Pixels and Widgets

A blog by Tai Toh

Author: ttoh

  • iPhone (iFun) for a Weekend

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    I had a chance to take the iPhone from work and use it over the past weekend and I felt that I should write about it. The process was very simple: Just switch SIM cards and sync my contacts, email settings using iTunes. It was so seamless. Pretty jaw dropping if you have a Mac…

  • If you don’t save, how do you expect to get wealthy?

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    At one level this should come as no surprise. For most of the last decade America was a nation of borrowers and spenders, not savers. The personal savings rate dropped from 9 percent in the 1980s to 5 percent in the 1990s, to just 0.6 percent from 2005 to 2007, and household debt grew much…

  • Neil Gaiman sums up the whole Kindle text-to-speech debacle

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    When you buy a book, you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the…

  • MacBook Pro Woes… Again.

    MacBook Pro Woes… Again.

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    I took this picture of the ports on my MacBook Pro (2007 Santa Rosa). I have bought a new FW800 enclosure, but the port on the MacBook Pro is recessed about 2mm and I cannot attach the enclosure properly (although the FW400 and USB2 connections work well on the enclosure). Can anyone say lemon?

  • Restoring a 100 year-old clock

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    I was at my parent’s house on New Years Day with Jen and my daughter, Evy. I walked into my Dad’s workshop (he’s a 3rd generation watchmaker by trade), where he showed me this 100 year-old clock he was restoring for Odyssey Time’s president (they are Seiko Canada’s distributor, along with other watches like Nike,…

  • Social Entrepreneurship Summit 2008

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    Through the concerted efforts of Kevin, Rahul and Owen, I was able to attend an invite-only conference at the MaRS Discovery District yesterday. You’ll see quite a few twitters from me during the course of a day. I’ll blog more when I have the time, as my work with a national crisis hotline takes precedence.…

  • ATI x1600 + Ubuntu 8.10 + Xorg 7.4 = Meh

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    I made an impulsive decision today to upgrade my Ubuntu box from 8.04 LTS to 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). In hind sight, that was not the best move, as I didn’t do any research, just made a slight change in the System -> Administration -> Software Sources application and hit the upgrade to 8.10. The reality…

  • PC World reports 38 percent revenue from online

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    When I was at PC World, I explained to anyone who’d listen that our editorial strategy was pretty simple: We had to be a Web site that had a magazine, not a magazine that had a Web site. That philosophy affected the decisions we made in 10,000 different ways. And it’s nice to see revenue…

  • RIP! A remix manifesto

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    RiP: A remix manifesto is an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture. Created over a period of six years, the film features the collaborative remix work of hundreds of people who have contributed to this project, helping to create the world’s first open source documentary. I’ve been tracking this movie for several years.…

  • Courage to create

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    UPDATED: I added some further thoughts on why I think MB Design is being really brave Mark Boulton and his team are the bravest designers I (don’t) know. [stag_intro]Designers all know that design by committee doesn’t work. However, can design by community succeed? [/stag_intro] I personally don’t know, but Mark Boulten & Leisa Reichelt intend…