I am just going to leave this here:

Discussion in Samsung’s marketing department:

“You know what I saw my kids watching?, Ganggang style or something…”

“That video made that Korean dude famous.”

“Wait, we’re Korean.”

“LET’S DO IT… IN INDIA.”

Then this happened:

Seriously. What the hell Samsung.

Stephen Hackett at 512 Pixels:

…iOS doesn’t have a notification setting to “send to Bluetooth” anywhere. To grant an app’s notifications the ability to be pushed to the Pebble, you have to disable then re-enable the notification. It’s clunky, and made worse but the fact that when the Pebble and iPhone lose connection, the Pebble has to be re-setup.

Ouch. So any time you loose connection to the watch you’ll have to re-setup the notifications. This seems like a fairly decent sized issue. It doesn’t matter if it’s an iOS issue or a Pebble issue the fact is any time either item turns off you’re hosed and have to start again. Normally I wouldn’t see this as a huge issue however in the case of a watch that’s a fairly large hurdle to leap.

One of my bosses at work now has one of these watches and I only had a brief look at it, it is very cool and the geek in me wants one so badly however the realist in me knows that the first time the things fails me or the battery dies at an inopportune time it’ll end up being retired in favour of my less smart watch.

The idea of the smartwatch is cool, but the Pebble is rather simple and — in places — downright crude. But it’s pointing the way forward.

Which seems to point back to what I was saying in an earlier post where I think this tech really isn’t ready for the limelight just yet, it’s very cool when it’s working but right now it’s still a crippled version of Notification Centre. As Stephen has said it’s pointing the way forward and in time the smart watch is bound to get smarter but for now until the battery life and the brain on smart watches improves I won’t be shelling out for one. It is indeed an admirable first shot at what will probably become a new niche in watchmaking however for this to see real mass market success they need to get closer.

Okay guys I don’t want to alarm you but aside from Kim Jong Un using an iMac he also uses a telephone! He also uses something which looks to be some kind of can with a red button on it? Also he has a photo frame… WHO COULD BE IN THE PHOTO FRAME? IS IT STEVE JOBS?

This is just astonishing we have a fairly serious situation occurring in the world and yet people seem to want to discuss what computer the maniac uses?

According to Ars Technica Google is also thinking about building a watch:

The watch would be able to display e-mail messages, geographical location, and direction information, and it sounds like the camera would be able to effect some kind of augmented reality: “the processor is configured to activate an image retrieval system that generates information related to an image captured by the camera when the flip up portion is in the open position.”

This report is based off a 2011 patent filing by Google. Their implementation seems a little strange as well, it’s going to have a flip up portion? That’s exactly what I want on a watch is something to flip up at an inopportune time to get caught on things and break.

I’m really not sold on the whole smart watch idea. It seems like a solution looking for a problem. The pebble smartwatch was the first one out to market and all I see are drawbacks it’s a watch which you have to charge every 7 days it’s another thing which needs to live on your nightstand charging, sure it can notify me of incoming calls, SMS messsages, pop up reminders and emails aside from performing it’s primary function of telling me the current time however it’s failing is that unless I can perform those functions ie. responding to those notifications the best thing this watch could hope to be is a crippled version of notification centre on my wrist but even then it’s a lot of money to lay out just for that.

This is my new site. Hello!

I have a few reasons for putting together a new site. For one I felt the site was a little played out, I’m thinking this new site will allow me to cut ties and figure out what I really want to write about. I know it’s technology but not much more than that. It may be a link blog or it may end up being a full blown long form site for me. I don’t know and that’s fine right now.

The move away from Squarespace is more about their platform no longer lining up with my needs. I needed a platform which I can hack around with and exert full control over. If I was only interested in the CSS & Javascript then Squarespace would still be fine but I want to get down into the guts of my site and edit the way it functions directly, I could do a lot of that in Squarespace but it would take me twice as long to get to the same place.

I have decided to go with the static site generator Octopress. This gives me a lot of flexibility in terms of my hosting and data portability. All pages that Octopress generate are static HTML files which means that I will get the most out of my meagre 512 VPS which I have with Linode. I also like the idea that all of the posts that you see on this site will now just be a collection of markdown files in a folder this allows me to move around to other platforms all I like without suffering any kind of portability problems.

Right now the site is using the default theme which shipped with Octopress however over the coming days, weeks, months and years I will update the site to suit my needs.

Things may be a bit hairy while I get everything shifted over but for the most part you should hopefully not see anything different.

In the coming days I will be permanently redirecting my current site over to this domain. Let me know what you think!

I can be found on twitter or App.net Alpha