Seven Sons

Charlie Stross writes about the things he can and cannot do with his iPad while traveling.

I happened to be traveling also last week and my only internet device was the iPod Touch. And I discovered something that bugged me more than it should. I had read all the magazine articles that I had transfered to the iPod using FileViewer, and really enjoyed the experience (on the plane, on the deck of the lake house, over breakfast cereal in the kitchen…). I was out of reading material. So I found an open WiFi router, opened about 5 Safari pages, pointed them at various online articles, and then shut the thing off. Later I realized that when you open Safari while offline and browse a previously loaded page, it blanks it out and tells you that you have lost your connection. Why can’t it cache those pages that it has already downloaded?!?

My sister-in-law had another complaint; she has a first generation 8GB iPod Touch, and resisted upgrading to v3 iOS for a long time because Apple was charging for it. No problem; it was her choice to stay on the old software. The thing should still keep working, right? But then her work email server (she works at a University) was upgraded and no longer supported mobile email on pre-v3 devices. Her apps upgraded themselves automatically and many of them started breaking because they didn’t support the old iOS. So she decided to suck it up and pay for the upgrade. Now that v4 is out, many of the same problems are popping up again, but there is a new twist – iOS v4 doesn’t support the first generation iPod Touch hardware.

Back in October of last year we posted on the demise of Gourmet Magazine. Well, it’s back. Sort of.

Is this the first sign that the iPad may live up to the promise of revitalizing the magazine industry?

A guy has remixed Bohemian Rhapsody using old computer hardware. Some may not be impressed by this, but I am.

…and yet there is still no such thing as a drip coffee pot that is both transparent and insulated.

Add this to the list of things that should have been invented by now, including a washing machine that also dries your clothes, batteries that keep a charge for weeks instead of hours, and a cell phone that completely replaces everything else in your pockets including cash, credit cards, membership cards, discount cards, coupone, insurance information and a swiss army knife. Honestly, how hard could these things be to build?