Interesting stuff : May 4th

• Hangerpak – Great packaging that transforms a container into a hanger as well!
• Beauty Water – Some amazing packaging of water, beautiful illustrations on the bottle.
• IdeaPaint – Transform any wall into a whiteboard just by using a paint. Marvelous!
• WSJ: Apple moving into chip design – Apple has hired many chip design specialists. Looks like the next generation of Apple products are going to be even better.

MacBook macros

Ever since I’ve got the 2008 Unibody aluminium MacBook, I’ve wanted to take real close-up photos of it, showcasing its design and engineering. Shockingly, no one seems to have done that till now. Unfortunately, to get really close, you need macro lenses, or their cheap substitute, extension tubes. I went with the latter, ordering off a cheap set from DealExtreme.

I also grabbed an even cheaper remote shutter release and took some macro photos of the MacBook. This time, I’ve uploaded them on flickr instead of the usual place. Click here to see all the photos.

Interesting stuff : April 28th

• India buys 250,000 OLPCs – The Indian government decides to buy 250,000 OLPC's for distribution in various schools across the country. With the millions of students in schools, I wonder which 250,000 are getting these.
• Meet the I7500, Samsung's First Android Phone [Samsung I7500] – Samsung launches it's first Android based phone. Superficially, it looks much better than the HTC offering.
• Facebook Announces Support for OpenID Logins – Facebook finally starts offering OpenID based login support
• Facebook Cracks, Here Come the Apps – Facebook releases API based on the emerging Open Stream standard
• The Mystery Of CSS Sprites: Techniques, Tools And Tutorials – Using CSS sprites for managing image resources better, decreasing page load times and decreasing bandwidth usage

Interesting stuff : April 27th

• Mystery Spots: Places Where Bizarre Forces Obscure Reality – Wired magazine visits mystery spots around the world
• Geometric Pop Art – Tadaomi Shibuya (8 illustrations) – My Modern Metropolis – Amazing new style of pop art, must see for art fans
• 15 Creative Ads in Unusual Places – Amazing creativity, must see.

Interesting stuff : April 23rd

• Apple 2nd Quarter: $8.16B revenue, $1.33 profit per share – They just keep on rising and rising and rising

Interesting stuff : April 22nd

• Expensive Running Shoes Aren't a Necessity [Running] – Barefoot running much better? Nike realized this in 2005. A great wired article on the Nike "Free" here – http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/08/68474?currentPage=all
• Search for "me" on Google – Google helps us be better narcissists
• The Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown – A tragicomic piece on the illegal usage of US military satellites by Brazilians. They make transponders dirt cheap and use the satellites to communicate with each other.

Flight Control does it right

Since the past week, me, my wife and at times people around have become gaming addicts. I’m a Fieldrunners and Lux enthusiast and she likes games like Trism and Bejeweled. But the game in question is Flight Control, a relatively new game for the iPhone. By Firemint, an Australian studio, Flight Control puts you in the role of an air traffic controller who has to get 4 types of aircraft on their respective landing areas. Touch the aircraft and drag them to their landing zone, making your own flight path.

In fact, Flight Control can be a case study in what makes an amazing game. Here’s why -
- Simple idea – get the planes on the ground.
- Fantastic use of the iPhone’s touch capabilities. Touch and drag for a free-form flight path.
- Sweet graphics and music.
- Progressive difficulty.

The simple idea, brilliant execution and progressive difficulty gives it any time, all time re-playability. The low price of $0.99 just makes it unmissable. Judging on the basis of its genre, it has to be the best game for the iPhone platform – because it gets anyone to play it. Continuously.

Interesting stuff : April 19th

• Pirate Bay Court Loss Won't Stop the Flow of Files – The Pirate Bay has moved some servers to the Netherlands, so the file sharing most probably wont stop.
• Why Is Connectivity So Cheap In Stockholm? – Stockholm has 100 Mbps internet connectivity for $11 a month.

Interesting stuff : April 17th

• Pirate Bay Loses Case – The Pirate Bay founders, of one of the biggest bittorrent sites on the web are found guilty of copyright infringement
• A Fantastic New Way to Find Hot Music – A wired.com article about “We Are Hunted”, a new service that helps find the most popular music on the web

Glims : a better alternative to Inquisitor

All of a sudden, Inquisitor started barfing some weird messages instead of displaying search links. Suspiciously, only when the search engine used was Google. Pssst… maybe it?s got something to do with its acquisition by Yahoo!. Thankfully, a bunch of kids developed a better alternative to Inquisitor, all while having fun. Called Glims, it does all that Inquisitor used to do and also throws in a bit of functionality that Saft provides – for free.

Bye Inquisitor, Hello Glims.