Nathan's blog

I get it, Microsoft. Windows. Not flags.

But what happened to the colours? Windows 8 is a visually rich OS, with tiles of different sizes and a vibrant palette of colours. So why is its logo just one flat shade? With one quartered trapezoid?

Above, I present my version of the Windows 8 logo, based on the official version.

• Through the coloured panels I’m looking back at Microsoft’s heritage from Win 3.1 to 7.
• But by splitting up one of the “windowpanes” I’m looking forward at the new Windows 8 “Metro” interface.
• And by half-assing this in MS Paint I’m attaching this concept to a proud Microsoft tradition of taking a good idea and kinda screwing it up.

If you bought the X10, Fuji's new retro-styled point & shoot as soon as it was released, you may be the type of photographer who'd enjoy using something as quaint as a cable shutter release. So Fuji just sent this $8 accessory to those customers.

The only thing they could have done better is sending it earlier, so customers could have used it during the holidays. Then the camera could have been a conversation piece at family gatherings — no small thing in a market of DSLR v. IPhone.

As a biz school autodidact, I'd love to know what analytics they're basing this on and what they're expecting to happen. But as the husband of one of their customers I'm just impressed at the gesture.

I talked erotic ebookselling with CBC’s@alisoncrawford5 yesterday. cbc.ca/news/arts/stor…

— Nathan Maharaj (@nrmaharaj) January 28, 2012

1. There's the person I love more than anything in the world.
2. And there's the jackass numbskull with no regard for the personal safety of person 1.

Talked to Andy Zaltzman this morning. They’re considering their options. The Bugle will continue. Long live The Bugle. #SaveTheBugle

— Jesse Thorn (@JesseThorn) December 15, 2011

Jesse, you bring The Bugle into the MaxFun family and I’ll instantly up my monthly contribution. 

Why don't we use this

to do this

?

This would be a great name for a business specializing in things that I think might be legal in Thailand.

Me and Apple TV, we’ve been through some times.

There was a time when it seemed to refuse to play purchased content except when it was pushed from my desktop. You could navigate to it, and you could select it, but it would fail to start playback: instead, it advised that the content wasn’t authorized for playing on this device, whatever that means. So you couldn’t navigate from the couch, and couldn’t play music through airtunes while video (ie. Sesame Street) played on the TV.

But since I got an awesome new receiver things have improved. Here’s why.

• My old receiver had a power outlet for low-consumption components. Like Apple TV, for example. Every time you turned off the receiver, it turned off the outlet. My new receiver doesn’t have this. Apple TV stays plugged into the wall, where power is continuously available. Since changing to this new configuration we haven’t had authorization problems. Apple TV works like it should.
  • To offset power vampirism (minimal in a device with no moving parts) we’ve retired both the CD player and the VCR.
• You can’t get multi-channel Dolby Digital sound out of Apple TV through the optical outlet. There was a time it used to work, but the last firmware update killed that. You want DD, you need HDMI. And if you’ve got Netflix, you want DD.

I hope I never give that little black box any more thought than I’ve given it in the last couple of weeks.