How do I disinfect my iPad, iPhone, Droid, cell phone, touchscreen, etc.?

http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/how-do-i-disinfect-my-ipad-iphone-droid-cell-phone-touchscreen-etc/

Austin Frakt:

But ask the hive mind how to disinfect a touchscreen and you’ll get a load of snark. Why do you want to disinfect it? Are you some kind of germ-a-phobe? Don’t you know the germs came from your hand anyway? Just wash your hands you moron!

I really laughed at this, I’m very surprised by this reaction. The solution?

I poured a bit of the alcohol on the pad, rubbed my touchscreen, then wiped it down with a lint free cloth.

I’ve always used alcohol to clean the screen of my devices and the keyboard.

Just turn the device off first, just in case.

At home I use rubbing alcohol and at work I use the disinfectant sprays they have outside the bathrooms.

Edit: a comment on Hacker News links to apple’s support page that advises against using alcohol because of the oleophobic coating.


Clayton Christensen and Siri

http://www.asymco.com/2011/10/18/clayton-christensen-and-siri/

Horace Dediu on siri:

However, it does seem to be good in a very limited set of tasks. It is something you can hire for some minor jobs that you’d rather not do. Basic calendar booking, context aware search and a few delightful surprises. But it’s not trying to be much more. It’s not trying to be a typist. It’s not trying to be a companion. It’s not trying to be smarter than you and make you redundant. It’s only trying to help lubricate your life. This is what makes it so exciting.

Hacked!

http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8673/1/

Short version: a gmail account of a woman was hacked and an email was sent to all her contacts saying she was stranded in Madrid and needed money to be sent… via Western Union.

Yes I know what you’re going to say, tl;dr but you should and here’s why…

It teaches you that you should backup your data, even if it lives in the cloud…

a message from Google’s help system arrived in my account, with instructions on how Deb could at last reset her password and regain control of her information.

She did so, and logged into her Gmail account with enormous relief, which lasted perhaps five seconds. When she looked at her Inbox, and her Archives, and even the Trash and Spam folders in her account, she found—absolutely nothing. Of her allocated 7 gigabytes of storage, 0.0 gigabytes were in use, versus the 4+ gigabytes shown the day before. Six years’ worth of correspondence and everything that went with it were gone.

And even web services that promise you security are not invulnerable:

Chastened by my wife’s experience, I decided to make my online passwords “stronger,” and to shift to an online storage site to manage them. The following week, that site—LastPass.com—was itself hacked and some of its data stolen. (I still use it, as I’ll explain.)

If you haven’t been a victim of a hacked email account, don’t count your chickens just yet:

At Google I asked Byrant Gehring, of Gmail’s consumer-operations team, how often attacks occur. “Probably in the low thousands,” he said. “Per month?,” I asked. “No, per day,”

How could it happen? (emphasis is mine)

As in thegreat majority of hacking cases, my wife had been using the same password for her Gmail account as for some other, less secure sites, where her username was her Gmail address.

And your username doesn’t have to be your same email address to be vulnerable, because a less secure site can take down your overall safety:

“If you have ever used the same password in more than one place, you have reduced your overall safety record to whichever site had the lowest amount of protection,”

Or you could have registered in a fake social network and voilà, you’re toast (I know some that have).

And then there’s identity theft threat:

The greatest practical fear for my wife and me was that, even if she eventually managed to retrieve her records, so much of our personal and financial data would be in someone else’s presumably hostile hands that we would spend our remaining years looking over our shoulders, wondering how and when something would be put to damaging use. At some point over the past six years, our correspondence would certainly have included every number or code that was important to us—credit-card numbers, bank-account information, medical info, and any other sensitive data you can imagine.

So with all those threats, why would you still have only one password for all of your online credentials? Are you sure you want to use the same password to your online banking and that new Facebook-for-Latinos-that-dance-electro-salsa? Didn’t think so.

Managing multiple passwords is hard, but there’s apps for that:

I personally use 1Password , the author recommends LastPass and RoboForm . All of them seem to work just fine, andthey allow you to have to remember just one password while having different passwords for each site you use (yeah I know, sorcery).

1Password even allows you to safely store credit card information, personal id numbers so you and other pieces of information like serial numbers for software and other random notes.

The sad side of this story is that her family tried to actually help her by sending money, if you receive an email like this go ahead and call that person or relatives to confirm she’s in trouble.

And if there’s Western Union somehow involved, be extra wary.



Genmaicha: green tea, but better!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genmaicha

Every time we went to a Japanese restaurant we asked for green tea and it tasted different than the one we had at home, after many tries buying green tea in the foreign food aile in our local super store we finally found it.

Genmai-cha:

Genmaicha (玄米茶?, “brown rice tea”) is the Japanese name for green tea combined with roasted brown rice. It is sometimes referred to colloquially as “popcorn tea” because a few grains of the rice pop during the roasting process and resemble popcorn. This type of tea was originally drunk by poor Japanese, as the rice served as a filler and reduced the price of the tea; which is why it is also known as the “people’s tea.” Today it is consumed by all segments of society.

Definitely the best I’ve had.



Steve Jobs: a personal remembrance

http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits/2011/10/steve-jobs-a-personal-remembrance.ars

I have read a good set of great articles this evening of Steve Job’s death.

John Siracusa’s article is definitively at the top. best quote? Referring to the first Macintosh as a lesson from Steve:

The Macintosh was the first thing in my life that I recognized as being wholly new. Everything I’d seen thus far in my eleven years had seemed like it already existed prior to my birth—perhaps like it had always existed. But here was something different, something amazing, and this magazine explained how it had been created by this small group of people.

The implications bloomed in my mind. We aren’t stuck with the things we have now. We can make new things, better things. And it doesn’t take many people to do it. The team that had created this mind-bending new machine were all up on my wall, their individual faces clearly recognizable.

This bit me: “Unknown class<myclass> in Interface Builder file” error at runtime</myclass>

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1725881/unknown-class-myclass-in-interface-builder-file-error-at-runtime/5546554

I was having problems with XCode referring to a View Controller I had just deleted and it turned out the linker was loading stuff from cache.

I found this stack overflow question and deleting the contents of this folder solved the issue:

~/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/4.3.2/Applications

Now I can continue learning :D