When the hot zone is the entire device, and it’s a device you’re likely to be frequently picking up and handling, using it is actually slightly stressful: you don’t want to accidentally trigger unexpected behavior, so you’re more careful and cautious… One reason the Kindle seems like a more “peaceful” ebook reader, and why the Kindle 2 is so much better than the first Kindle, is that it has almost no hot zones.

Marco.org on touch screen ‘hot zones'. I know the feeling from the iPhone - it’s disorienting when it rotates when you don’t mean it to.

Kotaku on game worlds. Be interesting to see where something like the old Ultima games came in. Very small I suspect, despite feeling huge in their day.

At my first corporate sell-out job, there was a guy running a PC piracy club. You paid him $20 to be a member, which qualified you for a bottomless list of games and apps burned to CD on request. This was in the days of 28.8k modems, so it was a big deal - he was downloading cracked software 24x7.

There was no way he, nor any members, could have bought or even played more than a few of the games available. People would go nuts requesting every last download, despite there being no chance they would get through them. It was more about the kudos of having the game than actually playing it. Which also means they would never have paid for it even if it wasn’t available via the ‘club'.

Which makes this article ring very true.

Wired:

Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.

Australian iPad pricing: $629-$1049

The Guardian:

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s remarkable single is arguably the perfect protest song: moving, memorable and perfectly timed. Shortly afterwards, the NME’s Ritchie Yorke predicted: “There will almost certainly be a trend towards very politically oriented pop acts in the very near future. Entertainment for the revolutionary troops, so to speak.” But Ohio turned out to signify the end of the fertile period of political songwriting that had begun with Bob Dylan, rather than a thrilling rebirth.

I keep reading stories like this about the iPad:

I was always going to enjoy using this device, but I confess to not having been prepared for quite this sort of transformative experience. I truly wouldn’t want to be without it from now on, and (work notwithstanding) I’ll be making a concerted effort to use it as my sole travel/portable device whenever possible.

Creative Space & iPad (via kottke.org)

They’ve all been largely obsoleted (at least at my home) by a sleek $499 device that doesn’t really have any right to be called a “computer” in the traditional sense. 

Sure, there’s a handful of tasks that I still would prefer a real computer, but — amazingly — that list has now shrunk dramatically. In less than a week.

What iPads Did To My Family (via Daring Fireball)

Two similar perspectives from very dissimilar writers (a Mac coder vs a CTO at EMC). Question is, is this just the glow of a new toy, or is it truly a “transformative” moment in tech evolution?

Tim Bray on HTML5:

But the best case doesn’t help the Web, as such, all that much, and the worst case doesn’t really damage it. Because every interesting application, more or less, is already a Web application.

Understatement:

The game itself was fantastic - I’m glad I bought it either way - but I have to say, this is a nice return on my investment.

Buzzword alert:

I reached out to [person] to buy him a coffee

You reached out? What?