Year: 2014

Paula recently submitted her work to the gallery and I immediately fell in love with this piece from her watercolor archive.

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#portraitswithoutpeople

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Me, on Space Bits… Did You Know? The Griffith Observatory was used as a shooting location for none other than MacGyver’s home in episode 1 of the now iconic TV series. Later on in the series he moved to a much more modest houseboat. This is the sort of information you can only get from…

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This is why I do not like the Mercator projection.

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A Tribute to Discomfort: Cory Richards from Blue Chalk on Vimeo. Time to get the DSLR out. /via Jeff Sheldon on Twitter.

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Mid-summer last year Elliot Kember discovered that Chrome saves passwords in plain text on your computer and, with a few clicks, anyone sitting at your desk can see them. This made some waves in the community and, as you can see from the bottom of Kember’s post, had the likes of Chrome’s Head of Security,…

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Last weekend, for the first time in my life, I went kayaking! I loved it so much, I went again the next day. For the last few months I’ve spent a lot of time reading, watching videos, listening to podcasts — all about paddling. And I have to say that so much of that information…

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Huge news for DuckDuckGo. Safari in Yosemite will now have DDG as an option for a search engine. Remember Fred Wilson’s graph from a few days ago? You can expect that spike to continue. /via Daring Fireball.

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Dan Eden lets us know how not to install OS X Yosemite: The moral of the story; don‘t install 10.10 just yet. And if you do, make sure you‘re not an impatient idiot like me. I was this close to installing Yosemite this morning. I backed up my work Macbook to a Time Capsule, downloaded…

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My friend Geoff DiMasi, of the great P’unk Ave, on A List Apart: We always cared about our work and had good relationships with our clients before, but intentionally pursuing projects that align with our business values has brought a higher level of investment and internal motivation from all members of our team. We have…

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Ted Landau: Make no mistake: this was a historic keynote. It’s hard to overstate what Apple did today. If you’ve ever written and released any amount of software in your life it is pretty easy to see how much work went into what Apple announced yesterday. I don’t know for sure, but I’d be willing…

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Yesterday’s WWDC Keynote was, in my opinion, the best WWDC Keynote ever. In fact, it was their best presentation since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it right here. Craig Federighi: I’ll tell you, you just have not had chili by the campfire until you’ve…

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Jim Dalrymple, of The Loop: There are a few things that struck me during the WWDC keynote presentation this morning. The first, and perhaps most important, is how much fun the Apple executives were having on stage. I’m not talking about the normal smiles and jokes, I mean they genuinely looked like they were having…

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Jeffrey Kalmikoff on Medium: I effectively stopped looking at my Instagram feed, but did continue to use it to take, filter, and post photos (to Facebook). Early this year, in an effort to reduce overall social media noise from all accounts, I decided to unfollow everyone on Instagram and start over. As you may, or…

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Jonas Downey, of Basecamp, on Signal vs. Noise: It would surely be easier to do that with 8 simple, straightforward HTML files than with some custom WordPress installation that’s several versions out of date. So what if I have to repeat the navigation markup 8 separate times? It’s not that hard. We used to do…

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Chris Lema, on how things have changed in the WordPress theme industry: Today people treat themes like IKEA furniture – easily replaced and never intended to last for years or decades. He makes some excellent points. In case you missed it, Lema’s piece is in response to this.

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Google recently introduced a new self-driving car at Code Conference. This was slightly different than their previous self-driving cars in that they manufactured the entire car as well as the system that drives it. Liz Gannes, at Re/Code: The car — which was conceived and designed by Google, unlike the ones it previously modified —…

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Last Friday I was able to take my nephew out in my Oru Kayak for an hour or so. It was a blast.

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David Perel, of Obox Themes and SalesGenius, on The State of the WordPress Theme Industry: These days there is very little to choose from between theme companies. Themes look the same, have very similar features and all offer decent support. If you look at the industry’s biggest market — business themes — you will be hard-pressed to know who…

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Fred Wilson on the growing trend of companies producing more than one mobile application, each that expose different sets of features from the same service: I have been calling this trend App Constellations. Facebook now has a collection of mobile apps that share a single login and have app to app linking built in. Google…

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Marco Arment: I haven’t tried every headphone on the market — far from it (much to my chagrin). But among those I’ve tried, there are some clear winners, and a handful of models I haven’t tried seem worth consideration since they’ve gotten so much acclaim. He mentions more models in his blog post than I’ve…

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Jon White: Unironically yapping about my love for this in 2014 is tricky, because my love for the series it belonged to has become so uncomfortably, uh, asterisk-laden lately. Back in those halcyon early-00’s days, I loved The West Wing. We all did! And now that it’s streaming to boot, freeing me from fiddling with…

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Cole Rise, whom I mentioned in What I saw this week #7, and Sam Soffes have collaborated on a great app called Litely. Litely is an app for editing photos using Rise’s Litely photo presets. I’ve been using it for a bit and I’m really digging some of the interactions and, obviously, the presets are…

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In Caddy Shack II Randy Quaid’s character is famous for saying “Don‘t hit it long … No, no, wait. Don‘t hit it short … Wait, hit it long but let it go short” So, which should you focus on? The long term or the short term? The somewhat obvious answer is that it is good…

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There’s some conversation about whether or not applications such as Twitter, email, or RSS clients should have unread counts on their icons. I seem to think yes, but perhaps Brent Simmons ruined me years ago. When he built NetNewsWire he never intended for people to think they had to keep up with every post from…

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For the past several years the trend has been swaying away from open, real, face-to-face communication — especially in tech culture. No meetings, remote work, less email, more chat. Over the last few months our team has been working hard to create a coworking community in Scranton, PA. We’ve been reaching out to freelancers, creative…

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You may have read how I use Unmark, but here also is how Chris does, how Tim does, and how Kyle does.

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I don’t remember ever seeing this; Google’s Newspaper Archive. Wow. /via Coudal.

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I was very happy to be a guest on Systematic #89. Brett Terpstra and I discussed building things behind closed doors and in the open (which I’ve recently covered a little on our company blog), about our favorite services shutting down, about watercolor painting, kayaking, and our three picks of the week. For those wondering,…

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There are a lot of CMSes out there now. So what should you use? Should you use just one CMS and live with it for every project? Should you choose different CMSes based on the project your working on? My recommendations for CMSes vary and are biased (since I’m one of the team behind Barley…

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Sometimes we’re asked: “How do you compete with Wix, which is free, with Barley CMS?” My answer is usually “You get what you pay for.” If you need an example of how terrible Wix is, check this out. A nice watercolorist named Stan submitted his art to my Watercolor Gallery to be featured. He tried to tell…

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Marcin Wichary, on Medium: Unfortunately, for all the advances in web typography we’ve seen during the years — better CSS properties, more support for internationalization, custom web fonts — underlines remained mostly as they were, with very little customization available to web designers. Marcin goes on to show exactly how they did the best they could to clean up…

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Some have asked how I use Unmark, our to-do application for bookmarks. We only just recently redesigned, rebuilt, and released Unmark so I waited a few weeks to write this post until my habits formed more clearly. Every link I see goes into Unmark On average I will see between 2 and 50 links per…

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Yesterday’s episode of the happiest of podcasts, Happy Monday, featured your’s truly. We talked about how I blame my mom for being a geek, 9rules, Barley, Spacebits, and much more. Thanks to my good friend Josh Long and new friend Sarah Parmenter for having me on their show. It was a lot of fun to have a…

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Evan Williams, at Fortune: It feels like we considered this area [publishing] done and we stopped working on it. Clearly there’s more to do. We agree. Ev also announced that Medium is coming to a mobile app. I’m sure a lot of people will be very happy about that.

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In October of last year I mentioned Ron Husband’s blog in one of my “What I saw this week” posts. Man I miss composing those. With Unmark out, I really should get back to doing them. Ron Husband was a Disney animator and is blogging his experiences through the years. Just recently he published a post…

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My friend Yaron direct messaged me: “You like Space?” Me: “Yes.” Almost one month to-the-day later we launched Spacebits together. If you like Space… you can subscribe via RSS or follow along at @SpaceBitsFeed.

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Brie Weiler Reynolds, writing on Medium about working from home: The salacious reality about what I really do when I work from home is that I…work. Interesting word use. She makes the point that so many people still do not understand how working from home can be a real, actual, job and how it has…

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Matt D. Smith, whom I met at Greenville Grok and whose work I admire, recently held a Transform Athens event and asked John Saddington to present. And present he did. On blogging, of all things. Here is what Matt wrote afterwards about the event and blogging: The very fact that you are reading this right…

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Fresh URL is a JavaScript library that strips away all of the extra cruft at the end of URLs but does so only after each service that uses that cruft gets the data they need. Brendan Schwartz, CTO of Wistia, writing on their company blog on how it works: Here‘s how it works. Fresh URL…

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Stewart Butterfield, on Medium, regarding the “innovation” that Slack brings: But, for organizations that adopt it, there will be a dramatic shift in how time is spent, how communication happens, and how the team’s archives are utilized. There will be changes in how team members relate to one another and, hopefully, significant changes in productivity. We…

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Chris Poole, founder of 4chan, remarks (on his personal blog) on the debate for and against anonymity on the web: The combination of anonymity and ephemerality has fostered experimentation and creativity rarely seen elsewhere. It’s incredible what people can make when they’re able to fail publicly without fear, since not only will those failures not…

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David Sparks, on his blog MacSparky: I‘ve been sloppy about cleaning out my camera roll. I could do this on the phone but it isn‘t very fast. So I fired up my favorite Mac app for managing/copying/deleting lots of images at once, Image Capture. I‘m often surprised by how many Mac owners don‘t even know…

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The people behind 1910 Design & Company took at stab at redesigning Wikipedia: While big parts of the internet have gone through an amazing journey in terms of typography these last years, Wikipedia’s reading experience is still stuck in the 90’s. We wanted to take a few days and propose a direction through which Wikipedia…

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Conor McClure, on his personal blog: What is an RSS feed? I thought you’d never ask. No, really; the non-geek community is seriously missing out by not taking advantage of RSS in this online-media-dominated world we live in. I agree. And sometimes, on Twitter, I pretend to know the way out. Sometimes I think that…

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