PUBLIC MARKS with search cheap

A nice MacBook Air competitor starting at $1969. The real thing starts at $1299.

Jean-Louis Gassée n'est pas souvent de mauvaise foi, mais ça lui arrive quand même.

Food trucks, the next step up the evolutionary ladder from the traditional sidewalk food cart (trucks are generally larger, more tricked-out, and self-propelled), aren’t exactly new.

The world sees sales of 1.37 Billion mobile phones sold in just this past year! Only 22% of all phones sold this year were smartphones. The other 78% were what now is a bit dismissively grouped as 'dumbphones', which includes anything from very high-end featurephones (many non-smartphone featurephones in Japan and South Korea have more features and abilities than the best smartphones known in the rest of the world) to mid-priced phones to the ultra-cheap basic 'Africa phones'.

Both glides were filmed by sticking a – relatively cheap – digital camera out of the window of a train as it arrived at a station. The ‘trick’ is the camera collects images at a rate of 210 per second – but the film is played back at 30 frames per second. So, every seven seconds of footage that you watch corresponds to 1 real second.

After the iPad came out there have been all sorts of predictions of the imminent demise of the dedicated e-reader. My look at current technology suggests that, at least for the next few years, the best reading experience will be delivered by simple, cheap, dedicated reading devices, and the business models for ebook sellers will likely center around content and forms of interaction that work well on slow, black and white displays.

Le problème de ces prédictions, c'est qu'elles n'étaient pas faites par des gens qui lisent.

The trick is that PNG files are an easy to read, even from high level scripting languages like Python. So you can use the App Engine Image Manipulation Service to convert an image into a smallish PNG, then read the raw data using a pure python library like pypng:

Yes, it's probably not possible to quit your primary job because of App sales, but you don't lose anything by trying, and an extra $1K a year or so can help pay for computer upgrades, a cheap vacation somewhere, software...

I just like unique identifiers because they make it easy (possible) to connect lots of little pieces in order to create new things, so I figured I would share.