I find myself always keen to find better ways to write. Whether it’s using different apps or working in a completely different location, chances are I’ve tried it, or thought about trying it.

After recently reading Matt Gemmell’s excellent article about writing tools, I decided I should heed his advice and pick up a bean bag to help me think whilst writing. This is how Matt uses his:

I repeatedly throw it up at the ceiling and catch it, and it’s strangely therapeutic. I can often resolve a narrative, structural or inspiration issue within a few minutes, using this. It’s my first port of call when I freeze up during writing, and I use it to recharge my brain during an editing session.

Set of 4 bean bags for PE, games, training

£3.38

Buy on Amazon

I don’t write in quite the same way Matt seems to: my approach is much more “spew out as many words as possible for half an hour, then edit and refine until everything makes sense”. The bean bag comes in handy primarily whilst refining.

Unfortunately, I had to buy a set of four bean bags, rather than just one. As I’d predicted before the bags arrived, my go-to writing bean bag is the blue one. My second favourite colour bag is red. I find the green and yellow to look reasonably unpleasant: I don’t really want them sitting on my desk.

Throwing a bean bag up to just below the ceiling is an extremely fun game to play, which takes my mind off what I’m currently writing about. After a minute or so playing like this, I often find myself having “eureka!” moments, whereby I realise exactly which word I was looking for. This is why I bought them; they delivered what I was expecting. Your mileage may vary.

The bean bags fit in my hand well and have surprisingly similar proportions to an iPhone 5: if you want a size guide, the bean bags are approximately 10cm wide by 15.5cm long. The iPhone 5 is about 5.75cm wide and 12.5cm long. The smell of the bean bags wasn’t pleasant initially, but I’ve had my blue bag out in the open for less than a week so far and the smell is starting to fade. I imagine any odd, artificial smells will completely disappear within a month.

The texture of the beans is firmer than I expected. To give a rough impression of what each bean feels like, imagine a dodecahedron made from tough plastic, about a quarter the size of a pea. The beans are not round; when squeezed tightly and played with in my fingers, “clicks” can be heard as the beans pop past each other. When talking about the entire bag though, the individual texture of one bean becomes largely irrelevant. Together the bag feels about half-full of beans, giving it a pleasant weight and texture. Squeezing the bag as tightly as possible doesn’t result in an uncomfortable feeling and I’m not the slightest bit worried about the bag splitting.

Overall, even though I’m primarily using just one of the packaged four bean bags, I’m happy having paid £5.83 including delivery. I’m pleased about the purchase and I recommend these specific bean bags if you’re looking for writing help. They’ll also be fine for more traditional bean bag use, I’m sure.

I was having a discussion with an acquaintance of mine who seems to like the Microsoft Surface RT more than most people. This is the best (and last, for a while) bit from our conversation:

Basically the Surface is a tablet designed for intelligent, capable people who will buy them, and the iPad is designed for the masses.  A basic dumbass friendly tablet for people who struggle to cook pasta.  That's okay and their business model is great and profitable.  But since i don't care about that, and since MS are still making pleanty enough money to satisfy me, i don't see their ecosystem dropping off the board any time soon and therefore, their Tablets only selling in modest numbers is fine to me.  It's cool, then it doesn't become a pleb item.

Damn, if only I could master that pasta. Maybe one day.

What follows are my notes taken during RIM’s BlackBerry 10 launch event. I wrote them on my iPhone whilst watching the live stream. After the event finished, I took some time to review and edit my thoughts into more concise phrases. They’re short, candid and honest. My initial takeaway, written after the event, is at the end of the following snippets.

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Gestures — was never really shown these throughout the video. Profiles look interesting. I'd like that feature on my devices.

Keyboard? LOL

Port-a-thon? Wow. They're shameless.

Isn't telling other people to honk their horn whilst driving illegal?

Lil 'E. How much did RIM pay him?

Cutting some guy's hair? Wow. He has a "fanboy" shirt on. At least BB fans embrace the word.

Disco lights. Hm.

Like the blue colour scheme and huge screen behind CEO. Dare I say that even some of the typography is tasteful.

"Braaaands."

Most challenging year of CEO's life. Wow.

Innovation, really? Getting sick of this word.

I'm liking this presentation more than Microsoft's. Feels more personable.

Connected. Getting Things Done. Maybe this OS could be better for me? I fit those boxes.

First iOS reference. Had a go at home button for a poor experience. Fair enough — it's a bit clunky switching between apps, I guess.

True mobile computing? Is he suggesting iOS and Android aren't? If not, what are they?

"Personal Internet of things."

Go it alone, instead of adopting….? …Android? Didn't say Android, but implied? WP maybe? They did what Apple would have done: made their own OS. Makes sense to not be tethered, but it's certainly more risk. What if BB10 doesn't catch on?

3 "innovations" said in 5 seconds?

That unveiling of the devices rising up from the stage was cool. Reminds me of the iPhone 5.

Q10 with keyboard is dead on arrival. Ugly, looks like a phone I'd see in early 2000s.

Z10 looks more promising. Like the idea of a textured surface on the back. Maybe it'd feel cheap, though?

He says "responsive" a lot, but not that the phone is. He says it makes HIM responsive. Phone doesn't look slow, though.

People didn't really clap much when physical keyboards were mentioned. Slightly awkward. Even the keyboard faithful have realised they're a dying breed?

So far that's what he's pushed the most since the phones were unveiled - the keyboard.

Demo. This is going to be good.

Flow. How does swiping work with games / music creation apps? Reminds me of charms bar in Windows 8.

Full multitasking? That's a bad idea, right? Battery life? That isn't explained.

Flow looks neat if you get a new notification whilst video is playing — it's easy to just slide the video out of the way to view notifications, without interrupting playback. That's a feature I'd love on iOS.

Flow is designed to be used one-handed.

Saw some jitter during animation, then.

Deep integration with tons of services: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. That's cool. BlackBerry's "Hub" is a cross between Notification Centre and an inbox. It's possible to do a lot more in the hub that Notification Centre, though.

Gestures will save time when switching between apps. I like that, but have to wonder if it impacts individual apps to use gestures.

The Hub brings together all your notifications — but can show you upcoming events from your calendar, too. That's a neat feature: an interesting and new past/future approach. I like that.

Some of those photos pulled from Facebook and LinkedIn are warped and distorted, but pulling live info is a clever technology. Is this content stored on the phone? How does it work? Does it require 3G? No explanation.

Hub reminds me of WP8's People app. A lot of potential, but I think it needs to be explained more. How exactly does it work?

Typing on the software keyboard: flicking words as a kind of autocomplete. I'd like that on iOS. I want better keyboards on my phone. This looks advanced and more thought-through than iOS's.

Typing in other languages is pointless if you don't understand them, but it's clever that BB10 can detect which language you're typing in.

Dropping spaces and fixing errors is amazing. That should have been the demo. Imagine typing a full sentence without tapping the spacebar between words, and even making some typos. Once you're at the end of the sentence, BB10 figures out what you meant to say and autocorrects. That's very clever. I want it.

BB Balance: these are like the old Nokia profiles on phones. Work and Personal are defaults. Everything can be changed between the two: wallpapers, apps, colour schemes. Looks a bit confusing, though — apps running in one profile show up on both? Isn't that exactly what having profiles should be eliminating?

There doesn't appear to be a guide for app icons. Some are clearly taken directly from iOS. Some are square. Some are round. Some are oddly shaped. Not consistent. Doesn't look as ugly as Android can, though.

Battery life is depleting on the demo unit. Less than half battery.

All the features he's mentioned in BB Messenger are available on iOS. Their video calling UI looks just like FaceTime.

Screen-Share sounds fascinating. But why would I want that in a call environment? I have AirPlay mirroring. I suppose sharing your screen from one side of the world to another is a novel idea, but how practically useful is it? Still, it's neat.

Perhaps the Screen-Share feature is still a little buggy. It looked like the demo went out of sync near the end, with the device sending the screen lagging behind the device which was viewing the screen. No idea how that could happen. Perhaps it was the live feed — the device sending the screen was on the other side of the world. A little confusing of a demo.

This is confusing. Vacation? Voice memos? Evernote? What is Remember? A to-do list app? I don't understand.

BB10's camera is interesting. In order to take a picture, you must tap the screen in a non-specified area. Doing so will shake the entire device, making pictures blurry. Every single image taken during the demo was blurry, almost certainly because of this.

Blurry images. Time shift looks cool - when's the iOS app which does that coming out? Tomorrow? Camera+ on iOS has a similar feature: it automatically takes an image when it detects the iPhone isn't moving.

More thoughts about Flow, with regards to navigating the OS. It's more modular than iOS and Android. Instead of having a "Homescreen" upon which all your apps are displayed, with a Home button always returning the user to the Homescreen, BB10 allows and even touts the ability of launching one app directly within another. This seems to suggest the "Homescreen" is a last-resort. More of a way to delete apps than launch them. This is an interesting concept, but it is certainly more confusing. It's less structured.

"Story Maker" app. Which iOS app does this represent? iMovie? It looks simpler than iMovie. Curious as to how many different styles and themes are contained within the video editing software. It's installed by default?

Starting to feel the whole OS is a little too easy to lose yourself in. Perhaps it's a great update for existing blackberry fans, but I don't think it's much of a threat to iOS. New users will have a very steep learning curve.

Disco lights again.

70,000 apps available from day 1. That's a big number. "Not just 46 of the top 50" - is that a Windows Phone joke? Pretty sure WP8's presentation touted 46 out of the top 50.

The Economist app on BB10 is using the exact icon of their old iOS app — complete with Apple's gloss shine. The Economist on iOS is now a Newsstand app with a more beautiful icon.

Did he expect applause after saying there's no need to reboot the device after installing an app? Really? How is that a feature?

End of February? Available in US in March. UK today?

"Conversations with working moms and artists"? Global Creative Director position at BB. What does this mean? Her? This is going to be someone they paid a lot of money to.

Yep, looks like Alicia Keys will be getting a lot of dough from BlackBerry (no longer called RIM).

---

So, RIM is now called BlackBerry. (That's a shame.)

BB10 is finally here.

It looks to be a very different departure from iOS, Android, Window Phone and Ubuntu mobile. This is a good thing.

If I had to describe BB10 using existing smartphone operating systems, I’d call it a cross between Android and older BlackBerrys software-wise, with some of Apple’s control over hardware. The design seems to be more unified than Android, but not as beautiful as iOS.

One of the biggest differences between BB10 and other smartphones is the deviation from a “Homescreen > App” navigation UI. This is familar to any iOS user — you’re either in an app, or you’re navigating the homescreen. BB10 seems to push a “flow” idea, where the user can navigate from “App > App” as appropriate, with less time “wasted” on a homescreen. This was mentioned repeatedly throughout the presentation. I can see the appeal, but can’t help but feel this approach poses a higher learning curve for new users. It certainly risks being too complex.

The Z10 hardware (without a hardware keyboard) looks very good indeed. I’d love BlackBerry to get in touch and send me a review unit, so I can give some real impressions. I worry that the plastic back of the device may feel cheap to the touch, but it’s also more likely to provide a gripping and comfortable surface, as opposed to the iPhone 5’s metallic and angular edges, sides and back. I’d feel more comfortable resting the Z10 hardware on a smooth gradient, like the arm of a sofa, than the iPhone 5 — which would almost certainly slide right off.

One final question worth asking: is BB10 going to save -RIM- BlackBerry? This is impossible to answer. I think it shows promise. It might stabilise the company short and medium-term, but I don’t feel it’s enough to raise BlackBerry to where they once were.

When Amazon first created the text-to-speech feature in their Kindle devices to read purchased books out loud, book publishers and the Authors Guild promptly claimed its use was illegal and forced Amazon to make the feature optional for every individual book. Needless to say, many publishers never allow it, even today.

The quote that Paul Aitken, executive director of the Authors Guild, gave to explain the Guild’s decision is as follows:

“They don't have the right to read a book out loud. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

It appears the concern raised is that reading a purchased book out loud would kill sales of audiobooks. This view seems very short sighted and greedy.

If a Kindle owner wants to listen to high quality and professionally recorded audio from a book, there are plenty of options available: the first which springs to mind is Audible, Amazon’s own audiobook service. Unfortunately, the library of audiobooks is much smaller than the library of ebooks. Many more books are available for Kindle than are available through Audible.

If a customer searches Audible for a title they’d like to listen to, then discovers it’s unavailable, it seems reasonable to assume the customer will simply do without. Text-to-speech integration in technology is not mainstream enough for most people to consider as an alternative to audiobooks.

It goes without saying that a computer reading text out loud — à la Siri — won’t sound anywhere near as good as a professionally voiced audiobook.

There is a group of users, however — larger than you may imagine — who will expect text-to-speech integration in a device like a Kindle and don’t mind its relative shortcomings: the visually impaired or disabled. Where the Authors Guild step over the line, in my opinion, is in their refusal to accept text-to-speech even in the capacity of accessibility.

The Disabled World website writes about the Kindles, back in 2009:

Many people with disabilities were happy to learn that the Kindle version 2.0 includes a text-to-speech feature, but their joy has been short-lived because the Authors Guild promptly pressured Amazon to remove the audio feature from Kindle due to concerns that it would interfere with sales of AudioBooks. Amazon’s response was to allow each publisher to decide whether the text-to-speech feature would be available for their titles.

Several publisher [sic], to include Random House, have already told Amazon to turn text-to-speech off, cutting off a resource related to people with disabilities and a channel of mainstream media access. Disability Rights Advocates (DRA) and additional members of the Reading Rights Coalition are working to get Amazon to reverse this policy. It seems that Random House prefers greed over people.

[Emphasis mine.]

It’s worth noting that blame shouldn’t be placed on Amazon for this. I hope the Authors Guild reconsider their approach to text-to-speech and allow its use for accessibility reasons.

Text-to-speech is a bread and butter accessibility feature. If a customer cannot enjoy a book visually, why penalise the customer further by not allowing them to enjoy it audibly? Audiobooks are clearly the preferred options for both average customers and the visually impaired or disabled, however the library of audiobooks is smaller. The compromise text-to-speech makes in quality is below what average customers want, but it’s a lifeline to the visually impaired, who have few options.

Amazon and the Authors Guild should be striving to improve the experience of every reader, by making more titles available as audiobooks and improving accessibility of Kindle devices.

Note: it’s worth mentioning that when VoiceOver is enabled on iOS, purchased books in iBooks will be read out loud. Books purchased through Amazon, shown in iOS’s Kindle app, will not.

Nvidia announced their Project Shield portable gaming device at CES on Monday, with no details on price. Or availability. Or battery life.

The Shield seems far too bulky and oddly shaped to carry around comfortably. It’s thicker and bulkier than existing portable gaming hardware and even thicker again compared to the average smartphone. Calling it portable is certainly optimistic — can you imagine this being used on public transport? It looks to be clunky and awkward in size, almost certainly too large for an average pocket. It also appears more delicate than a smartphone, with a hinged screen worth protecting. It may well be “portable”, but I can’t see this being used outside of the home to the same degree people use a Nintendo DS.

Fortunately, the Shield isn’t only trying to be a portable console. It has another trick up its sleeve.

Where the announcement gets really interesting is Nvidia’s integration with traditional PCs with Nvidia graphics cards. I’ve already pondered Valve’s interesting position in gaming and how it might create for an interesting future for consoles. Whilst the Shield isn’t a “Steam Box”, it’s possible to use the device as a controller for games on a PC and use the Shield’s screen instead of the PC to view the action. Essentially, the Shield becomes the screen and the controller for some of your PC games — in much the same way the new Wii U’s game pad acts as a screen and controller to the Wii U. Interesting.

Nvidia is presenting a device with two goals: to be a portable gaming system (running Android) and a way to play PC games in a more portable way… when at home. The Shield fails in the first goal — smartphones and existing gaming devices like the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS do far better jobs at either being mobile and ubiquitous (smartphones) or being a “good enough” compromise of mobile and quality gaming (portable consoles). The Shield isn’t mobile when compared to a smartphone and it isn’t better than existing home consoles or PCs for gaming around the house. I don’t even need to mention how short the battery life must be when streaming HD video over Wi-Fi.

If you want a portable gaming device, either use your smartphone or buy an existing console — which will come complete with a rich ecosystem of top-tier gaming titles. If you want a controller experience at home with pleasant HD graphics, either use a cheap Xbox controller with a gaming PC or simply get a full console. They’re cheaper than ever. The Shield is trying to solve problems which have already been solved.

As it stands today — before the Shield even exists — dedicated electronics hardware is in decline. Gaming hardware is dying. I don’t have much hope for existing portable gaming consoles like the DS or PSP, so announcing a brand new device with very few gaming titles in an arguably worse form factor than existing products seems to be a sure failure.

The First Steam Box?

Another related announcement to come out of CES is the “Piston”, the first Steam Box device for use with Valve’s Big Picture mode. As I said over a month ago, whilst speculating about the future for Valve and Steam’s Big Picture mode:

If Valve released moderately powerful hardware, bundled with a “Steam OS” and took away the hassles associated with PC gaming, they could be on to a winner.

I still stand by this. Valve are in a unique position: they create hugely successful games, own an extremely popular gaming distribution platform and have a huge audience: as I write this, nearly four million users are online on Steam. I believe we’ll know much more about Valve’s Big Picture mode when first party hardware is released. Until then, I remain hopeful. As I said back in December:

I wonder if existing console manufacturers even consider Valve a threat to their business today. Perhaps they should.

Andrew Cunningham writes a great review of the new 21” iMac over at Ars. To summarise, the new 21” iMac is better than the previous 21” iMac in almost every way. But it’s not all roses:

In a desktop computer, though, the pursuit of thinness at the cost of features makes less sense. The vast majority of the time, it’s going to be sitting on your desk, and users will be interacting with a separate keyboard and mouse, pausing only occasionally to plug something in or adjust the screen’s angle. Giving up desirable features like user-upgradeable RAM just to make a thinner desktop seems like the wrong move, even if it’s one that only IT people and power users will notice or care about.

Marco links to the same Ars review, and adds:

The thinness also made the speakers worse and didn’t leave enough room for a 3.5” (“desktop”-sized) hard drive in the 21.5” model. (The 27” model still uses 3.5” drives.) Even though the gap is narrowing, 3.5” drives are still significantly faster and larger-capacity than 2.5” (“laptop”) drives from the same generation. With 1 TB laptop drives standard and Fusion Drives only available at $1,749 and up, there’s even less of an advantage than usual of choosing the iMac over a MacBook.

Marco notes how the thinness of the computer negatively impacts performance compared to the previous generation: the speakers have poorer bass response (because they’re crammed in a much smaller space) and the spinning hard drives have changed from the regular, desktop-class 3.5” flavour to the slower, laptop-sized 2.5” models. Further, user-upgradeable RAM has disappeared from the 21” iMac.

Apple compromised performance in order to slim down the computer. Was this the right move?

Putting form over function in a desktop computer initially sounds nuts: why would the thinness matter if performance suffers? There’s plenty of space on a desk, and desks don’t complain about weight.

I’d argue that the move, although unfortunate for some users, was the right thing to do. This becomes clearer after examining the 21” iMac’s bigger sibling, the 27” model.

The 27” iMac received the same thinness treatment as the 21” did, but it didn’t suffer the same performance hit: the spinning hard drives in the larger iMac are still 3.5” desktop drives and RAM is user-replaceable. The only hiccups in the new 27” iMac compared to the previous 27” model are the thinner, less bass-intensive speakers. However, speakers are not vital to the actual performance of a computer: they’re merely a nice addition.

Anyone who cares enough about audio equipment to notice the poor bass response in the newer iMac speakers is likely to already have a great set of external speakers. Dedicated speakers have always been significantly better than any integrated computer speakers. This will likely remain the case.

Apple places value in unity within product lines and between product themselves. Anyone who has seen one Apple laptop will almost certainly recognise another. The same goes for all their products: from iOS devices to iMacs.

The 21” iMac and the 27” iMac are almost identical in form: one just houses a larger display. The rest of the product is scaled up or down appropriately. The 21” and 27” iMacs are two peas in a pod.

In order for both iMac sizes to look equally elegant, the space within the iMac’s chassis for components had to be proportionally scaled. The 21” iMac has much less internal component space than the 27” model.

If Apple shipped the same, larger-size hard drives in both iMacs, the 21” model would look disproportionally thick and ugly. It wouldn’t be a unified design: the 21” model would look like the 27” iMac’s ugly sister.

This is a logical reason why the 21” iMac has a laptop-sized hard drive—and quite possibly the reason it doesn’t have user-upgradeable RAM. With much less space to play with, perhaps the RAM couldn’t be positioned in such a way to allow end users to access it. With the reduction of internal fans, from three in last year’s iMac down to just one, compromises in component layout would have had to be made.

The iMac is in a weird transition stage: no Retina display and not yet fully SSD-based¹. The 27” iMac is a more solid machine: faster internals and more storage and RAM options. If you’re considering an iMac, I’d recommend a 27” model, perhaps with some upgrades.

That’s what I’m ordering for myself.

—

1: No stock configuration iMac includes all-SSD storage.

In a somewhat impromptu interview with Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, Gabe Newell, the head of Valve, discussed the next steps for Steam:

Newell said Valve's current goal was to figure out how to make PCs work better in the living room. He said the reaction to Steam's TV-friendly Big Picture interface has been “stronger than expected,” and that their next step is to get Steam Linux out of beta and to get Big Picture on that operating system, which would give Valve more flexibility when developing their own hardware.

Gabe is certainly pushing Linux heavily at the moment. I imagine this must mainly be due to a combination of two things:

1. Windows 8 is much less friendly to third party game developers and distributors like Valve. The Windows App Store is direct competition to Valve’s Steam Store.

2. The more control any software company has over hardware, the more tightly integrated the two can become. If Valve controls the hardware and the operating system, it seems logical that the Valve gaming experience could greatly improve. Whether it actually improves is a question of execution.

It makes sense for Valve to design a “Steam OS”, built on Linux and optimised for Steam’s distribution methods and catalogue, with a focus on optimising the entire gaming experience. This seems to be what’s happening:

Newell says that he expects companies to start selling PCs designed for the living room next year — with Steam preloaded — and that Valve will create its own.

Is control over hardware and software important for Gabe? It seems so:

“Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment,”

People no longer want to manage all the cruft which comes along with PC gaming: graphics cards, drivers, updating and worrying about frame rates are nothing but headaches and relics of the past. If Valve released moderately powerful hardware, bundled with a “Steam OS” and took away the hassles associated with PC gaming, they could be on to a winner. Having this level of control over hardware and software would likely give Valve the ability to create a better gaming experience, either in the living room or on a PC device.

Amazon has taken a similar approach with tablets and it seems to be doing quite well for them. Amazon took stock Android as a foundation, designed their own shell and shipped custom hardware running it. Valve will take desktop Linux, customise it as they see fit, and package the software in hardware approved by them.

Existing PC users who are unwilling to lose control of custom hardware would likely be satisfied with the third party hardware Gabe said would be available—although I find it hard to believe that third party hardware will be as well integrated as Valve’s own.

I wonder if existing console manufacturers even consider Valve a threat to their business today. Perhaps they should.

As a quick addition to my ​“Efficiency with Siri” piece last week, here’s another case where Siri can accomplish something not otherwise possible on iOS: informing how many days have passed since a given date.

To Siri: “How many days have passed since 28 June 1992?”

A WolframAlpha card is displayed with the number of days I’ve been alive. As I described in my piece last week, obtaining this number to copy—if you wish to work with or manipulate the result without transcribing—is possible albeit fiddly:

First, install the free WolframAlpha Viewer app and the paid WolframAlpha app. Then, once Siri presents the answer to you, tap the WolframAlpha icon in the bottom corner of the displayed card. You’ll be taken to the result in WolframAlpha’s app. In order to copy the result, tap the small, double arrow next to the result you wish to copy, then tap the result itself. The result will be copied into the search field at the top of the WolframAlpha app. From there, it’s simple to just select and manipulate it.

Apple Insider reports that some of Apple’s new iMacs are marked as having been “Assembled in USA”.

How many iMacs does this apply to? We don’t know. But what does it mean, exactly? More than you might think. The requirements for a product to sport this statement are rather strict:

Assembled in USA Claims

A product that includes foreign components may be called “Assembled in USA” without qualification when its principal assembly takes place in the U.S. and the assembly is substantial. For the “assembly” claim to be valid, the product’s last “substantial transformation” also should have occurred in the U.S. That’s why a “screwdriver” assembly in the U.S. of foreign components into a final product at the end of the manufacturing process doesn’t usually qualify for the “Assembled in USA” claim.

Example: A lawn mower, composed of all domestic parts except for the cable sheathing, flywheel, wheel rims and air filter (15 to 20 percent foreign content) is assembled in the U.S. An “Assembled in USA” claim is appropriate.

Example: All the major components of a computer, including the motherboard and hard drive, are imported. The computer’s components then are put together in a simple “screwdriver” operation in the U.S., are not substantially transformed under the Customs Standard, and must be marked with a foreign country of origin. An “Assembled in U.S.” claim without further qualification is deceptive.

[Emphasis mine.]

This suggests that a moderate to large amount of assembly is taking place in the US.

Tim Cook has talked in the past about his desire to have more Apple products made in America. From a transcription of Cook’s interview at the All Things Digital conference earlier this year:

Walt Mossberg: “There’s been a lot of talk recently about reviving manufacturing here in the US. […] You’re probably the most influential company in technology, and you’re an operations expert — will there be an Apple product ever made again in America?”

Tim Cook: “I want there to be! I want there to be!” [T]here’s an intense focus on the final assembly. Could that be done in the U.S.? I sure hope so. But look, how many tool-and-die makers do you know in America?”

”We will do as many of these things [in the US] as we can do, and you can bet that we’ll use the whole of our influence to do this.”

Looks like his wishes are coming true. He certainly has the influence.

Without question, Siri is one of the greatest additions to iOS in recent years, however it can become even more valuable if you know its nuances. The discoverability of Siri is lower than most Apple experiences, presumably due to the limitations of conversational recognition.

Luckily, Apple provides a quick-start guide with Siri: simply hold the home button down to activate, and tap the i button. A sizeable list of example commands appear, one for each category, and even more are accessible by tapping down further. Not every command is listed there, though.

Siri often provides a different way to achieve something equally possible without it: you can launch Safari and search for “pictures of kittens”, or simply ask Siri to show you pictures of kittens. The result is the same.

There are some rare instances where Siri provides a significantly more efficient way to accomplish a task then is possible using other methods. There are also some scenarios where Siri is capable of something not otherwise possible using touch input alone. This article lists my favourite examples of such features.

“Delete all my Alarms”

I use the alarm feature in Clock.app on my iPhone every single day, even if it’s just as a backup alarm. This ensures that over time, an incredibly large number of alarms build up in the Clock app. I recently found out, to my delight, that asking Siri to “delete all my alarms” does just that. It would normally take three taps to delete one alarm using the Clock app alone: Siri can delete every single alarm after I press and hold the home button and utter a few words. This saves minutes every few days.

“What’s 53 multiplied by 4?”

Siri’s Wolfram Alpha integration ensures easy mathematical problem solving: just ask Siri a simple multiplication and you’ll have you answer faster than you could have launched a calculator app and entered in your query.

A caveat to this otherwise great solution is the complexity by which receiving a copy-able answer is obtained. If having the answer available to copy into another app or document is vital after having asked Siri, it is possible, just fiddly. First, install the free WolframAlpha Viewer app and the paid WolframAlpha app. Then, once Siri presents the answer to you, tap the WolframAlpha icon in the bottom corner of the displayed card. You’ll be taken to the result in WolframAlpha’s app. In order to copy the result, tap the small, double arrow next to the result you wish to copy, then tap the result itself. The result will be copied into the search field at the top of the WolframAlpha app. From there, it’s simple to just select and manipulate it.

I can’t help but feel it’s far too difficult to copy an answer to the clipboard from a WolframAlpha result displayed in Siri. It seems needlessly complex to have two apps installed to do this. I understand WolframAlpha’s desire to receive money for the feature, but I don’t understand why I can’t remove the free WolframAlpha Viewer app once I’ve installed the paid version. This is inelegant.

“Direct me to the supermarket”

Asking Siri this simple query is far more elegant and efficient than launching the Maps app and searching. I use this weekly.

“Play music by Rush”

I’m not a regular user of the shuffle feature when listening to music, but occasionally I’ll want to listen to a mixed selection of tracks by a single artist. Asking Siri to “Play music by Muse” will do exactly the same as me launching the Music app, navigating to the Muse entry, tapping All Songs, then hitting shuffle.

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Siri is a new interface to iOS. Comparing Siri to regular touch input is interesting: it excels in some respects and is almost equal or even inefficient in others. Finding new ways to become more efficient is a fantastic feeling. These Siri commands have helped me do just that.

If you have any other favourite Siri commands not listed here, let me on on twitter or send me an email and they might just find their way into this list.

I've had this Tiny Terror Combo (the 12" variety) for a couple of months now and I adore it. I'm working on a full review, but until then, here's a quick preview of some of the tones available through the amp.

My favourite feature of this valve amp is how I can roll back the volume knob on my guitar to get a clean tone. My only previous experience with guitar amps has been with the solid state variety, and boy, this blows them all away.

Throughout this entire recording, the only effects I use are a Cry Baby Wah pedal (you'll be able to figure out where that kicks in) and a BOSS Blues Driver pedal for some extra punch. I only use the Blues Driver pedal for a small section around the Muse-esque part of the following recording. Almost all of the recording was solely with the amp, and different settings on my Ibanez guitar.

I hope you can excuse both my awful playing and the not-so-great quality of this recording. Believe it or not, this was recorded on my iPhone 5. I'm planning to pick up a more professional microphone in the coming months, but this will have to do for now.

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These are the settings on the amp. I didn't change any throughout the entire recording. I've experimented a lot, but find that these work best for me.

If you're looking for a more in-depth look at Orange amps (or anything guitar related), I highly recommend RobChappers' YouTube channel. Especially this Orange Tiny Terror series video and this Jim Root Dark Terror video. The audio in RobChappers' well-produced reviews is much higher quality than mine.

Public broadcasting is a balance. It’s a balance between not getting your message across to an audience at all and spamming your message so loudly that its demand for attention becomes deafening and is ignored altogether.

I feel I haven't been broadcasting Chasing Perfection articles optimally. I’m making some changes to how I broadcast articles today, and I think you’ll like them. When I share my writing, I don’t want to yell out like an entitled child; I want to unveil my very own work of art.

The more you shout, the fewer listen.

A new entry is added to Chasing Perfection about once a day. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Due to this infrequent-esque posting schedule (and the relative timelessness of articles), I often feel I should share new entries to twitter more than once — after all, twitter is where most of my audience resides (and not everyone reads every tweet in their timeline). Mentioning an article more than once would increase the chances of each follower seeing and enjoying the articles.

Unfortunately, the caveat here is that some people do read every tweet. For those people, seeing the same article mentioned by the same individual multiple times would surely become tiresome very quickly. I don’t want to annoy or spam my followers, so this seems far from ideal.

There is a Chasing Perfection twitter account which tweets a link to every new entry, and there’s my personal twitter account, which tweets on no particular schedule.

My new strategy for sharing articles is to make further use of retweets: my personal twitter account will share tweets from the CP account. I will not abide by a strict policy; not all will be shared, but most certainly will. My judgement will come into play here. The main reason for this is that the retweets will only be seen by those who do not already follow the CP account. For someone who does follow the CP account and my personal account, there will be no repeated tweets.

The second prong of this new approach is creating a tweet-sized description of each article. That description, along with a link to the article in question, will be tweeted from my personal account. These “tease-tweets” will act as a blurb; individually crafted to provide new value even to those who have read the article already.

The problem with retweets is that they’re endorsements of something else, rather than statements by the retweeter. A viewer of a retweet sees the username and avatar of the retweetee, with only a small mention of the retweeter. Interestingly, this is similar to how twitter displays adverts.

I feel it is important to tweet both from my own account — a “tease-tweet”, if you will — and to retweet the CP account. The personal tweet and the retweet contain different content. The personal tweet has my avatar next to it and doesn’t look at all like an advert. This makes the link appear more trustworthy and of higher quality. The CP retweet will appear to be more “adverty”, but is also a statement from me: “If you like my writing, why not follow the CP twitter account?”

Getting a broadcasting balance just right is hard. These changes should hopefully improve my own balance without annoying followers, repeatedly saying the same thing, or shouting.

I’ll whisper more and shout less.