Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
Solid gold. Jason Santa Maria recalls his journey into design in his interview on The Great Discontent: From the beginning, whenever I was in a position to tutor or mentor someone, I was always up for it. I want to leave a mark in a way that helps other people to be better and if I have knowledge…
Seth Godin: If you can influence the outcome, do the work. If you can't influence the outcome, ignore the possibility. It's merely a distraction. That second part is very hard for me.
Jean-Henri Fabre, circa 1879 in Souvenirs Entomologiques: We all have our own talents, our special gifts. Sometimes these gifts seem to come to us from our forefathers, but more often it is difficult to trace their origin. A goatherd, perhaps, amuses himself by counting little pebbles and doing sums with them. He becomes an astoundingly quick reckoner, and…
Don't worry, I won't take a photo of every fire. Wait, maybe I will.
While most of my friends hate them, I love them. $3 at Goodwill.
It is a bit of a moving target at the moment (presumably it is being removed as quickly as possible) but a preview of Adele's theme song for the upcoming James Bond film Skyfall can be found right here. Update: Within seconds of me posting this link it has vanished yet again. Doing a search on Soundcloud for…
App.net is no longer $50/yr. You can choose to pay monthly at $5 or for the year at $36. Is this a response to Tent.is coming out for free with a $12 a month plan for "early adopter" status? I don't know. But either way, if the way forward is going to be a paid social networking solution…
More exploring is sorely needed.
Tent.io is a decentralized Twitter-esque social networking "protocol". Tent.is is for those of us that would like to use Tent.io but don't feel like managing our own server. I have no idea where this is going to go, but I signed up anyway to poke around. This is an interesting time in the social web.
Me, over four years ago: As it stands I post what I’m currently doing to Twitter, I am testing out Pownce with mobile blogging, events, links, and files, I post mobile phone photos to Flickr (as well as the occasional screenshot), videos go on Viddler, bookmarks end up on Ma.gnolia, tasting notes end up on Cork’d, and my thoughts on Appleproducts find their way toTUG.n. What a…
James Duncan Davidson: The light did its thing a few times. For a little bit, it looked like the sunset was going to get lost in clouds rolling in from the west. But then we got a reprieve and sunset kicked in in a wonderful way. We all picked a bit of a different thing to focus on….
Simplenote for iOS, an app I use every single day, is now iPhone 5 ready. Grab it!
Tim Cook: We launched Maps initially with the first version of iOS. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better Maps including features such as turn-by-turn directions, voice integration, Flyover and vector-based maps. In order to do this, we had to create a new version of Maps from the ground up. This reads as…
Tapbots is on App.net. If Tweetbot worked with ADN it'd, quite simply, change everything for ADN. /via Steve Streza on Twitter (which says something, I think).
This was eluded to in Kara Swisher's aforelinked piece but it wasn't spelled out quite as well as this, by Nicolas Carlson at Business Insider: Mayer's rule: If a new product can't be shipped in six months, and if it doesn't have a realistic shot of reaching 100 million users or generate $100 million toward the company's top…
Scott McNulty flies across country using the new Passbook app in iOS 6: It seems to me that Passbook is a clever idea, but honestly having my eTicket with the QR code emailed to me (or just using the one displayed in the United app) would have been simpler. Once you get the ticket into Passbook it is…
Matt Van Hoven: Bottom line, flat structures create confusion about where power lies, because eventually someone has to be in charge – whether because a client demands it or a job won't get done unless someone takes charge. Van Hoven leaves off an important point; it really depends on the type of start-up whether or not a flat…
Bret Victor: Because my work was cited as an inspiration for the Khan system, I felt I should respond with two thoughts about learning: How could I possibly avoid linking to this? See also: Inventing on Principle.
Alexandar Safonov's bull shark photos are awesome. All of his work is.
Giancarlo Ditrapano in an interview with Casey Neistat (aforementioned) regarding advertising on his very popular YouTube channel: In April, YouTube began allowing all of its the users the option of earning ad revenue from their uploads, a seemingly ideal situation for a guy like Neistat, who self-finances the vast majority of his films and has already logged more…
Tom Mylan for Gilt Taste: In the game of food dork one-upsmanship, the rarer you order your steak, the more of a real gastronome you are—it means you like your meat good and a little dangerous, like it was meant to be. That is why I like to order my steak "still mooing with the hooves on".
Ben Brooks: I haven’t noticed the lack of simultaneous data, as I figured I would rarely notice it. I have yet to not have LTE coverage in the areas I have roamed around in. The family plan thing was a piece of cake. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto.
Chris Dixon has a good post about the shift from sales-driven software efforts to product-driven software efforts. Thus enterprise software went from being about sales (one-to-one) to being about marketing (one-to-many). Marketing requires crafting a compelling message, figuring out the right channels and then optimizing. But the most effective marketing isa compelling product that can be easily tried….
From the backyard. I'm looking forward to shooting a lot more this fall with the iPhone 5.