Nokia Facet: One Watch I Won’t Be Buying

Sure, it’s easy to bag Nokia as a company that’s on the downward slide due to a lack of innovation. That said, I’m not sure I want innovation if this is what it looks like:

This COULD be a joke – the iMovie template used for the video gives a hint to that, or it’s further proof of how low a budget the company now works on. If it isn’t a joke, then maybe it deserves to be. To be fair, all prototypes can look clunky, but for the life of me I can’t see how you could make this clunker look stylish.

Do you agree?

[Via Endgadget]

Kids Have It Easy

If you are 40 or older you will think this is hilarious!!!!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious shite about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking Twenty-five miles to school every morning…. Uphill… barefoot… BOTH ways Yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of shit like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it!

But now that… I’m over the ripe old age of forty, I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today.

You’ve got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a FUCKING UTOPIA!
And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don’t know how good you’ve got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn’t have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the bloody library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalogue!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter – with a pen!
Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take, like, a week to get there!
Stamps were 5 pence!

Child Protective Services didn’t care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick the shit out of us! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3′ s or Napsters! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!
Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and fuck it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We’d play our favorite tape and “eject” it when finished and the tape would come undone. Cause – that’s how we rolled, dig?

We didn’t have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that’s it!

And we didn’t have fancy Caller ID either!
When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mum, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn’t know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn’t have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Asteroids’. Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen… forever!
And you could never win.
The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel!
NO REMOTES!!!

There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I’m saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you SPOILED LITTLE RAT BASTARDS!!

And we didn’t have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the cooker! Imagine that!

That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled. You little arseholes wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1970 or before!

Regards,
Grumpy Gang

Men Are Deep Thinkers

What deep thinkers men are…

I mowed the lawn today, and after doing so I sat down and had a cold beer. The day was really quite beautiful, and the drink facilitated some deep thinking.

My wife walked by and asked me what I was doing and I said ‘nothing’. The reason I said that instead of saying ‘just thinking’ is because she would have said ‘about what’. At that point I would have to explain that men are deep thinkers about various topics which would lead to other questions.

Finally I thought about an age old question: is giving birth more painful than getting kicked in the nuts?
Women always maintain that giving birth is way more painful than a guy getting kicked in the nuts.

Well, after another beer, and some heavy deductive thinking, I have come up with the answer to that question. Getting kicked in the nuts is more painful than having a baby; and here is the reason for my conclusion. A year or so after giving birth, a woman will often say, “It might be nice to have another child.” On the other hand, you never hear a guy say, “You know, I think I would like another kick in the nuts.”

I rest my case. Time for another beer.

Project Sci-Fi: Enter Your Machinima

The team at University of Western Australia continue their amazing virtual worlds work, hosting the machinima section of a huge undertaking called Project Sci-Fi:

WD Project: Sci-Fi Film Challenge (Australia) 2013 is a Competition run by Screen My Shorts Inc in collaboration of WD (S.E.Asia Ltd). We invite entrants of all ages, cultures and ability to submit original creative digital content and win a share of the AUD 10,000 (L$2.28 Million) cash and prizes (with at least AUD 1,500 / L$230,000 reserved for Machinima), and have their works exposed on the international stage.

Here’s the teaser trailer:

If you want to enter, check out all the details over at the UWA in SL blog.

Adobe hacked

Fire-Effect-TutorialsIn case you haven’t heard – 2.9 million of Adobe’s customers have had their details hacked, and that ‘may have’ included info like credit card details.

Here’s a little more via Wordfence (which I highly recommend by the way):

 

Within the last 48 hours Adobe announced that they have been hacked and that the user account data of 2.9 million Adobe users has been breached. They also confirmed that the attackers may have gained access to the user’s financial information. The Washington Post are covering the story.

Adobe products are used extensively in the WordPress community, so we are issuing a special alert to ensure that our subscribers are aware of the breach and know what action to take.

Adobe has issued a bulletin on their Help website which details what happened and what to do and it includes a FAQ about the incident at the bottom of the page. You can find the Adobe bulletin here.

I’d like to add special emphasis to two items:

 

  1. If you have the bad habit of using the same password on multiple websites, make sure you change your password on all other websites that used the same password as your Adobe account.

  2. If you purchased something from Adobe within the last few years, keep a close eye on your credit card or bank statement for illegal activity.

Here’s the full blurb from Adobe, including info on changing your password etc.

[Pic via http://webdesignerfan.com]

Five Cool Cases For The iPhone 5s

The iPhone 5S has been out for a couple of weeks now, so I thought it might be worth a quick roundup of some of the more different case options out there for the phone. Of course, most iPhone 5 cases will fit the 5S too, so unless you see otherwise assume those below are iPhone 5 compatible. All prices in US dollars.

BookBook_for_iPhone_5_5s_-_BookBook_for_iPhone_5_5s_-_Twelve_South 1. BookBook

I’ve owned a MacBook Pro version of the BookBook for a few years now, but the iPhone 5S version has a wallet built in as well.

If you only have a few credit cards to stash and you don’t mind having to open the BookBook to chat on the phone, then this is worth considering.

It looks great and although pricey at $59.99, it’s leather and looks solid.

Find out more here.

 

 

2. Bling Biscuit

Ok, it’s gimmicky and appears only available on Ebay, but I like it:

biscuit

3. iLuv Camera Case

If retro is your thing, the vintage camera case design might appeal. $44.99 from iLuv.

iLuv

4. Danchi Government Housing Case

Not sure how many of these have been sold, but I suppose there’s a market for everything. $41 will get you one from here.

danchi-government-housing-iphone-5-cover-case-1 5. Thumbs Up Pill Case

This one’s been out for quite a while for the iPhone 5, but it deserves a special mention. Not sure how you’ll go putting it through customs at the airport though! Cheaper than real pills at just over six euros from Amazon.

iPhone-5-case

 

If you know of a particularly cool iPhone 5S case, drop a line in comments to let us know.

Does Aerogard Keep Away Bees?

Does Aerogard keep away bees?

Travelling in convoy will not deter bees

We tackle some of the huge issues in life here at The Creative Shed, and here’s such an example.

We have a bee hive in our yard – a friend keeps bees as a hobby and we decided to help out by having a hive, with the promise of some fresh honey each spring. Of course, once the honey is taken from the hive, you have a very unhappy bunch of bees. In our case, three days later and they’re still patrolling their perimeter and seeking any human that comes within about 15 metres of the hive. Which is a pain if you want to do things like mow the jungle formerly known as your lawn.

So after two aborted attempts at mowing, I decided to try Aerogard (N,N-Diethyl-meta-toluamide) to see if the couple of bees hounding me would back off. I’m pleased to report they did but I wouldn’t want to rely on it as a deterrent for more than a couple of bees and if you have a bee allergy I wouldn’t even risk that. And of course there are many other brands out there beside Aerogard, it was just the one I had at hand.

And did you know: Aerogard was developed by Doug Waterhouse at Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO, who passed on the formula to Mortein. For nothing.

[Pic via Motifake]

1953 Sci-Fi At Its Best: The Rotifers

The RotifersWe all have stories from our childhood that scared the hell out of us – or at least entranced us with the power of the situation they described. Once such story for me was The Rotifers, which I read in the late 1970s or 1980s in a paperback sci-fi short story collection.

It enough of an impact for me to recall it recently, and after some serious googling (I couldn’t recall the story’s title), I found it on Project Gutenberg. Aside from the fact it was a joy to read again, I was interested to learn that it was more than 25 years old when I read it as a kid. Given some of the domestic descriptions I should have realised, but there you go. Written by Robert Abernathy, the story’s power is in its simplicity and the story premise that still has a lot of power today: that the microscopic can harm us if it wants to.

Anyway – have a read of a 1953 short story that’s likely to give you at least a small case of the creeps.

How to turn off your Mac’s spelling auto-correct

If you’re like me and driven to distraction by OSX Mountain Lion’s determination to change the words you type, it’s actually very easy to turn it off:

1. Go to Apple Menu > System Preferences

2. Click on ‘Language and Text’

3. Uncheck the box ‘Correct spelling automatically’:

Language___Text4. That’s it!

 

How To Get Feedly Working With Safari

feedlySpeaking from personal experience, there was a bit of mystery for me about getting Feedly to work on Safari for OSX. So for your benefit here’s what to do (I’m on 10.8.4 OSX):

1. Go to Feedly.com

2. Download the Feedly Safari extension

3. Double click on the downloaded extension and you’ll get a prompt asking if you want to install it – click that you do want to.

4. The next step is where I got lost: how do I access the extension? Well, it’s not obvious unless you have a sharp eye, but look up to the left of Safari’s search/URL bar:

feedly2

There’s the Feedly button. Click on it and you start the process of importing your Google Reader feed into Safari!

5. That’s it!

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