When I saw the today's XKCD, I thought "meh"

Then I noticed the tooltip: "Clic and drag"

So I clicked and dragged the image on the right

"Oh, cool, there is a little world here"

And I continued to drag

Again

Again

Again

Is it endless??? It's an huge comic, undoubtedly the biggest in the world!

Fortunately for our wrists, there is who made a keyboard-friendly version, making the exploration a pleasant experience!

You can also zoom backwards, finding easter eggs as a Falling Icarus, two falling whales, or someone doing surf on a Jet that it would be *impossibile* to find with "click and drag"

Just a while ago I was examining a folder in Windows 8, when I accidentally pressed DEL. Boom, deleted, without confrimation! Ok, it has just moved to the Recycle Bin, but I'd like to have a confirmation.

Probably Microsoft saw that Apple in OS X deletes files without a confirmation, so they thought: "hey, if they do that way, it means it's the right way!". Well, on OS X, you delete files with cmd+del, not by just pressing the del key, so the accidental deletion of files and folders is harder!

Fortunately, it's possible to enable the confirmation, by following those three easy steps:

• Right click on the Recycle Bin
• Select "Properties"
• Select the "Display delete confirmation dialog" checkbox

Yesterday I was making a video, showing Sony, Capcom, SEGA, Tomy, etc.. addresses, so I thought it would be funny if I added a small title "Achievement Unlocked" once I shown the address on the map.

I made a title template to be used with Final Cut Pro X. 

You can see an example of its use in this video.

Unfortunately, there is a little problem. It looks like it's not possible to insert sound effects in a Final Cut Pro X title or generator, so you should insert the Achievement Unlocked "ding" manually. The mp3 is included in the zip, you just have to insert when the title is displayed.

Download it now

Copy it  in /Users/yourname/Movies/Motion Templates.localized/Titles.localized

For a better effect you should use the font used by Microsoft in the XBOX: Convection Regular. There are two ways to get it. One is buy it for $49. The other way is...

It's 10 am and after receiving a long phone call (15 minutes) I'm just with 46% of battery left. At 10 am. Just three hours after disconnecting it from the charger, I'm with less than a full charge.

On the left there is the battery stats from Battery Eta. If you don't count Sunday ("Domenica" - I went to the beach and I left the phone charging the whole day), the average duration is disappointing... 12 hours. It means that if during lunch break I forget to charge my phone, after dinner the phone is dead.

It's the battery? No, it always behaved like that. Tthis phone (T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide), when is not in a good reception area (see the screenshot, I only have one bar), increases the transmission power to a ludicrous level, eating battery like hot cakes.

In optimal conditions it lasts about 48 hours, but I would have to move in a new house, so it's not a good solution.

I could disable the Gmail push mail, but at that point I could carry a cheap dumbphone with infinite battery.

How long does the battery last to you? I'm curious to know if I'm just an isolated case or it's normal that nowadays a phone have to last just half day.

In the official Steve Jobs biography you can read this story:

Bill fired up his demo and it quickly filled the Lisa screen with randomly-sized ovals, faster than you thought was possible. But something was bothering Steve Jobs. "Well, circles and ovals are good, but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners? Can we do that now, too?"

"No, there's no way to do that. In fact it would be really hard to do, and I don't think we really need it". I think Bill was a little miffed that Steve wasn't raving over the fast ovals and still wanted more.

Steve suddenly got more intense. "Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!". And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. "And look outside, there's even more, practically everywhere you look!". He even persuaded Bill to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find.

When Steve and Bill passed a no-parking sign with rounded corners, it did the trick. "OK, I give up", Bill pleaded. "I'll see if it's as hard as I thought." He went back home to work on it.

Bill returned to Texaco Towers the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast, almost at the speed of plain rectangles. When he added the code to LisaGraf, he named the new primitive "RoundRects". Over the next few months, roundrects worked their way into various parts of the user interface, and soon became indispensable. 

At that time the computers were limited, typical user interfaces were simple and without frills, yet they decided to make it more enticing by using rounded rectangles.

Take a look around you, a lot of design elements use rounded rectangles.

Not in Windows 8 .

This shot I composed shows what I mean:

Shading? Gone. Gradient filling? Gone. The border it's just a 1 pixel line, I guess it would be almost invisible on a retina display.

Do you like it? I don't.

The author of XKCD, a "scientific" webcomic has created a new blog, "What if..." where he answers weird questions from readers.

The first question is "What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?"

It's interesting because he gives a scientific yet funny answer:

Some time ago, I got the 2012 issue of the Italian Yellow Pages to my home.

It's this:

It's just an handful of pages! It's completely useless, maybe there are just 3-4 firms for each category!

If you think that every firm paid 500-1000 euro to be included, it's not an advertising investment anymore. This is wasted money!

But, the makers are going digital! In this way:

WFT??? It's just a PDF conversion of the printed edition or something like that!

It's senseless to do something like that! Why not just list my search in an intuitive way, instead of presenting minuscule text without a decent search!

Reading an article on an Italian newspaper, it really become clear how the record labels are thinking that we are still in the '70s.

I'm talking about Payphone, from Maroon 5.

In the USA it has been released on 16th April, making almost 500k downloads in the first week.

Instead in UK they decided to release it on 17th June, as if nowadays music goes back to the old world on a caravel.

What happened?

A cover, released on 17th April, entered on the sales top10 before the official song was available for purchase!

The reasons to the waiting are a mystery for me. They did it to protect sales of the full album? Marketing?

The moral is: if people wants to PAY for a song, why deny it???

Otherwise people is forced to illegally download the mp3 from eMule 3 months befor the official release... and then they say that piracy hurts sales...

A while ago, Microsoft released Halo Waypoint, an app to follow the latest news from the Halo World.

For promoting it, they placed on the official website this image (already replaced):

I don't know what you think about it, but I find it very hilarious!

Have you ever seen a company that places their own phone with competitors phones, keeping it in a corner, half hidden, maybe too shy for a direct match, with the competitor names written in a BIG WHITE font, and their "Windows Phone 7" in grey, much smaller, as a remind to its lesser success??

Of course, after that someone let them know the problem, they switched the image with an inverted one, but it's still a big gaffe.

I'll continue to criticize: when the Nokia Lumia 900 was launched, there were rumours about the upgrade path to Windows Phone 8. Current devices won't be upgradable, the rumor said.

Of course if it was true, the sales of the Nokia Lumia would have been hurted a lot, so, Microsoft promptly denied the rumour, promising the upgrade.

What happened last week? Windows Phone 8 was announced and the upgrade won't be available.

A great way to thank faithful customers, right?

I just read an article that says: developers like iOS more than Android. The proof is given by Flurry, a plugin to analyze the user behaviour in apps. According to them, there are much more iOS apps that use Flurry than Android apps.

Ok, but this data is only about apps that use Flurry.

If an app doesn't spy the user behaviour with it, does not count!

And then, it's possible to directly use Google Analytics in Android apps, why I should use Flurry?

Moral: beware of stats published by an Apple fanboy, the data has been analyzed with closed eyes.