Is this the beginning of the end for the iPhone Fad?

When it comes to usability, generally everyone would agree Apple has always been the king ranging all the way back to the early 80's.  The iPod turned cellphone -- iPhone seemed to de-throne the Palm Treo as the new king of the smartphone world shortly after its introduction.

But does usability carry a product long-term for Apple?  The AppleII series, Lisa, Macintosh,  Newton, PowerBook, Quadra, QuickTime, AppleDesktopBus, all products that made a lot of noise when released, some were quite successful, most now hold a minority marketshare if any.

Now I read that Samsung has now shipped more smartphones than Apple this past quarter, evidence of a profound change in mobile computing again.  Human beings now choose Samsung over Apple smartphones.  Do people really prefer functionality over form long-term?

Using Apple's product history as a guide, once they lose top marketshare has any Apple products recovered dominance?

Capturing Firewire 1394 camcorder MiniDV in Ubuntu 12.04

How to transfer MiniDV Camcorder footage digitally via Firewire 1394 to your Ubuntu 12.04 computer:

I have a bunch of old (>10 year) MiniDV tapes laying around that I wanted to transfer to my Smugmug account online.  Mainly because I am concerned about losing the content due to decaying magnetic tape and partly because I am organizing the last bit of imagery I have onto the cloud for easy access across all of my devices.

Once upon a time circa Ubuntu 8.04 I was able to plug in the firewire cable into the back of my PC and into my Panasonic MiniDV Camcorder, load Kino, and everything worked.   This time, it wasnt so obvious.

The problem:

• Kino reports "WARNING: raw1394 kernel module not loaded or failure to read/write /dev/raw1394!"
• The newest Firewire driver does not create the raw1394 device node
• Permissions are not setup to allow for general user access on the /dev/fw0 node
• Bug Report here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dvgrab/+bug/779680

The fix:

• Create a link to the newer /dev/fw0 node
• $ sudo ln /dev/fw0 /dev/raw1394
• Run Kino as superuser
• $ gksu kino

Hope this helps someone else out there as it took me a good 3-4 hours of searching the net and trying different drivers to come up with this simple solution.

Reduce paper towel waste with this simple method

Shake and fold!  :-)

Watch "TEDxConcordiaUPortland - Joe Smith - How To Use One Paper Towel" on YouTube

1080i vs 720p - Which is better?

Found this on life hacker today: a very simple explanation of what video formats in the HD spectrum are.

The end of personal data storage?

My house server's 1TB hard drive is giving me SMART drive warnings that the disk is about to fail.  I immediately started looking for its replacement and looking into SSD storage which of course costs substantially more.   It was then I realized what do I need this space for anymore?

Once upon a time my entire life revolved around data stored on my server:  Source Code, Documents, Movies, Music, Pictures, Software, etc.  That landscape for me has totally changed in the last couple of years mainly brought about by faster Internet connectivity (currently have 50 / 5 mbps).

I am (or *will be soon) using:

• Google Docs - Documents
• Amazon/Netflix/Vudu - Movies / TV
• Smugmug - Pictures / Personal videos
• Grooveshark / Slacker - Music
• Linux - Every program I use is either online or comes from apt repositories
• *Github - Personal projects / source code
• *Google Drive - Miscellaneous?

Basically, I dont have any need for personal data storage anymore.  Quite frankly I am curious why anyone else has need of local storage anymore?  Trust?  Re-acquisition costs? Internet Speed?

How about you?

Three Best Paper Gliders

Just saw an article on Slashdot about what is the best paper airplane.   Piqued my curiosity as  I use the Paper Airplane Factory Game sometimes when I am presenting on Agile / Lean processes.

Of the designs presented in the post, I have narrowed it down to the following three that interest me the most.

1.) The "Harrier", built for stability and speed
2.) The "Bat", built for entertainment
3.) The "Ball", a crushed paper ball that will sometimes out-perform even the best plane designs ;)

Robotic Quadrocopter Formation Flying

Very impressive demonstration of spatial programming!

Digital Trends » Swarm of little flying robots is amazing, terrifying (video)