Author: Colin Devroe

  • Systrom and Krieger resign from Instagram

    Kevin Systrom, former CEO and co-founder of Instagram: We’ve grown from 13 people to over a thousand with offices around the world, all while building products used and loved by a community of over one billion. What a run! Talk about leaving while on top. A Seinfeld-esque move.

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  • Fiery is oddly spelled.

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  • Twitter fixes their timeline

    YES!!!!!! The Verge: Twitter has made a surprise change to how it shows tweets to its users, following a viral thread earlier today that discussed ways to reverse the platform’s algorithmic timeline. Now, when you uncheck the settings box reading “Show the best tweets first,” Twitter will completely revert your timeline to a non-algorithmic, reverse-chronological…

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  • Manton Reece on smaller social networks

    Manton Reece: Many people are looking for “the next Twitter”, but it’s not enough to replace Twitter with a new platform and new leadership. Some problems are inevitable when power is concentrated in only 2-3 huge social networks — ad-based businesses at odds with user needs and an overwhelming curation challenge. This might be Mastodon’s…

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  • Snapthread is now free to try

    Becky Hansmeyer: You can use all of the app’s features for free with only two limitations: a watermark in the lower left corner and a 30-second limit for video exports. I’ve mentioned Snapthread in the past. I’m not on iOS anymore, but if I were, I’d use and buy Snapthread in an instant. Looks great.…

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  • Coming to Iceland has me reevaluating my understanding of, relationship with, and appreciation for water.

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  • Firefox 62

    Mozilla has released Firefox 62. It contains an update to Containers that I’ve been wanting for a little while. “Reopen in Container” tab menu option appears for users with Containers that lets them choose to reopen a tab in a different container Very happy with this latest release.

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  • How to transfer photos from iPhone to Windows 10

    Occasionally I will have need to transfer photos from Eliza’s iPhone X to my Windows 10 laptop. I’ve found the process of transferring the photos to be excruciatingly slow, unreliable, and frustrating. That is, until I figured out a better way. Most tutorials, including Microsoft’s own, will recommend you plug the phone into your computer,…

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  • Joel Embiid writing about me

    Joel Embiid, Center for the Philadelphia 76ers: Listen, I know it’s a stereotype, but have you ever seen a normal, 30-year-old white guy shoot a three-pointer? That elbow is tucked, man. The knees are bent. The follow-through is perfect. Always. You know how in America, there’s always an older guy wearing like EVERLAST sweat-shorts at…

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  • Leo Laporte leaves Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook

    Leo Laporte: Yesterday I deactivated my Twitter account and kicked Tumblr to the curb. A couple of weeks ago I did the same with Instagram. A month or so before that I killed Facebook. And I survived. No, thrived! I had deleted my Twitter account in the past and lived. And while I haven’t deleted…

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  • Palmer Lucky on Magic Leap

    Palmer Lucky, co-founder of Oculus (no longer with the company): The product they put out is reasonably solid, but is nowhere close to what they had hyped up, and has several flaws that prevent it from becoming a broadly useful tool for development of AR applications. That is not good for the XR industry. It…

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  • Seeing every social tool begin to see growth is very reassuring. I think a decentralized future – one where no one network owns all people or content – is coming. It won’t just be Mastodon or just blogs or even just Micro.blog. It will be them all and others.

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  • Back on a different Mastodon instance

    Longtime readers of my blog will know that I was on Mastodon and then didn’t log back in for a long time. My first instance (mastodon.cloud) was sold? or was given? to a new admin and somehow my account was suspended and I couldn’t reset my password. I reached out to the current admin via…

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  • Photos for Mac isn’t a long term photo library option

    Bradley Chambers, writing for 9to5Mac, about his photo library backup strategy: If there is one thing I am obsessed with when it comes to technology, it’s my pictures. I keep them extremely organized and culled. He then goes on to say, regarding his use of iCloud Photo Library as a sort of backup: This service…

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  • Real Twitter

    Over the weekend Andy Baio tweeted a URL to a search result that shows Twitter the way it used to be: This magical link shows your Twitter timeline in true chronological order—without retweets, liked tweets, or any algorithm nonsense. (On mobile? Click “Latest.”) Enjoy! Erin Sparling owned realtwitter.com and pointed it to that URL now.

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  • Repost: Aaron Parecki \”blogchain\”

    👉 Aaron Parecki: what if instead of webring we called it blogchain

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  • Repost: Aaron Parecki \”blogchain\”

    👉 Aaron Parecki: what if instead of webring we called it blogchain

    Continue >

  • Repost: Aaron Parecki \”blogchain\”

    👉 Aaron Parecki: what if instead of webring we called it blogchain

    Continue >

  • Repost: Aaron Parecki \”blogchain\”

    👉 Aaron Parecki: what if instead of webring we called it blogchain

    Continue >

  • Repost: Aaron Parecki \”blogchain\”

    👉 Aaron Parecki: what if instead of webring we called it blogchain

    Continue >

  • Repost: Aaron Parecki \”blogchain\”

    👉 Aaron Parecki: what if instead of webring we called it blogchain

    Continue >

  • Repost: Aaron Parecki \”blogchain\”

    👉 Aaron Parecki: what if instead of webring we called it blogchain

    Continue >

  • Keeping a record of your thoughts and media and owning it

    Go ahead and read Matt Haughey’s post on why he left Twitter. But I wanted to pull out this bit: I didn’t like that everything I wrote ended up being hard to find or reference, and even hard for me to pull up myself when I wanted, where a blog makes it pretty dang easy…

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  • Matt Haughey on the mobile WordPress app

    Matt Haughey vents his frustrations with WordPress: Over the past week I’ve written a bunch of posts while out and about using the iOS WordPress app, often with photos of things I was seeing. But unless I was on WiFi or had 5 bars of LTE connectivity, I would get a Posting Failed, Retry? message.…

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  • Learn 1Password

    Shawn Blanc, writing at The Sweet Setup: Learn 1Password will be a deep dive on one of our most irreplaceable apps. We’ll show you how 1Password works, and we’ll go through all the different ways you can use it: from a digital will, to sharing important information with your team members and family members, to…

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  • Things about Windows 10 #2: Moving non-existent windows

    Well, I had said I’d try to keep this series positive but every now and then you run up against a problem. It turns out Windows 10 is fairly terrible at remembering window sizes and placement when connecting to or disconnecting from an external display. So far I’ve had issues going both ways and having…

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  • Magic Leap hype

    First line in this Wired piece about the Magic Leap One: In retrospect, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz realizes that all the hype was a big mistake. “I think we were arrogant,” he says. Umm, yeah. /via Daring Fireball.

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  • Magic Leap One Creator Edition

    Adi Robertson for The Verge: But the Magic Leap One’s 50-degree diagonal field of view, while larger than the competing Microsoft HoloLens, is still extremely limited. And the image quality feels roughly on par with the two-year-old HoloLens. It’s generally good, but with some tracking and transparency issues. Given how much effort Magic Leap has…

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  • Colin Walker takes a break (so I will too)

    Colin Walker: I’m not going to be blogging much – maybe the occasional post but nothing regular. I’m going to remove my feed from micro.blog for the time being so that I’m not drawn into conversations there that might result from any posts – if any conversations occur they will have to happen locally, for…

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  • Kayaking to Bannerman’s Castle on the Hudson River – July 2018

    Kayaking to Bannerman’s Castle on the Hudson River – July 2018 Eliza and I paddled on the Hudson River to a long abandoned arsenal castle. It was a great day.

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  • Used my Dell XPS 13” 9370 to edit a drone video today. Zero lag dealing with several gigabytes of 4K video. So glad I chose this little thing.

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  • I need to find a place with gigabit Internet speed for a few days. I have so much data that I need to get down and up. I’m downloading tens-of-gigabytes of application software, uploading hundreds of gigabytes to OneDrive and then again to Google Drive (which is why I hope this is real). Ugh.

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  • Things about Windows 10 #1: Task Bar Previews

    There is so much blogger coverage for Apple’s hardware and software products that I feel there needs to be a few more in the Microsoft and Google world. To that end I’m going to start a few new series here on my personal blog; Things about Windows 10, Things about Android. Generally, I’ll be keeping…

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  • I wish I could play video games without spending any time at all playing them. Does that make sense? Like, if while playing games real time just stopped.

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  • Windows 10’s tablet mode needs work

    Zac Bowden: A good tablet is about more than just good hardware, you need a good OS experience to go along with it. Unfortunately, Windows 10 doesn’t have a good tablet experience to offer, not when compared to iOS on the iPad at least. I agree. As I said in February. If they invested in…

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  • I read a chapter of Hitchhiker’s Guide each day at lunch. I can’t recall ever laughing out loud this much at any other book.

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  • Finished culling all photos into a single library. Old school style of year, month, day directories. Nearly 80,000 images and videos all told.

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  • My checklist for setting up Windows 10

    Once I had decided to switch from macOS to Windows 10 I knew that I would need to unlearn old tricks and learn some new ones. The oddest one that can only happen through brute force is to teach my pinky to do what my thumb used to. On macOS the CMD button modifier is…

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  • Laura Kalbag on blogging

    Laura Kalbag: When I wrote about owning and controlling my own content, I talked about trying to keep my “content” in its canonical location on my site, and then syndicating it to social networks and other sites. Doing this involves cross-posting, something that can be done manually (literally copying and pasting titles, descriptions, links etc)…

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  • Xamarin.Forms 3.1

    David Ortinau on the Xamarin Blog: Earlier this year, we surveyed Xamarin.Forms developers about the kinds of custom controls and extra platform code being written repeatedly that should be considered for support “in the box”. From these conversations, we created an initiative to deliver as many as we could in the next several releases. Just…

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  • Still working through my new photo library, syncing, back-up strategy but I believe I’ll have a much better solution than Apple provided me when I’m finished. And, of course, I’ll document it on my blog.

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  • My clipboard managers: 1Clipboard & Clip Stack

    I use two clipboard managers currently. On Windows 10 I use 1Clipboard: A universal clipboard managing app that makes it easy to access your clipboard from anywhere on any device. It says “any device” but I do not believe it has any mobile apps. Since I now use the Microsoft Launcher for Android I may…

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  • Spotify vs. Apple Music

    Sean Wolfe, compares Spotify vs. Apple Music for Business Insider: The subscription prices are generally the same, there isn’t much disparity in the music that’s available, and on the surface the services all appear pretty similar. But there are some important differences that will decide which music app is right for you. This is a…

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  • If you share Google Calendars and want them to show up in Windows 10’s calendar app, this is the tip you need.

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  • My opinion of Microsoft Surface, 6 years later

    Me, in 2012, writing about the first time I saw a Surface device: I could have played with it longer. But I wouldn’t want to. The Surface is terrible. Even if you’ve never picked up an iPad or an Android-powered tablet you would think the Surface is pretty slow, hard to use, and heavy; three…

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  • What I saw this week #52: July 13, 2018

    More accurately, what I’ve seen somewhat lately. I’ve been off my blogging game lately as I’m making the switch from Mac to Windows. So I’m busy moving photo libraries, installing apps and services, configuring options, and learning keyboard shortcuts. Here are a few things I wish I had more time to write about, but do…

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  • My experience buying a Windows laptop

    After 16+ years working, writing, playing, making, listening, watching on a Macintosh, I’m switching back to Windows. Within a few days from today I will no longer be a Mac user. In fact, the only Apple product I will be using regularly will be my 2014 iPad Air 2 which I plan to replace soon.…

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  • My half-written draft on how I chose a Windows computer needs to be finished and published. I need to find the time this week.

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  • Friendly reminder: If you use Gmail, check your Google Drive storage. If you run out, you will not get any email and Google will not notify you. So you have to check yourself. Log into drive.google.com and click Storage.

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  • I’ve been getting more value out of Twitter lately and as a result I’ve been tweeting a bit more (on my “new” c2dev2 account). I don’t know what this means.

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