Author: Colin Devroe
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Invisible iOS Home Screen Icons
Pretty cool trick from _David Smith. Since getting my iPhone 6 a few weeks ago I’ve been continuously trying to optimize the configuration of my home screen. The larger screen means that I now have an extra row of icons to fit onto the screen, but the physical size of device means that I can’t…
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Me, on Product Hunt
Starting today, Product Hunt allows following and I’m right here. You know what to do.
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Podcasts that I listen to
Nearly a year ago I jotted down some non-tech podcasts that I was enjoying at the time. However, today I was tagged by Joe Casabona (Cassy) to jot down those that I’m listening to currently. Here is that list: Astronomy Cast Inspiring Adventurer FreshAir Planet Money TEDTalks Hardcore History Sea Kayak Podcasts The Tim Ferriss…
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Saving China’s Salween River, One Trip at a Time
Will Stauffer-Norris: This is the fourth pig carcass that has washed up in Dead Pig Eddy. The bloated creature rocks gently up and down against the beach about 10 feet away from our brewing morning coffee. The pig must go, it’s decided, so Lao Tang and Bob tie a piece of p-cord to a stiff…
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Space isn’t everything, people matter too
I love that Toni Schneider is blogging regularly. In a recent post he tries to find the balance of having an open, collaborative office space and one that allows for private time to execute. Ideally, an office would offer both. Open spaces for collaboration/inspiration and private spaces for taking that inspiration and turning into action.…
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A blogger meet up at Coalwork
Finally, a meet up that is going to be less about technology and more about blogging. I’m excited for next month’s NEPA WordPress Meet up. Don’t let the name fool you, this one is simply a place for bloggers to chat and enjoy each other’s company. At Coalwork. I have very fond memories of blogger…
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How many blogs do you have?
Daniel Jalkut on finding the right stuff to publish to a personal blog: I find it sort of charming when people write “whole person” blogs that may contain material spanning from their personal emotions, to the culture they appreciate, to the work that they do, and the politics they believe in. But I also find…
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Should Twitter be trust by developers?
Marco says no way. Even though the WSJ is reporting that Twitter is going to try to appeal to developers this week at a conference… he writes: Twitter will never, and should never, have any credibility with developers again. Enjoy it while it lasts, but be ready for it to disappear at any moment. I’m…
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Every Project is an Opportunity
Last night I was reading Empire Magazine’s awesome piece with the cast of The West Wing (my favorite TV show of all time). I caught this nugget from Bradley Whitford: Early on in my career I got a part in Revenge Of The Nerds II: Nerds In Paradise. If I hadn‘t done that I wouldn‘t…
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Your Two Jobs as a Manager
Elizabeth Speirs: Over the years I’ve ended up hiring and training a lot of people in their first jobs as a manager, and I always tell them they have two responsibilities: to set clear expectations and to reduce uncertainty for their teams. I try to do the same thing with my team and also with…
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Digging Crowd Favorite
Joe Casabona, fellow Coalworker, recently joined the Crowd Favorite team. I’ve “known” Alex King, the founder of Crowd Favorite, for many, many years. But since Joe joined Coalwork I’ve been digging around their stuff more. I’m digging what I’m seeing. I think Plain will begin using a few of their products and solutions for upcoming projects.
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A bit of a social break
I’ve recently pushed passed 38,000 tweets and I’m not really sure how I feel about it. To continue to get the most value from Twitter over the years I’ve tried to change the way I use it as often as I felt as though I needed to. I’ve followed hundreds and thousands of accounts at…
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30 Days Of Blogging Challenge (continued)
This is great. Om is picking up the blog challenge and pulled in three others. I thought it was a great idea and instead of doing it all by myself, I roped in three guys to the 30 day blog challenge. I think world needs a lot more classic blogging — from links to photos…
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Five for the Future (of WordPress)
Speaking of Matt Mullenweg (I’m catching up on his blog)… he has a great suggestion for how companies that benefit from WordPress can contribute to its longevity. He suggests: I think a good rule of thumb that will scale with the community as it continues to grow is that organizations that want to grow the…
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Salvador Dalí in Print
This weekend we at Coalwork sponsored a local blogging event called NEPA BlogCon. You can read more about that on the Coalwork blog. While visiting Misericordia University I popped my head into the Salvador Dalí in Print exhibit, which they have on loan from Elizabeth Marrow. Dalí was a trip. Nice exhibit. (Side note: Check…
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Shane Burcaw
Speaking of NEPA BlogCon… the closing presenter was Shane Burcaw. Shane suffers from Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Three years ago he started a Tumblog and decided to hit publish. The rest of the story can be found in a book that comes out tomorrow titled after his non-profit foundation; Laughing At My Nightmare. Shane’s presentation was,…
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You go Matt
Matt Mullenweg: It started with a tweet from Colin Devroe. You go Matt.
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Why iOS 8 adoption rate is flattening
People aren’t updating to iOS 8 as quickly as was first thought. The main reason? Free space on the device. John Gruber: It’s all about the over-the-air update requiring 5 GB of free storage space, and many people not having that much free space, and not knowing how or simply not wanting to deal with it.…
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GitHub Student Developer Pack
If you know a student, or a faculty member, you may want to point them to the GitHub Student Developer Pack: There‘s no substitute for hands-on experience, but for most students, real world tools can be cost prohibitive. That‘s why we created the GitHub Student Developer Pack with some of our partners and friends: to…
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Emoji++ Keyboard
I feel the same way _David Smith does about trying to find Emoji in the default iOS keyboard: I feel like I’m always playing a game of memory each time I’m try to craft my perfectly composed Emoji response. It is pretty painful. So, Smith set out to fix it with Emoji++, a keyboard that…
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Improved Sea Kayak with Gordon Brown videos
Simon Willis, reporting that new, refreshed downloads are now available for the Sea Kayak with Gordon Brown videos: Firstly, I went back to the source file and used improved compression software to produce higher quality downloads at a faster bit-rate. Secondly, each film is now an .mp4 file (rather than .mov) and, at customers‘ request,…
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Don’t be a startup expert
Great nugget from Paul Graham’s latest piece “Before the Startup”: The way to succeed in a startup is not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users and the problem you‘re solving for them. I see so many “entrepreneurs” that are caught up in the startup culture. That are more concerned…
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Street View in the future
Google Street View is pretty amazing. Here is the corner of Adams and Spruce in Scranton — the same corner Coalwork is on today and from where I’m writing this post. But something got me thinking this morning… I love looking at old photos of cities (example) from 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ago.…
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On daily blogging
Lockhard Steele (how does someone have a name that awesome?), on daily blogging: Harder than it looks. Fell off the wagon hard last week in the depths of Eater bug-crushing. Still trying to find a rhythm to this practice. Typing this while on a conference call (suboptimal). Agreed. I’ve been super, super busy at work…
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Shanghai By Mobile
Brandon Page on Storehouse: This last trip, I put my pro camera down, and ran around the city with my iPhone. This is the first time I have shown this collection outside of Instagram. Content exclusive to Instagram. I know a few photographers raised their eyebrows at this… however, it appears that the vast majority…
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Tom Hickey
Tom Hickey, of Cork Ireland, on his personal blog in a post titled Stop feeling sorry and start living: I write a blog that’s mainly about my life coming to terms with facial disfigurement. I wanted to share my pain, hopes and dreams, and show you that despite so many setbacks I managed to come…
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New Photos from Mars
Holy cow, a Space Bit! Gorgeous photos of Mars coming in from ISRO’s recent mission on the cheap.
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Being in the paper
Over the years I’ve been in the paper a few times for various reasons. Mostly good. However, something that I’ve learned is that you never really know how you’re going to be portrayed, what information you provide the writer will use or not use, or how the article will come across to the general public.…
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Clay Shirky on multi-tasking
As if I needed more fodder to convince myself as to why I shut off all notifications on my phone, tablet, and computer. Clay Shirky wrote an excellent piece on Medium about why he has changed his mind and now asks his students to close their laptops and put away their phones. Here is a…
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Ello deleted
I went from bullish to puzzled, back to bullish, and now downright miffed by the messaging roller coaster that Ello is on. I think we all want to see someone, anyone, make great things. You know my stance on these things. I say, applaud people that make things. Making things is hard and people won’t…
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Same thing, different day
I agree so hard on this. Brent Simmons: I’ve often had the thought that our social networks are the same thing every day, with just slightly different details. When I skip them for a few days, I find that I have absolutely no feeling of missing anything. Here are some things that don’t give me…
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Not an iPad nano
Jason Snell, on his still smells-like-a-new-car blog Six Colors regarding whether or not the iPhone 6 Plus is like a small iPad: When Apple announced the iPhone 6 Plus on Sept. 9, I entertained the idea that it might be a replacement for my iPad mini. At last, the promise of a single device small enough…
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Founders Grid Productivity Hacks
It was nice to be included in Founders Grid’s list of productivity hacks. When they asked me what productivity hacks I had for other founders this is what I wrote: Productivity hacks are a myth. Not that none of the proposed productivity hacks we see every day do not work, just that any of them…
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The death rattle of old Twitter
Can you hear it? I can. Read this, as reported on the very great GigaOm: Twitter’s timeline is organized in reverse chronological order… but this “isn’t the most relevant experience for a user,” Noto said. Timely tweets can get buried at the bottom of the feed if the user doesn’t have the app open, for…
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It feels good when people say nice things about your hard work
When people are willing to talk or write about your product it is a good thing. It doesn’t matter if what they write is positive or negative — if they write negatively you can fix the issues they mention and if they write positively you can sit back and smile. This morning I walked into…
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Jess Brown takes the challenge
Jess Brown on taking the challenge to write on his blog: Hopefully my writing will bring an audience and an audience will bring opportunities. It does and will Jess.
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Hashtag ShareRSS
Marco Arment’s comment on his blog a few days ago got me thinking… we should be doing a better job to promote RSS. So here is one way to try doing it. My RSS feed is http://cdevroe.com/feed To subscribe to my RSS feed you need an RSS reader. There a tons of these for every…
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Listen closely and you’ll learn something
Never take for granted the fact that everyone you meet can teach you something. Here are just a few recent examples of things that I’ve learned in the last few days: Last night, while visiting an older friend (I believe she is 88), I had what was easily the best rice pudding I’ve ever had…
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The longblog
There is so much awesome going on in the resurgence of personal blogging. I can’t stop reading and linking and smiling. Brent Simmons: My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it’ll…
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What blogs were like before it became “professional”
Adam Kuban, who was behind the original New York pizza blog Slice, in an interview by Ben Leventhal: I miss the early days when you could just get up a post about whatever and just kind of express yourself without really thinking about page views, thinking about SEO, thinking about how it will play on…
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Writing mostly badly but more often
Elizabeth Spiers, one of the founders of Gawker, on her newly revitalized personal blog: So in the interest of rejecting later and discriminating less severely, here is my contract with you, the reader: I will write mostly badly and more often. Not so much that either of us want to slit our wrists, but more…
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What I did this weekend
Kyle and I spent the weekend setting up the first coworking space in Scranton, PA — Coalwork. We’ve been working on this for over a year. Not just us two but other members of the coworking community such as Nick Semon, Bruno Galvao, Michael O’Boyle, and Joe Casabona. I’m very glad to finally be seeing all…
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We’re in!
Update from yesterday. She was surprised. 😉 We’re in! Coalwork, the coworking group, podcast, blog, and community that Kyle and I founded over a year ago finally has a place to call home in downtown Scranton. This is Scranton’s first official coworking spot. I am totally stoked. Not only to see this finally happening but…
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15 Year Anniversary
Today is my 15th Anniversary. My wife Eliza and I have known each other our entire lives — in fact, her mother was pregnant with her when she visited my mother in the hospital after giving birth to me. So, really, this is like our 33rd or 34th anniversary. For the first time in many…
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Blogging every weekday for 30 days
Who’s in for the challenge? I’ll give it a shot. Fred Wilson pointed to Lockhart Steele and Elizabeth Spiers. Spiers mentioned trying it for 30 days so I thought that was a good idea. Writing has never been an issue for me. I’ve typed a bunch of posts here. But I’ve strayed from the personal…
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SeaKayakPodcasts.com coming back Sept 1
My favorite kayaking podcast at SeaKayakPodcast.com is coming back on September 1st. Host Simon Willis: We have recorded quite a few fascinating chats and the first will be an absolute cracker. The new podcasts start on Monday 1st September. We‘ll hear from Scott Donaldson who spent almost three months in a kayak, paddling 1300 miles…
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Speed is the only filter in Instagram Hyperlapse
From a piece in Wired about Instagram’s new app Hyperlapse: Once you start using the app, you quickly see that replay speed itself becomes a novel, alluring tool: For pets and people, replaying at about 1x gives you the sense that you’re creating a tracking shot like that Copacabana scene in Goodfellas. The higher replay…
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The golden age of Twitter is over
I said that this morning to Kyle. That the golden age of Twitter is over. I couldn’t think of a more eloquent way to put it. The Twitter we fell in love with is actually gone already. It no longer exists at all. In fact, it is tough to even see the remnants of that Twitter…
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Congratulate before you ask
When a new product is announced more often than not the first comment I read is someone asking for features which this new product does not have. To illustrate; if your grandmother made you delicious, homemade chocolate chip cookies and you — looking grandma directly in the face — ask “What, no ice cream?” Most recently I…
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Just pick one
Shawn Blanc, on making a decision on how to get fit: Something I’ve learned over time is that when you’re facing a decision and you know you need to act, it’s often best to just do something — anything — and then figure it out as you go. I can recommend, from vast experience in…