journal: toy

An Adventure In Phone Shopping (Ode To Crackberry)

By Jay, November 27, 2010

Posted courtesy of http://www.piratedthoughts.us the private blog of Jay Grider, DTgeeks.com features editor. Original article can be found At this location. This is a modified version of the article edited to better suit the content of this site.

My Curve was a gift from a friend and former boss Chip. Chip bought the phone through T-mobile probably when it first came out as the Curve 8320 was released in 2007 and it was gifted to me in 2009. Chip moved from that crackberry to another quickly, and shortly after moved to AT&T for an iPhone. When my Nokia flip phone, whose model number I am too lazy to find but we can suffice that it was a piece of crap, died after a long string a abuse (being pushed into the pool during JAWS camp, being thrown into my wall and getting stuck, being dropped out the car window on the interstate on accident [you get the idea]) I tried to seek a cheap alternative to pay for a new phone.

As someone who has task management issues I found myself craving the scheduling features that a smartphone packed. Posting around and tweeting asking if people had any old blackberry’s laying around *since i knew no one would give out a free iPhone or Droid* @ichip offered his to me. I fell in love as soon as I unlocked the T-Mobile device to work on my wireless carrier, a process that only took me 18 hours of active hacking. The phone…
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In Light of the Lyrics App Debacle

By Liam, May 19, 2009

Link

Apple initially rejected Jelle Prins’ iPhone app Lyrics, which displays lyrics for the songs in your music library, including the profanity contained in some song lyrics. Apple cited that fact as the reason for turning Prins down.

Oh Apple, look what I found:

Uploaded Image

Perhaps maybe you should make them censor it?

Ooh, and there’s this other app that allows unfiltered access to the internet, including objectionable content which you seem not to like allowing. I think it’s called… um.... Safari, that’s it! Wait a minute....

Uploaded Image

Yeah, make the developers of that conduit of smut pay for their sins against our children.

Speaking of children, won’t somebody think of them?

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So I’ve Just Come Into the Posession of a New Monitor

By Liam, November 11, 2008

And it’s been quite illuminating. Before I go on, however, I should note that this post contains images, and that if you’re using dial-up you should take a moment to remember that you are accessing the internet using the telephone line, which although may have sufficed in a bygone era, is a preposterous thought in this day and age. You should then go get something to drink because this page will take a while to load, what with you calling it up and asking it what it looks like instead of using broadband like civilized people.

Ahem.

For starters, I found a minor display bug in iTunes.

I wonder if Apple has any large displays laying around their offices.... Eh, probably not.

I also found that glossy displays are better than matte. All matte advocates are hereby committed to a mental institute for their choice, which is wrong by virtue of differing from my choice.

What’s on the screen? What’s in the room? Hours of fun for the whole family!

Lastly, I’ve found that the mobile web is more fun the larger the display gets.

Who needs line wrapping?

The interesting thing that I’ve noticed is that, despite coming from a dual-monitor setup, I feel more like an evil genius now than I did before. There’s something about a guy hunched over in front of a huge panel that exudes the feel of 1960s evil.

And this concludes the last content-free post I’ll be making.

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Saying Is Believing

By shempzilla, May 5, 2008

About a year ago, I wrote an article here on DT analyzing the high-def DVD war and predicting an eventual win for Blu-ray. Despite the fact that I was completely and totally correct, I am not here to brag (although I won’t pass up the opportunity, either). In the course of that article, I poked some fun at the world of technology analysts:

So, here’s the part where I play “tech analyst,” which is to say that I will make something up and present it to you as fact. I will even put it into blurb form so that newspapers can use it and quote me as an expert.

Ironically, it seems that this has worked far better than I had imagined. For reasons I won’t get into, I was recently visiting the online directory site ZoomInfo. While I was there, I decided to have a little fun and search for my own name, just to see what might come up. Among the accurate results was this tidbit:

Now, to be fair, they use some kind of automatic crawler bot to aggregate a lot of their information, which appears to pretty much take at face value anything it is told.¹ I agree that this is a good idea, as we all know that the Internet contains only 100% truth.² I hereby heartily endorse ZoomInfo as a fine purveyor of factual information, and look forward to seeing my new title “James Viviani, President of the United States.”

¹Much like Tom Cruise.↩

²I…
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Who’d’a thunk it? Most facebook apps are pointless

By Nick, May 2, 2008

According to a recent study, most Facebook apps are pointless silly time-wasters, according to a CNET blog post. The blog post cites a new study from Flowing Data, which tabulated the nature of the 23,000+ Facebook applications. Roughly 9600 are categorized as “Just for Fun,” while many more are labeled as “Gaming,” “Sports,” “Chat,” and other productivity-killing categories.

Now wait just a second. Why on Earth did Flowing Data research the number of pointless Facebook apps? Anyone who has spend any time on Facebook and has been bombarded with endless application invitations could tell you that most Facebook apps are pointless. A pointless survey on the pointlessness of Facebook apps. Hard to believe someone actually got paid for that.