Author: Colin Devroe
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Rob Cockerham makes clear ice
Rob Cockerham was determined to make clear ice in his home refrigerator. It took him well over a dozen different tries and methods. Until: Around this time, I spotted a crystal-clear ice sculpture of Optimus Prime on Reddit. I asked in the comments how they got the ice so clear and was sent a link…
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App.net Hackathon recap
The official ADN blog: The fourth #adnhackation was this past Saturday, and, as always, developers worked on some extremely creative and inventive projects, which open up new uses for an App.net account. Really hard to believe this was the fourth hackathon already. As in the past, some great projects seemed to have come from this…
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Jared Sinclair on the new Dark Sky
Jared Sinclair, on his personal blog, on the new Dark Sky: The raw idea for the redesign is good; the three-panel view with a side panel for the globe is an interesting riff on two established navigation patterns. But the execution is sloppy. It lacks clarity. It fails to shape the data into visually coherent…
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How Van Gogh‘s Sunflowers came into bloom
Not everyone understood Van Gogh’s work at first. Frances Spalding for The Gaurdian: The artist Henry de Groux threatened to remove his own work from the 1890 exhibition if he found it in the same room as “the laughable pot of sunflowers by Mr Vincent“. A recent trip to MoMA in New York City has…
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Killing the Crunch Mode Antipattern
Chad Fowler, CTO of 6Wunderkinder, has written a post on his personal blog about how our industry glorifies working long hours and how it is ironically counterproductive. I agree and in general Chad is spot on. I’ve helped lead and develop software products for 15 years of my career and this is the lesson that takes…
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Revival Letterpress in Scranton, PA
A friend of our team, Matthew Hiller, has a great letterpress shoppe in Scranton, PA and his little business got covered in our local newspaper: Each order begins with a client consultation, followed by a briefing at which Mr. Hiller presents ideas for the design either on his computer or with handset type. He shows…
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The Mac turns 30
We’ve come a long way in 30 years. Steven Levy, writing for Rolling Stone in 1984: On a pleasant, light background (you can later change the background to any of a number of patterns, if you like), little pictures called “icons“ appear, representing choices available to you. A word-processing program might be represented by a…
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“There are no black holes” – Stephen Hawking
I’m not going to even pretend to fully grasp this, however, I simply had so link to it. Stephen Hawking has published a paper on arXiv.org titled Information preservation and weather forecasting for black holes. He postulates, and somewhat contradicts his own theories from decades past, that black holes aren’t exactly as we think they are.…
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There was a supernova in the Cigar Galaxy yesterday
Well, not yesterday. Since the Cigar Galaxy, or M82, is roughly 12 million lightyears from our little hometown planet this supernova likely occurred some, well, 12 million years ago. Mike Hankey, quoting Star Wars: A New Hope, on his personal blog: Was yesterday one of those days when you felt a disturbance in the Force, as…
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No one geotags photos on Instagram
I do. MG Siegler does. But, as he writes, on his personal blog: Instagram is a service with hundreds of millions of users. And it seems that a large percentage of them are not aware of a key feature of the service. I frequently get the same question as MG does: “where was this photo taken?”…
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Building an open source Nest thermostat
Fun, neat thing Spark did. They built an open source Nest thermostat in a day: All in, we spent about $70 on components to put this together (including $39 for the Spark Core); the wood and acrylic were free. We started working at 10am and finished at 3am, with 3.5 engineers involved (one went to…
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Developer Tip Tuesday
Dara Skolnick, who has a beautiful personal blog, writes a tip on Tuesdays for developers. She has a two-part series on developing locally. As you’ve probably already figured out, WordPress is written in PHP, which is a server-side language. This means that the website has to communicate with a server in order to display the…
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Glucose level measuring smart contact lenses by Google[x]
Brian Otis and Babak Parvis on the Official Google Blog: We’re now testing a smart contact lens that’s built to measure glucose levels in tears using a tiny wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor that are embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material. Whatever we think about Google these days this sort of…
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Internet 3.0
Fred Wilson, on his personal blog, on the doomsday scenario that is likely being created by the ruling on Net Neutrality: Telcos will pick their preferred partners, subsidize the data costs for those apps, and make it much harder for new entrants to compete with the incumbents. I hope not. Oy.
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True wisdom from Ben Brooks
Chris Gonzales has started an excellent Artifacts series on his personal blog Unretrofied. His first in the series is with Ben Brooks and, well, I suppose you learn something new every day. There‘s only like a two-month span of the year where my nose isn‘t runny. These little packs of tissues are crucial. I only…
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Twitter + Stripe
Jason Del Ray & Mike Isaac, reporting for re/code, say Twitter and Stripe are near a deal to allow Twitter to accept credit cards in some fashion. I think they hit the nail on the head with their last paragraph: Or another likely scenario: Twitter could integrate Stripe’s payment processing into its “Cards” technology, allowing…
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How will the world remember landmark design on the web?
Jason Santa Maria, on The Pastry Box Project: We talk all the time on our personal and periodical sites about the latest techniques for design, but how often do we break down new designs? I mean really discuss them, not just add them to a gallery of notable sites. Jason was moved to rethink about…
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Stupid people and the stock market
I had written a much longer draft of this post called “Greed and ignorance in the stock market” but after writing what became a very long, whiny post about how I used to work at a stock brokerage and have thus learned how completely broken and stupid the entire system is — I realized it sounded…
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What does quality mean?
Derek Sivers, on his newly rejuvenated personal blog, on Quality, quoting Benjamin Joffe: In Japan, if I ask almost anyone what quality means, they’ll say, ‘it’s perfect – zero defects’. Japanese culture emphasizes the importance of striving for perfection. Fascinating yet strangely unsurprising yet still a great reminder of a read.
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Rebuilding Nilai
Timeline: In March 2012 I decided to hack away on a side project called Nilai.
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Writing is Thinking
Sally Kerrigan, on A List Apart: When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you—because it forces you to go beyond the polite cocktail-party line you use to describe what you do and really think about the impact your work has. Totally agree. I also find speaking…
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You, too, can be a geek
John Siracusa, on his personal blog, The Road to Geekdom: You don’t have to be a geek about everything in your life—or anything, for that matter. But if geekdom is your goal, don’t let anyone tell you it’s unattainable. You don’t have to be there “from the beginning” (whatever that means). You don’t have to…
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Brett Terpstra goes indie
No one can say his name correctly, but Brett Terpstra has pumped out a slew of amazing projects over the years — most of which were offered for free. Brett has decided to part ways with Aol Tech and strike out on his own. Now is the time to open your wallet and show your…
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Fuelling the iPad-as-Camera Bandwagon
Shadoe Huard, on his personal blog: I‘m officially coming out in favour of iPads as cameras. Brave man. Loosely related: Craig Mod’s piece in The New Yorker, and Apple’s new iPad ad.
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Blogging matters
Dave Winer, on why comments on a blog post turned bad: What bloggers are guilty of — always — is telling their story imperfectly. It’s the imperfections that make it interesting, and human — and worth it. I have an opinion on many things. Typically I have a rather strong opinion on many things. And…
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Comments are not dead
Tina Roth Eisenberg on Twitter: Comments are not dead. She’s right, of course. However, I don’t have comments on my blog for the following reasons. I do not want to manage them I’d much rather people respond via their own blog, Twitter or email I do not want to manage them This topic will simply…
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How to turn off Google‘s new Gmail option that allows strangers to send you emails
Yesterday The Verge revealed that Google “made it really easy for strangers to email you”. Google being Google. No one can out-Google Google. Anyway, TUAW shows how to turn it off.
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Hyperrealistic pastel drawings of icebergs by Zaria Forman
These works by Zaria Forman are simply amazing. /via Marco Suarez on Twitter.
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Software in 2014
Tim Bray on the state of Software in 2014. I agree with him on many things including: Browsers suck too. […] JavaScript is horrible. […] CSS sucks too. […] /via John “I can use whatever extension for Markdown I want” Gruber.
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Some non-tech podcasts I’ve enjoyed lately
I think when some of us hear the word podcast we immediately think of those that deal with technology or those in which a few tech nerds sit around and chat about tech-related topics. But podcasts are so much more than tech. Though they’ve been around a little while they are still a revolution. They…
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Source Code in TV and Films
If you’re even remotely geeky you’ll have noticed countless instances of code showing up in television shows and movies. And, usually, you can see that the code is total junk. In comes this tumblog which showcases code in TV and films and goes the extra mile to detail what the code is actually designed to…
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The Indie Ocean
Jared Sinclair, on his personal blog, on the potential for indie devs to up their game. My finger-to-the-wind says that apps and services aiming for mainstream consumer appeal, which were already impossibly hard, are only going to get harder in the coming years. There’s too much noise, and attention is fleeting. Any company that hasn’t…
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What blogging was
Dave Weinberger, who started blogging even before me, writes about What blogging was. Your blogroll was a list of links to the bloggers you read and engaged with. It was a way of sending people away from your site into the care of someone else who would offer up her own blogroll. Blogrolls were an…
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Will we lose the web?
Cory Doctorow, on his personal blog, is worried we’ll lose the web this year: Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. It is worrisome. “They” have always ruined everything. We know we can’t have anything nice. And for the last several decades we’ve had the…
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Writing from home
Me, last night on Twitter: I know @jkottke said blogs were dead. I know I said they were “just sleeping”. It might be Jason’s fault, but I think they’re on the upswing. Jeremy Keith has noticed too: I’m not saying that this is a trend (the sample size is far too small to draw any…
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Writing it down
Brian Doll, on his personal blog: Today, while technology has seeped into every cranny of our personal and professional lives, when a thought comes to me, when I want to remember something now, when I need to draw that sketch of an idea, or make yet another list of lists, writing it down in a…
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Yahoo News Digest
Yahoo News Digest is a new app from Yahoo in collaboration with the team behind Summly, which Yahoo purchased last year, to show you a digest of the day’s news stories twice a day. It is excellent. Summarization is only one part. Tweets, graphs, videos, etc. round out a great way to look at a…
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Jelly
Biz Stone and Ben Finkel have launched Jelly. Jelly changes how we find answers because it uses pictures and people in our social networks. In short, if you’re wondering about something and have a question you can use Jelly to ask those in your extended social network to find the answer rather than searching for…
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iOS 7 restarts
MG Siegler laments in I Got Bugs: At least two times a day now, my devices running iOS 7 will simply cease to function and restart themselves. Ditto. iOS 7 and Mavericks, although huge steps in what I feel will ultimately be the right direction for both platforms, are the buggiest versions of Apple software…
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\”Write for two people\”
Speaking of blogging, Matt Mullenweg (who knows a thing or two about blogging), gives his tips for writing on your blog and not worrying about stats and click-throughs and sensational headlines. The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will…
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\”Write for two people\”
Speaking of blogging, Matt Mullenweg (who knows a thing or two about blogging), gives his tips for writing on your blog and not worrying about stats and click-throughs and sensational headlines. The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will…
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\”Write for two people\”
Speaking of blogging, Matt Mullenweg (who knows a thing or two about blogging), gives his tips for writing on your blog and not worrying about stats and click-throughs and sensational headlines. The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will…
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\”Write for two people\”
Speaking of blogging, Matt Mullenweg (who knows a thing or two about blogging), gives his tips for writing on your blog and not worrying about stats and click-throughs and sensational headlines. The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will…
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\”Write for two people\”
Speaking of blogging, Matt Mullenweg (who knows a thing or two about blogging), gives his tips for writing on your blog and not worrying about stats and click-throughs and sensational headlines. The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will…
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\”Write for two people\”
Speaking of blogging, Matt Mullenweg (who knows a thing or two about blogging), gives his tips for writing on your blog and not worrying about stats and click-throughs and sensational headlines. The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will…
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Changes to Evernote, spurred by a blog post
Jason Kincaid wrote, on his personal blog, Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant. The post met with some very encouraging responses… Two days ago I published Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant, recounting the ongoing issues I’ve had with the service (and, more recently, serious incidents of data loss). The response has been staggering: over a hundred comments on my post, hundreds…
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\”Write for two people\”
Speaking of blogging, Matt Mullenweg (who knows a thing or two about blogging), gives his tips for writing on your blog and not worrying about stats and click-throughs and sensational headlines. The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will…
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re/code
The team behind AllThingsD, a property of the Wall Street Journal, has just launched "a new tech and media news, reviews and analysis site" re/code. And it seems that it will just be the beginning of much more to come. We are thrilled to announce that we are forming our own new and independent media…
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Inspecting view hierarchies of iOS apps
This is far too geeky and cool not to link to. Peter Steinberger has cleverly used an iOS 7 jailbreak loophole to see the view hierarchies of other iOS applications. He explains why: Why? Because it’s fun, and it can inspire you to solve things differently. Studying the view hierarchy of complex apps can be…