Year: 2012

Taken on March 13, 2012 in Jermyn, PA. Sadly the only photos I’ve been publishing are through Instagram of late. I haven’t had the time to post process any images but I heroically opened Aperture and managed to throw this one together. Hopefully I’ll find a little more time for photography and processing over the…

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Chris Bowler on finding, and even trying to build, a service that helps him to store more link types for later: The issue is that none of the services I’ve seen fit allmy requirements. Instapaper is primarily a tool forreading later. Same for Readability. But I come across items on my iOS devices that require another…

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Sebastian Krger does it again with ‘Sean Penn’: His work is amazing.

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Interesting topic. Cities, such as they are, were primarily built around the movement of cars. This resulted in a bunch of noisy, ugly, polution-creating highways running directly through cities where parks, rivers, and other quality of life areas could be. Ben Welle of The City Fix: Freeway removal is really about shifting priorities from moving…

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My friend Kyle Neath on the GitHub blog: 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…

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So, let me get this straight. The guy that wrote, produced, and directed an amazingly successful blockbuster movie about how greedy, evil people were mining the natural resources of another planet to the detriment of thehabitatand natives is now funding mining on extraterrestrial bodies? Got it. /via The "I said hot when I meant warm"…

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My friend Abby wishes people would slow down and take the time needed to explain things. 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…

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The Oatmeal takes a crack at how to get more likes on Facebook. Incidentally, the answer to that question is also the answer to how to build a business; make great stuff.

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Instarchive will gather up all of your Instagram photos to-date and give you a copy of every one in a nice little zip. /via John "Loud Keyboard" Gruber.

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Quick, everyone run over to Google and search for blog before this happens.

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PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser is a pretty great open source project for parsing the DOM using jQuery-like selectors. I recently used it on Nilai to parse recipes from the leading recipe sites. Worked great.

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Trent Walton on blogs: 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…

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There have been some pretty interesting milestones in the history of Viddler for the last 5 years I’ve been on the team. This is one of them. We’re working with Foreigner of _Waiting for a Girl Like You_fame to help them bring a video contest online in a way that no other company could have.…

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Andy Baio’s Waxy.org is one of my favorite blogs and it recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. Baio recalls a few posts from each of those 10 years in his post marking the milestone. I can remember where I was when a few of these posts were published. I’m just happy I, and our team at…

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Ben Yagoda on the use of the comma: 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).…

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Elad Gil 4th tip on hiring the right person for your company’s culture: 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…

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There was an avalanche a few days ago in Pakistan. You may have missed it scrolling by on the CNN news ticker. More than 135 people are either trapped or dead below 70 feet of snow.

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Umair Haque writes an interesting rag on why things are they way they are and to what eventuality it may all end up. The Great Collision. Here’s why: 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…

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Interesting. WordPress.com now has an API. Which is slightly different than WordPress simply having the use of the decade old Meta-Weblog API. This opens up features on WordPress.com like reblogging, following, etc. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

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Remember Tumblr’s fairly easy to understand TOS? 500px has a similarly great TOS. /via AOL TechCrunch.

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As a follow-up to my link to Danny’s post about Liquipel there is this review on iHeartApple2: 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…

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Danny Nicolas, on the newly-revived Waking Ideas blog, about Liquipel: 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…

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There is pandemonium in the streets. Riots are breaking out. Here is Dan Moren of Macworld with more: 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…

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Paul Ford, of NYMag, about Facebook: 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…

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Maybe you’ve heard; Facebook bought Instagram for a cool $1 Billion. Remember, I said it was a network not a camera. Well, some people are a bit miffed and are planning their escapes. Not nearly as many as I’d thought would though seeing how many people were up-in-arms about Instagram on Android. Assuming you didn’t…

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Oh I’m done for. The Cornell Labs ofOrnithologyhas set up a live cam on a Great Blue Heron nest.

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One of my favorite customer spotlight videos from Viddler; Under the Belfry. "With Viddler within three days we were able to roll advertising. That’s ridiculous."

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Working for a video-related startup for the past five plus years has given me the opportunity to see many ideas for episodic video content. Some great, some good, some bad. I’ve had a few dozen of my own. One of my ideas was to create a video show about everything but the Internet or technology.…

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Troy Rutter, former member of The Diet, is back on. He’s logging his progress publicly (something I canattestto being very helpful) at One Man’s Loss. I love this bit from his most recent blog entry: After changing my insurance and paying the copay, I waited for the doctor, and eventually went into the exam room.…

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A rather rarecelestialphenomenonis about to happen. To describe just how rare this event is I’ll let Wikipedia explain. 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…

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Jason Kottke recently redesigned his site. His analysis is interesting to read for anyone who has done the same for their site. Here is what he said on attempting to make his site’s Twitter stream a little more engaging. One of the small changes I made was to stop using post titles for posting to…

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Justin Blanton isn’t just a hard-headed atheist. It turns out he’s also a softy. Many happily married years my friend.

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Warning: The following may contain some strong language. I’ve tried to clean up the tweets a bit though. Last night, after a whirlwind trip to New York City on business and just before crashing like a rocket into bed, I pulled up Tweetbot to see what was going on the in world. It turns out…

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See also: Introducing Smart Labels. Nilai has quickly morphed from being a simple list of links to many lists of links each with their own purpose. Using Smart Labels, which are getting smarter with each release, members of Nilai can save links into these lists with a single click. Sometimes the purpose of saving these…

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Speaking of Loren Brichter and The Verge – Loren was recently interviewed for their 5 Minutes on The Verge series. In response to what phone he uses? 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…

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Square is rethinking the card case model and going more for an application that allows you to pay at Square-enabled merchants just by having your phone in your pocket. They call it Pay with Square. I love the idea. And, as I’ve said before, I really, really want these types of systems to take off…

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AKA – August 10, 1972 Bolide. During a recent trip to a nearby observatory the presentation highlighted this little number, a comet that streaked across the sky in early August 1972 over the Tetons. Notice the trajectory. They don’t call this thing an earthgrazer for nothing. This small bit of space rock (about 9′ in…

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Tumblr, in their recently-updated Terms of Service that all logged in users are being asked to agree to. 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…

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Derek Steen, friend and co-worker, on Twitter. First, @cdevroe removes comments from his blog. Now, he’s uploading DSLR photographs to Instagram. Talk about hipster… — Derek Steen (@djsteen) March 23, 2012 I realize he was poking fun. But I wanted to address this topic anyway so I thought I might as well reply to him…

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Loren Brichter interviewed for The Geek Talk. I did some pretty nutso stuff with that little turtle. I wonder what he’s been up to.

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I’ve seen and heard the word ‘indefinite’ used in place of the word ‘forever’. I figured it was time for another realwords intervention. The definitions of indefinite are as follows. lasting for an unknown or unstated length of time: they may face indefinite detention not clearly expressed or defined; vague: their status remains indefinite. Now…

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This week I’ve added a new feature to Nilai called Smart Labels. Nilai currently offers seven labels that can be used to categorize a bookmark: Read Later, Video, Recipe, Shopping, Inspiration, Documentation, and Research. Each time a new bookmark is added the member can simply choose a label and they’re done. Starting today Nilai will…

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Jon Gingerich from 20 Common Grammar Mistakes that (Almost) Everyone Makes has an addition to make to my realwords tag: 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…

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 I’ve got a new nights and weekends project and its name is Nilai. Nilai is a simple bookmarking service and over the last few weeks I’ve been having a lot of fun working on it in my spare time. In fact, I have found it so valuable to me that it is now my homepage…

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This is a subject that is near and dear to me. It is a bit clich to say this but I’ve been blogging since before it was a common verb. I’ve watched, very closely, as the blogging world has evolved over the last decade and even took some small part in that evolution. It wasn’t…

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Instapaper 4.1 just hit the shelves. Here’s Marco Arment with what’s new: The biggest two changes are the six_awesome_new reading fontsand 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.…

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This was a post I was going to write here but I thought the Viddler blog a much better fit. We’re seeing huge demand for reliable, talented online videographers and we think videography is poised for a boom.

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