Pebble: the e-Ink-based Watch
What isn't to like about a watch that tethers with your phone's Bluetooth to give you caller id information, e-mail updates and all sorts of other things while also displaying it all on an easy-to-read e-ink screen? I can't think of much. Take a look.
Note to Self
If there is virtually no one on a major highway connecting St. Louis and St. Charles counties, even later in the evening, that probably means most folks have heard the bridge a few miles down the road is closed due to an accident and they are using alternate routes. Not that I am speaking from experience or anything…
The 4" iPhone
I'm still not entirely convinced Apple will move to a bigger display size on the iPhone, but they would be much more likely to if the physical device size differences were minimized. That is what makes this mockup very interesting.
Late Night Haiku XLII
CXIX. The porch light glows. Isolated
From anyone to enjoy
Its undarkening.
CXX. Silence. Rain passed.
Drip. Drip. Drip. The trees lose hold
Of storm-remnants. Drip.
CXXI. Crickets do not care.
They do not chirp at all now.
For it is still spring.
Karl Barth on the Reformation
Today's helping of Karl Barth, courtesy of Lewis Spitz's anthology, Interpretations of the Reformation (p. 156):
[T]he Evangelical church in the Reformation sense is there and only there where the concern is for the pure teaching of the Christian truths, where the whole life of the church Is determined and measured by this one task. But one must pay close attention. The Reformers were concerned about the pure teaching of those truths.
Barth challenges the reader as he explores this concept of “pure teaching” and relates it to the proper role of faith in the life of the Christian. The “is there” in the first sentence in the quote is not a careless wording: Barth is astutely aware that the orthodox, Evangelical teaching of the Reformation is always at risk for falling into a cold, dead orthodoxy vacant of living faith.
Why Can't I Use My Phone Number on Messages.app?
Zach Phillips explains my most significant frustration with iMessage on the iPad and Mac:
It would only take one feature to make Messages on iPad and Messages.app useful. Allow me to use my phone number as my iMessages account. My phone number has always been my unique identifier through which I choose to receive these short bits of text (for good reason). If I can't use my real “address,” there's not much point in signing up for a different delivery company. The package will not arrive where I need it.
Since iOS 5 launched, it has puzzled me why Apple designed the system so that iMessages sent to my Apple ID go to my Mac, iPhone and iPad while iMessages sent using my phone number only go to my iPhone. It creates a confusing (and technologically needless) situation where one ideally needs to give up iMessages' brilliant capability of seemlessly replacing SMS to reap all the benefits of using it.
Apple should fix this in iOS 6.
For the record...
This is the handiest way to calculate one's grades in a course and figure out what final grade one can still achieve in the same. I show it to my students when they ask if a certain letter grade is within reach for them.
Obama vs. Romney
Well, with Rick out it looks like we know who the players in this year's race for the White House will be. Alas, another presidential election will pass without a brokered convention, dashing the hopes of this political junkie who would like to see a political convention that decided a party's candidate and wasn't prior to my lifetime.
Iran-ternet
This is big. Iran, it seems, is going to build its own isolated intranet and all but cut its citizens off from access to the real, worldwide Internet:
Millions of Internet users in Iran will be permanently denied access to the World Wide Web and cut off from popular social networking sites and email services, as the government has announced its plans to establish a national Intranet within five months.
This is unprecedented for any nation with readily available Internet access. Here's hoping the plan falls apart.
Outlet Mall Wars
It seems two outlet mall developers are vying to build an outlet mall in Chesterfield Valley. This is just down right bizarre:
It was surely a highly contentious decision for Saks to decide to go with Simon's project, she added. After all, Saks has a big presence in many of Taubman's malls.
“I'm sure they were sweating bullets on that one,” she said. “It is often more political than trying to end the war in the Middle East.”
Hmm.
