral good.