One of Microsoft’s all time crappiest “innovation” has to be the hide-unused-menu-items function. It’s like an evil house-elf that hides infrequently used things such as the first aid kit and the fire extinguisher…

Is the Office 2007 ribbon interface yet another way to hide stuff from me? And steal my screen real estate at the same time?

I totally appreciate the effort …

I upgraded to Picasa 3 recently and was shocked to discover it’s Face Detection functionality crawling through my photos and pulling out faces – without my knowledge and without my permission. And I had to struggle to find out how to stop it.

The technology is impressive of course. But I found the whole thing rather invasive and nasty for some reason. Faces are …

Every time I make a purchase, I can choose to use either my MasterCard or my VISA card.

The VISA card is PayWave-capable. All I have to do is wave it in front of a sensor to make a payment. Easy.

All else being equal (same fees, equivalent loyalty programmes etc.) guess which card is used more often?

(MasterCard has something similar called PayPass, though not …

Three students, a iPhone app, 15,000 people inspired to do a small good deed a day.

Subscribers to the free application are prompted daily with a “DoGood”–a simple task from conserving water, to turning out a light, to beautifying the world. When they’ve accomplished their good deed for the day, they click the application’s “done” button.

The program tallies how many users are fulfilling that day’s deed, and users can …

Discovered Wordle today. What fun. The above is made from today’s feed from my blog.

Death by Information Overload by Paul Hemp

Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist and expert on attention-deficit disorders, argues that the modern workplace induces what he calls “attention deficit trait,” with characteristics similar to those of the genetically based disorder. Author Linda Stone, who coined the term “continuous partial attention” to describe the mental state of today’s knowledge workers, says she’s now noticing—get this—“e-mail apnea”: the unconscious suspension of …

The Australian government recently opened up data for the citizenry to make sense of and play with.

“the Government 2.0 Taskforce brought an army of 150 geeks together in Canberra over the weekend for a coding marathon called Govhack.”

Top marks for openness and community involvement.

Results (and debate) has begun.

Yay!

When I hear the digital divide I always think of Africa for some reason.

I found this photo today, taken at a conference in Copenhagen in 2005. It nicely sums up the digital divide that is closer to home. The invisible digital divide perhaps?

The average age is 35 years
40% of all gamers are women
99% of teenage boys play games
94% of teenage girls play games
$9.5billion annual revenue

Source: Entertainment Software Association
Via Animating Human Rights: Games, Animation and Multimedia.

(Thanks for the link Bob.)

According to a Wired magazine article, UK vendors Vodaphone and Radio Shack both gave away netbooks to customer who sign up to wireless data accounts.

“… Computers are developing the same economics as mobile phones. Hardware is becoming a commodity. It is difficult to charge for.”

It was hard to imagine a mere decade ago that tangible, real, physical, see touch smellable hardware could be so quickly reduced …