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
Matt Haughey, on this blog: Instagram stories feel like work, like being forced to watch ads from my friends’ lives instead of casually browse stuff at my own pace. The feed: I can just scroll through quickly, and stop on interesting photos, but Stories slow down the whole process of popping into Instagram for just a moment. Also?…
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.
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 order, which is…
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. And the new…
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 greatest contribution: getting…
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.
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, open the Photos…
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 the court? That…
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 my account again…
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 is slightly better…
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 email and unfortunately…
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.
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 puts a copy…
👉 Aaron Parecki: what if instead of webring we called it blogchain
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. The wild thing…
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 to see everything…
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 having instant access…
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 to rearrange all…
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 apparently put into…
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.
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.
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 now. That isn't…
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 both of these…
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 making Windows 10…