Pie Chart Yourself Into a Diet?
Pretty much everyone who could actually use with a diet has problems with it. They either don't know how much they should be eating of each of the different types of food, or they simply shun the idea out of their minds when push comes to shove. With this in mind, a very clever Portuguese guy and some other people (nationality bias much? 
) came up with this plate that has a wheel of nutrition drawn on it.
This way, you will not only know exactly how much you should be eating of each of the wheel's categories, but you will also feel guilt ridden if your t-bone steak occupies the whole vegetable and cereal sections. These plates are apparently still just a proof of concept, but I'm pretty sure you can even photoshop the wheels yourself and have them transferred into normal white plates.
Image after the break.
Lufthansa offers Gray Powell flight to Germany
Everyone who follows the technology world would know the name Gray Powell. This is the name of the lad who lost his prototype iPhone 4G at a German beer bar. Well, guess what? Lufthansa is offering him a business class flight to Munich for him to "pick up where he last left off".
Image of the letter after the jump.
Imagine Cup and volcano ash
So! It's been a while and I come back with nothing but sad and unhappy stories.
As perhaps some of you knew, my team was one of the UK finalists in the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition. As fate wanted, we did not win. We came home, not empty-handed but in a way, empty-hearted. Maybe it is for the best; my team is composed of Master's students and the workload isn't comparable. I did not expect to have enough time to make it through to the finals, so maybe it is indeed for the best that someone else won.
Still, we got some loot from this competition! We won a magnificent Microsoft LifeCam HD and a superb Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 6000, with the new BlueTrack technology! Last but not least, we also got a diploma signed by Bill Gates himself! Quite good huh?
Unfortunately I cannot post many details from this visit to Microsoft's campus in Reading as we were all forced to sign an NDA to prevent us from leaking the latest details. All that I can say is that I've tried a Windows Phone 7 and it's amazing. It's a complete break with Windows Mobile and it is definitely a great break. From my experience I can say that the OS still feels a bit unpolished on certain aspects like image handling, but that's to be expected as it hasn't even been released yet. I also got to try a Microsoft Surface in person and whoa.... it's quite an amazing experience and I quite like the applications they have to showcase it. Perhaps the only disappointing factor is that it doesn't use either resistive or capacitive technologies, but instead it resorts to a projection and five cameras to detect touches. That is why it is such a tall device.
We also got a nice presentation by a gentleman from Lionhead Studios but unfortunately they had really strong feelings about the NDA and I am really not supposed to say anything about that!
Moving on to the next topic there's... volcano ash! Namely Eyjafjallajökull's ash. This is the name of the very nasty Icelandic volcano that has stopped me from going back to Portugal for my well deserved holidays. I had a flight booked for the 16th which got cancelled, then I rebooked it for today (the 19th) and again it got cancelled, and right now I have it booked for this Friday, hoping that things will look better in a few days.
The latest news on this is that the volcano comes from the UK Met Office (check image) and they tell us that it has actually stopped erupting and that maybe now the skies will start clearing.
Apple Tablet – the iPad is… meh
The so much awaited Apple Tablet has finally been announced by good ole Steve Jobs. My first impression? Meh. Put it this way, I was very very excited about the Apple Tablet, I was amused that the name could have gone the iSlate way (is late, get it?), but even the name is a total and uttermost failure. iPad... what's with the easy iPod pun?!
Those of us who read Gizmodo and other technology-oriented websites have been showering in mockups of how the iPad would look like and truth to be told, most of them look better than this chunky piece of an eBook reader. What's this supposed to be anyway? A phone? But it has no 3G... An eBook reader? But it costs $1000... An MP3/video player? BUT IT COSTS $1000!
Come on guys, who does not sincerely believe that Apple has just shot themselves in the foot please raise your hands and drop me a comment with sound reasoning. As for me, if I had Apple stock I'd be hitting the sell button as hard as I could right now... poor move Jobs, poor move...
Photos after the break (courtesy of Gizmodo).
UPDATE: Alright, alright, it only costs $500 after all. My point still remains: it is ugly and it only allows one app running at a time... $500 for a giant iPhone? Meh.
iMacs and the yellow tinted screen
Oh oh! No, not Santa, this is actually a juicy story. Mark Wilson at Gizmodo brings us an issue with the latest Apple's iMacs. According to said person, some of the latest iMacs randomly display a yellow tinted screen, turning the whites into... well... yellow. Manufacturing issues like this happen you say, and I would agree; that's not really the issue in this case.
The issue is the fact that Mark's iMac was exchanged but the replacement computer is also icteric. So what's the deal? Well, I'm not a fan boy for either side, I'm not fanatic so this brings me no special joy; despite that, I share Mark's opinion on the issue: multi-thousand dollar computers, computers that are known for being overpriced for their specifications, shouldn't have issues like this. Moreso, the issue should never happen again on a replacement computer. This can only mean one of two things - either the issue is happening on a large percentage of iMacs or Mark has just been extremely unlucky. Considering Apple's previous rapport with manufacturing issues and faulty parts, I would go with the former.
Right now Apple has been creepy and resorted to shady backstage data mining to flag Mark's Apple account to disallow any other exchanges; apparently his computer will now be repaired instead. Mark isn't happy and he's trying to spread the word; this is my attempt to help him and to get Apple to change this behavior. This would be acceptable from a cheap computer brand but not from Apple, THE most expensive computer brand, whose flagship is to produce computers with above-par quality. This sure as hell isn't above-par.
[via Gizmodo]
10 Google Wave Invites
Yeah, it is serious I have 10 Google Wave invites to distribute to the first ten visitors to leave me a comment on this post. This is NOT a contest, I will be giving the invites to the ten first lucky people who leave a comment on this post requesting an invite. Please be sure to leave the comment with a working e-mail address, or the invite won't go through and you will lose your chance.
Comment away!
[UPDATE]: 8 invites left!
Out with the old, In with the new!
The New Year is at the gates and so I thought it would be a splendid occasion to change the looks of my blog. Therefore, avast ye landlubbers! The new theme is here, hope you like it
Cheers!
Tiago
Adobe and the slap on Apple
Well, for some weird reason, Apple refuses to give in and have Adobe port Flash over to the iPhone. It would be a massive advantage if we could see an iPhone with a full blown version of Flash, as opposed to Flash Lite. But... Apple won't bend. So what does Apple do? The best it can do right now: get people angry at Apple.
Below is the image that people will see when they try to download Flash on their iPhones (courtesy of Engadget):
Sidekick data recovered (most of it, maybe all)
You just have to take the fun of being a critical blogger, don't you T-Mobile? It seems that T-Mobile has actually managed to recover most of the data that was deemed 'probably lost' as the result of the massive server crash. According to the magenta folks, they will be able to recover most, if not all, of their customers' data. Good news for the Sidekick owners, but if I was you I'd just go with Robin anyway...
Official Microsoft statement after the break.
[via Gizmodo]
T-Mobile Sidekick in Danger
Well, truth to be told this had to happen at some point. According to the good folks at Engadget, T-Mobile has most probably lost the data of their customers' Sidekick phones. The T-Mobile Sidekick is a device that relies heavily on cloud-computing and simple things such as looking up contacts or reading old text messages are done through servers in the cloud (that is to say, in the Internet). So if these servers fail for some reason, or more extremely (like it happened) lose all the data they contain, then the end user is pretty much screwed.
I hope for the sake of the costumers that the data isn't just lost; I would have also hoped that T-Mobile had off-site, offline backups of all this stuff but that clearly does not seem to be the case. It is also up to our imagination whom to blame for this. Of course that for all the people affected by this problem, T-Mobile will be the one to blame, but whose fault was it in the end? Is it a bug in the servers? Will it happen again? Has it been patched?
Doesn't really matter now but here's the morale of the story: ALWAYS keep backups of your data.