Tag: recommended

  • Cypress is now available for free on Micro.blog

    If you’re a member of Micro.blog you can now choose to use Cypress as your theme for free. Log in and click on your Design settings page, and choose the theme. That’s it. I’m happy that this came together. I thought it might be fun to make a Micro.blog theme and when I tossed the…

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  • NFTs and energy use

    There has been an enormous flood of information regarding NFTs — in general — and the amount of energy needed to facilitate the creation of them and their transfer. I’ve kept my mouth and my blog shut on this topic because I knew immediately that I needed to gather much more data before I spouted…

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  • Using Docker to build a WordPress theme

    If you have no idea what Docker is or how it works, this blog post won’t help you too much. For that, I recommend Julia Evans’ Zine How Containers Work! I recently wanted to build a premium WordPress theme to offer here via my website. I started, finished, and released the theme in record time…

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  • Cypress – A premium portfolio theme for WordPress is now available

    Cypress on WordPress Cypress is a simple way to create an online portfolio using the world’s leading website builder WordPress. Artists from all mediums; painters, photographers, designers, sculptures – all need a way to showcase their best work online. Cypress is an affordable way for artists to set up a website to control their brand,…

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  • Craig Mod on using social networks for their strengths

    Craig Mod, in a footnote of the post announcing his newsletter Huh: So my general philosophy of these social networks is to lean into what they do well — a bit of distribution, a bit of playfulness — and don’t kill yourself trying to make them do things for which they aren’t designed. I am angry…

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  • No more boring apps

    Andy Allen: The world of apps—once an exciting canvas for creative exploration—has become repetitive, predictable, and… boring. If this isn’t a rallying cry, I don’t know what is. I downloaded his apps, they are fantastic. I’m on it Andy.

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  • Link priority

    I have linked to what must be millions of things. I share a lot of links from here on my blog. I have linked to hundreds of artists from The Watercolor Gallery. And on social media I have linked to and retweeted countless times. I take linking very seriously. I have a sort of link…

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  • I’m releasing some code projects

    When I first started hacking away at a computer (sometime just after the first Jurassic Park film was released in theaters), and ultimately hacking away on the web, people would release small projects for others to use. Single-use scripts, small applications, design files for a specific niche, and proofs-of-concept that you could download and use…

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  • The best of 2020 as told by me

    I didn’t want to get too deep into 2021 before I compiled my best of list for 2020. I usually begin to compile this list somewhere near the beginning of December and publish it before the new year starts – but I didn’t get that chance this year. The most difficult part about making this…

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  • Understanding ProRAW

    With iOS 14.3 and the new iPhone, Apple has introduced an updated RAW image file format spec that extends on the already robust editing capabilities of RAW. They call it ProRAW. Ben Sandofsky, of Halide, goes long on explaining how digital image sensors work, what RAW is, and how Apple has extended that spec and…

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  • The story of the Studebaker darkroom print

    If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter you may have seen that I was in the darkroom this weekend. In March 2020, I purchased this Ansco Speedex from a local hip shop On&On. Around that same time a family member gifted me some expired Kodak Tri-X that he’s had frozen since 1982. A few…

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  • Help! What should I do?

    So I’d like to earn a few extra reoccurring dollars for my habit using one of my skills. But I’m having a bit of an internal dilemma as to what that should be given that I have such a limited amount of time between my day job and my volunteering. Here are a few ideas…

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  • Unmark chosen for GitHub’s Archive Program

    Unmark, the open source bookmarking app that you can use for free on our hosted service or grab your own copy on GitHub, was selected to be included in GitHub’s Archive Program. GitHub describes this program’s purpose “The mission of the GitHub Archive Program is to preserve open source software for future generations.” This happened…

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  • Om Malik: Why bother with film?

    Om: One aspect of film that I have personally found appealing is the restrictions it imposes. Film photography is about constraints. It limits the frames at your disposal. It limits the capability of the sensor (aka the film.) And in most cases, it limits the choice of lens and equipment. Such constraints tend to ultimately…

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  • We need to disincentivize dangerous photo ops

    Dangerous photo ops are all the rage on social media. Countless stories over the last decade or so have hit the news about someone trying to get a selfie on a rock ledge, on the balcony of cruise ship at sea, or hanging one-handed from an under construction skyscraper hundreds of feet in the air…

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  • Matt Webb’s 15 rules for blogging

    Matt Webb finds himself on a bit of a tear on his personal blog: I’ve now been writing new posts for 24 consecutive weeks. Multiple posts a week. How on earth? I just calculated it, and I’ve added the live streak count to the site footer. I wonder how long I can keep it up.…

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  • Austin Kleon reflects on 15 years of blogging

    Austin Kleon: Every time I start a new post, I never know for sure where it’s going to go. This is what writing and making art is all about: not having something to say, but finding out what you have to say. It’s thinking on the page or the screen or in whatever materials you…

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  • Jack Baty gives up on Lightroom

    Jack Baty: I’m here to tell you that I can not make it work for me. There’s too much overhead in having to decide what to add to a synced collection and when. And where to keep any synced originals? Do I do that in both apps? And so on. I seem to end up…

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  • Photography isn’t my job

    Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. That’s the saying, right? What can also happen, though, is that by doing your hobby as work you can suck all of the joy out of that hobby for yourself. I make some money doing photography. But, by and large, my photography…

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  • I do not like Reels

    Instagram has been the place that Facebook jams all of its cloned-app-features into for the last few years. When it copied Snapchat it jammed all of the features into Instagram. And now, as it clones TikTok, it is jamming those features into Instagram as well. The Snapchat-like features are easy enough to ignore if you…

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  • I too miss the old days of blogging but they are never coming back

    TTTThis: When you search for blogs now on you see things like ‘Top 100 Blogs.’ ‘How to Make a Successful Blog.’ ‘Most Powerful 50 Blogs.’ But what you really want is 10,000 unsuccessful blogs. Much of the linked piece is likely to be taken as hyperbole but it is mostly true-ish. It is true that…

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  • Micro.blog for Teams

    Manton Reece: Today we’re launching a new feature on Micro.blog: support for multi-user blogs, so your whole team can write posts on a shared blog. We think it’s going to be great for small companies, families, and schools, with everything from shared photo blogs to podcasts. This is a big update. You may remember that…

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  • My first contact print

    Above is my first ever contact print. A contact print is when you lay a negative (film, paper, tin, glass) onto photo-sensitive paper and shine light onto it to expose the paper. You then develop that paper into a positive print (or what you’d think of as a normal photo). This is a milestone in…

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  • Photographing the same location over and over

    I’ll likely touch on this topic in an upcoming pandemic powered Podcast episode. Albert Dros, 2017: Sometimes the area where you live would not be motivating to photograph because you see these things everyday. However, when I started photography I began to see the world (and my home area) in a different way. I started…

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  • An interview with artist Marc Taro Holmes

    Late last week I published an interview with Marco Taro Holmes, one of the original members of Urban Sketchers, on my now 10-year old web site The Watercolor Gallery. It was a pleasure to interview Marc and a lot of his answers epitomize the reason I built The Watercolor Gallery in 2010 – to inspire…

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  • Podcast: Photographing Mic & Nics – January 2020

    Mic & Nics Photographing Mic & Nics – January 2020 Recorded January 15, 2020 You may recognize this building. I wrote about how I practiced my light metering with it. Well, I also recorded myself on a different day shooting it with very expired film. The filmstrip In this episode of the podcast I chat…

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  • Creating a bedroom camera obscura and making a paper negative

    I’d been wanting to make my own camera for several months. Something simple like a shoe box pinhole camera. But then quarantine happened and I stumbled across Brendan Barry’s YouTube video about turning a room in your house into a camera obscura – and making a paper negative and positive print. I thought with the…

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  • 35mm film in a Medium Format camera

    Ansco Rediflex, expired 35mm Fujicolor Superia 400 35mm film in a Medium Format camera From the same roll as my 2020 avatar are these select exposures of 35mm film hacked into a medium format Ansco Rediflex. What you’re looking at isn’t normal. The Ansco Rediflex is a medium format camera which, when invented in the…

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  • The Best of 2019 as told by me

    At the end of the year I like to sit down and make a rather random list of the “best” things I’ve seen that year. I do this almost entirely from memory but I also peruse my browser history and look through my Unmark archive in order to uncover some of the things I appreciated…

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  • I want any size screen, any time, any where

    Andy Baio in an interview on Uses This: I’ve worn glasses for my entire life, so my personal dream setup would be replacing my laptop, monitor, and phone all at once by replacing my prescription lenses with augmented-reality glasses that annotate the world around me without blocking it out entirely. I do not wear glasses…

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  • Thoughts on the Microsoft Surface event

    I’m pretty excited for Microsoft. I’ve been excited for what they’ve been doing as a company, on several fronts, for a few years now. I won’t rehash all of the nice things I’ve been writing about them, but I can link to how I feel about Satya, the work they’ve been doing in open source…

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  • Alastair Humphreys on blogging for 18 years

    Alastair Humphreys, adventurer, blogger: I wrote my stories as I cycled around the world and updated my website intermittently whenever I found an internet connection stable enough to send a bunch of text. The screech of dial-up internet and being plunged into darkness by power cuts were regular accompaniments to my early days of blogging.…

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  • Audio: Read the manual (again)

    Recorded September 30, 2019 Have you already read the manual for a product you own? After you’ve used it for a while, I recommend reading it again.

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  • Twitter Lists are having a moment

    Twitter recently released an updated UI that allows you to “pin” Lists you’ve created to your Home timeline view. This makes it possible to swipe between each List quickly. It is a nice feature – especially for those with only a few lists or for those just starting out with them*. Since this update was…

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  • Bad reasons not to blog

    There are a lot of bad reasons not to blog. Here are a few of them and why they are bad. Update: See “I’m not a web developer”. If you have any desire at all to have a blog and have ever thought that any of the above bad reasons should stop you – please…

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  • My personal data sharing policy

    I’ve been online since 1994. I’ve shared a lot of information here on my blog, through various social networks, and to different services like Google Maps, Untappd, and many others. That information has often included location, photos, audio and video. For decades I thought nothing of sharing my current location online. I used check-in services…

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  • Audio: My armchair analysis of Automattic acquiring Tumblr

    Date recorded: August 19, 2019 Yesterday while driving (sorry for the audio quality) I recorded a quick audio bit to distill my thoughts on why Automattic acquired Tumblr. Short-version: Automattic sees Tumblr as an entry point for new WordPress.com customers – especially youth. For someone to go from idea to full commerce or publishing success…

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  • Automattic acquires Tumblr

    Matt Mullenweg, on this Tumblog: When the possibility to join forces became concrete, it felt like a once-in-a-generation opportunity to have two beloved platforms work alongside each other to build a better, more open, more inclusive – and, frankly, more fun web. I knew we had to do it. Let’s get a few things out…

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  • Mike Davidson on working remotely

    Mike Davidson: First, let’s dispense with the easy part: despite what you may read on Twitter, remote work is neither the greatest thing in the world nor the worst. We are not moving to a world where offices go completely away, nor are we going through some sort of phase where remote work will eventually…

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  • Google Pixel 4 wishlist

    Yes, I know there have been leaks galore regarding the Google Pixel 4. While I’ve seen the leaks I haven’t paid much attention to them. I’ve tried to ignore them so that I could be at least a little surprised when it is announced. I currently have the Google Pixel 2 XL. I’ve had it…

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  • iOS creates a competition hostile environment

    Below is a screenshot of the sheet you see on YouTube for iOS when tapping on a link in a video’s description. They invoke this custom sheet because, like Google, Apple has created iOS to be competition hostile to other browser vendors like Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft, etc. Tapping on a link should open your default…

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  • Jonnie Hallman on burn out

    Jonnie Hallman, who created Cushion and a bunch of cool stuff you’ve probably seen, burned out building his start up: Then, on Cushion’s 5-year anniversary, I experienced my first panic attack. Read his post for the full story. But the entire post resonates so much with me because with Plain I (and Kyle, my co-founder)…

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  • Microsoft invests $1B in OpenAI

    Microsoft on the investment of a cool $1B in OpenAI: The companies will focus on building a computational platform in Azure of unprecedented scale, which will train and run increasingly advanced AI models, include hardware technologies that build on Microsoft’s supercomputing technology, and adhere to the two companies’ shared principles on ethics and trust. This…

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  • On a Microsoft Surface Phone

    Zac Bowden: It’s fair to say that in 2019, Microsoft is “all-in” on the Android platform thanks to its efforts like the Microsoft Launcher, Edge, and Office, all first-class experiences on Android smartphones around the world. I’m glad Bowden wrote this post. I’ve been wanting to. Longtime readers of my blog will know that I…

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  • React is an ecosystem

    Jonathan Snook, on his learning curve when joining a new organization that uses React: When people talk about learning React, I think that React, in and of itself, is relatively easy to understand. At least, I felt it was. I have components. I have JSX. I hit some hiccups with required keys or making sure…

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  • Libra (the new cryptocurrency) must-reads

    So Facebook, among others, announced a new cryptocurrency and blockchain called Libra. You’ve likely already seen the headlines. But perhaps you’re wondering what it means, what makes Libra any different than, say, Bitcoin, or perhaps you have other questions. I did too. So I’ve rounded up a few links that helped me gain some perspective…

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  • Those who share, receive (or, how to get noticed or get work)

    I touched on this topic in 2017 in How do you get work?. But let me just pull one sentence from that post: The clear way to get work is to share work. The same thing goes for getting “noticed” if that is something you want or need. You have to put things out into…

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  • Riva-Melissa Tez on making things

    Riva-Melissa Tez, who recently joined Intel, on making things: Lastly, one of my concerns of our generation is that we’re talking too much and not building enough, partially spurred on by the immediate reward mechanisms of social media. We seem to think we can all invest in or inspire hypothetical others into building the futures…

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  • I’m calling it, Satya Nadella is Microsoft’s best CEO ever

    Me, in September 2017: I have the feeling we’re going to look back at Nadella as one of the best CEOs in the history of tech. We’ll see how this bold prediction pans out but I’m ready to call Satya Nadella the best CEO in Microsoft’s history. Microsoft reported a record-setting Q1. They are killing…

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  • My interpretations of announcements by Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter

    Apple pre-announcing something: “We’re excited to get this in customer’s hands late next year”. My interpretation: “We never pre-announce things. Why are we doing this? We’re terrible at it. In fact, we make fun of other companies for doing it! Steve Jobs would never allow this! (mostly) We must be doing this because some group…

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