Giles Turnbull - page 18

Woz: “Computers Are Making Us Less Relevant”

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stevewozniak1

Everyone’s favorite former Apple co-founder, Woz, gave a speech to Michigan State University grads last week, declaring: “Every time we invent a computer to do something else, it’s doing our work for us, making ourselves less relevant.”

He went on: “How does a computer ever create art, for example, if it can’t sense things that a human understands, like the wind on a beach. Well, our computers have gotten hearing and seeing, they’ve got feeling, touch sensitive; they can sense motion, just like our inner ear. Pretty soon we’re going to have holograms, which are much better than what you call 3D television. We’ve created a new species; no question. We’re creators and, like I said, we’re making ourselves less relevant.”

I, for one, welcome our new more-relevant computer overlords. They can do all the dull stuff to do with managing finances and designed sewage systems, and while we irrelevant humans go to the beach with a good book.

Tour The Solar System From Your iPad [Review]

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NASA has released version 2 of its popular Space Images app for iPad, and it’s lovely.

It’s packed full of gorgeous images from pretty much every aspect of the space agency’s work. Each one comes with a brief explanation, and you can fave or rate the ones you like.

Even better, you can save images to your iPad and use them as wallpapers. And all of this is free. If you have an iPad and you have kids, or even if you don’t have kids, this is well worth downloading.

[xrr rating=100%]

Frenzy Turns Dropbox Into A Private Social Network

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Here’s the scenario: you’re a hip web geek working from your hip home, or from some hip coffee shop somewhere in the hip part of town, and you’re always, always sharing links with your colleagues.

Trouble is, you don’t want to share them on Faceter or Twitbook. They might be work-related. Top secret. Or just plain weird.

So you want to share them, and discuss them, privately. How can you do that? Perhaps Frenzy can help.

Winners Of Camera+ Photo Contest Revealed

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The guys at Tap Tap Tap wanted to show off the new Clarity feature in their photography app Camera+, so they came up with a clever idea: run a photo contest.

This is the winning entry, snapped by Nick Wood, and it’s a pretty good showcase for what Clarity can do. What’s it supposed to do? Its makers call it “one tap to awesomeness”. It brings out details, colors and contrasts in otherwise dull photos.

Try This: Google For “Tilt” On Your iPhone

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This is all over Twitter today.

Grab your iThing, open Safari, and use the Google search box to search for “tilt”.

Your search results are… tilted.

Is this an easter egg? An April Fools gag that someone forgot to switch off?

Factotum App Brightens Up Web Music Streams

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If you love your music, you’ve probably encountered this situation: you’re streaming songs from the web via one of your favorite sites, and the phone rings, so you need to hit pause. Or your Most Hated Song Ever comes on, and you just want to skip it as fast as possible.

But wait, you have 67 tabs open. And that’s just in the browser window that’s visible. There’s two more windows full of tabs minimised in your Dock. Where’s the music, the pause button, the skip controls? Gah.

Factotum is a tiny utility that solves the problem. It works in Safari and Chrome, and lets you attach your Mac’s built-in media control keys (aka F7, F8 and F9) to a long list of web streaming services (the full list is Rdio, Grooveshark, Hype Machine, Pandora, Last.fm, Napster, Playlist.com, Live365, BBC iPlayer, Songza, Jango, We Are Hunted, Deezer, thesixtyone, and Blip).

Want it? Go here. It’s four bucks in the Mac App Store.

(Via OneThingWell)

Tighten Up Safari’s Security With One Click [100 Tips #52]

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Safari security

Photo: Safari/Apple

You want your computer to be as secure as possible, right? Here’s one thing that newcomers to OS X might want to change pretty soon after getting their hands on their first Mac.

The OS X web browser, Safari, is a pretty good browser in almost every respect. But it has one default option that, personally speaking, I’ve never felt very comfortable about leaving switched on.

Switch Photo Effects Faster With Lumiere Photo App [Review]

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Lumiere is yet another photo effects filter app for iOS, but before you sigh and say: “Oh no, not another Hipstamatic clone,” I want you to pause and give this one a second look.

What makes Lumiere different isn’t that it applies filter effects to your photos – Hipstamatic and a gazillion other apps already do that – but the way it lets you flick from one effect to the next.

Twitter Kills The #dickbar

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Twitter for iPhone users, rejoice: the #dickbar is dead.

Officially called the QuickBar, it was nicknamed in honour of Twitter boss Dick Costolo.

It was supposed to be a discovery tool for Twitter users – a way for them to find out what’s happening, to see trending topics and sponsored tweets.

There was only one small problem: pretty much everyone hated it.

Recreate The Game Boy Camera With 8-Bit Pocket Camera App [Photography]

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Those of you of a certain age might remember the Game Boy Camera, an ingenious add-on for the original Nintendo Game Boy that snapped tiny 128×112 pictures.

It was briefly one of the most exciting ideas in handheld consoles – suddenly the Game Boy wasn’t just for games, it was for other fun stuff too!

Better still, if you had the money to spare, you could buy a Game Boy Printer and print out your pixellated works of art to give to friends.

All that’s ancient history, which is precisely what makes it the ideal starting point for an iOS app.

It’s called 8 Bit Pocket Camera, and it’s lots of fun and, at just a dollar, excellent value.