http://www.dragthing.com/blog/?p=285

Here at TLA Systems, we take our responsibility to protect innocent minds very seriously.

Have you, or somebody close to you, ever turned your calculator upside down and accidentally seen a mildly suggestive word? Have you ever been in a maths class, and had to put up with groups of giggling boys performing elaborate calculations that are not part of the lesson?

Yes, it’s one of the main problems affecting the calculator industry today, the so-called “calculator words”. These otherwise harmless devices can be made to display smut at the press of a few buttons. Added to that, the iPhone App Store is very strict about having inappropriate content in apps. Nobody wants their app to get a 17+ rating, or worse, to be rejected entirely.

Which is why we are happy to announce that the latest version of our PCalc scientific calculator for the iPhone contains a new patent-worthy profanity filter.

Simply enter a number such as “5318008″, turn the calculator upside down, and the offending word will be discreetly censored. Many common calculator words have been included as standard, and we plan to increase this over time via software updates.

http://finerthingsinmac.com/post/199348232/smarter-playlist-m3u-handling-in-itunes

I dropped a folder of mp3s that also included an associated .m3u playlist onto iTunes 9. Lo and behold iTunes didn’t double up the tracks! Yay, finally! Previously I’d always needed to remove any playlists before adding to the Library.

As a tiny experiment, I dropped just the .m3u file and iTunes added the tracks fine. Seems iTunes now knows to ignore them when appropriate. About time, really.

New bus technology that Apple has been pushing Intel to develop, with plans for standardization in late 2010. It aims to replace many ports and connectors with one single, very high speed (10Gbs) optical interface. Rumor from Engadget is that Steve Jobs has been speaking to Intel CEO Paul Otellini personally about this.

Intel’s page about Light Peak

via @mattgemmell

Guys, who wants to have a Window 7 Launch Party at my place? It’ll be nut-clenchingly awful.

UPDATE:

Cabel Sasser has his party planned.

Read the full speech on the FCC’s very familiarly styled new site, OpenInternet.gov.

Basically, two rules so far, with the implementation details to be meted out in the coming months via an open process.

1) Broadband providers of any kind can’t discriminate against content or applications.

2) Broadband providers must be transparent about their network management policies.

Look in the coming months for every major ISP to somehow try to wriggle out of these rules by claiming they are somehow not broadband providers. They will also start beating the drum that this is “government interference” in the freedom of the Internet, when in fact it’s the opposite. It’s a cementing of principles that have long been held on the Internet, even to the point of taking them for granted. As the chairman consciously points out in the speech, these conventions have been the norm for the Internet since its inception, and these rules are only a defense against the acts of large, greedy ISPs who would seek to fuck it all up.

Read the entire speech. This is really the best possible statement the FCC could have given.

So, you know that one longstanding iPhone bug whereby it would take every photo in landscape mode, even those where you held the iPhone vertically in portrait mode, and compensate by just adding a JPEG EXIF tag to tell the image viewer (whatever it may be) to simply rotate the image 90 degrees, but that really kind of sucked since nothing in the whole wide world support EXIF rotation directives (notably the Finder, and especially Web browsers) but iPhoto, Preview, and the iPhone itself? And that when you then synced the photo you took with the iPhone back to the iPhone immediately after snapping it and syncing, the syncing process would strip that EXIF data anyway in the process so all your portrait mode photos you took with the iPhone, in the Photos app, would display with the wrong orientation?

Yeah, you know that bug? They fixed it. Photos are now actually rotated when snapped instead of using EXIF orientation metadata.

The bug is not actually fixed. I was using TiltShift Generator app to take pictures, which correctly rotates the image.

Unibody MacBook Pro, originally uploaded by g_k_day.

Next to the previous model.

Flavor Flav puppet, originally uploaded by g_k_day.

homemade hip-hop puppetry.