Category: Blog
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Honda is sunsetting their only EV and their best car.
Honda will apparently stop production of the Honda Prologue after the 2026 model year, even though it’s in the top 10 best-selling EVs in the US. This also means they’re killing a great car.
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Mercedes-Benz Had Peak Automotive UX in 2008
Great user experience doesn’t just consider the device and user in isolation, but also the environment and circumstances of use. This is particularly important in the automotive sector where distraction can be fatal and users need to be able to access important controls within seconds without looking away from the road. This is difficult to…
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Sometimes, premium consumer product companies can benefit from regulation.
Companies making certain consumer products often fight regulations. But I believe that in a regulated market, especially premium products can come out on top.
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CarPlay and the Age of Frankenstein UI
Rendering certain content on your smartphone, to be integrated with the car’s native user interface, leads to an inconsistent user experience.
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Why Apple doesn’t have a password sharing problem
We’ve all heard about Netflix and Disney+ cracking down on their users sharing account access with friends & family that aren’t in the same household. Why aren’t we hearing about the same for Apple TV+? Apple is in an advantageous position, offering much more than streaming TV shows. Sharing one’s Apple ID Password means not…
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Yes, I Do Like Motion Smoothing.
Motion smoothing refers to techniques that modern consumer TVs and projectors use to add additional frames in-between the frames. While users going to cinemas are usually exposed to a frame rate of only 24 frames per second, movie fans watching at home often have a choice. Yes, this is about an article published on Polygon.com…
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Cross-Progression Ruins The Sense Of Achievement Of Console Games.
So… this is in direct response to this article on Wired.com “every game should let you cross-save“ I’m sorry, but no, thanks. I believe, cross-saves can be detrimental to the game experience. Let me explain.
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The Deepfake Defense
With deepfakes, it will be difficult to claim that anyone has ever said anything, since any evidence of it might be fake.
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Thoughts on AI
Now that we have language models… great! I can just write this post as bullet points and you may simply copy/paste into the AI of your choice and turn it into a text that I’m sure is better than what I could conjure in an hour.
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Native Display Controls on macOS
MacOS supports controlling the brightness of attached displays via they keyboard. The user can even control monitors separately, simply selecting the controlled monitor via the mouse. I use that all the time. Unfortunately, macOS and Mac monitors communicate through an arcane, apple-specific protocol instead of the standard DDC/CI protocol. This means that only some monitors that are…
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WordPress again…
I’ve been using PageKit for years, but is unfortunately no longer updated for PHP 8. So here we go again, WordPress!
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The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Product Lifespans
If the only metric for how long products should be used is how long they’re commonly used, we won’t be able to make longer-lasting products.
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Bait-And-Switch Loopholes
Bait-and-switch refers to the illegal practice of advertising a product or service, tempting customers to invest resources (time or money) based on the advertisement, and then changing the product once the customer has already invested, presumably to squeeze more money out of the transaction. The problem that many products that rely on software to function,…
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Why can’t calls on iOS just be muted?
So many zoom calls Simultaneous speaking Why no speaker mute? Tiffany McBride
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We need to find a way to reduce tire emissions already!
Electric cars with standard tires trade a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions for an increase in fine particulate matter. We need a solution.
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Why do people sell their data for digital, but not physical products and services?
Thought experiment: What if you go to a bakery and buy a bread roll for $2.99 and the baker says “you can have it for free if you give me all your family photos and the rights to analyze them using robots and sell your data.”
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Pixel-Perfect Graphics for Embedded Systems
This is an ode to pixel-perfect graphics and an explanation as to how, even with advancing technology, they are still important. Great graphic design for embedded systems don’t only look great on the designer’s display device, but take the characteristics of the target display and environment into account.
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Why Apple’s ARM Transition is Going to Work
Today it happened. Apple did announce that they are, in fact, transitioning to custom-built ARM processors for Macs. Although they didn’t explicitly say “ARM” during the keynote today, I’m assuming their new CPUs will be based on the ARM architecture as the devkit they announced today is running their A12 ARM processor and it seems…
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How PBR and Photogrammetry are changing real-time asset workflows.
Historically, when working on technical art direction for a video game, every game was different. The 2D/3D art pipeline was defined by the visual style of the game, hardware capabilities and the render pipeline, which was often built specifically for a particular game. But if the style you need is photo-realistic, why bother creating assets…
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The “Licensing” Loophole
A lot of products you buy come with a “software licensing agreement,” typically stating something like… “The software that is part of this product is licensed to you, not sold.” and further, something along the lines of… “We reserve the right to modify this licensing agreement at any time with or without notice.” What’s the…