It’s been said before, but when you have a lot of experience in a certain area, you generally think of solutions and approaches that have worked for you in the past. Sometimes this prevents you from taking a fresh approach which ultimately would work out better.

I’ve seen this so many times. People excusing off good ideas because it hasn’t worked in the past or it doesn’t seem to work for someone else. If you want to enjoy the upside of opportunity you have to be willing to try things that others may think impossible or stupid.

Impressive demo video as well as samples that include a video demonstration and code on Github for each one.

/via Shawn “I know a lot about keyboards” Blanc.

• 1 cent: I don’t care whether we keep these. I’ll still keep them in a bowl and eventually bring them to a Coinstar machine for Amazon credit.
• 5 cents (5x previous denomination)
• 25 cents (5x)
• $1 (4x): I don’t care whether it’s a coin or a bill. Just pick one.
• $5 (5x)
• $20 (4x)
• $100 (5x)

My swing at this would involve the same number of currencies but would look slightly different. After spending a few weeks in Ireland last year I grew to love coin money over paper money. So I’d do it this way…

• 5c
• 25c
• $1 coin
• $2 coin
• $5 bill
• $20 bill
• $100 bill

This would mean that prices would have to change. Gone would be the days of prices that end in .99. I say good riddance to the penny and bring on the dollar and two dollar coins.

This brings something very interesting to light, I have gotten really good at processing information returned from Google searches. I can quickly determine what is a useful result and what isn’t.

After using DuckDuckGo for one week I can concur with most of Yusuf’s findings. I’ve gotten so well acquainted with Google’s search results, and various other products like Images search and Maps, that I find it hard to stick to DuckDuckGo for anything other than single result searches.

In other words, if I’m looking for a particular web page I can use DuckDuckGo to find it. It works. It is quick. And it is actually less distracting than Google’s search results for the plain reason that Google now has more ads than search results per page. However, if I’m doing a lot of research on a particular topic I’m always in need of something a little more powerful than DuckDuckGo. I’ll need images, calculations, and – more often than ever before – Maps. Google has all of that.

For any search engine to come in and usurp Google’s strangle hold is going to be a really, really steep hill to climb. No matter how much I think it is time for it to happen.

Generally speaking, there are two distinct audiences for this show: people who like to look at images of food and are interested in where it comes from and how it got to the plate—and people who like to travel—or like the idea of travel—and enjoy watching images of faraway places and cultures. Oh—and there’s also a smaller group who apparently enjoy watching me get falling down drunk and stupid.

I happen to fit all three.

Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
Cheez-Its.

I respect Jack quite a bit but this puts it over the top for me.

At MetaLab, everyone is responsible for their own schedule. No bunk beds in the office or ramen-fueled overnight programming melees. We usually clock between four and six hours a day, and most of us don’t even get to the office before noon. We believe in working smart, not hard, and having lives outside the office. It might sound wimpy, but it’s working.

I agree with Wilkinson here however I’m more of a work hard and smart kinda fella.

I believe there is a mixture of working smart and hard from which great things can be accomplished. People are at their best when they are happy and usually happiness stems from loving what you’re doing, being given the chance to do it well on tools you love to use in an environment you like being in, having a good life full of friends, family, some traveling, and a little bit of money. Combine all of that with a little sweat and you’ve got something.

I thought it would be a clever idea to do my 1976 high school journal as a blog but I never realized just how many people the world over could relate on so many levels to my general seventeen year old geekiness. The blog quickly became amazingly popular with coverage from major sites and write-ups from various different countries.

So, why is his campaign only at $127 of the $12,000 goal even after being featured on Boing Boing? My guess is because the rewards for pledging to the campaign aren’t worded correctly. At first read it looks as though you have to pledge at least $250 in order to get a copy of the book.

I think if Steven rewords the rewards and makes it clear at which point you get a copy of the book his campaign will get some traction. Awesome idea.

For any social networking service the single biggest reason they fail is lack of adoption. While Google+ has become the fastest growing site of-all-time that doesn’t mean that people are using it. In my Circles (get it?) Google+ has not yet been fully adopted. The people that have been most active are very early adopters, people that work at Google, and people that do not have accounts on Twitter or Facebook. Will this change? Will Google somehow convince people, as they did me, to use Google+ for a few days to see if it sticks? We’ll see.

It is now nearly 10-months later. How is Google+ doing? Not so well from my chair. They haven’t figured out a way, besides Circles, to differentiate themselves from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks that clearly have carved out their niche.

I think Google+ is a great product. It does a lot of things and does them fairly well (although their iPhone application is pretty unusable). If it was launched in February 2004 at the same moment Facebook was launched it would have given the now 900 million user network a run for its money.

So what’s the problem? Again, me, nearly 10 months ago:

Every social networking site was started with a particular purpose in mind. Over time those services typically find their niche (if they survive long enough to do so) whether or not it was the original reason for its inception or not.

[...]

Google+, however, goes against this “find the niche” convention. Rather than trying to fill a niche like Facebook or LinkedIn they’re taking on every level of human connection; professional, familial, social, voyeur, etc. and combining them all into one service. They do all of this by providing a different relationship model called Circles.

At the time I thought this approach would have a positive effect for Google+. I thought that nearly anyone could find a way to make Google+ useful. But it seems like it has been the opposite. Perhaps this lack of focus has made it so that Google+ doesn’t identify with very many people.

The only types of people that I see using Google+ on a regular basis are early adopter tech geeks, social media experts, and people that work at Google. Perhaps someday they’ll separate themselves from the pack somehow but until then it doesn’t seem like Google+ has caught on with any particular crowd in any meaningful way.

The issue is that none of the services I’ve seen fit all my requirements. Instapaper is primarily a tool for reading later. Same for Readability. But I come across items on my iOS devices that require another look when I get back to my Mac. Items to archive (whether in Yojimbo, Pinboard or my bucket of choice, Gimme Bar). Designs to explore further. Videos to watch. Technical resources to investigate, then archive. Apps to purchase.

Bingo.

His post talks a lot about Pocket and since I haven’t had time to write much about Read It Later’s pivot (forgive my use of this buzzword), and his opinions align fairly closely to mine, I recommend giving his entire post a read.

My ideas for Nilai far outreach anything that Pocket is currently attempting to solve. But, like Bowler’s Pinbox, most of those are still on the drawing board.

His work is amazing.

Ben Welle of The City Fix:

Freeway removal is really about shifting priorities from moving cars to moving people. This can result in people being more physically active and healthier. Studies have begun to show that those who travel by mass transport, walking and biking as their main ways of getting around are more physically active than those who primarily use cars. Freeway tear downs not only encourage more active forms of travel, but can create signature recreational amenities for cities, as most of the documented examples have.

It is obviously still vitally important to allow for cars, trucks, trains to get in and out of a city  - but surely we can begin to think of better ways to do it that results in far less people with highways as their front yard.

/via Geoff “the nicest guy in Philly” Dimasi.

Today we’re rolling out a new and improved flow for creating repositories on GitHub.

Remember when I said this, shortly after GitHub released GitHub for Mac:

If Git is easy to use more people will use it and therefore more people will sign up and pay for GitHub.

It is just as important for Github to make git easier, so that its potential customer base expands beyond us geeks, as it is to promote best practices (like including a .gitignore file with one’s repo). This is why the GitHub website with its ease of use, documentation, training, etc. is really such a great business.

You see, GitHub isn’t just in the business of giving people access to git. They’re in the business of helping people to use git the right way. They’re creating some of the most loyal customers you’ll find anywhere online.

Got it.

/via The “I said hot when I meant warm” Verge.

Details have such little value to many people. No one wants to hear the whole story, they just want you to get right to the point. [...] In my mind it would be helpful to explain how I arrived at a certain problem…but all that they want to hear is the ending.

Sometimes the entire story is in the details. Context is everything. The fact that more and more people are getting used to getting entire stories from headlines, sound bites, and tweets means that people’s knowledge may very well be missing the most important parts. The details.

Abby continues:

Don’t get me wrong…I’m not sitting here disgruntled with all humans. It’s just my observation. Someone out there will listen to the details.

Sadly this is a number that is shrinking rather than growing and I’m unsure if the trend is possible to counteract. More and more people would rather understand complex concepts by being told or learn how to cook recipes in less and less time. Great things take time. If you’re one of the few that appreciate that and you see yourself slipping into this trend, slow down, relax, and look at the details.

Places on the web for sharing content and ideas often remind me of real life interactions. Facebook is the everlasting high school reunion. Twitter, which I love, is maybe half cocktail party, half party-line. Flickr & Instagram can be the best way to send a postcard, while LinkedIn is the best way to send a fax To me, there’s something sacred about reading a blog post on someone else’s site. It’s like visiting a friend’s house for a quick meal ‘round the breakfast table. It’s personal— you’re in their space, and the environment is uniquely suited for idea exchange and uninterrupted conversation. In many ways, we should be treating our blogs like our breakfast tables. Be welcoming & gracious when you host, and kind & respectful when visiting.

Twitter, for me is slightly more familial, professional, and often news breaking but otherwise I whole heartedly agree with this sentiment. If you have a blog you should feel it is your home online – everywhere else are places you go out to.

/via John “Loud Keyboard” Gruber.

I just unbuttoned the top two buttons on my shirt.

Light Table is based on a very simple idea: we need a real work surface to code on, not just an editor and a project explorer. We need to be able to move things around, keep clutter down, and bring information to the foreground in the places we need it most.

This project is inspired by Bret Victor’s presentation Inventing on Principal that I also mentioned Nilai is inspired by. Light Table makes for a very interesting demo. The most intriguing of the modes shown was the mode wherein you could see all of the related code while you were editing, say, a specific method in a class. This type of IDE wouldn’t just save time, it’d probably result in far better code.

It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

You see this kind of thing all over the Internet as well. People punctuate that way because, if they spoke these sentences, they’d pause after the conjunction (and because the extremely fanciful and undependable Microsoft Word grammar and style checker refrains from applying a squiggly green underline).

I’m no writer. I’m sure I get this wrong all the time. In fact, I know I do. (See what I did just then?) I do exactly as Yagoda suggests. I write commas based on how I would say or read the sentence.

He goes on about the use of the Oxford comma as well. Which I wholeheartedly agree with and strive to do myself though I’m sure if someone ripped through the catacombs of this here blog they’d find a million grievances.

Yagoda has a follow-up coming. Stay tuned.

/via John “I’m using Facebook by way of Instagram” Gruber.

4. Take people out for a “beer” test as part of interviews.
We would take every candidate to some social outing (typically dinner or beer after work).  In a startup, people work long hours and you want to make sure people fit in and the team and create an even awesomer [1] environment.

Intriguingly, in a “social” environment, the candidate would often show more of their “true colors”. Especially if beer was involved.  This often happened before any beer was drunken – I think it was just a shift to a more social context from a work one that triggered behavioral changes.

A great example is a candidate we rejected post beer test, who was one of the strongest engineers technically that we had ever interviewed.  However, once we made it to the bar he made a lot of really bad off-color jokes that crossed the line and made the team uncomfortable about him.

For many of the people we hired at Viddler we did exactly the same thing. And sometimes with a similar result. First and foremost I want someone I can work hard with. And it is tough to work hard with someone who creeps you out regardless of how good they are.

/via Dick “I’m the CEO at Twitter but really I shouldn’t have let Feedburner die” Costolo.

It’s easy to construct a narrative of victimhood; and a narrative of victimhood is as easily palatable as a Big Mac. Sure, you can argue that the modern condition is a finely jawed trap: bound by the chains of debt peonage, our horizons have been ineluctably delimited. But I’d say we’re equal parts victims and victimizers — preying not merely on one another, but our own better selves. When it comes to real human prosperity, in the crudest terms of political economy, “demand” is about what people have the impertinence to, well, demand — and perhaps the simple fact is that we’ve become a society that’s simply not demanding enough.

It was tough to pull a quote for this one so if you’ve got a few minutes I recommend reading the whole thing. I don’t know that I agree with it wholly, however, it is good to see someone rising above one’s normal 6-odd-foot perspective and seeing the world from a different angle.

/via Alex “One who knows HTML” Hillman.

This is my view of management as administration—as a service corps that helps the talented individuals that build and sell products do their jobs better. Attempting to see management as the ultimate decision makers demotivates the smart people in the organization who, without the authority to do what they know is right, will grow frustrated and leave. And if this happens, you won’t notice it, but you’ll be left with a bunch of yes-men, who don’t particularly care (or know) how things should work, and the company will only have one brain – the CEO’s. See what I mean about “it doesn’t scale?”

Precisely.

/via AOL TechCrunch.

/via Andy “$1B is a good deal” Baio.

After viewing videos and reading reviews I think Liquipel is a great idea that is just not quite there yet. I think it would be great for protecting your phone in the rain or from spills but a toilet or pool, no way! It’s clear that results will vary in every situation and with this being said I just could not feel confident enough to recommend or use Liquipel right now.

Some protection is better than no protection, I always say. However, one shouldn’t expect to go swimming with one’s iPhone either.

/via fellow-Viddler Thomas Kover (TKO).

The number one complaint that I hear from friends, family and random strangers complaining on the train is that their personal technology devices (mp3 player, phone, watch, etc.) are not waterproof. The number one enemy to their electric devices is water. Be it the humidity in the air, the sweat from a successful exercise session, or devices that just seem to be drawn to pools of standing water, there’s a huge disconnect between the number one feature people want, and the ever increasing feature list of things that don’t matter as much.

I’ve often thought that every single device which is meant to be used daily should also be waterproof. There is a huge benefit to the user even if that device never, ever gets completely submerged in water. I may have to look into Liquipel further.

Be sure to watch the video demonstration at the tail end of Danny’s blog post.

The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world — but man, does it work.

I use PHP. Which makes sense because man do I love scrapple.

It’s been almost two months since Apple released the Messages beta, the revamped version of iChat slated to arrive with Mountain Lion this summer. And, thanks to a lack of subsequent updates, I and at least a few of my colleagues have jumped ship back to our pre-Messages IM clients. Those who haven’t, well, I’ve noticed they seem to spend a lot of time cursing at Messages.

I knew what I was getting into with the Messages beta when I downloaded it. I knew there would be a few bugs and that, in general, it wouldn’t be the best experience. The Apple experience. But there hasn’t been a single update to make it better and, as it stood, Messages was a terrible, terrible experience.

I’ve since attempted to roll back to iChat which is supposed to be possible since Messages comes with an uninstall routine built-into the menu. But I’ve since not been able to get iChat to work. Even after trashing every file I can possibly find related to iChat.

So, I’m using Adium – which I think is also terrible – until Mountain Lion comes. What a mess!

Assuming you didn’t already share your Instagram photos to Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter and also assuming that you deleted all of the photos off of your iPhone without backing them up first – you could export your photos from Instagram using instaport.me.

I’m in no hurry to leave Instagram. But we’ll see what the next year or so means for the service.

One of my ideas was to create a video show about everything but the Internet or technology. For a long time there was a glut, and I’m sure there still is, of video podcasts about tech. I was going to call it “5 minutes about something else”. But, who has the time?

That’s why I’m happy to link to Made by Hand a series of short films (sounds much better than video podcast, doesn’t it?) about the people that make the stuff we use. Awesome.

Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena. They occur in a pattern that repeats every 243 years, with pairs of transits eight years apart separated by long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years.

A transit of Venus took place on 8 June 2004 and the next will be on 6 June 2012. The previous pair of transits were in December 1874 and December 1882. After 2012, the next transits of Venus will be in December 2117 and December 2125.

Suffice to say you’ll be alive for the next transit – in June – but you may not be alive for the next one.

I know where I’ll be in June. Watching Venus move across the Sun.

For more information take a look at TransitOfVenus.org

One of the small changes I made was to stop using post titles for posting to Twitter. I had hoped that using more descriptive text would make the tweets more easily retweetable…look at this tweet for example and compare to the title of the post it links to. This hasn’t really happened, which is surprising and disappointing.

And, this about Tumblr.

That big Tumblr increase was due to kottke.org’s new Tumblr blog. Having kottke.org posts be properly rebloggable is paying off. In addition, it’s got over 800 followers that are reading along in the dashboard. I’d like to see that number increase, but I’d probably need to engage a bit more on Tumblr for that to happen.

I don’t know what Jason is trying to gain by having a Tumblr blog for Kottke.org – besides the same benefits of having a Twitter stream or RSS feed – but as most of you probably know I gave up on getting engagement on Tumblr.

For the most part the Tumblr crowd seems a click-happy bunch. If they can’t click a single button to engage (like, retweet) they won’t do much else. So long as you can figure out a model that works within those constraints I suppose it could end up paying off.

A boring old machined-steel-fits-in-my-hand-scrolls-at-60-fps-with-proper-physics-glorious-retina-none-of-this-crap-pentile-display black iPhone 4S.

And then this on whether or not to build an app.

Anyway, I say make an app if it’s better as an app. If you’re not sure, then don’t bother. The folks working on WebKit are more talented than the average app developer. Just embrace the constraints of web technology — don’t make your site act like an app. Or chop down a tree with a herring. You’d think that was obvious.

He’s a quotable dude.

I love the idea. And, as I’ve said before, I really, really want these types of systems to take off and to be able to get rid of the credit card as quickly as possible.

However, the video for this new app first shows off the ability to tell your friend that you’re going to an ice cream shop. I’m not so sure that should have been highlighted first and foremost. I think it is fine they have that part of the system but I’d much rather show how quickly and easily it can be to get in and get out without dealing with cash or cards.

/via The Verge.

You have to be at least 13 years old to use Tumblr. We’re serious: it’s a hard rule, based on U.S. federal and state legislation, even if you’re 12.9 years old. If you’re younger than 13, don’t use Tumblr. Ask your parents for an Xbox or try books.

I’d add, if you’re less than 13, try going outside. But this is good.

I did some pretty nutso stuff with that little turtle.

I wonder what he’s been up to.

Contrary to common misuse, “moot” doesn’t imply something is superfluous. It means a subject is disputable or open to discussion. e.g., The idea that commercial zoning should be allowed in the residential neighborhood was a moot point for the council.

I’ve been using it wrong. But I suppose that is a moot point.

The biggest two changes are the six awesome new reading fonts and the distraction-free, full-screen reading interface.

I just updated Instapaper for my iPad and iPhone. For free. Marco puts a lot of thought and care into this application and it only costs a few dollars. If you’d like to mark things to read later I suggest grabbing Instapaper.

Side note: I’m hoping to integrate the brand-new-not-even-finished-yet Nilai with Instapaper in a future update. I do not foresee Nilai supporting any other read later services.

For $99 I think anyone with a Mac and a television should own an Apple TV.

I’ll go one step further. I think anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod should own an Apple TV. Nay, two steps further. Anyone with a TV should own an Apple TV.

This summer the Mac will be able to use AirPlay much more effectively and even allow full screen mirroring on the TV. Until then iOS devices have been much better supported by Apple TV than the Mac has been. Really, it is about time that the Mac joined the party.

But even if you don’t use AirPlay (which I do almost every single day) the Apple TV has easily the best Netflix experience of any Netflix-enabled device. Eliza and I rent movies via iTunes all the time. We stream videos to the TV. Look at vacation photos and videos. Etc. Etc. The reasons are piling up with every single software and hardware update.

In short, the Apple TV is now at a point where I’d consider it a must-have.

/via Nilai.