SteveX Compiled

I love emergent behaviour.

Real estate agents are expensive. They typically take 5-7% of the sale price of your home. (The seller pays both the buyer’s agent and the seller’s agent). A lot of people these days are selling privately, because the process of connecting a buyer and seller has been made much simpler through the Internet, so we [...]

We were just about to buy an episode of a show we’re following on the Apple TV. The screen where you make the purchase lets you choose between HD for $3.49, or standard for $2.49. My wife was convinced that she wouldn’t notice the difference, and believed I wouldn’t notice the difference either. We came [...]

A friend of mine contacted me a few weeks ago with information on a “new mobile phone company”, Buzzirk Mobile. The pitch was that they are launching July 1st with UNLIMITED service for a flat $79.95 taxes in. I was skeptical. He sent me a link to this audio conversation and after listening to it, [...]

The Flash Platform team at Adobe announced yesterday that they’re open-sourcing the Text Layout Framework that they’ve been working on on top of the text foundation built into Flash 10. This is Kind of a Big Deal, because as far as I’m aware open-source code that handles text editing and display of Unicode text that [...]

On the one hand, I appreciate the job that Facebook has done in building a great multiplayer casual gaming platform, and drawing people into the experience by making players activity in games a part of the regular Facebook experience. But the constant spam from friends in my newsfeed is annoying, and about 20% of the [...]

Apple’s iTunes 8.2.1 update broke syncing with the Palm Pre. Normally when companies do this sort of thing – make changes that break another company’s product – they don’t brag about it. They say that it’s not a supported configuration and you’re left to wonder if it broke as a natural consequence of some changes [...]

I like Flash video because I hate this:

I’m sitting in my car in downtown Ottawa listening to streaming Internet radio on the iPhone. 64 kilobit streaming and it sounds great. I’ve also got the Mac connected via Bluetooth tethering, and surfing the Internet over the same wireless Internet connection. The Internet feels fast. Fast enough that if I didn’t know it was [...]

Here’s a little tip if you use the Mac Mail application to read your Gmail. You can hook Mail up to Gmail through IMAP, using these instructions. But once you’ve done that, you should make sure you’re using these recommended client settings, because the default is that mail that you delete through IMAP gets moved [...]