Singers' view on the world

I’m sure everybody have heard of all the many ways you can donate money and help the people in Haiti. Twitter has almost exploded with ways you can donate money and this just shows how many things Twitter can do. As always Twitter was one of the first places that the news of the earthquake was told, pictures was posted on twitter a long time before any of the official channels had any photos. It was real-time tracking of what was going on in Haiti and for that Twitter just keeps amazing me. The world has come together to help Haiti in this time of struggle and that’s great – let’s just hope the world doesn’t “forget” about Haiti in two weeks or so.

Today someone retweeted a link to a new way you could donate. It was on a site called JustGiving which is a site that makes it easy  for people to donate to different causes, they built the backbone and then you get the fundraising idea and launch it on the site. Great concept and I’m surprised I haven’t seen the site before. Well anyway, David Stripinis(@davidstripinis) was trying to figure out what he could do to help Haiti and he thought that a raffle for a Avatar Crew T-Shirt would be a great idea. Here’s what he is saying on the donation page:

Hey everyone!  I was trying to figure out what I could do to help out in Haiti.  Then I had a thought – could one shirt help a lot of people?

So, here’s the deal.  Donate.   And share your email address with me.  All the money goes to Oxfam, the email address goes to me.  For every £3 ( or $5USD ) you donate, you get an entry to a raffle to receive an Avatar Crew T-Shirt.

This is a brand new, never been worn XL t-shirt only available to those that were lucky enough to work on the film, or know people who did.

Raffle will be run Saturday, 23 Jan 2010.  Shirt will be sent off as soon as the winner sends me his address, at my expense.

So give.  Give because if you are lucky enough to be able to give, you might be lucky enough to own a piece of movie history.

I would have to agree that it’s an awesome idea and I hope you’ll all go support the raffle. So go out there and share this story and help Haiti. I know there is a lot of different donations out there but this one just caught my eye and I think you should all go check it out.

So I thought I would do a quick little post about all the great things I found around the Internet this week and what I’ve been up to lately. I’ll try to do one of these every single week. It’s going to be split into categories for clarity.

Photography:

• Top 30+ Flickr Tools to Enhance your Flickr Journey - This is a great article that a friend sent to me on Twitter and I really think you should go check it out.
• Top Tips for Choosing a Tripod – a list of great questions that I’ll definitely remember when I go out to find me a good tripod. As I wrote in the [intlink id="61" type="post"]Nikon D60[/intlink] post I’m looking for a great tripod.
• Yosemite 17 Gigapixel photo – I know this a little old but it’s still amazing and I love how you can see all those people. Amazing
• 124 “Best Photos of 2009? Blog Posts - Great for the weekend if you have some time to kill, that is so many blog posts.
• High-Res Satellite Images of Haiti Capital Show Devastation From 423 Miles In Space – This is such a tragic event and it’s been really hard for the world to understand how much devastation the earthquake actually have caused.
• Odd Romance: Lady Gaga Partners with Polaroid - I’m still not sure I get this but I guess Lady GaGa is the head of relaunching the Polaroid.
• 14 Hours of Walking in Stop-Motion - Just amazing video of the the longest street in the world.

Youtube videos that amazed me this week:

• Guy Has Glasses Tattooed On His Face – When I watched this the first time I couldn’t believe that it was real but then I read some comments on it at Mashable and I guess it was a fake. People are even talking about it being a RayBan Viral Ad but I’m not so sure about that.
• Tilted Twister – LEGO Mindstorms Rubik’s Cube solver - Lego + Mindstorm + Programming + Rubik’s Cube = awesomeness x10. This is really nerdy yet so awesome.
• Avatar Makeup Tutorial - In the beginning I thought she was serious but then I realized that she was just making fun of all the hardcore Avatar fans and it’s actually quite funny at times. “their human equivalent to having really bad acne”
• Drawing Illusion - I can’t believe I haven’t seen this one before, because that is some awesome drawing skills.
• Tiny Gallon breaks backboard – New Year’s Eve 2009 – This is just plain crazy, not exactly new but still crazy.

In other news:

• DisplayPort 1.2 spec blessing for creative pros - Sounds like some good news for the new MacBook (Pro)
• The best of the best and the worst of the worst of 2010 CES - Only coverage of CES 2010 I’ll do – check it out.
• Climbing Mt.Story: How to Survive the Creative Journey - They look at the journey of writing on a different but really cool way.
• Today’s Date Is Especially Binary - We had a Binary Day in the MM/DD/YYYY zone.

I hope you liked some of the things that I read/watched this week. Please comment on these or give some tips for more awesome things that happened this week.

You can also tweet me some links/tips and follow me on Twitter @matiassingers.

So you are thinking “oh yet another fanboy writing down the things he wants in the iPhone” but boy are you wrong. I’ll list some things I would like to see implemented into the iPhone OS(4.0). Some of these features can be archived by jailbreaking and I will cover this too. TUAW wrote an article about things that their readers would like to see in the iPhone OS 4.0 but I’m not going be nice about this or make any statistics. I’m not going to comment on the standard request for multitasking/background applications because so many other sites and blogs have already been there.

22 things Apple should to implement in the iPhone OS:

• Edit the dictionary: We need a way to edit the dictionary, this could be done through iTunes or another app on the computer. I’m tired of Messages.app correcting the same words all the time and it doesn’t seem to learn the word that I always choose. There is some workarounds such as:
  • type the word in the Google search bar in Safari.app,
  • add it to a contact in your address book
  • type it multiple times in Notes.app
  • keep correcting it
• Application folders: This have been available to jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touches for ages and it’s even a good way to do it: [Categories.app] This shouldn’t be hard to implement and even easier to do this through iTunes where you already reorder and move your apps around.
• Text Delivery Reports: A standard feature which all networks around the world supports and could just be implemented as an option under Settings.app. There is a ton of alternative SMS/Text/MMS application in the jailbreak world. Another way to do this now is to write network specific commands before the message. Network code delivery reports look for your networks code here: [iPhones Talk]
• Character Count: Like the Delivery Reports this have been available in all the alternative text applications. Applications like biteSMS does this plus a ton of more features.
• Custom tones for SMS/MMS/Mail: You can already do this for ringtones and alarms so it just seems odd that you aren’t able to do it with these. You can do this if you jailbreak in multiple ways.
  • SSH into you iPhone and fix it that way
  • Download custom tones from Cydia or other apps.
  • Themes with WinterBoard
• Wireless Sync with Mac: This is possible on a lot of standalone apps but not the core ones. I’m suspecting Apple of doing this so people are forced to buy MobileMe which is really sad. I don’t want sync of videos, music and so on because it would drain battery and take a long time – just data like calendar, contacts, notes and maybe Voice Memos.
• Better Group-SMS with support for contact groups: I can’t believe Apple didn’t already do it this way because their Address Book works so good with contact groups yet you still can’t send a SMS to a contact group. This is also available through the alternative SMS/MMS applications.
• TV-Out of the whole OS and all applications: As it is right now you can only do this of videos and photos but I want to be able to show some applications and games on my screen. You can do this with the jailbreak application:
  • ScreenSplitr is one great way to it output the display. Check the developer out on twitter: @c0diq
  • The iPhone TV-Out project is another great tool to do this. Erica Sadun is a part of this project.
• Ability to hide Core applications: Come on, this can’t be hard to do – gimme a toggle in Settings.app or iTunes.app to hide/show Core apps. I don’t think everybody is interested in Stocks or Weather and maybe they found an alternative and doesn’t want to look at the Core app anymore. Of course this is possible in the jailbreak world too check out: Poof;
• Unified Mailbox: A way to show multiple Mailbox accounts in one Inbox. I’m sure you can do this with some jailbreak application.
• Turn off auto-rotate/landscape mode: Some way to toggle this in certain apps or situations. Sometimes you just don’t want your iPhone to rotate the video or photo you are looking at. This is possible with a jailbreak solution called SBSettings
• Save contacts to SIM: Right now it’s only possible to import contacts from SIM, let’s get this function implemented so it’s easier to switch SIM cards and/or phones. You can do this with the jailbreak app iSIM
• Panorama mode for Camera.app: This is possible with a ton of applications from the App Store but, come on Apple, implement it in the original Camera.app
• Custom toggle icons: Who wouldn’t like to be able to turn WIFI on/off from the SpringBoard just with a click on a icon/app.
• Automatic sync of podcasts: You can already download music and applications over 3G and WIFI so why can’t you check for new podcasts from you iPhone?
• Ability for some apps/you to disable incoming calls: Imagine you are playing a game, without an auto-save function, and you’ve just gotten to the finale boss and suddenly your girlfriend calls you. Wouldn’t you like to be able to block incoming calls in certain games/apps? Think of it as “Airplane mode” kicking in when you opened Awesome Game.app Update: “Ability to quick reply to text messages so you don’t have to quit games etc.” [Thanks for the comment mnmminies]
• Themes: The jailbreak application WinterBoard have had this function for a long time and with a wide support for themes and customs fonts. I know for a fact that a lot of people are getting tired of the iPhone UI, they want to see something new and I think themes are a great way to change things up a little bit. Apple could even control which themes to let through the needle hole.
• Better file sharing over BlueTooth: There is some apps in the App Store where you can share images and contact info but lets get some more filetypes enabled. The iBluetooth project which is now known as iBlueNova will allow this.
• Landscape mode for Calendar.app: Ability to rotate Calendar.app and see more info or something like that. I’m sure Apple could implement this in a great way.
• Show pictures of contacts in Address Book: Why not just make a small thumbnail with the picture that is in their contact information. You can buy the application Cyntact from Cydia.

Features requiring a little more developing and coding:

• Speech Recognition: Why not add more languages to this feature? This is probably coming over time or at least that’s what I’m hoping. With the [intlink id="85" type="post"]Google Nexus One[/intlink] having the Speech-To-Text why not give the Messages.app the same ability?
• FM Radio: This one requires a little more explanation. It was reported that the iPhone 3G(S) has a chip that enables it to both receive and broadcast a FM signal and Apple is reported on working to implement someway for the Radio.app to connect with iTunes Music Store so you could buy the music you are listening to. More about the iPhone Radio.app at 9to5mac.

Hope you liked my run-through of things I would like to see implemented in to iPhone OS in a near future. I still think the iPhone is the greatest phone that I’ve ever owned because even though these things are missing Apple have perfected the features that the iPhone have.

Please comment below if you have any more ideas for things that should be implemented or a way to fix the problems with the current OS and iPhone.

I’ve always been quite impressed by how you design a logo for a big event, whether it be a sporting or some other type of event. We might not think much about the logos in our daily lives but the logos are still those small things that remind us about the event. Even if it’s a bad logo it’ll make us remember the event. A lot of time and money is spent on coming up with a great logo but sometimes it just seems like the designers didn’t get any response from the outside world. In these cases it seems like they found something they liked and didn’t give it a second thought or researched it more. An example of a bad choice of logo can be seen in the 2012 London Olympics

Almost immediately after this logo was released it sparked a lot of debate around the world and hundreds of Facebook groups was started. Specially this group became widely popular: 2012 OLYMPICS LOGO LOOKS LIKE LISA SIMPSON GIVING HEAD. Now I’m not going to talk about this logo nor about what it’s supposed to look like. No I’ll try to just show you some of the latest Winter Olympic logos.

Winter Olympic logos 1984-2010:

Sarajevo 1984 // Calgary 1988

Albertville 1992 // Lillehammer 1994

Nagano 1998 // Salt Lake City 2002

Torino 2006 // Vancouver 2010

I think it interesting to see how the logos have changed over this period of time.

Let us know in the comments what Winter Olympic you think was the greatest and why you remember it so fondly.
Personally I remember Salt Lake City 2002 very strongly but I’m not sure why that is. It just seems like that is the Winter Olympics I watched the most and therefore I think that was a great Winter Olympic.
Can you tell some stories about what you experienced at a Winter Olympic?

Edit:

Just found these “10 things you didn’t know about the Winter Olympics”:

1 The 21st winter games take place in Vancouver and Whistler, in western Canada, on February 12 and run for 16 days. It is their second appearance in Canada, having visitedCalgary in 1988.

2 Ireland first competed in the 1992 games in Albertville,France, with a four-man bobsled team and have missed just one games since, in 1994.

3 The event tends to throw up an unlikely hero every so often, with hapless British ski jumper Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards competing in the 1988 games. Ghana’s first Olympic skierKwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, aka ‘Snow Leopard’ is favourite to take that mantle in Vancouver.

4 Fifteen disciplines are competed in during the games across 86 events on the snow and the ice. These range from ice hockey and curling to luge and cross-country skiing.

5 The first games took place in 1924 in Chamonix, France, and they have visited eight countries. They took place in the same year as the summer games until 1994, when the Lillehammergames interrupted the sequence.

6 The closest Ireland have come to a medal came when Clifton Hugh Lancelot de Verdon, 6th Baron of Wrottesley, finished fourth in the Men’s Skeleton event in 2002, at Salt Lake City.

7 Ireland’s 2010 hopefuls include the two-woman bobsled team, skeleton athlete Patrick Shannon and Alpine skier Kirsty McGarry, who will be hoping to improve on her 32nd-placed finish in Turin in 2006.

8 Eighty nations participated in the 2006 games in Turin, a massive increase over the lifespan of the event. Just 16 took part in 1924.

9 Ski cross is making its debut in Vancouver. A variation of motocross, it is a timed racing event that takes in the skills of freestyle skiing.

10 The 2010 games are being organised by Irish emigrantJohn Furlong who hails from Tipperary and played GAA, basketball and handball before leaving for Canada more than 30 years ago, where he became Canadian national squash champion.