Year: 2019
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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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Great ad for Hipcamp. The video is already 4 years old but I only just saw it this morning.
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Butterfly – July 2019
Butterfly – July 2019 Went for a hike last night to see the digger wasps again. The fields were full of butterflies.
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Just figured out that Libby, the app I use to get books/audiobooks free from our local library, syncs across devices. So I’ll be able to keep my current reading pace a bit easier now.
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Craig Mod on the speed of nvALT
Craig Mod, in an essay that has been linked by just about every blog I’m subscribed to: One of my most used, most speedy pieces of software is nvALT.1 It’s an oddly named, very bland application. Just a database of plain text files with a plain text editor bolted on. But it’s fast. The fastest…
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Pruned my Twitter Lists this morning. I like to shake the box periodically. I want to be sure I do not create an echo chamber for myself. I do the same for RSS feed subscriptions.
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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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Finished my first ever Sherlock Holmes book — The Hound of Baskervilles. A fun read. The attention to detail is hilarious. I will likely read another in a few months. Recommendations welcome. ⭐⭐⭐⭐
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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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Fisherman, Lackawanna State Park – July 2019
Fisherman, Lackawanna State Park – July 2019 “I once saw a pelican out here.”
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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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Hudson Valley Balloon Festival, Rhinebeck, New York – July 2019
Hudson Valley Balloon Festival, Rhinebeck, New York – July 2019 A beautiful day in New York to watch these things float away.
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Eliza, sunset – September 2018
Eliza, sunset – September 2018 I remember this as a gorgeous early fall evening with Eliza and friends.
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I haven’t been blogging as much. Spending a lot of free time fishing. And that is totally OK.
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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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Repost: Brent Simmons on blogging
👉 Brent Simmons: Here’s the thing: blogging is like any other human activity — some people stop and other people start. It’s natural.
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Midway through a biography of Leonardo Da Vinci and I’m convinced if he were alive today he wouldn’t have a GitHub account. All local private repos. All unfinished. All brilliant.
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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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Tourists will ruin Iceland
If you go to any scenic area in the United States you’ll see countless warning, prohibited, and no trespassing signs. In some areas it nearly ruins the experience of seeing some of these amazing places. In Iceland, however, you don’t see many at all. Icelanders are extremely welcoming to tourists and its landscape is relatively…
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Om Malik, on his photo journey
Om: I find using a 24mm wide angle lens, a 90 mm medium telephoto, or a 280 mm tele lens akin to using saffron in my rice or black salt in my lentils – flavors that are beautiful in their restraint. I like reading his perspective on this. Less is definitely more. And constraints breed…
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Whenever a beta is released for a major piece of my software stack I’m tempted to update. I factor in what I’m working on and whether or not it would effect my productivity. If it would, I don’t update. If not, I roll with it and report bugs as I can.
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How Micro.blog’s Discover is curated
Jean MacDonald: The Discover timeline has evolved and will continue to evolve with the community. The guidelines will evolve too. We want to have additional curators from the community. We need to build some tools to make that possible. It would be particularly nice to have curators who can encourage discussions and connections in languages…
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Demoed the React app I’ve been working on to our team today. It worked! Pretty excited about what we’re making with this. Fun project. Looking forward, though, to someone taking it off my hands soon. (Could it be you?)
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The bear I mentioned. Turns out (after closer inspection and research) it is likely a ~400lb male black bear. At one point, I was about 10′ from him.
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🔉 Listening to this week’s Micro Monday. My ears were burning! 🙂
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The Swift Era begins
Brent Simmons: Though I don’t discount Catalyst’s usefulness — we will get lots of apps new to the Mac — the real news this week was about SwiftUI and the Combine framework. This, finally, is a new way of writing apps, and it’s based on Swift and not on Objective-C. It’s very much not from NeXT.…
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Finished Watchers by Dean Koontz. ⭐⭐⭐ – Odd. Seemed like two stories in one and oversimplified narrative. But, it had a few tense moments.
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Random WWDC 2019 thoughts
Random WWDC 2019 thoughts: Overall, this seemed like a solid, solid WWDC. I’m sure there will be a lot more news over the coming week. But to me, it addressed the main things I was looking for: a commitment to the Mac, iPad OS updates, and for Marzipan (now Project Catalyst it seems) not to…
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Repost: Alex Hoffmann on the importance of WWDC 2019 for him
👉 Alex Hoffmann: This week’s WWDC is going to be a make-or-break situation for me. It’s going to determine whether I will continue to consider Apple’s tablets worthwhile or if I’m going to move to a Microsoft Surface Pro once they release one with USB-C/Thunderbolt 3. I’m telling you. This is an important one on…
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The importance of WWDC 2019
waffle: Whether I’ll like the outcome or not, the cards are stacked for Apple to weigh in heavily on all these things (including possibly by inaction, to focus much more on iOS) come Monday. If optimism left me easily, I would be typing this on a capable PC laptop instead (although possibly swearing equally at…
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TIL that Windows 10 has a “Game Bar” (intended for gamers) that makes it really easy to record my screen.
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Humans have set foot on the Moon, nearly eradicated Polio, measured supernovae of distant stars… yet the traffic lane merge baffles them.
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Pixlr – A free photo editor. Nice to have in a pinch. Played around with it. Works great. /via Jeremy Keith.
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WWDC is just around the corner. I usually write up my wish list and predictions but this year I’m just going to stick with my questions.
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Khoi Vihn on the impact his blog has had on his career
Khoi Vihn, in an interview on Own Your Content: It’s hard to overstate how important my blog has been, but if I were to try to distill it down into one word, it would be: “amplifier.” Writing in general and the blog in particular has amplified everything that I’ve done in my career, effectively broadcasting…
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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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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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Windows 10 May 2019 update brings better Windows Update
Zac Bowden, writing for Windows Central: Windows Update received some pretty significant upgrades with the May 2019 Update, and it’s good news for users. Microsoft is backing off its heavy-handedness when it comes to forcing updates onto users. Starting this month, users will no longer be forced to install new feature updates unless they explicitly…
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Yesterday’s catch. Went for a hike with my nephews and I needed to keep my cool Uncle status intact so I caught this snapping turtle. Photo credit: Ethan.
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Gjáin, Stangarvegur, Iceland – September 2018
Gjáin, Stangarvegur, Iceland – September, 2018 Earth’s history is written within it.
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You can now follow any blog on Micro.blog
Neat feature from Micro.blog. Here is Manton Reece, from his personal blog, on the new feature: You can now follow blogs in the Micro.blog timeline, even if the blogger hasn’t yet registered on Micro.blog. Manton describes this feature as another type of “username”. I understand why he’s framing it that way but I’m unsure if…
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Taughannock Falls, Trumansburg, New York – May 2019
Taughannock Falls, Trumansburg, New York – May 2019 Had a nice weekend up north in an Airbnb with friends along the western shoreline of Cayuga Lake. The falls were running well with the spring rains.
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Repost: Simon Woods on silos
👉 Simon Woods: The line between “I hate these silos and everything they represent” and “I like being part of the conversation with big groups and value the space where everybody can be found” continues to be a line upon which I stare. Ugh. This is at the core of my neuroticism.
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South Branch Tunkhannock Creek – April 2019
South Branch Tunkhannock Creek – April 2019 Had a lovely time fishing here recently while the sun set at my back.
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My favorite video on YouTube so far this year
The Creek, by Rolf Nylinder is my favorite video on YouTube so far this year. The techniques and tools are all invisible lending way to only the story. I try to explain this to those whose videos I respect but that could be improved. So typically on YouTube it is about the gear. The drone…
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Bokeh: Private, independent, and user-funded photo sharing
Timothy Smith, on trying to promote his Kickstarter for Bokeh: I hate doing this type of stuff, but I feel like this idea is so important it’d be foolish of me not to try. Even if this Kickstarter ends up being unsuccessful, I won’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t do everything…
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Microsoft releases WSL 2
Lots of Microsoft developer related announcements over the last few days. Since I use WSL every single day I am really looking forward to this WSL 2 release. Initial tests that we’ve run have WSL 2 running up to 20x faster compared to WSL 1 when unpacking a zipped tarball, and around 2-5x faster when…
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I’m giving Microsoft’s new Chromium-based Edge Insider browser a week of being my default. Immediately miss Firefox’s Containers feature. It may be a feature I simply can’t live without.
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Hubble’s Legacy Field
I don’t cover space nearly enough here on my blog. I miss the days of writing Space Bits with my friend Yaron Schoen. Sometimes announcements of new images of our vast Universe just seem to float by with the deluge of information we’re bombarded with every single day. However, I figured this new image from…