In an apparent effort to catch a ride on the latest wave of popularity, Facebook has updated their homepage layout to mimic Twitter. I’m not really sure why — isn’t Facebook still massively popular?
Based on a small sampling of people’s reactions, they seem to fall into the following categories:
So whatever Facebook’s motivation, it appears to be a net no-win.
As new parents, we can’t help but read and pay attention to everything that starts with the phrase “Research shows…” That’s why, when we were told showing our babies black and white patterns for stimulation was a good idea, I went on the hunt for some ready-made patterns.
Among those I found was a set from Babystrology. Unfortunately their downloadable PDF has them all on one page, which isn’t very practical. So, being the geek that I am, I opened up Illustrator and created my own versions. Here they are as individual PDF files:
Checkerboard
Target
Circle Grid
Vertical Lines
Asterisk
Horizontal Lines
Among the things our puppy thinks are tasty treats, that we never thought she’d like:
Things that are perhaps a little less strange, but that she gets just as excited about:
I think it’s mostly that these things come from us, but she definitely doesn’t like mushrooms, no matter where they come from.
The newest member of our household finally came home today.
Recently published patent documents outline PVR functionality for Apple TV. TiVo still has some unique features (e.g. TiVo Suggestions), but a PVR-enabled Apple TV might seriously give TiVo a run for their money.
Not that Apple cares too much about the Canadian market1, but if they ever did make this device, and it did high definition, and it worked in Canada… I’d be first in line.
1 Where’s my iPhone already? And some TV shows on iTunes I’ve actually heard of? And movies?
My favourite dashboard widget, Wimic, broke when I upgraded to Leopard recently. This isn’t so bad at home, because I already have it configured and can still sort of read my comics. As I discovered with my new iMac at work though, it’s a little challenging setting it up for the first time.
Luckily, widgets are just HTML pages under the hood, and a little CSS diddling fixed the problem. So here it is: Wimic updated for Leopard.
The long-awaited Comcast TiVo service is finally available, and Steve Garfield is the lucky first customer. He has a Flickr set with pictures of the unit and interface.
I hope Rogers is paying attention.
As an aside to all this TiVo in Canada talk, this past Saturday (November 24th) marked the break-even point of my TiVo Lifetime Service plan.
I paid $299 up front, which works out to 23 months of $12.95 payments — the going monthly rate for the TiVo service at the time1. Every month from this point forward is gravy.
1 There were no deals for 1-, 2- or 3-year prepaid plans. Factoring them in since they became available would actually push the break-even date out somewhat.
