Recalibrating your iOS home button
Have no idea why this works, but my iPad home button was feeling very sluggish while in Singapore – I even suspected it was the humidity – and this fixed it, so it works on iPads as well as iPhones too!
A community? from feeds?
Dave Winer is allowing his readers to submit their feeds to his community. Take away the surface visual beauty and add a dollop of transparency and community building, and Dave’s scripting.com has been as much at the intersection of Liberal Arts and technology as Apple. Can’t wait to see what experiments he’s cooking up!
Mac Parallels 7 for just $29.99
Parallels is offering a competitor “cross-grade” to its latest Parallels Desktop 7 for just $29.99!
Don’t own VMWare Fusion? Apparently, this license key will work for the cross-grade 
Is it worth the upgrade? If you’re a speed demon like me, you betcha!
Optimizie your Facebook Social Plugin with Ruby On Rails
Facebook is now officially suggesting you add a “channel url” in the FB.init() call for their Javascript SDK.
Here’s how to do it in Ruby on Rails. Add code like below in a controller
def fb_channel
response.headers['Pragma'] = 'public'
expires_in 1.year, :public=>true
response.headers["Expires"] = CGI.rfc1123_date(Time.now + 1.year)
render :text=>'<script src="//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js"></script>' + "\n"
end
I added this in a MiscController that I usually have hanging around for non RESTful paths like this.
In Rails 3, I would add this line in my routes.rb:
match '/fb_channel', :controller=>'misc', :action=>'fb_channel'
and when I do my FB.init() call, I’d do something like this:
FB.init({appId:appId, status: true, cookie: true, xfbml:true,
channelUrl: '<%= url_for(:controller=>'misc', :action=>'fb_channel', : only_path=>false) -%>'});
Grocery Stores Use Big Quantities to Entice Shoppers – NYTimes.com
When they say Buy 10 Get 10 free. You usually don’t have to buy 10. 1 will suffice.
Grocery Stores Use Big Quantities to Entice Shoppers – NYTimes.com.
Bullish Cross
Can’t recommend Bullish Cross enough. Minimally, it’s a very hands on tutorial on how to profitably trade on options. Maximally (and hopefully), it’ll be a major component of my savings plan!
Bonus: It’s off to a fantastic start on every aspect (in-depth step-by-step analysis, making the right calls, using the right instruments to bet on an investment thesis, etc.) Marketing timing is hard, but if you get it right, the rewards are fantastic.
5 tools for 5-year-old to learn to build robots
Why have a kid unless you can spend hours creating fantastical robots?
I’m collecting a list of products to teach a 5 year-old about the world of programming and robots:
- TerrapinLogo and Kinderlogo
- Lego WeDo
- MIT’s Scratch
- Alan Kay’s Squeak
- Cubelets
- For Ruby lovers: Hackety-Hack and Ruby4Kids
- Stencyl is another scratch-like tool
- Seymour Papert’s Mindstorm’s and The Children’s Machine (if I read the latter, is it worth reading the former still?)
- I my friend KCL recommends Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners
The Girl with the Purple Sarong
OK, not quite a Stiegg Larsson novel, but this story is incredibly fascinating on so many levels:
- A classic story of how our hero recaptures something stolen (a laptop and birth certificate) from him, with a few unexpected twists and turns along the way
- A story of how technology is planting wormholes through geography: our hero retrieves belongings 500 miles away from alleged perpetrator
- Most of the action involves collaboration via social media, amongst hero and his twitter followers
- The story itself is told via storify in what is mainly a series of tweets
Did AVC Fred Wilson make a logical fallacy?
Super VC/Blogger Fred Wilson just wrote another great post, this time about First Time vs Serial Entrepreneurs.
However, I’m humbly suggesting he could have mixed up causation and be viewing things from a skewed sample.
It seems like the main thing that would attract Wilson about a first time entrepreneur would be that she is gaining user traction. After all, by definition, there isn’t much else to go by! It’s very likely that there are lots of first time entrepreneurs that do not get the right product into the market at the right time, arguably even more proportionally than serial entrepreneurs.
Likewise, what would attract Wilson about a serial entrepreneur (esp. compared with a first time entrepreneur) would naturally be her track record! It seems much more likely that Wilson would back a startup with less market traction IF the founders have a good track record than without.
So, I don’t think it’s true that first time entrepreneurs are better at getting significant user traction quickly. I think it’s really, really hard for both first time and serial entrepreneurs; and arguably it gets a little easier with experience.
However, I can see how if you observe from Wilson’s point of view it’ll seem like of the companies he’s backing, the one’s founded by first-time entrepreneurs have fewer user traction issues; that’s perfectly understandable. But it doesn’t mean first time entrepreneurs in general are better at establishing user traction.
