The missing dollar

I stumbled upon this riddle using StumbleUpon:

Three men go to a cheap motel, and the desk clerk charges them a sum of $30.00 for the night. The three of them split the cost ten dollars each. Later the manager comes over and tells the desk clerk that he overcharged the men, since the actual cost should have been $25.00. The manager gives the bellboy $5.00 and tells him to give it to the men. The bellboy, however, decides to cheat the men and pockets $2.00, giving each of the men only one dollar.

Now each man has paid $9.00 to stay for the night, and 3 x $9.00 = $27.00. The bellboy has pocketed $2.00. But $27.00 + $2.00 = $29.00. Where is the missing $1.00?

I found this riddle surprisingly difficult to solve by thinking only. I needed to put my reasoning in writing to see what was wrong.

Social media joke

Smartphones can give us the impression that we're really social while we're watching TV or doing nothing. That's what this commercial is really about. It presents iPhone5 and uses some well-known lines from Apple commercials, but it could otherwise be about any smartphone, or DSLR perhaps?
http://gizmodo.com/5936453/iphone-5-commercial-is-a-hilarious-parody-inspired-by-us-all

Good Game: Alcohol Check - Skills Test

This Proctele app is for checking your mental and physical abilities to see if you're fit to drive.  It tests these important abilities:

1. The steadiness of your hand. This is tested by letting you drive a car from the bottom of the screen to the top, to the tune of a great V8 snarl. Easy though it sounds, this is quite a tough test. You have to park your BMW convertible first and that's not at all easy in this game. The steadiness test is my kids' favorite. The youngest one wants to crash as many cars as he possibly can. Quite contrary to the test's intention.
2. Eye-hand coordination. Here you're supposed to puncture a balloon as soon as it appears on the screen.
3. Visual clarity. This works similarly to the balloon test, except the difficulty is to actually see the dot you're supposed to touch. A true challenge if you've had a couple of drinks.
4. Mental agility. Tests if you're still mentally agile enough. You'll see a digit on screen and the task is to input the next higher digit using a keyboard.
5. Memory. This tests if your memory is working Ok. Works similar to the smiley-test in our Elephant Super Memory Challenge game.

If you don't score well on these tests, you probably should ask someone to drive you home. But it could also mean that you're nervous or have concentration problems, and that might be a reason not to drive either.

Enjoy the app, but always drive safely.

1984 is here again

I wanted these pictures in my blog, because they're cool. 
It's an iPad in a case looking like a 1984 Mac.

They come from Gizmodo.com and this URL: 
http://gizmodo.com/5934584/double-take-an-ipad-case-thats-a-1984-mac

This is what iPad mini may look like

Here are pictures of what the new iPad mini might look like. The guys at Gizmodo.com have created these great pictures of an iPad & iPad mini. Their assumption in creating the pictures is that the two will have similar designs:

Here's the original story:

http://gizmodo.com/5932809/this-is-how-the-ipad-mini-will-look-next-to-the-ipad

Microsoft's Surface Intention

Notebook PCs with Windows tend to be dull. There are exceptions, because the most attractive ones are colorful, some are wrapped in expensive feeling metal or plastic. So I say "tend to be".
Notebooks come in many sizes, storage capacities, connectors and CPU performances. The human interfaces are a screen and a keyboard with a touchpad in one packet plus a mouse. The concept has remained unchanged for about two decades, because it's so good!
Microsoft has long been interested in a touch interface and they seem to have thought there would be products if they put touch into Windows. With few exceptions that has rarely happened. The Windows PCs offering touch UI have not taken off, because the products were too expensive and didn't handle well. People didn't really know how to deal with them. Here's an example scenario: "I need to write a document, so I'll use the keyboard now. Where's the cable, ... type, type type,  ... Ok. Done. Turn it off.". Whatever the intentions were when turning the PC on, the user mostly ended up using the keyboard. Touch didn't add anything really. The graphics wasn't made for a touch interface and neither was the product as a whole. The price/experience ratio was poor.
Time went by, iPad came and Microsoft had to admit it seems to work fine and Apple had beaten them again. "Let's make our own touch PC, since no one else can be bothered to do it correctly", they must have thought, and Surface was born. (Surface is an iPad competitor: http://proctele.blogspot.se/2012/06/whats-microsoft-surface.html).
I think they are right about doing both the hardware and the software themselves, just like Apple. It's essential for getting it right. Microsoft have made some good mistakes along the way, so it's possible they've learned enough. Hopefully enough to make the Surface+Windows8 an excellent product.