Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. I write about what interests me such as blogging, photography, technology, social media, and my personal creative projects.
Series: Diversions, WIS, typicalday
Topics: blogging, photography, programming
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My tips for new iOS 11 upgraders
I’ve been using the iOS 11 public betas on my iPhone and iPad for several releases and I think it is one of the most important updates to iOS. It brings lifesaving features to the iPhone and powerful features to the iPad. Tomorrow iOs 11 is being released to the public, I thought I’d jot
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Many are sweating over a notch on a phone while Space X is making trips to Earth’s orbit routine.
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Attending September’s NEPA.js meetup
On September 12th, NEPA.js held its September meetup. Anthony Altieri presented on beacons – the typically small Bluetooth devices that “chirp” some very basic information multiple times per second allowing app developers to understand the proximity of a user. This allows for things like understanding where a shopper is in a retail space. His overview
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Firefox Multi-Account Containers
moz://a: The Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension lets you carve out a separate box for each of your online lives – so Exhaustive Shopping Researcher Self can steer clear of Humble Bragging Social Self, and Super Professional Work Self can go about the bizness without worrying about being followed by those other two. What a fantastic feature
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Matt Mullenweg on Automattic’s use of React
Matt Mullenweg: I’m here to say that the Gutenberg team is going to take a step back and rewrite Gutenberg using a different library. It will likely delay Gutenberg at least a few weeks, and may push the release into next year. Automattic will also use whatever we choose for Gutenberg to rewrite Calypso —
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Pacific coast, Higuera Blanca, Punta de Mita, Nayarit, Mexico
Pacific coast, Higuera Blanca, Punta de Mita, Nayarit, Mexico
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Repost: Ike on Twitter re: the iPhone X notch
👉 Ike: So here’s a nice wallpaper for your iPhone X, OWNING the notch. (be sure to follow the link) /via Mike Rundle on Twitter.
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Cassini dies tomorrow
Lee Billings for Scientific American: All good things must come to an end. For NASA’s Cassini orbiter—its fuel dwindling after 13 years exploring Saturn, along with the planet’s sprawling rings and dozens of icy moons—the end will come Friday at 7:55 A.M. Eastern time. That’s when mission planners project radio communications will be lost with
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Jason Washo interviewed on tecBRIDGE Radio
Jason Washo, owner of Sho Technology Solutions in downtown Scranton and someone who I’ve worked with on multiple client projects and who has become a friend over the last year, was recently interviewed on tecBRIDGE Radio. Here’s just one bit: I work hard, and I will work to bring things to close and I think
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John George shares a solution
John George, fellow NEPA.js attendee: I’m writing this because I discovered the hard way that .NET Core’s ‘dotnet run’ command is NOT meant to be production ready. My biggest headache was that my website shut down when I exited my shell. Not even the ‘disown’command would dissociate the running service from the user. Posts like this
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_DavidSmith on the Apple Watch Series 3
_DavidSmith: While I’ll have to live with it for a few weeks to see if it really pans out, imagining a future where my iPhone is no longer a ‘must carry’ device is remarkable. This is why I’m ordering one. As I said I would.
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Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”
Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also
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Dan Kimbrough reviews the Samsung Galaxy Note8
Dan Kimbrough seems to love his Note8. However, he did offer this one caveat: The one big let down I have is the speaker. It’s weak and poorly located. There’s only one speaker for media playback. At the bottom, to the right of the charging port. If you’re left handed, that’s probably where your pinky
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Get your NEPA BlogCon 2017 Tickets
NEPA BlogCon 2017 tickets are available: Attendees can expect presentations and roundtable discussions on branding, content development, podcasting, vlogging, and more. I like the format changeup. (See also) Looks like some friends are presenting as well. Go grab your tickets.
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Repost: Conan O’Brien on Twitter
👉 Conan O’Brien: When in Tel-Aviv… (be sure to follow the link)
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Repost: Maciej Cegłowski re: iPhone X
👉 Maciej Cegłowski: iPhone X summary: wireless charging (with wire), all-screen display (with black bar) and sleek, flat shape (with camera bump)
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From a beachfront balcony in Mexico (audio)
Recorded on September 1, 2017 A quick audio bit from the Pacific coast of Mexico. Download Audio File.
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Repost: Daring Fireball on the iPhone X notch
👉 John Gruber: Long story short: embrace the notch.
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Repost: Mike Rundle on Twitter re: the iPhone X notch
👉 Mike Rundle: In landscape the notch literally chops out part of the video. Can’t believe they didn’t indent it a little bit.
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Tom Dale: \”Compilers are the new frameworks\”
Tom Dale, Senior Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn and co-creator of Ember.js, in a post where he argues that compilers are the new web frameworks: Native code tends to have the luxury of not really caring about file size—a small 40MB iOS app would get you laughed out of the room on the web. And
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Add favicons to tabs in Safari
Faviconographer: Faviconographer is a little utility that displays Favicons for the tabs you have opened in the current Safari window, just like almost every other browser does it. Magic. /via Daring Fireball.
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Clinton, PA – July 2017
Clinton, PA – July 2017
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CNN lite
Remarkable find by Jack Baty, CNN Lite: I could not love this more. Can we get all of the news sites to do this? I can’t tell if this is official or not. Either way, bookmarked.
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Python is blowing up
David Robinson, not The Admiral, for Stack Overflow: We recently explored how wealthy countries (those defined as high-income by the World Bank) tend to visit a different set of technologies than the rest of the world. Among the largest differences we saw was in the programming language Python. When we focus on high-income countries, the
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Repost: Mike Rundle on Twitter
👉 Mike Rundle: The new top-end iPhone will have a notch. New top-end Android phones (V30, S8) do not. Hard for Apple to spin that.
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Wishes for Apple’s Fall Media Event
On Tuesday Apple is holding its Fall Media Event. Thanks to a rogue Apple employee, who I can only imagine is packing their personal affects as I type this, the rumor mill has been working overtime and it appears as though we “know” just about every detail one could imagine prior to this event short
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Mobile blogging goals (audio)
Recorded September 10, 2017 Starting with this audio bit I’m making a few changes. I’m ditching the episode numbers. My audio bits are not a podcast, they aren’t really episodes, and keeping track of the numbers is just more work. I will, however, denote in the title that this is an audio post. I’m also
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Prompton State Park – July 2017
Prompton State Park – July 2017 I’m just getting to look at some photos I made with the drone in July.
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Jack Baty: “Please just start a blog”
Jack Baty on his rather handsome looking new blog: Would you all please just start a blog? I don’t care which platform you choose. Pick one and publish. Cross-post or don’t. Implement Webmentions or don’t. Allow comments or don’t. Tweak the design to within an inch of its life or don’t. Publish long posts or
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A unique color for every address in the world
A recent, yet-to-be-announced client project had me designing a mobile app interface that dealt a lot with showing locations and events that are happening at certain locations (how is that for vague? sorry). While I utilized the brand’s colors to represent certain sections of the app I wanted the app to have tons of colors
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Chris Lovie-Tyler on supporting different building blocks of the IndieWeb
Chris Lovie-Tyler, from the other side of our planet: After reading a handful of Colin Devroe’s posts (links at the bottom), I’ve made a few decisions. I’m glad my posts, in which I was just thinking out loud and forming my own opinions on these matters, helped him to form his. I believe everyone should
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David Nield: \”RSS still beats Facebook and Twitter\”
David Nield on Gizmodo: Whether you’ve never heard of it before or you’ve abandoned it for pastures new, here’s why you should be using RSS for your news instead of social media. I’ve used RSS since it was released and feed readers began to appear and I don’t see a future of the web without
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Repost: Emily Lakdawalla on Voyager’s 40th Anniversary
👉 Emily Lakdawalla on The Planetary Society blog: The fact that both Voyager spacecraft are still functioning and doing science, 40 years after their launches, is reason for optimism. We can build robust, adaptable machines capable of surviving unpredicted storms and responding to new discoveries. We can build them, launch them, and stably operate them for
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Florence’s two moons
Center for NEO Studies PR on Astronomy Now: Radar images of asteroid 3122 Florence obtained at the 70-metre antenna at NASA’s Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex between August 29 and September 1 have revealed that the asteroid has two small moons, and also confirmed that main asteroid Florence is about 4.5 km (2.8 miles) in
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Reading Ready Player One, Downtown Scranton – July 2017 Easily my favorite book this year. Eliza just finished it too. I may want to read it again before the movie comes out.
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Repost: Noah Read on Trevorrow’s exit
👉 Noah Read: Heard the news about SW IX director. After seeing how Disney handled Rogue One’s director and the results I’m optimistic. They seem to be good stewards, with the humility to make changes when necessary. See also.
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Rian Johnson: \”Luke is The Last Jedi\”
Rian Johnson in The New York Times: It’s in the opening crawl of “The Force Awakens.” Luke Skywalker, right now, is the last Jedi. There’s always wiggle room in these movies — everything is from a certain point of view — but coming into our story, he is the actual last of the Jedi. And
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Colin Trevorrow out as Star Wars Episode IX Director
Bryan Bishop reporting for The Verge: Lucasfilm’s creative process has been a bit of a mess lately. Rogue One had to undergo extensive reshoots before release, and earlier this year producer Kathleen Kennedy took the extraordinary step of firing directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller of the standalone Han Solo film just two weeks before
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E19: Launching Summit’s public beta
Recorded on August 23 2017. A quickly captured audio bit while walking to get a coffee the day after launching Summit’s public beta. Download MP3.
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Luke Skywalker is The Last Jedi
Earlier this week I rewatched Star Wars Episode VII. It is really great. Most of the criticisms of the film do not hold up well. It is fun, engaging the entire time, and the actors are perfect. And the film fits in perfectly with the other 3 originals. One thing I’m surprised about, and was
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Microsoft holding Surface Keynote in October
Tom Warren for The Verge: Microsoft’s Surface chief will hold a keynote speech in London at the end of October. The software giant is holding its annual Future Decoded event in London from October 31st to November 1st, and Microsoft revealed to The Verge today that Panos Panay will be speaking. Microsoft typically launches new
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Just off Old Mining Road 3, Archbald, PA – June 2017
Just off Old Mining Road 3, Archbald, PA – June 2017 I haven’t been on a proper hike since July 29 and I’m starting to get the itch.
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Colin Walker: \”Should replies be posts?\”
Colin Walker, in a post on whether or not replies to other posts (or, comments) should be their own posts: There has to be a line, a point where a comment is just that and not a reply. It’s a question of semantics but not everyone’s answer to "what is a comment and where does
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Microsoft Windows Mixed Reality
In this video Tom Warren of The Verge uses some mixed reality headsets for Windows. Watching them I’m reminded just how far this industry has to go. I’d call much of what I see in this video very much beta-level hardware and software. It has only been 5 months since I wrote the aforelinked piece
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Voyager’s 40th Anniversary
East coasters keep your lunchtime open on Tuesday as NASA is celebrating Voyager’s 40th Anniversary. Check out this description from APOD: Launched in 1977 on a tour of the outer planets of the Solar System, Voyager 1 and 2 have become the longest operating and most distant spacecraft from Earth. Nearly 16 light-hours from the
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Sunsets over the Pacific have their own special feel.