Month: September 2015
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Ad control
Something else to consider during this ad blocking and ad serving conversation is that if you publish your words, photos, sounds, videos on your own web site you can control the ads that are shown on it. In fact you can choose to show none at all. If you share these things on sites, services, or…
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Kayaking Dunn Pond in September
I shared a few photos from my paddle in August and I plan on sharing some from paddles in October, November, and December. Hold me to it. I don’t mind getting cold to catalog how the pond changes over the next few months this fall. Here are a few photos from last Friday, September 11th.…
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Sleep++
From _David Smith, the creator of Pedometer++ (which I highly recommend) comes Sleep++ — an app for Apple Watch that monitors how you sleep at night based on your movement. This obviously creates an issue since most people would charge their Apple Watch while they sleep. He offers this solution: The TL/DR is to charge…
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Unblocking The Deck
I run Ghostery in Safari on my Mac. Currently I’m allowing Google Analytics (stats), Adobe TypeKit (fonts), and The Deck (ads). Here is why The Deck is the only ad network I’m currently allowing through. Some may block TypeKit for speed but I don’t mind a small amount of load time to read the current…
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A little bit on ads
I am not all that eager to jump into the recent discussion on ads and ad blocking. Over the last near decade, however, I’ve mentioned advertising a few times here on my blog so I decided to go back and curate a few pull-quotes that help to show my opinion on the subject. Here are the…
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Ditched the Tracking
Nick Wynja writing on his personal blog about completely ditching any analytics: I’m interested in seeing if anything will change with what I publish since I no longer have analytics telling me what people are clicking on. I’ve never paid too much attention to this site’s (admittedly small) traffic numbers, nor experimented much with topic…
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Using Reminders to create travel maps
Gabe Weatherhead at MacDrifter on using Reminders to create lists of map locations: Reminders is also great for vacation planning. I keep a list of map locations for New England breweries in Reminders. When I recently took a trip to Portland Maine, it was a simple task to put the map list in the order…
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Photos from NEPA BlogCon 2015
To date I’ve been typing NEPA BlogCon as NEPABlogcon — the organizers of the event can please accept my deepest apologies. I’ve gone back and fixed my mistake. This past weekend’s event was very well attended, executed, staffed, and organized. Kudos to all that volunteers to make the event go smoothly. Here are a few…
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The future of TV
I strongly dislike the TV model. The always-on, million channel, ad ridden model. But I love watching things on my TV. So, for many years Eliza and I have had both a DVR and Apple TV connected to our living room, pub, and bedroom TVs. This has allowed us to control the TV model to…
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At NEPA BlogCon on Saturday
As I said in early August, Kyle and I are going to NEPA BlogCon again this year. Both of our businesses; Coalwork and Plain, are sponsors and we each purchased a personal ticket. I’ll be the guy with the GoPro camera clicking away. Will we see you there?
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Neocities and the distributed web
The discussion started by the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle that I linked too earlier this month is starting to ripple out over the web. Neocities, a free web site hosting service, has implemented IPFS — which is shorthand for a peer-to-peer filesystem. Starting today, all Neocities web sites are available for viewing, archiving, and hosting…
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Photos that will make you want to go kayaking
If the kayking photos that I publish to my blog or Instagram aren’t enough to get you into the water perhaps 500px’s latest post will help.
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The unfollow Q&A
Since I’ve covered this topic in several sprawling posts here on my blog I wanted a single place to link to about why I unsubscribe from all feeds and unfollow nearly all Twitter accounts a few times a year. Here are some questions I’ve gotten about it. Why go through all of the trouble? Doesn’t it…
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Fire with friends
A few times a year a few of our friends get together, start a fire in a field, set off a few fireworks, and enjoy each other’s company. Here are a few photos from the last two fires.
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Ben Brooks’ iPhone home screen
Ben Brooks on The Brooks Review writing about removing mental overhead on his iPhone’s home screen: The most immediate change that you notice: there is a lot less mental overhead involved in using your phone. If you take a look at my current home screen you can see that I have only 16 visible app…
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Clearing Safari’s cache without deleting your history or cookies
I like to keep my browsing history and cookies intact for as long as possible. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve searched my browser’s history to find a site I viewed months ago. And, cookies keep me logged into the services I use most. The latest version of Safari keeps a single year of…
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Distributed web
Fascinating read on Brewster Kahle’s blog (he founded the Internet Archive) about restructuring the fabric of the web to be distributed like the Internet is. Contrast the current Web to the Internet—the network of pipes on top of which the World Wide Web sits. The Internet was designed so that if any one piece goes…
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Paddling White Oak Pond in July
Last paddling season I managed to squeeze a paddle in a few times per week. Perhaps I did this because it was new to me (last year was my first time kayaking) and I didn’t mind folding and unfolding the Oru 8 times a week. This season I’ve gotten out a little less so as…
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The new NetNewsWire
The app that keeps on ticking… NetNewsWire 4 for Mac and iOS has been released by the folks at Black Pixel. Syncing is free. Nice.
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You can buy BB-8
Given my site’s new theme (which purposefully looks as if I coded it when I was 16 in celebration of the new Star Wars film this December) I’d be remiss not to link to this story on The Verge about BB-8. What a great toy.
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Countr
Super simple yet incredibly great iOS application from Josh Hrach, Countr helps you count things without needing to write down a bunch of numbers. The app is quick and small. I can think of a few good reasons to have this app and I can’t think of any reasons not to.
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Flash-free clipboard
For years and years the only way to create a button on a web site that would copy something to the visitor’s clipboard was to use a Flash shim of sorts since Flash had an API that could access the clipboard. It looks like Mozilla is going to step in and change that requirement where JavaScript…
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Developers helping designers
Kylie Timpani writing on the Humaan blog: The tricky thing, however, is that people are now finding themselves in unknown territory unsure of how exactly they should contribute. While I’m not a developer I have had conversations with developers where they have specifically pointed out that they don’t think it is their place to offer…
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Picking up a second kayak
A few weeks ago a friend told us he was willing to part with his kayak. I knew I wanted it immediately because I knew it was only a year old, I knew how much it was worth, and he was parting with it for a very fair price. However, I hadn’t yet gotten cross…