ben1040

76 ms·

1. 661.▲
   by ben1040 15y ago

   Rhapsody has the advantage of not trying to leak your listening habits to Facebook, as well.
2. 662.▲
   by ben1040 15y ago

   So the punch is based on scanning a QR code? That's correct. The business has a card with a QR code printed on it that you scan to get a "punch." This is part of the value proposition for the merchants, I guess - they don't need a phone
3. 663.▲
   by ben1040 15y ago

   A frozen yogurt shop I used to visit a lot started using Punchd back in June. The app is cute, but I'd rather just have a paper card. After the transaction, the clerk has to pull out a QR code card to let you scan. The app on your phone w
4. 664.▲
   by ben1040 15y ago

   Before the app tries scanning anything, it gets a location lock to verify you're at the business. Which is a little annoying because my phone has flaky/slow GPS (thanks HTC Thunderbolt) so I end up standing there at the counter waiting to
5. 665.▲
   by ben1040 15y ago

   Exactly. The G1 was technically EOL'd at Android 1.6, but a coworker been running 2.2 on his for well over a year now using a custom ROM.
6. 666.▲
   by ben1040 15y ago

   In flyover country where I live (St Louis) I should be happy that we even have digital coin-op meters and not ancient clockwork models. A couple years ago they put pay-and-display meters in a few neighborhoods, only to inexplicably get rid
7. 667.▲
   by ben1040 15y ago

   I really like this because it does make it more convenient to use vending machines by removing the need for cash and coins. Going beyond that, I would absolutely kill to see NFC-enabled parking meters. Using credit or debit all the time
8. 668.▲
   by ben1040 15y ago

   A few years ago I signed up for a NEXUS pass[1] and was background checked, fingerprinted, photographed, and had my iris scans taken. I can only assume that my information had to have been transferred to other databases such as this as wel
9. 669.▲
   by ben1040 15y ago

   And as I remember it, it was just a matter of months after iTunes was released for Windows that the iPod really took off. iTunes for Windows came out in October 2003, and then the iPod Mini was released in January 2004. By even that Febr
10. 670.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    http://db.tt/Il2imkP - Thank you!
11. 671.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    Yeah, the last two years they've said "there are no plans for giveaways," only to give away $1000+ worth in freebies to attendees. Nobody's going to listen if Google goes crying wolf once more. The talks are worth well more than the $450 a
12. 672.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    This'll be my third I/O so I hope the same. But in any case I hope they don't use the same third party vendor who handled registration last year. That was not fun for some colleagues of mine who spent the better part of an hour trying to g
13. 673.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    I have a hard time believing they selectively blocked Twitter and it wasn't just some connectivity issue. The Facebook post screencap implies it was an emergency landing due to a security issue. I guess the presumption behind this person n
14. 674.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    The ITA Matrix tool was ridiculously helpful when dealing with my old company's corporate travel agent. They would invariably put me on some horrible flight schedule unless I used Matrix to find the best route and just give them the flight
15. 675.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iph... (this is the text of a popup window on the unlocked iPhone page). The unlocked iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S will not work with CDMA-based carriers such as Verizon Wireless or Spri
16. 676.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    One of the affected models, the Thunderbolt, only now started getting updates to Gingerbread this week. That is, until Verizon halted it due to a major usability bug that should have been identified easily in carrier testing (voicemail noti
17. 677.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    On the other hand I recently wiped and rebult my laptop with Lion and case sensitive HFS+, only to find that Adobe Creative Suite explicitly refuses to install on case sensitive volumes. Incredibly annpying.
18. 678.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    Yep, it looks like anyone can get a USAA bank account even if they are not military or a spouse/child of a USAA member. https://www.usaa.com/inet/pages/why_choose_usaa_main USAA's investment products, most checking and savings products,
19. 679.▲
    23andMe Exome Sequencing Pilot(23andme.com)

    3 points by ben1040 15y ago|0 comments
20. 680.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    So I surmise you must be in St. Louis. Hope to see you around at one of the many various nerd meetups around town.
21. 681.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    Having recently lost the grandfather who would sit with me at his basement workbench for hours on end teaching me how to put things together, I found that post really touching. Thanks for sharing.
22. 682.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    It might not be valuable to competitors, but I wonder if this data set would be useful for someone trying to write fake reviews that get past their filtering mechanisms.
23. 683.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    It's pretty awful in the stock configuration, at least unless you disable LTE (in which case why did you buy an LTE phone?) or root it and use SetCPU. Honestly, it's BS that you need to either root the device or disable its flagship feature
24. 684.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    > I really don't want to pay more to get 4G (up to $10/month for some carriers) What carriers in the US do that? Verizon has no surcharge for LTE. Sprint's $10 surcharge started out as a surchage on WiMax phones, but is now a surcharge
25. 685.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    I have a Verizon Thunderbolt, and the battery life absolutely sucks compared to the iPhone 4. AnandTech did a great comparison [1]. The other 3 phones on their LTE lineup are all huge too, with equally bad battery life (maybe with the exce
26. 686.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    And no, you can't use AT&T, Verizon and MetroPCS LTE devices on each others' networks, as the companies spec out their radios to exclude each others' frequencies. Well that's also because nobody's doing voice over LTE, and they're sti
27. 687.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    Netflix has 8 years worth of ratings I've made, so it's gotten very good at suggesting me new movies. Amazon is the only other company that has a longer history of what I buy and what I like, and they're making some decent inroads into st
28. 688.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    I remember seeing this in the demo pit at Google I/O and thinking it was one of the coolest things I saw there, because I love browsing historic pictures. I then promptly forgot the name of the service so thank you for posting this. Now I'
29. 689.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    I had seen a few projects like GiveCamp that try to do this for nonprofits. They would get together on a weekend and hack on database/web projects, and then turn it over to the organizations. It seems like a great improvement on this would
30. 690.▲
    by ben1040 15y ago

    Is it a honeypot, or is it a way to monetize piracy? Imagine a user who has a pile of music he pirated over the last decade. The labels saw no money from that. Now that user can sign up for iTunes Match and presumably some portion of that