I love my iPad and my iPhone. I really do. I’ve been a big user of mobile tech for 20 years, and the sheer usability of these things blows me away.

But there’s one thing you’re doing with the mail client that makes me very frustrated every time I run into it. Neither iOS device keeps non-inbox folders in sync in the background, which in and of itself isn’t a big deal. However, what IS a big deal is that on the off chance I need to refer to a mail I sent yesterday from my desktop, opening the Sent folder on my iPad will be an exercise in frustration because it will bring it up to date starting with the oldest mails it doesn’t have.

Just now, sitting in an airport, I needed access to a mail I sent last night. I hadn’t opened my Sent folder on my iPad since January, which meant I got to watch 4 months of sent mail slowly trickle down over 3G before I could find the one I sent yesterday to forward it elsewhere.

How about you give us an option to pull mail down newest first, at least?

In game theory, there’s a thing called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which you may have heard of. It happens that there is also a British game show (called, hilariously, “Golden Balls”) that uses PD as its final round: There’s a pot of money at stake, and the final two contestants must make a choice to either split the pot or try to steal it — and they must disclose their choices simultaneously.

• If both say “split,” the pot is split evenly.

• If one says “split,” but the other says “steal,” the stealer gets the whole pot.

• If both say “steal,” nobody gets anything.

Security maven Bruce Schneier is of course aware of PD, and even mentions it in his book Liars & Outliers. He’s come across this game show, too, and in so doing found this very interesting final round. Watch it.

Back in 1998, Harper’s ran an interesting story about David Hahn, a teenager who very nearly created a breeder reactor in his parents’ garden shed, which subsequently became a Superfund cleanup site.

A very different tale played out for young Taylor Wilson, another teen with nuclear dreams, except with much better parents. Wilson’s story was covered in Popular Science earlier this year, and is worth your time.

Death to Word.

Jack Tramiel, the man behind the Commodore line of computers, has died.

It would not be wrong to say his computers had easily as much to do with the pervasive spread of computing as anyone else. I never had one — my parents swayed me to buy local and get something at Radio Shack, more’s the pity — but he looms large over generations of computer nerds like me.

Thing I did not know before today: Tramiel was born in Poland; he and his family spent the war in Auschwitz and other camps before Tramiel alone was rescued in 1945.

More at MeFi.

“Fun Fact: The Edmund Fitzgerald, the Kursk, and the Lusitania all sank in water shallower than they were long.“

Also, apparently there’s a lake in Siberia that’s over a mile deep. Whoa.

This is a great rant, but it’s for hardcore geeks only.

h/t Rob.

My first DOS computer was a 286-based system. This was in a time when most folks still had 8088 or 8086 systems, so mine was the hot rod in my dorm at the time. It was pretty fast, for the era at least, and I never really had to wait on it doing many things. Of course, back then we didn’t ask our computers to do the sorts of things we ask them to do now, either.

Three years later, I bought a new computer. It was a stupid-fast 33Mhz 80386 system — top of the line at the time — and it was a complete fucking screamer. My buddy Mike and I spent hours basically marveling at how ridiculously quick it was at EVERYTHING. Even doing a directory list was blazingly quick. It was, truly, life in the future.

In the 21 years since that day, I’ve bought lots of computers, but I’ve never had an upgrade that blew me away like that again. Things got more incremental, as is the case with most progressions. The Pentium I replaced the 386 with was quicker, but Windows was more bloated, so the actual user experience uptick wasn’t that dramatic. That became the rule, even with the on-paper giant boosts in power that I’ve gained in my last few Macs. Quite frankly, for most people and most tasks, you’re nowhere nearly CPU bound — other things are in the way. Like, say, hard drive speeds.

That’s where the new development comes in. I say I haven’t had a “holy shit” upgrade experience in 21 years, but that’s no longer true. See, I bought one of these to replace the ailing traditional hard drive in my Macbook Pro, and when I booted it back up after the (lengthy) restore process, I was reminded of nothing so much as the first few minutes with that Gateway 386 in 1991.

Everything happens IMMEDIATELY now. There is never a disk delay. The absurdly fast processor is free to be, well, absurdly fast. Notoriously piggy apps (I’m looking at you, Office) spring to life like tiny utilities. Even Lightroom opens with a speed that beggars belief. Task switching? Trivial. My Windows VM sings. If I’d realized how dramatic this upgrade was going to be, I’d have done it years ago.

A visitor to a Marriott in New York discovered every web page had been dynamically edited by the hotel’s network.

Assuming those jackasses are monitoring everything. Use a VPN or a private broadband device. There are many options.

Apparently, Alan Moore was — briefly — in a band.

Active Directory. “Hey, how do you get a list of nondisabled users from a given group?”

dsquery * ou=associates,dc=manassas,dc=[companynameredacted],dc=com -filter (!userAccountControl:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=2) -attr name samaccountname > Associates.txt

Seriously?

Extremely high-volume mid-80s metal is pretty much the only thing keeping me from exploding in a paroxysm of sacrilegious profanity, cynicism, ire, and misanthropy.

Gather round, children, and let me tell you once again what a terrible idea code outsourcing is. The abominations I’ve seen rival the Great Old Ones for Things Which Should Not Be. As Cthulu is my witness, the dev manager showed me a place where they’d used string functions to determine absolute value, I shit you not.

Not even once, people. Not even once.

Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day have created a new online show called Tabletop, which appears to be a merging of two things we loved at Casa Heathen: Jon Favreau’s Dinner for Five and the early seasons of Celebrity Poker Showdown.

It begins on April 2.

Did you know that it’s possible to hide from the ghosts in Pac-Man?

The author of the upcoming puzzle game Gunpoint just posted a smart piece on handling saved games. It’s always interesting to see how really GOOD sausage gets made.

This is what we found:

A bit of commentary, left to right, top to bottom:

Microsoft Windows

Heathen with good eyes can tell that’s disk 1 for Windows 3.1, which was the first really modern version. It still shocks me that the move from 3.0 to 3.1 didn’t inspire a major-number release, but whatever.

AOL

“Why Chief Heathen, what are you doing with this?” Well, kids, everyone needs coasters.

Lotus Agenda

Sadly, it’s just the print disk, which is a story in and of itself (back before Windows, every program needed its own printer driver, kids; imagine what a delightful world THAT was!). Agenda was seriously groundbreaking and awesome, so of course few folks could figure out how to use it. It was soon replaced by the bone-stupid Lotus Organizer, whose tacky faux-leather presentation was sadly resurrected for OSX Lion’s Address Book and Calendar.

Microsoft Word

5.0 for DOS. The last good version of Word.

Visual Basic

There was NEVER a good version of Visual Basic.

PFS Professional Write

Broken on the rocks of the Word-WordPerfect duopoly in the late 80s, PFS was nevertheless the first PC word processor I really used. Then I found Word (supra). I know it may be hard to grasp for you youngsters, but MS Word really did win its market by being better — as opposed to winning by default, which is what Windows networking did, or winning because the opponent was stupid, which is what Excel did.

Naturally, I have no device in my home that will read any of these disks.

Why on God’s green earth did Microsoft present the summary of various types of Sharepoint 2010 site templates as videos and not just text? Are we post-literate? WTF?

“The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing.”

Carry on.

Tet Ray.

…but it still strikes me as pretty cool that I can deposit checks into my account using my smartphone.

I saw links to this all last week, but only finally clicked it thanks to a link from Heathen Ceaser in Louisville.

Holy cow, am I glad I did:

The robots aren’t remote-controlled. They’re preprogrammed and autonomous, yet are still working in concert.

Whoa.

Ars Technica has noticed something interesting in their logs: Apparently, folks at Apple have been visiting the site using iPad 3 hardware and running iOS 6.

Yes, it does appear the new iPads will have a higher res screen.

(H/T: Rob).

“There is no stack on the PDP-1.”

But if currently policies continue, I might be glad I bookmarked it.

JWZ point us to Carlos Bueno’s article How Bots Seized Control Of My Pricing Strategy, which is an interesting bit of weird Gibsonian emergent behavior:

Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It’s one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.

It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.

Go read the whole thing.

Astute Heathen (is there any other kind?) may have noticed a drastic uptick in output since the mid-January migration to the new platform, and there is a very, very simple reason for that: MarsEdit.

ME is a dedicated blogging client I run on my Mac. It does all the talking to the blog software for me, and frees me from having to type text into a web browser. It’s awesome.

I first starting using it long ago, but a couple years back there was some sort of shift in the underpinnings of Heathen that made kept it from working. (You can actually track roughly when this happened by looking at the post counts by month over in the archive section; the last month with as many posts as February 2012 was December 2007; there was a problem in early January of 2008.) We were always “just about” to fix it, until “just about” became years, and the fix became “migrate to something else because Movable Type is as dead as disco.”

But then a thing happened, and I ended up needing to bump my Mac up to Lion (about which I’m not particularly pleased), and post-Lion my copy of MarsEdit — which was a few versions behind — developed and annoying but minor tic. I wrote to support, basically expecting to be told to upgrade to the latest for full Lion compatibility, and that’s when I got surprised.

See, they did suggest that I just download the newest to see if that would solve the problem, but when it did they insisted on comping my upgrade. “We don’t know what the problem was, but you shouldn’t have had to upgrade to fix it. Here’s a key with our complements.”

Granted, we’re only talking about $15 here, but it’s still surprising. That’s some customer service right there, I tell you. Serious kudos to RedSweater Software for making a cool product, and standing behind it in a way big companies have long since forgotten how to do.

“What if PHP was British?”

(Via MeFi.)

This game looks awesome. His official site is GunpointGame.com; follow @gunpointgame on Twitter for updates. It should be out by May, apparently.

Edit: First link fixed. Thx, AF.

So here’s a quick stat: Apple sold more iPod Touches, iPhones, and iPads in 2011 alone than they did Macintoshes in TWENTY EIGHT YEARS. This is the new platform of record. It is the new default, for good or ill.

No, Android is not going to supplant this juggernaut. I hope they can remain a viable competitor, but the crown is Apple’s to lose.

Also, you know what name isn’t even part of this discussion? Microsoft.

The Adventures of L’il Cthulhu.

Click to find out!

The competition for “Best High Concept Nerd Article Online, Software Review Division” will have to get pretty tight for anyone to surpass this one.

Please buy me one of these, because it’s without a doubt the coolest toy I’ve ever seen.

No, really.

It may help if you know what The Eye of Argon is.

Iron Man, played with a MIDI guitar and Tesla coils.

This excellent drunken rant of a video explains, in 16 minutes, the whole Death of Superman storyline from 1992, complete with re-enactment skits and some unexpected guest stars.

(Note: Guest stars probably only possible because the filmmaker (an narrator) is Max Landis, who has a famous dad.)

Stay with it for the final reveal. Via MeFi.

In 2012, do you think it’s really still important that all years be input as four digit values? Do you not think it’s safe, for example, for a hotel to assume that the year is the only year for which they’re currently taking reservations?

Sigh.

Apple Scotland: Having a wee bit of trouble with Siri.

NSFW (language).

Simple instructions. Enjoy.

Shit Programmers Say. Stay with it.

Go watch this and tell me your brain didn’t just go “OOOOO! SOMETHING COOL IS COMING!”

Destroy All Software: WAT.

h/t: Rob

Owing to the increasing complexity of printers and a lack of defensive coding, it is now possible to compromise an entire LAN simply by printing a special document.

Whoa.

Best. Skyrim. Mod. EVAR.

This just made me laugh out loud.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

So, the Heathen Mother — who would dislike being referred to that way quite a bit — has a fancy new sewing machine that costs as much as a used late-model Honda. It’s an upgrade from the not-quite-so-spendy model she got just a year ago, and is said to count for many, many present-giving occasions this year. (I think it’s safe to say my stepfather adores her.)

Anyway, said machine has lots of capabilities best explored by plugging it into your computer. In true niche-market fashion, the software appears to be pretty poorly written (as has been the case for most of her quilting tools), but the real shocker is that this machine also appears to ONLY work with Windows 7. That’s kind of amazing to me, given the fundamental technological conservativism of 71-year-old grandmothers into high-end quilting. The market share of Windows XP is still only barely below 50%. It’s a dog and a pain, but it’s what’s out there in lots of places — not the least of which is the Parallels virtual machine on my mother’s 2006 Macbook.

This Macbook still works great for everything she’s needed to do so far, up to and including using the WinXP VM to connect to prior sewing machines and quilting accessories. XP’s great for this, too, because its needs are so modest — the whole VM is barely 6 GB on disk. That’s important because a 2006 Macbook comes with 2GB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive, and Mother’s down to about 15GB free. (She takes lots of pictures, too.)

Windows 7, on the other hand, appears to want at least a GB of RAM and 15-20 GB of hard drive space just to run. Oh joy.

I got her on a path to a stopgap with Amazon links to a Win 7 Home disk and a new external drive, but at the same time I went over to Apple to see what a replacement computer would cost. And that’s where the surprise crops up.

I figured the 13″ Air would be the right call for her. Small, light, and with a solid-state drive? What’s not to like?

Well, lots as it turns out.

This will be her only functioning computer once she gets it, so she needs an optical drive. An Air’s only option is the external one, which means something else to keep up with. Sure, my stepdad has a nice iMac, but we can’t be asking Mom to figure out how to share his optical drive.

She also needs materially more space. If you’re already almost full with an 80GB drive, going to a 128GB is a dumb move. That means the 256GB model is the only truly viable option.

So I did a comparison. Before Applecare, a kitted out 13″ Air with the 256GB drive is nearly $1,700.

On the other hand, a 13″ Pro with a 500GB drive is . . . $1,200. Add AppleCare, and it’s out the door at $1,448.

Moral: Tiny computers with flash-only drives are cute, but they’re not ready for prime time with even the modest needs of 71-year-old quilters, apparently. Who knew?

Also: We live in an age of miracles and wonders, wherein I am routinely called upon to help my mother sysadmin her sewing machine. How exactly did this happen?

The attention to detail here is really, really wonderful.

Wow. Just wow.

JWZ noticed something interesting on a new TV installed in his pizza joint. It has static when there’s no signal on HDMI.

As he notes, this seems perfectly normal if you’re old enough. Except this kind of static is an artifact of an analog signal chain — which doesn’t exist for this TV. The static is synthetic, built into the TV, just for style points.