Author: Colin Devroe

Marco Arment: I picked on the iPad earlier because its problem is deeper and more visible than on the iPhone today: while the iPad has most of the pricing and competitive pressure of the iPhone, the iPhone’s immense installed base can hide the problems for longer. The iPad has a much smaller installed base, so…

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On Sunday I was able to get out early for my first morning paddle ever. Paddling in the morning is completely different than the afternoon or evening. I wasn’t prepared for the subtle differences, namely; the air is cool, crisp

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For reference: App Constellations. First, William Shatner has a Tumblog. I’m cool with this. Second, he wrote about Facebook Mentions — yet another app from Facebook specifically created to help “celebrities” with managing their Facebook accounts. He writes: I’m not quite sure why Facebook released this app for “celebrities”. It seems to be ill conceived. I…

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Bank Towers Building, Wyoming Avenue, Scranton.

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It turns out, it was bigger than that. I’ve seen a few tweets and heard a few comments this weekend along the lines of “Rap Genius raised $40M? I quit.” Funny. But pretty far off the mark. Surely you think that while Silicon Valley is willing to be a bit nutty about apps that do little…

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I managed to get away from work on Friday and do some paddling. Then, on Saturday, things happened to align where I could meet my friend Andrew for a second paddle. Very happy Colin indeed. Here are some photos I snapped on the gram.

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Simon Willis, someone who has been a huge inspiration to my kayaking endeavors with his Sea Kayak Podcasts series, recently went for a hike. I love this bit: Show me an horizon, an overlapping series of ridge lines or a valley stretching into the distance and I yearn to discover what lies behind those hills,…

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Our friends at Appek, a company just a few miles south from Plain in Scranton, recently hit 1,000,000 installs for their selfie-drawing app FrenchGirls. The concept is pretty simple; take a selfie, submit it, the community sketches something in return. What you get in return isn’t always a sketch of your selfie. Sometimes it is a message,…

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Pinboard, the excellent bookmarking service, recently turned five. Here is Maciej Cegłowski on the Pinboard blog: Now back to some beard-stroking:  I see my role much like a small-town praire banker in the 1880‘s. My job is to project an aura of calm, solvency, and permanence in an industry where none of those adjectives applies. People…

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In April Stripe announced an Open-Source Retreat. A little over a month later they had chosen three grantees. Though unannounced on the company blog, Andrey Petrov wrote about his experience working on Urllib3 at Stripe for two weeks over on Medium: Last week completes my two week grant from Stripe to work on urllib3 full…

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Last night there was a thunderstorm warning for our county. I desperately wanted to get out kayaking since I hadn’t all weekend. So, I opened up Dark Sky and found a slot of around an hour in between storms and I went for it. I’m glad I did. Easily the best paddle I’ve had so far.…

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Matt Krizan paddled the California coast in a 36-day expedition. Dave Shivley wrote about what Krizan learned for Canoe & Kayak. Here is what happened on day two: Four miles offshore, the zip-tie linking his left steering pedal to the rudder snaps. Krizan must act. He spots a channel through 8-foot faces breaking on what…

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I’ve been following Guillaume Kurkdjian’s Tumblr for awhile. He posts “weekly animated gifs”. But, what’s better than a gif? An animation with sound. Vehicle #4 – Food Truck from Guillaume Kurkdjian on Vimeo. Check out his recent videos on Vimeo.

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Richard Banfield, on Medium, in a piece titled The Myth of the Design Studio Turned Product Company relates how he feels it got started by 37Signals: In the process of doing that they unknowingly started the mythology that every design or development studio should become a product company. I’ll just state, flat out, that not…

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Jim Dalrymple, on The Loop: Apple introduced a new Photos app during its Worldwide Developers Conference that will become the new platform for the company. As part of the transition, Apple told me today that they will no longer be developing its professional photography application, Aperture. I have a hard time caring anymore. Photo storage,…

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Speaking of Wolfram Alpha (I mentioned them yesterday). Wolfram Alpha was used to try to predict the outcome of the World Cup. Again, Brazil is the favorite, but with a 32% chance to win now. After its impressive victory against Spain, the Netherlands’ odds jumped to 23.5%: it is now the second favorite. Germany (21.6%)…

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I do not think it is fair to compare Apple’s WWDC keynote with Google’s I/O keynote. It should be fair. But the two simply do not compare. It should be fair because WWDC and I/O are both developer conferences. WWDC and I/O both begin by largely attended, well rehearsed, staged keynotes by top executives at…

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This piece on The Wire is over a year old but this morning Unmark reminded me that I had read it last year around this time. I think it still rings very true today. In general it speaks to how the perks of the modern-day tech company are really a waving-of-the-hands to entice people to…

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The team behind my favorite, yet now defunct, service for collaborating on the written word — Editorially — is joining Vox Media to work on Product. From the outside this seems like an excellent fit for both teams. But, also important, it will work out for those of us that loved Editorially in two key…

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This is my Great Grandfather’s pocket-watch. A few weeks ago my father gave it to me and I wore it for the first time yesterday. I have a lot to say about it, but for now due to time I will just say this… this watch is at least 70 years old, has never been…

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Frank Chimero did a wonderful “Ask Me Anything” session on Designer News earlier this week. I loved this bit about the window of approval on your own work: Writing and publishing a book is hard. Here‘s the tough part: you have a window of approval on your own work. For me, I typically only like the…

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I paddled for about an hour last night on the way home from work. I think I’m starting to get used to this routine. Of course, there is a square crop.

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Tom Taylor, the maker of Satellite Eyes (among other things), has been working on a way for people to receive print versions of the things they’d like to read online. It is called PaperLater. He writes: PaperLater lets you save the good bits of the web to print, so you can enjoy them away from…

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In an effort to further confuse us as to which of their apps to use for what purpose… Facebook introduces Slingshot. The app isn’t yet available but there is more detail on TechCrunch. The “reply to receive” is interesting and has been sort of present in other apps like Rando.

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Tony Stark, I mean, Elon Musk on the Tesla company blog: At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. He also writes that “Tesla…

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My good friend, and co-writer of Space Bits, Yaron Schoen was recently interviewed in Net Magazine — which takes the name Creative Bloq online for inexplicable reasons: I honestly am not so sure that the tech community fully embraced the role of the designer as much as it likes to claim it did. I have…

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Joshua Hammer on Matter/Medium in Einstein’s Camera: Adam Magyar is a computer geek, a college dropout, a self-taught photographer, a high-tech Rube Goldberg, a world traveler, and a conceptual artist of growing global acclaim. Good piece. What an amazing talent Magyar is. I suggest you check out his site.

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Jurassic World, the fourth installment in the Jurassic Park franchise, is coming next June. E! Online has a few preview images and says this about the synopsis: Jurassic World takes place 22 years after the original blockbuster Jurassic Park. In director Colin Trevorrow‘s upcoming sequel, Pratt plays a scientist who conducts behavioral research on raptors.…

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Last night I stumbled across this tweet from Neill Cameron on Twitter. Which I favorited. Which automatically syncs with my Unmark account. Which led me to his new site this morning. Which led me to discover his Pirates of Pangea gallery. A wooden ship, on top of a Brachiosaurus, with a girl riding a T-Rex…

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The special effects in Jurassic Park were originally planned to use animatronics, stop-motion animation, and other traditional effects of the time. But, contrary to the opinions of some, a few “mavericks” at ILM thought they could pull it all off digitally. If I listened to “You will never”, T-Rex would have never have been built. Great video.…

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On average I save the lives of three or four of these each time I mow my lawn.

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Also, an Instagram crop.

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Want to learn Swift, the new programming language from Apple? I’d say start by watching the WWDC Session videos. Then, hit up this curated list of Swift resources. /via Marc Edwards on Twitter.

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Horace Dediu: For them WWDC had a great deal of meat. Indeed, for them, it was probably the most significant event Apple ever staged. Again, agreed. It took all my strength not to capitalize Earth. Perhaps Dediu meant dirt. So I’ll leave it.

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Mandy Brown: You cannot know what you know until you’ve written it. As you write, you learn what you know—or, more likely, what you don’t know, which, let’s face it, is most everything. I have hundreds of unpublished drafts for this blog, yet, I’m so happy that I wrote them because I was able to…

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There are hundreds of thousands of third-party apps that you can use on your computer, phone, and tablet. Some of them are amazingly good and far better in a number of ways than what ships with these devices by default. By using third-party apps, however, you sometimes give up a level of seamless integration between…

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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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