#Chemicals found in #phones are a no-no for #kids
#Chemicals found in #phones are a no-no for #kids
I saw this on Fran Drescher’s Twitter account from the Cincinnati Business courier and am quite floored by it. Am I the only one who doesn’t know this? How about all of the little kids I see where parents are handing them their ipad and smart phones for play purposes. I jusst need to know more but it is based on a study presented at the Pediatric Academic societies meeting in DC. Of course, they recommend hand washing.
But pregnant women should be careful – a 10x increase in maternal PBDE’s is associated with a 4 point IQ deficit. Of course, we also have the age old question here of causation or correlation. I do think we need to know more and also if the equipment we’re purchasing to use with young children has PBDEs in them.
If you know more, please leave comments. It does say that some manufacturers are voluntarily phasing these out.
“Small children should not touch electronic items such as TVs, mobile phones, computers and other products, according to University of Cincinnati researchers.
Chemicals found in such items and in many other products, including older carpets and furniture, can cause behavioral and cognition problems, they have found.”
‘Dragon Day’, Fri July 5, free #nature event @whampstead
Froglife’s London Dragon Finder project is holding a dragon day to celebrate the launch of the renovated pond at Mill Lane Open Space.
Bring the family, meet new friends, and enjoy an afternoon of free activities!
Friday July 5th 3-6pm 160 Mill Lane NW6 1TF
Nearest tube West Hampstead, free parking nearby.
· Crafts
· Educational Talks
· Animal identifying
· Pond Dipping
· Music
· Tombola
· Plant sales
· Refreshments
Libre Office your complete Microsoft Office suite replacement is completely #free
Recently received a query about having to pay for a Libre Office update! – it is of course totally FREE, as in speech, beer and lunch ..
In this article I am actually focusing on a version known as Libre Office Portable, not the full hard disk install. This product is currently a minor step behind the mainstream version, 4.03 as opposed to 4.04.
This is how mine looks if I try to run the updater – NOTE: it is NOT possible to update the portable version using the automatic update tool
For more information about Libre Office loveliness, see for more about prices, features, background, etc.
You can of course make a contribution to support them, http://www.documentfoundation.org/contribution/
From their website:
- It’s free – no worry about license costs or annual fees.
- No language barriers – it’s available in a large number of languages, with more being added continually.
- LGPL public license – you can use it, customize it, hack it and copy it with free user support and developer support from our active worldwide community and our large and experienced developer team.
- LibreOffice is a free software community-driven project: development is open to new talent and new ideas, and our software is tested and used daily by a large and devoted user community; you, too, can get involved and influence its future development.
LibreOffice gives you high quality:
- The roots of LibreOffice go back 20 years. This long history means it’s a stable and functional product.
- Thousands of users worldwide regularly take part in beta testing of new LibreOffice versions.
- Because the development process is completely open, LibreOffice has been extensively tested by security experts, giving you security and peace of mind.
LibreOffice is user-friendly:
- You get a simple-to-use yet powerful interface that is easy to personalize – Microsoft Office users will find the switch easy and painless, with a familiar look and feel.
- Compatible with all major competitors’ file formats. You can easily import files from Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint and many other formats, and can easily save to Microsoft Office and other formats when needed.
- LibreOffice is supported by a big worldwide community: volunteers help newcomers, and advanced users and developers can collaborate with you to find solutions to complex issues.
It is incidentally available for Windows, Apple Mac: Intel or PowerPC, Linux
#Apple rejecting #opensource coded apps from #appstore without reason #ulteo
Here is the edited extract from an email received today. It certainly looks like they aren’t interested in the factual situation, but will heavy-handedly take a swipe at anything that could be perceived as a risk.
But I guess this is a symptom of any large company, once it has out-grown its ability to see the person, instead seeing just the customer.
For some reason Android/ Google Play hasn’t been affected.
Early 2012, we published our first Ulteo OVD Active
Client for the Apple iPad, quickly gaining a significant
following of Ulteo mobile users
For the early development of the iPad client we chose to
use FreeRDP libs (v. 0.9) from the popular FreeRDP
project. Subsequently, a software company raised a GPL
violation issue relating to the use of these (now
superceded) libraries and requested that Apple remove
the Ulteo OVD client for iOS from AppStore which, they
claimed, included traces of their registered but now,
out-dated code.
Earlier, the FreeRDP project addressed the copyright
issue by removing the few identified copyrighted lines of
source code and had since released a complete, stable
version of its libs, published under an Apple App Store
compatible license.
Following requests from Apple, Ulteo engineers
immediately migrated the client source to the latest
stable FreeRDP code-base and after testing, released a
compliant, high-quality, stable iPad active client.
This was published on the App Store on April 28th, 2013.
Unfortunately, Apple decided to unilaterally remove our
application from the Apple App Store, disregarding the
withdrawal of the copyright action.
We are very disappointed by Apple’s decision and are
actively exploring all legal and technical options to
resolve this matter and we hope it will be back soon.
Be sure to check out our great HTML5 OVD (zero-install!)
client and our OVD active client for Android
(available on Google Play) – enabling platforms around
the world!
According to Moore’s Law, every Christmas your computer games are almost twice as powerful (in terms of memory and processing speed) as they were the previous year. Furthermore, as the years pass, this incremental gain becomes truly monumental. For example, when you receive a birthday card in the mail, it often has a chip which sings “Happy Birthday” to you. Remarkably, that chip has more computer power than all the Allied Forces of 1945. Hitler, Churchill, or Roosevelt might have killed to get that chip. But what do we do with it? After the birthday, we throw the card and chip away. Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969 when it sent two astronauts to the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3D situations, use more computer power than main frame computers of the previous decade. The Sony Playstation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.
Do you hear that? It’s the sound of your mind being blown.
(via world-shaker)
So do you really need to buy a *new* computer?
Royal Horse Artillery revisit St Johns Wood: pictures
being lead by Major-General George Pemberton Ross Norton CBE, General Officer Commanding London District and Major-General commanding the Household Division.
One for the ladies:
Full/edited copies available on request (bone fide only)
It’s been a year since the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery left their old barracks in St. John’s Wood, London for pastures new and they made a welcome return visit today, to much appreciation from the locals.
[- sorry, tumblr app made a mess of the pictures: had to reload -]
Totally unexpectedly, had the great pleasure of meeting some of these guys & gals at a civic event in Southwark.
RIP the free & open web: #Google #Twitter #API #RSS
Apologies in advance if this gets a bit technical, that’s because behind the scenes it is, but the effects could be life-changing!
Background
RSS is a way of publishing online, for example, a ‘news’ feed of headlines or updates, using a well established and open format. This enables you to see, say, just the most recent 100 headlines without actually visiting any web pages – you choose the ones of interest and follow them to the relevant page.
I wonder if RSS is falling from favour because it bypasses the concept of you visiting webpages (and, by extension, eyeballs on adverts).
If I get too technical, there are some other links to read at the bottom 🙂
Google Reader & RSS
announced on the Official Google Blog that they will soon retire Google Reader (actual date: July 1, 2013) – Google are also killing off the RSS extension on Chrome [this may have been an error – apparently the extension has been restored].
Implication: you wont be able to read the headlines unless you use the Google News search page (which has adverts).
Google News Alerts
These are being widely reported as being on the blink and raised concern it will be the next service to take a dive.
As ever Google chooses to not answer inquiries from the press or public (but will no doubt tell us their final decision in an out of the blue announcement)
Twitter RSS API
Twitter continues to lock down their platform, as they have since the switch to OAuth. If you want to add content to Twitter, you can do that easily. If you want to get content out of Twitter, well, you’ll have to conform to Twitter’s requirements.
RSS was an easy way of getting content out of Twitter, and so they killed it. They’ll tell you that it wasn’t really used, but that’s a load of bull and they know it, but it sounds good and most people will simply swallow it.
– so from March/April 2013: use OAuth and json to parse Twitter feeds.
And their RSS timeline feeds are now dust 🙁
Questionable decision to – Twitter API moving to v1.1:
Tweets being given Snowflake-based IDs, direct messages will also be snowflake 64-bit integers beginning September 30th, 2011 … a service we will be using to generate unique Tweet IDs. These Tweet IDs are unique 64bit unsigned integers …..
The problem … Before launch it came to our attention that some programming languages such as Javascript cannot support numbers with >53bits
In Google Chrome you can test compatibility with long integers by running (in the console):
(90071992547409921).toString() gives the result “90071992547409920” – just hope you’re not doing your accounts.
“no-one will need an integer address longer than 53 bits”
This reminds me of hard drives hitting the 137GB limit because of old IDE addressing, and not thinking ahead. And now 32bit operating systems being unable to access more than 2TB of hard disk partitioned space – the move onwards and upwards is relentless, pity the casualties along the way.
To quote Twitter: “we’ve decided to discontinue support for XML, Atom, and RSS, which are infrequently used today”
– cough, cough, like what planet you on man!!! (XML is the founding technology behind AJAX web programming, one that Twitter itself uses to dynamically update the page; ATOM is like RSS)
Quotes:
“This protesting about Google not continuing to provide something is just indicative of people denying that they had unrealistic expectations. This is a public company in a dominant position so it has little to no responsibility toward its clientèle. That’s just how it is. Pretending that is not the case is perhaps what all those people are doing who have bought into Google’s services and now complain when their dreams are broken. There’ll be more of this, and I for one, am not playing that game.”
The bottom line … writings on the wall
– you cant call yourself free unless you recognise and support open standards
– the big companies have fallen in love again with their own propriety APIs (‘use our tech or walk’ attitude)
– dont get me started on CalDav ..
As ever the maxim applies: if you use a something that is free, you’re not the customer you’re the product
– and in case you were unsure as to what a Maxim is/does, they used to make machine guns 😉 see Wikipedia
Now might be a good time to take up farming in an isolated village somewhere ..
And read these:
blogs-we-liked-google-shuts-down-reader-caldav and also talks about CalDav being closed down
104-this-is-not-about-google-reader
why-i-will-always-love-rss
Disclaimer: some of this was gathered and written some time ago, and I cant remember what is mine (I think it mostly is)! very sorry 🙁 #embarrassed
#Yahoo closes down development projects #Blackberry
Yahoo axes apps in wide-ranging product shutdown – Internet giant confirms seven products to be binned as part of “spring clean”.
Yahoo is ending seven products, including its mobile app for Blackberry smartphones, as if copying from Google’s Playbook by eliminating unsuccessful products (that’s unsuccessful to them, not us of course).
“The most critical question we ask is whether the experience is truly a daily habit that still resonates for all of you today,” wrote Jay Rossiter, Yahoo’s executive vice president of Platforms.
– reduce the 60 to 75 disparate mobile apps it currently has to a more manageable 12 to 15 apps.
– app for Blackberry smartphones would no longer be available for download, or supported by Yahoo, as of 1 April.
– stop supporting Yahoo Avatars on 1 April.
The cartoon-like digital characters on web services such as Yahoo instant messenger and Facebook
Download the avatar and then re-upload the information to their personalised Yahoo profile.
– products set to be terminated include Yahoo App Search, Yahoo Sports IQ, Yahoo Clues, the Yahoo Message Boards website and the Yahoo Updates API.
Read more: yahoo-axes-blackberry-smartphone-app-wide-ranging-product-shutdown