“Collide” by Kid Rock ft. Sheryl Crow:

has
homeschooled defenestrated pirate-raped provided affordable health care to

the
mobile web Christmas retailers cable providers mommy-bloggers

because after seeing a private presentation, we couldn’t be more certain that they have just dropped
innumerable atom bombs old-school hip-hop beats a tasteful dollop of mayo

all over the
slowly emerging bald spot left side forehead and right eye well-groomed rear flanks

of their competition with the upcoming announcement of their secret
mobile photo social music coupon sharing sharing social photo music mobile coupon coupon mobile social sharing music photo

service. Industry insiders familiar with the product suggest that none other than
Jeff Bezos Jeff Bridges Mark Zuckerberg’s aunt Mexican-equivalent Stevé Jobsbergo

personally oversaw the development and creation of the revolutionary new product, and is rumored to unveil the new product live on stage during the upcoming
TrunkCrunch CrunchFlap M. Arrington’s Hot N’ Spicy Backyard BBQ Chili-Cookoff

conference. Reaction to the upcoming announcement from around the TechCrunch offices has been
breathlessly hyperbolic hyperbolically breathless

with one TechCrunch staffer quoted as saying,
“Your move, Yahoo Pipes!” “Booyah! Take that, smelly redditors!” “Bladow, bitches! I’m not going to pay a lot for that e-muffler!” “Is there any more cocaine or did we do all the cocaine?”

From The Vaults: When I first started working at MassLive.com in 2007, producer par excellence Kristen Beam was putting together a very cool weekly podcast interviewing some of the local Western Massachusetts mayors. In order to check audio recording levels and network connectivity in Skype, she would call me first, and I would pretend to be a local mayor. She would test out her questions on me and I would do my absolute best to break her concentration and make her laugh.

Recently an excerpt from one of these test calls was discovered — enjoy.

So QR codes are being heralded as the way for the print medium to reroute readers to more interactive and compelling Internet content. Questions:

1. When has any medium ever successfully rerouted audience immediately to another medium? Think TV to radio, Internet to TV, movies to books, etc. It doesn’t happen. If your audience is currently engaged in a medium, it takes a large, large promise of payoff to entice an audience member to switch to another medium; and since by definition, the audience doesn’t know what lies on the other side of that QR code, it’s an unlikely mode switch at best. Once marketers start abusing QR codes, it will only get harder to entice people to give QR codes a shot.
2. As of Apr. 2011, why doesn’t any smartphone OS ship with a QR reader? Too geeky, perhaps? Too hard to explain to Mom and Dad? Any technology that is physically ugly tends to be marginalized. And QR codes are seriously ugly.
3. The most important physical object that might genuinely benefit from a QR code already has a scannable code on it: a UPC code. This code already works well as a scannable artifact in all kinds of existing apps today without any additional manufacturer effort. Why would a manufacturer put a QR code on as well?

QR codes are a technology looking for a purpose. They are the print industry equivalent of RSS feeds; appealing to a small number of geeks, but not useful (or explainable) enough to gain acceptance in a mass market. As the very astute Sebastiaan de With has said, QR Codes are a bad solution to make our world more understandable to devices. We should make our devices smarter, not make reality dumber.

is proud to announce

availability for the new

tablet which is expected to pose strong competition to the Apple iPad. The tablet features

2-megapixel cameras on the front and back, and also features a superior

pixel resolution. Powered by Google’s new

operating system, the tablet poses a threat to the iPad primarily because of the device’s easily accessed

Enthusiasts of the new device gathered

to laud the many

available for download from

for the device at launch. The device is expected to cost

and will be available exclusively for purchase at

I guess I’m pot the parget parket pere put pseriously, guys, nobody wants to curate five pages off the bat. Change up your initial screen or you are going to get bounce rates plike prazy.

~Jeff

P.S. Ditch “Books Worth Reading” entirely. No one likes to be reminded how few books we are reading these days.

You’ll have to disable “3D Acceleration” in Peggle Nights if you update to newer ATI drivers. But the UI of the menu screen freezes up so it’s hard to do that. Here’s a relatively easy, low-tech fix:

• Start your PC in safe mode (hit F8 at startup or use msconfig) and “Safe Boot”.
• Start up Peggle Nights and get a sticky note. Rip off three small squares of the sticky stuff up top.
• Stick one square directly on “Options”, one on “3D Acceleration” and one on “Done”.
• Reboot, but this time not in “Safe Mode”.
• After you’ve started up normally, start Peggle Nights up again. You’ll be on the frozen screen, but thanks to the sticky note squares, you can now click the areas you need to click: first, the bottom square, then, the top square, then finally the square in the middle.

By way of explanation, my daughter loves to watch people play Peggle Nights, so when this stopped working there was great sadness.

Keeping all my data in the cloud has become something bordering on an obsession for me. Here are my current suggestions on what the best bets are for staying nimble across a wide range of devices and operating systems — please feel free to leave your personal favorites in the comments:

Best web-based email: GMail

Full IMAP access and the excellent Google Sync keep GMail on top over recent upgrades by Hotmail and MobileMe. Google seems to be stretching for new features to add of late, but nothing else comes close.

What I’d like to see: More space. A recent influx of photos has me bumping up against the edge of my 8GB.

Best distributed file system: DropBox

Dropbox “just works” — it’s a dedicated part of my workflow to collect and distribute files for almost every project, so I’ll never be without that PDF, that Word document, that text file. If you haven’t tried it, hit this link to get a some extra space from day one.

What I’d like to see: “Play all music files sequentially in this folder” in the iPhone & iPad app, making simple folder-based playlists drag-and-drop dead-simple.

Best on-demand music service: Rdio

Not nearly enough tracks yet — the sync between my iTunes library and Rdio only picked up about 2,000 of my 6,000 songs — but the clean interface, killer mobile app and easy entry into this cloud-based music service makes it one to watch. I’m not sure if I’ll pay $10 a month for long — especially with Apple’s Lala-clone rumored to be close to release and Google working out something similar for Android — but for now, Rdio is your best bet for simple access to your music in the cloud.

What I’d like to see: Pandora still rules for casual listening and finding new music, so I’d love to see Rdio develop a music-discovery functionality for the desktop and mobile app.

Best browser sync: Firefox Sync

Chrome is steadily slowly adding browser sync features, but Firefox is ahead of the curve on this one with Firefox Sync (the Sync Service Formerly Known As Weave). I’m looking forward to the upcoming iPhone app, and having this feature ‘baked in’ to Firefox 4 will raise awareness of how great it is to have one single browser session.

What I’d like to see: Firefox Sync Extensions for Chrome and Safari could make this service the holy grail of sync services, with one set of bookmarks, history and saved passwords no matter where you are and what browser you’re on.

Best streaming video: No clear winner

YouTube, Hulu, and Netflix look poised to duke it out over the next 12 months for living-room supremacy (with Apple’s AppleTV as a dark-horse rival). It’s too close to call.

What I’d like to see: An open specification for streaming video so manufacturers and consumers can build “one set-top box to rule them all”. Good luck with that.

Best photo galleries: Flickr

Flickr’s recent ‘wide-screen’ redesign keeps them competitive with Picasa and whatever crap Microsoft is trying to trick people into using. The service remains a little pricey but the presentation and functionality is easily the best.

What I’d like to see: It should be easier to pull all your photos out of Flickr; users should not have to use a third-party client. Also, I’d like to see them build-in a fully integrated TwitPic killer for mobile users.

In the coming days or weeks, your friends, or neighbors, and/or loved ones may send you links and articles from Engadget.com, Wired.com, or even from noted child-pornography trading hub Gizmodo.com, articles that suggest that there is some sort of reception problem with the iPhone 4. Not that we would ever suggest that our loyal customers side with Apple over their own (often unreliable) family members, but we would like to take a moment to correct many of these ignorant, misinformed and outright evil statements repeated in the media and by your family members.

To start with: Apple products are not meant to be physically held. Simply by picking up an Apple product and leaving a single human finger print, you have voided your warranty in several of the continental United States — sorry, Tennessee. Customers that would like to do so may purchase AppleCare™ and a brand new, magical and amazing HoldingGlove® designed to enhance the natural shine and luster of our products when utilized outside the geographic confines of an Apple Store (not recommended).

Still, we have received reports that rogue customers who decide to use the iPhone outside of a Apple Store AirPort Extreme WiFi hot spot experience a dramatic drop in reception when they void their warranty, put the safety of their (often unreliable) family members in danger, and hold the iPhone 4 without the magical and amazing HoldingGlove®.

We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising. Both!

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the graphics representing the bars we used were too short, giving users the impression that reception was somehow lessened at “1 bar” or “2 bars”. An upcoming, free software update will make all the bars the same length, essentially fixing the problem that was not basically even a problem in the first place, because come on!

However, because Apple strives to not only match customer expectations, but instead, to exceed them: an upcoming free software update after the other upcoming free software upgrade will actually reshape and reinvent the very way bars are displayed on the iPhone 4. We asked our team of designers and hipster futurists to think “outside the quadraphonic egg chair” and radically change the fundamental way that bars are displayed on cell phones, for now and forever. Our engineers immediately realized that to strip away everything that has held cellular telephones back, all that was really necessary was one, single, elegant, really long bar.

Thus we present: The iBar™.

The radically new iBar™ will eliminate the confusion and clutter that is created by having too many bars to keep track of. The one, single, elegant, really long bar does not change shape. The iBar™ simply appears and disappears when the iPhone 4 is turned on and turned off. Turn on your iPhone 4 — there’s the iBar™. Turn it off, and it’s gone. It’s longer than any other cell phone reception bar indicator ever, and with one single glance, you’ll know if you can see if it’s a bar or not. Which it is.

To conclude, we have gone back and double-checked our sales figures, and the results are the same — we have sold a shitload of these things. So: awesome.

Anyhow, thank you for your patience and support and buckets upon buckets of money.

Apple

(Also: Gruber).

Notice I did not say all Facebook users*! But some of them!

*but I was thinking it

“About a dozen of the soy sauce packets from Chinese take out; more of the hot mustard packets; and half a dozen ketchup servings.

Easy pick up from front porch in neighborhood off ### Street near #####. Preference to prompt pick up – Monday would be great.

######
Northampton”

10). 6

9). 3

8). 7

7). 8

6). 2

5). 5

4). 9

3). 10

2). 1

1). 4