Year: 2015

Paul Stamatiou, on 10 years of blogging: For me blogging here is an outlet for creativity and an eternal personal project where I can tinker with design ideas and various web technologies. As good as any reasons to have your own blog. He also notes this about personal sites: The era of the personal website…

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Kurt Wagner on Re/code: Trevor O’Brien, who joined Twitter a year and a half ago from YouTube and oversees product for Twitter’s iOS and Android apps, is departing the company, according to multiple sources. Based on the application updates I’ve seen these last few months I’d say O’Brien wasn’t overseeing much of anything. The state…

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Jeffery Milstein specializes in aerial photography. Here is his collection of cruise ships. /via iGNANT.

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Jay Torres discusses the Apple Watch on Mark Miller’s series Watchscreen: I now always have my phone on silent and rely on my Watch to let me know of any texts. It’s subtle so it doesn’t interrupt anything, and the haptic touch is strong enough to let me know someone has texted me. As someone…

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Maria Popova on her incredibly good blog Brain Pickings: Indeed, he knew value of undisturbed creative labor and protected it fiercely, unafraid to stand up to the most powerful man in Europe. Unable to bear the interruptions any longer and determined to do his work on his own terms, he left Rome and returned to…

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This is great. ~karlen on tilde.town reads aloud bits on the web that says “no one will ever read this but”. My only wish was that this site linked to the source. /via Andy Baio.

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Interesting write-up on Medium by Pasquale D’Silva Creative Director at Elepath. He says this about Spotify: One of the most spatially confusing, while popular pieces of consumer software. To describe how Spotify’s interface makes use of space, would be to describe a rat’s nest of wires. I challenge you to effectively sketch it on a…

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Kyle Eschenroeder over at The Art of Manliness: Then there is the person scrolling through Lifehacker collecting listicles. Reading and re-reading the same hacks spewed out a thousand times. This is the person who won’t go to the gym until they know for a fact that they have the “perfect” workout regimen. This is the…

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Maciej Ceglowski, operator over at Pinboard, in a talk in 2014: The Web belongs to us all, and those of us in this room are going to spend the rest of our lives working there. So we need to make it our home. You’ve likely already read the transcript of his talk but I thought…

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Good move from GoPro. They’ve created a licensing platform for stock videos made by GoPro users. Christopher Heine for Adweek: At launch, GoPro Licensing will feature more than 600 videos from amateur and professional videographers with whom the San Mateo, Calif.-based company has struck licensing agreements. It plans to continuously expand the number of clips…

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Kyle Ruane, on his personal blog: It’s no secret that the more this region (Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, everywhere in-between) becomes comfortable with technology and success within that industry, the greater our ability will be to develop and keep homegrown talent as well as attract entrepreneurs from other areas. This conference was another big step in the right…

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Jason Major, writing for Universe Today: More than just a pretty picture of our blue marble, this image will be used by the EPIC team to help calibrate the instrument to remove some of the blue atmospheric haze from subsequent images. Once the camera is fully set to begin operations daily images of our planet will…

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Manton Reece, on his personal blog about quitting his “day job” and going full time indie:  I thought it would be fun to do a series of blog posts about the early part of this transition. For the next couple weeks, as I wind down one set of projects and ramp up new ones, I’m…

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S. Somasegar on his own blog at Microsoft: Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6 are an exciting next step for developer tools from Microsoft – combining new productivity for existing Visual Studio users with new platform support for developers targeting a wider range of platforms and programming models.  Huge update to Visual Studio but most…

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I watch Casey Neistat every day. Today he and his team released Beme. (App Store Link) Mike Isaac for Bits: Users capture four-second bursts of video by covering a sensor directly above the earpiece of the iPhone. During an interview in his Manhattan office on Thursday, Mr. Neistat demonstrated this by pressing the phone to…

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Mark this app down as one of the apps that will make iOS become a platform that rivals the Macintosh for creators over the next few years. This is just the beginning. iOS 9 will open the door for much, much more apps like this. Also, kudos to Panic for their hat tip to Dennis…

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Rich Cicci writing for the excellent NEPA Scene: San Diego Comic Con has come and gone, but unless you kept your face inches away from your cell phone, tablet, PC, or laptop this past weekend, you may not have known. That fact is shocking considering how much nerd culture has permeated everything nowadays. I mean,…

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Disclosure: I’m not an organizer of WordCamp Scranton, though two of my companies; Plain and Coalwork are sponsors, nor am I speaking for anyone involved with the event. I’m personally grateful for the coverage on WNEP about WordCamp Scranton but I believe it could have been so much better. I believe WordCamp’s organizers could have…

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Tal F commutes to NYC on a bicycle and has done so for years. He decided to shake things up and use a kayak to commute into work — and not just any kayak, an Oru Kayak. Tal F, on his excellent blog: Predictably, the process of setting up and dismantling the boat in Manhattan…

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Luca G, from the Netherlands, on Medium: I’ve compared the two and came to the conclusion that Evernote is the best option for me. I always carry my phone around, and it’s always charged. I’m much the same. I’ve defaulted to Evernote for almost everything. I say almost because I find that having a notebook…

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In 2008 seven investors were approached to buy 10% of Airbnb for $150,000. Five of them turned them down flat, two never responded. Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, on Medium: Next time you have an idea and it gets rejected, I want you to think of these emails. Airbnb is currently valued at a $25.5…

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Since we’re on the subject of hitting milestones around things done daily and the number 100… this one is a doozy. Casey Neistat just hit 100 episodes of daily video blog episodes. A huge accomplishment given the quality of Casey’s videos. I watch an episode every single day at lunch and catch up on the…

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Carl T. Holscher on growing up at a slower pace: I wasn’t ignorant. I read voraciously. I wrote and thought. I shared my thoughts in that fledgling collection of wires and computers. I talked to classmates and spent hours on the phone with a friend talking to the wee hours of the morning. No matter…

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Jared Sinclair: Here’s a little secret for newbie app developers out there: a fun app has nothing to do with clean code. You can replace “fun” with anything here. Shipping is better than not shipping. Manton Reece: Most programmers try to improve their code a little from one project to the next. But obsessing about how…

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It has been a whirlwind this last week or so. I’m writing this while 35,000 feet in the air as Kyle and I are off to San Francisco on a business trip. A trip we didn’t know we were taking until late last week. Isn’t flying amazing? The process of flying, however, is about as…

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Today was a beatiful day. After lunch I went for a 2.5 mile walk around the city. Each time I venture out, either alone or with a Coalwork member or two, I try a new route. I’m surprised by the number of routes that can be made in such a short distance from our space.…

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Noah Read, on his blog, on why he is posting “snippets” to his site which then get distributed to the social networks of his choice. Some of the content is so great that it seems a shame to be dumping it into 3rd party services, which may be gone within a few years. Microblogging and social…

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We’ve been doing some walking in the afternoons lately.

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DuckDuckGo: DuckDuckGo just crossed ten million searches a day for the first time ever! We’re proud to be helping so many people take back their privacy. In celebration, we’re giving away ten thousand DuckDuckGo t-shirts to enthusiasts who help their friends and family take back their privacy as well. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo on every…

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Yesterday a young chap walked into the doors of Coalwork wanting to see “what we were up to”. He moved away from Scranton but would like to see Scranton improve. After talking for awhile about start ups, failures, successes, our respective backgrounds, whether or not there was money to be raised in this area, it…

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Manton Reece, writing on his blog, about quick blogging workflows: I believe there are two important facets to microblogging. The first is the timeline experience: a reverse-chronological list of posts from your friends, like you see on Twitter. The second is that posting should be effortless: if there’s less friction between your idea and publishing…

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Monkey Keyboard: Monkey is a free keyboard for iOS and Android that allows you to drop stickers while you’re chatting in WhatsApp, snatch a file from DropBox while you’re writing email, or send your lover a Spotify song right in iMessage. Looks very interesting. But free makes me leery.

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Dave Winer is at it again. This time with an open source “browser” that can read a “river” called riverBrowser. riverBrowser is, at its core, a set of HTML, JavaScript, CSS that can read JSONP files and output them as HTML. What can this be used for? Well, it could — potentially — replace RSS for a…

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Yes, I skipped the weekend. I’m going to skip all weekends likely. Here is why. And you may just have to live with that. Speaking of the weekend, this one was pretty good. On Friday, I was able to play full court basketball for the first time since I was injured. It was painful but…

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43North “Behold the world’s largest business idea competition.” Five million dollars in cash awarded to the winners (plural) of this competition happening in Buffalo, New York. If you’re into investing this is a model to watch as it goes into its second year. I’m watching closely.

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Manton Reece, on his blog, about the fact that he’s using WordPress to “tweet”: I’m very excited about the potential for microblogging. For the last year I’ve been working on a new platform around this stuff. By adopting some of these tips for WordPress, your microblog will be ready for my platform, but more importantly your…

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WordCamp is a big deal in the WordPress community and I’m very pleased that Joe Casabona, fellow Coalworker, is organizing one for Scranton, PA. There are only 88 seats left so run and get your ticket. Side note: I’ve been to WordCamp’s in Hawaii, California, Texas, Arizona, New York, Philadelphia etc. I’m looking forward to…

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At Coalwork we somewhat recently began offering $5 Fridays. A chance to come in and work for just $5 (regularly $15). And today was the first day that someone officially took us up on the offer. In fact, two people — one from about 45 minutes away — popped in. Scranton has never seen coworking.…

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Jim Dalrymple, one of the nicest people on the planet, is down 40 pounds — in part, due to the Apple Watch’s constant nagging to move. He wrote a follow-up to his excellent review of the product specifically about his weight loss. While I’ll do my best to answer the questions, I have to say that…

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Speaking of losing weight; an interesting piece in the New York Times by Aaron E. Carroll about how eating less is more important than exercise as a determining factor in weight loss. In the adult population, interventional studies have difficulty showing that a physically active person is less likely to gain excess weight than a…

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Gestimer is “for those little reminders during the day” and has a pretty cool gesture-based UI for setting short-term reminders. I think I’d like an interface like this if Gestimer plugged into Reminders. Neat idea. /via Matt Gemmell on Twitter.

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I’m happy to see Joe Casabona pick up the 100 words torch. Dark Sky, one of my most-used applications on my iPhone, got updated yesterday. The update is terrific. It has the same information as it had before — except it is far easier to digest. It also has the added benefit of being more…

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Jason Fried in a post from September 2014: Remember that what you’re making is in a perpetual state of almost right up until the end. Great post. And boy is he right. Everything is a mess on a product until it isn’t. /via Jason Fried on Twitter.

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Paul Ford, in a tome-of-a-post for Bloomberg/Business Week: There are 11 million professional software developers on earth, according to the research firm IDC. (An additional 7 million are hobbyists.) That’s roughly the population of the greater Los Angeles metro area. Imagine all of L.A. programming. East Hollywood would be for Mac programmers, West L.A. for…

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