Around the holiday season many people ship packages, so this could conceivably get a lot of people. However, once you actually read the message, you realize that spammers should really learn to A) Speak English and B) Proofread.
Every now and then I come across something that was designed with a flaw. In my hotel room this weekend it was the Heater / AC unit. The unit was extremely difficult to get set to the right temperature, and we had to fiddle with it all the time.
This looks fairly typical right? Alas, it is flawed:
A better design would have been to eschew the bottom right control all together. Add an “Off” Option to the fan speed switch (because “off” is in fact a speed), and let the cool warm dial speak for its self. By adding temperature increments around the dial, the user can simply set the temperature they want and leave it.
This would require a more advanced circuit board, but not drastically – and the user would not have the momentary frustration that comes with using a confusing set up. (Not to mention waking up freezing cold, or sweating!)
-Ben
PayPal is a great service, leading the charge towards a digital currency that skips over borders. Unfortunately, they too have fallen towards the sentiment that your private information shoudl be public by default to further “advertising and marketing.”
This is enabled by default. I had to read halfway down through a muti-page email they sent me today before I found out about it. (Only because the email mentioned the word “Errors” which when associated with PayPal, perks my ears up!)
Anytime my information is being used by other companies, I want to know about it – Up front, right away. Unfortunately, I have come to expect that I won’t.
You can disable the PayPal sharing under My Account > More Options > Notifications
I got stung by one of this little guys brothers while hiking on the AT this weekend. Hurt like helland I still have a raised red area where he hit me.
The caterpillar will eventually turn into a moth and be non-poisonous, but in its caterpillar stage, it has the worst of the sitnging slug caterpillar venom.
I jailbreak my iPhone religiously. I love what it allows me to do, and now that there is a legitimate marketplace for jailbroken apps (yes, these do now cost money) there are services that manage them – and they have CUSTOMER SERVICE!
One of these is Rock Your Phone (www.rockyourphone.com). Several months ago i purchased an app that lets me tether my phone, recently i upgraded to the new iOS4 for my phone, and had to upgrade the apps i had purchased. Unfortunately this meant that I lost the old jailbroken apps I had paid for, but Rock Your Phone remembers these apps. When i tried to reinstall these, i no longer saw the list of my old apps.
I contacted Rock Your Phone’s customer service with an email, and hours later they replied, letting me know I had logged in with the wrong account (my gmail vs my benhanna.com address) and that they had combined the accounts for me so I could get al my apps back!
I wouldn’t expect that from apple, much less a jailbroken app store!
Kudos Rock Your Phone, you just became a legitimate company in my eyes.
-Ben
Mexico bound in a few weeks: here is an image of the upcoming path –
Not a short trip, but we will have 13 days to do it!
BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Chiming in on a 12 person Skype call from the Mediterranean sea.
Erin Cochran is our chef here in Istanbul, and we are doing a time-lapse series of her cooking. Eventually these will be up on her blog, and I will repost again with that info once it is complete. Until then, enjoy.
Traveling and Eating: Steak Taco Salad from Ben Hanna on Vimeo.
Erin makes Steak Taco Salad with Roasted Peppers faster than you.