Osama’s Blog

When a user interface is so intuitive, that even a one-year-old can use it.

PhillRyu.com - The Power of Good UI Design

(yes, this is about the iphone)

 I never imagined that solar power could be used for an air conditioner, this is a cool idea…

Coolerado Coolers: Getting Close to Solar Powered Air Conditioning (TreeHugger)

 At first I thought these were digitally Colorized, they are amazing color photos taken during WWI, in the forum discussion, an anonymous french guy (ribouldingue?) reveals this is a Lumiere technique called AutoChrome.

Look at the photos at World’s Armed Forces Forum

I was reading a lot about Apple’s iPhone, and how they say it’s a revolution in telephones, but many people think it has problems, the latest of which is no SDK:

Digg - No iPhone SDK Means No iPhone Killer Apps

The Dream iPhone would have

Hardware

• A High-end CPU.
• Lots of Storage.
• A Scratch and break-resistant screen.
• A 6MP camera built-in, The photos app is nice, but without taking the pictures with the current iPhones, you’ll need your PC/Mac.

Connectivity

• SMS/MMS/GPRS/3G/WiFi/WiMax/Bluetooth, yes, all of them, and maybe even add USB connectivity.

Development

• A developer SDK, and it would be great if it is similar to the regular Macintosh dev environments.
• J2ME.
• Flash.

File Formats

• Documents: pdf, doc, xls, …
• Audio: mp3, aac, wav, wma, ra, …
• Video: avi, divx, xvid, mov, mpeg, …

More

• Much more, this should have anything any other mobile phone has + more…
• It really needs to break lots of rules of telephones.

I first saw photosynth on ted, but now it’s available for preview, If you don’t know about photosynth, have a look at the Microsoft PhotoSynth Videos on Youtube.

After Apple’s move to intel x86 CPU’s, it’s now possible to do things that were previously impossible….

Have a look at VMWare’s Fusion for MacOS, that as the video shows, will provide Unity between MacOS and Windows Applications.

I seem to live online more than offline…

• When I need any information I either type it in the top-right corner of my firefox browser (Google Search - ctrl+k), or type a URL starting with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ and appending what I want to read about, replacing spaces with underscores, and starting each word with a capital ….
• I can be contacted using email or google talk much easier than by phone, I may ignore or forget about missed calls on my mobile phone, but i’ll always read my email and respond to chats (I’ve been using Skype in this trip to egypt to call home, and I’m impressed by the quality - but my previous audio experiences sucked only because of the dial-up connections used at the time).
• I watch more videos online than TV, using Youtube, Google Video, Metacafe, Digg Videos, Joost and StumbleVideo.
• My main news sources are online, even though I get a free newspaper at work and I have satellite TV at home.
• I buy lots of stuff online … amazon, woot … and many more.

Many of the people of the greater New-Orleans area have left the area, one of the visible effects of that is the 2007 telephone directory,What’s also interesting is that the 2007 directory has a Lasik surgery banner ad on the top of every page, reducing the number of listings per page , so the new edition is even smaller than it looks.

More info at jonnodotcom’s flickr page.

Here’s a nice comic from xkcd, you can order a t-shirt here.

Randall Munroe says:

This is probably the most popular comic I’ve ever done. It was spotted on the walls at Amazon headquarters and on some of the bigger blags. And now, as per your many email requests, here it is on a shirt!