Common Paradox Tech Blog

Mobile tech blogger Tnkgrl had a few minutes with the new Google Nexus One phone. Her full report gives some new insight into the much talked about device, and also confirms some things we’ve heard before. She was not allowed to take any new photos, but we’ve all seen the phone by now.

First off, there is no multitouch in the browser or maps applications. We can assume it has the same multitouch APIs as the Motorola Droid has. The Android 2.1 interface has five home screen panes instead of the three seen on previous builds of stock Android. Any Android user will tell you that’s a welcome improvement. We can pretty well tell from this that the rumors about the “Google Phone” running the “real” Android were wrong. This clearly seems to be an evolution of the existing platform. The interface is also quite snappy, being described as “Faster than the Droid”

On the hardware front, the device is rocking a 3.5 or 3.7 inch OLED display of the same resolution as the Droid. Overall, the phone apparently looks very nice and is thinner than you might expect. The GSM radio is for T-Mobile 3G bands. It runs EDGE only on the AT&T network. HTC has finally moved to MicroUSB for the data/charging port. There are also some gold contacts on the bottom of the handset, these may be for a dock of some sort. Based on what you’ve heard so far, Is this a revolution or just another phone?

We’ve received multiple tips right around 10 pm that Twitter was hacked and defaced with the message below.
The site was offline for a while.

We’re looking into this and awaiting on a response from Twitter.

Further updates below. Story developing

A long time ago, my ex-wife had two miscarriages. We could barely speak after that. Maybe that’s why I can’t understand how someone can tweet the death of her two-year-old son almost in real time. That’s what Shellie Ross did.

According to the New York Times, Shellie has 5,400 followers on Twitter. The wife of an Air Force sergeant, she uses her account to tell about her life as a mother of four.

Last monday she tweeted about her chickens and her chicken’s cage at 5:22pm. At 5:38pm she called the police saying that her son Bryson was dead at the bottom of the family pool. At 6:12pm she asked her Twitter followers to pray for the life of her son. Only five hours later, she posted photos of the two-year-old Bryson along with the following message:

Remembering my million dollar baby

I don’t know about you, but when I read this, something flipped inside me: I felt absolutely no sympathy for this woman. I just can’t believe that this is the way you mourn the loss of your own son. The same way I just can’t believe that anyone could have the cold blood to tweet about how your son is dead in the pool, just a few minutes after finding him there.

The NYT article is excusing her by saying that “it feels perfectly logical that Shellie Ross would reach out to that community with her pain.” Really? How is that “logical” again? Do you mean as logical as plastering the front of your home with photos of your dead kid, and publicly declare that you are “remembering” him shouting through the window? With a bloody megaphone? And what is that community of 5,400 followers? Are they 5,400 friends? Or just 5,400 spectators? And since we are at this logical game, could we step it a little bit further and turn on the Justin.tv webcam? I want to see the tears, please. What’s the difference, anyway? It’s all about “reaching the community” because everyone feels isolated, after all.

But as I was thinking about this, I remembered that I tweet about personal things too. Heck, you can tell when I’m angry, or happy, or in love just by reading my posts. So where to draw the line? Maybe each of us have to draw our own lines. I know, however, where to draw mine. Tweeting about the death of my kid—something that hopefully will never happen—or anyone else is a hundred billion miles out of that line.

At the end, the fact is that, no matter how you look at this, it’s terribly sad. Sad because a kid died. Sad because something is really fucked up when a mother’s first reaction is to post about the death of her son, just a few minutes after she finds him in the pool. In a bloody web page. Wrong with the mom, wrong with the whole society, wrong with whobloodydamngodfuckingever. But something here is just not working right, and no excuses on how this is a brave new world of technology can make up for this more-than-often-pathetic show we call the web.

But that’s really the key here: Technology has enabled us to easily transmit our lives in real time, and many people don’t have a clear idea of where their privacy or their “real” world starts or ends anymore. With our smartphones and digital cameras, with the Twitters and Facebooks of this world, we have became curators of our own digital live archives. So that’s probably the answer to the first question: Why does a mom tweet her son’s death In near-real time? Because now she can. [NYT]

Preware Main Screen

Preware is a free Homebrew Installer from WebOS Internals for your Palm Pre or Pixi. Preware lets you download Homebrew Apps, patches, and themes directly to your phone. Once Preware is installed you do not need to be connected to a computer because Preware does it’s magic "Over The Air."

In a few minutes you will have access to hundreds of free Homebrew Applications, Patches, and Themes right from your phone!

read more

Release date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:34:00 GMT

It’s time for some good old forum action. From the Forums is a great way to see what all of the current hot topics are on the TiPb forums. In order to create any new threads of your own or reply to any of the existing threads, you must be a registered member. Becoming a [...]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

From the Forums: Help Dieter, iPhone 3.1.3, Returning to iPhone, Jailbreak & Unlock

There are 1440 minutes in the day and the AV-Tokei online clock has cute gals in various states of undress holding up a sign with the current time for every single one of those minutes. Yes, it’s a lovely time-waster.

Honestly, I don’t even know why this caught my attention, but somehow curiosity had me refreshing the site every few minutes just so see what happens. Will that girl strip? Will the next minute bring a different lady? Is she going to…do something with that stick?

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Yes, you can certainly check the time by glancing at your system clock, but this is somehow so much more fun, especially since it’ll be quite a while before you’ve seen all 1440 images. Unless you sit there refreshing the page for 24 hours straight, that is. [AV-Tokei via Asiajin]

It’s been nearly a week since MySpace Music closed its acquisition of some of the assets of music service Imeem and redirected imeem.com to music.myspace.com. MySpace took a lot of heat for the sudden shutdown of the Imeem service, particularly the API.

But the fact is that MySpace didn’t shut the Imeem service down. Imeem’s creditors and the music labels did. If MySpace hadn’t done the deal Imeem would have shut down anyway. The company was just out of cash and options, and the wheels had come off the car. For the most part the press now gets that MySpace had very little to do with the shutdown, and has settled down.

Imeem’s 16 million monthly visitors apparently haven’t gotten the message, though, and every couple of minutes one of them fires off a frustrated message on Twitter. One example just a few minutes ago, in the image above: “Imeem, one of the best music sites, died, destroyed by MySpace.” Another: “RIP imeem, I will dearly miss you…All the more reason to hate myspace. They sold out on Dec. 8th.” Users are particularly upset about losing their playlists, something MySpace has said they’d work hard to transition “as quickly as possible.”

A few minutes ago, we got tipped off that Apple has begun a rollout of a redesign of the iPhone App Store within iTunes. It only took a quick check of Twitter and the iTunes store to confirm that, indeed, the application description pages of the iTunes store have changed.

The new-look app store is cleaner, whiter, and brings the most important information closer to the top. The new screenshots section of the app store is immediately apparent (and welcomed). It’s not live for every app page, but it is working for most of them.

Want to compare the differences? Here’s a screenshot of the old design:

Notice the blue-gray background, the location of important description information on the right-hand side of the page (farther away from the where the eye usually focuses first), and how only one screenshot appears on the page.

Now compare it to the new design:

The background is white, the purchase button is bigger and more prominent, you can view more than one screenshot when you land on the page, and customer reviews appear near the top of the app store page, rather than on the bottom.

Our gut says that this redesign is better in every way. It’s easier to find the most important information and is a more efficient use of space. It’ll also probably help app developers with their sales. Honestly, we wonder why it took Apple so long to redesign them.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Tags: app store, apple, iphone, iphone app store, itunes

Publish The Feed Later: WP Engineer provides a nice tutorial on how to publish your post to your feed a few minutes (configurable) after you publish your post. These few minutes can help you find errors or bugs in your post and fix them before they get sent out via your feed to all your readers. The “hack” requires you to change your theme’s functions.php file and add the code snippet provided. Alternatively you could also use a plugin written by our very own Keith, called Feed Pauser. I see no compatibility information on this plugin (maybe Keith could chime in and let us know) but it does offer further functionality such as the ability to prevent individual posts from appearing in your feed. A useful hack/plugin for those like me who have an itchy post finger.