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iPad in the Dark→

iPad in the Dark

Then I discovered a feature of the Kindle app that the Apple iBook app lacks: reversed fonts – white type on black pages. This is a silly idea for paper books: hard to read and a colossal waste of ink. It is also a silly idea for ordinary Kindles that, like paper books, are read by reflected light. But with a self-lit, back-lit device like an iPad, it becomes a new way to experience books. Even with very low light levels, the contrast of the white letters against the black page is outstanding. In a dark room, it is very readable.

Funny how with all the advanced technology, all it takes is one tiny feature to change the experience: there is practically no excess light to bother other people.

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Seven Steps To Mastering Your Web Browser→

Seven Steps To Mastering Your Web Browser

Thing is, the stock installation of any browser is only telling you half the story; it’s perfectly serviceable right out of the box, but there is a metric poop-ton of additional functionality and efficiency available. Thankfully, nerdy goofballs like myself have, mostly through trial and error, stumbled upon a host of great ways to make your browser work better and faster.

And lots of great tips in there. I agree: bookmarklets are little miracles.

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How To: Display WebP Images On Your Mac Browser

WebP is a new image format announced by Google last week which aims at making the web faster by providing the tools to use high-quality, yet lightweight, images. While preserving quality and resolution, Google’s engineers figured out a way to compress images so to make them even smaller than usual .JPEG files. About the technical details:

WebP uses predictive coding to encode an image, the same methodology used by the VP8 video codec to compress keyframes in videos. Predictive coding uses the values in neighboring blocks of pixels to predict the values in a block, and then encodes only the difference (residual) between the actual values and the prediction. The residuals typically contain many zero values, which can be compressed much more effectively. The residuals are then transformed, quantized and entropy-coded as usual. WebP also uses variable block sizes.

Being a new file format, it’s not officially supported in browsers yet. Maybe it’ll be very soon, but right now it’s just a cool developer preview that shows what it’s possible to do with Google’s technology. Here’s how you can enable WebP in your Mac browser right now. Read more

Twitter, Curation and iPad: Meet Tweet Library

On the internet, some words are often overlooked. When something becomes “popular” or even a “trend”, the original concept is abused and misinterpreted. It happened with “interface”, it happened with “geek” and “hipster”, it’s happening with “curation”.

Curation: “The act of curating, of organizing and maintaining a collection of artworks or artifacts”

Curation #2: “The manual updating of information in a database”

With Apple’s “curated” App Store platform, geeks and casual users have started using the term “curation” in their parlance to refer to a collection of items regulated by terms and strict rules. With 250.000 applications and stories of rejections, curation suddenly became an internet-wide topic of interest for the everyday iPhone user. This is not what curation is all about. Read more