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Ars Technica Goes Close Up With the Pebble Smartwatch 140

Posted by timothy
from the watch-out-for-these-things dept.
Ars Technica takes a close look at the crowd-funded Pebble smartwatch. The reviewer had to put up with repeated delays in production as a Kickstarter backer, but seems happy with the watch and optimistic about the future of third-party apps; an SDK is due later this month. "It currently ships with three default watch faces, as well as 12 others that you can load onto the watch with the companion app (free on iOS and Android). By far my favorite custom watch face is 'Fuzzy Time,' which rounds the current time to the nearest 5-minute interval and translates that number to what you might say if your friend asked you the time. While seemingly trivial, I love this rough approximation of time. Rarely do I need to know that it's 5:13:23pm, but seeing that it's 'quarter after five' is awesome."

Comment: I... don't understand this at all. (Score 4, Interesting) 125

by Nanoda (#43266695) Attached to: South Korea Backtracks On China As Source of Cyberattack

On my home network, I use the private 24-bit block 10.x.x.x, in case I buy more than 16 million devices. Is the article saying that they decided to map public IPs they didn't own to internal devices? Notwithstanding the confusion such cases like the above would cause, this bank could conceivably leak banking data out to that Chinese ISP!

All the articles I can find are equally uninformative.

Comment: Re:$6600 per Kindle! (Score 2) 117

by Nanoda (#41046185) Attached to: State Dept. Cancels $16.5M Kindle Contract

Having dealt with selling a government some hardware and services, I can understand charging way more. They don't just call up and order what's on the shelf like your other customers. They want studies and paperwork and certifications and documents and reviews and more paperwork and certificates and contracts and guarantees and the whole process takes a year for what takes your other customers a week.

Seriously, I'm all for accountability in government, but this is the kind of stuff you get for it.

Comment: Re:little kid brother modes (Score 1) 362

by Nanoda (#33037802) Attached to: Too Much Multiplayer In Today's Games?

I enjoy watching my brother play some of his games, and that SMG feature is hilarious. I'd like to see multi-player expand game types; I almost never played COD4 multiplayer, but I almost always like playing puzzle/adventure games (like Monkey Island or Space Quest or what have you) with someone else. Perhaps it's because they were my game of choice in the early 90s (when it was 1 PC per house, not per person), but they don't seem like anywhere near as much fun when played by myself. I'd like to be able to share a screen and controls, and have those arguments about where to go or what to click, and get called an idiot for killing Roger Wilco. :-)

Comment: Re:Appeals process (Score 1) 332

by Nanoda (#32409090) Attached to: Where Do You Go When Google Locks You Out?
People who are putting their life into "the cloud" perhaps should be looking at online backup solutions specifically aimed at Google.

I just bought an Android phone, and some of the more advanced features (search suggestion is the only one I can find right now) won't work unless I have an actual "@gmail.com" account. (My work email is accessed through Google, but apparently that's not enough).

The thought of my phone being crippled by Google on a whim certainly leaves me uneasy.

Comment: Are there CC companies that fight fraud? (Score 1) 511

by Nanoda (#31866550) Attached to: What Can Be Done About Security of Debit Cards?

A common theme I hear is that credit card companies don't care enough about fraud to do any investigation whatsoever. I'm loath to pay any fees at all on my credit card, but I'd probably pay, say, 50$/year to get a card where, in the event of my card being used fraudulently, the criminals are hunted down and prosecuted / persecuted to the fullest extent available in the country in which they're found. (Rather than it just being written off as a cost-of-business expense and raising everyone's interest rates)

Comment: You can buy green power right now (Score 1) 402

by Nanoda (#20377741) Attached to: Solar Power Headed For 45% Annual Growth
Your electrical energy provider might already have a program that lets you pay a few cents more for 'green' electricity.

In Alberta and Ontario, you can sign up with Bullfrog Power (I did just last week). For an extra 2c/kWh (less than $6/mo for me) they put 'green' electricity on the grid to match what I used.

In Alberta they use wind power, in Ontario a mix of wind and 'low impact' water generation. I imagine if more people sign up and solar power price drops as TFA says, that they'll be adding solar to the mix shortly.

The public is an old woman. Let her maunder and mumble. -- Thomas Carlyle

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