Blog

  • Split-Screen on El Capitan

    Josh Ginter: It’s taken a little while, but OS X El Capitan’s split-screen multitasking (see also, iOS 9 for iPad) has become one of my favourite features of Apple’s latest desktop OS. Ditto.

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  • Analog remembrances

    Sarah Pressler, also a fellow Coalworker by extension via Texas since she is our Project Manager at Plain, writes about giving up note taking on paper: I’m not willing to give up on my love for paper, planners, and photos from film, but I think it’s time I join the 21st century and stop taking […]

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  • Ben Brooks is doing his own NaNoWriMo

    You’ve likely heard of NaNoWriMo. Ben Brooks wants to take part but in his own way: I would write a novel, but honestly I have no good ideas for one, and did not have time to plan out a novel before November. I only decided to do this thing a week ago. I could probably […]

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  • I don’t know if I “Like” your tweet yet

    Twitter is pulling a switcharoo on Favorites and is now calling them Likes and using a heart icon rather than a star icon. People went a little nuts about this for a variety of reasons but I’m writing this post to point to when/if people ask me why I liked, or didn’t like, a particular […]

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  • Kayaking in Back Bay, Sandbridge, Virginia

    In late-September Eliza and I drove to Sandbridge, Virginia for two weeks with a bunch of friends, food, beer, and of course the kayaks. The first week was a wet, raining, windy disgusting mess. But that didn’t stop my niece from Florida, Leyana, and I from getting out and doing some paddling in the rain. […]

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  • Nick Semon’s Mock Nines

    Nick Semon, fellow Coalworker, has started a blog called Mock Nines. This from an entry on Apple Cider Donuts: I type this in the immediate vicinity of an empty bag, which previously was the second-to-final resting place of a half dozen of these not-actually-apple-flavored fried innertubes of spongy delightfulness. They now rest in pieces, masticated […]

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  • Scranton does not understand bicycling

    The aforementioned Nick Semon on his attempt to pick up a bike plate today: I stopped into the Licensing, Inspections, and Permits office today. They handle everything from building permits to food trucks to entertainment licenses. But all three of the friendly folks had never even heard of a bike license plate. Scranton Pennsylvania does not […]

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  • Ben Brooks: Death to Analytics

    Ben Brooks: If you are starting a new blog, or have one already, the best thing you can do is turn off all analytics. If you are worried about knowing when your site is “big” then worry no more. Trust me when I tell you: you will know when you site is big, with or […]

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  • Pogue leaves Evernote

    David Pogue on his Tumblog: But here’s the thing: Over time, Evernote has grown bulky, complex, and buggy. He also shares how he moved to Apple Notes using an AppleScript. See: here, and here.

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  • Woman Entrepreneur Monday

    Joanne Wilson, blogger, entrepreneur, traveler, investor, uses her Monday morning blog post to feature a woman entrepreneur. Great idea — especially given her perspective. My only critique would be that she doesn’t link to the women’s Twitter, web sites, company web sites, etc.

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  • Fitbit hack

    Darren Pauli for The Register: Attacks over Bluetooth require an attacker hacker to be within metres of a target device. This malware can be delivered 10 seconds after devices connect, making even fleeting proximity a problem. Testing the success of the hack takes about a minute, although it is unnecessary for the compromise. So, attack […]

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  • I’m sad that White Oak Pond is being drained

    Above: A panorama I took at White Oak Pond on October 20, 2015. My favorite place to paddle within 25 minutes of my front door is White Oak Pond in Waymart, PA. And now, due to the dam in the area being structurally unsound and having no budget to fix it, it is being drained. […]

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  • A great developer can come from anywhere

    Finally a voice of reason in all this hoopla around Marco and Overcast 2 — Manton Reece on his blog: We often see someone go from nothing to a top app in the App Store. We often see someone start without an audience and then make friends on Twitter and blogs through the quality of […]

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  • Brent Pennington’s photos from NEPA BlogCon 2015

    Brent Pennington, official photographer for NEPA BlogCon 2015, on his blog: I’ve had a unique perspective on BlogCon, both by being the organization’s official photographer and due to the fact that I live with one of the co-organizers. From it’s humble upstart beginnings, NEPA BlogCon has grown and matured into a powerful, full-featured conference that […]

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  • Clean out a messy “Open With” menu in Finder

    Dan Moren on Six Colors: We’re used to cruft accumulating in all sorts of unwanted places in our lives, but among my least favorite is the Finder’s Open With contextual menu. Follow the link to see how to do it. Good tip.

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  • Great Scott! A Back to the Future Art Show, hosted by Coalwork, begins tomorrow

    Kyle Ruane, my partner at Plain and Coalwork, is hosting a Back to the Future art show that begins tomorrow at 6pm and runs through the end of November. Should be a grand time. I’ll be bringing my GoPro.

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  • Bradley Chambers leaves Evernote

    Bradley Chambers: As of 10/18/15, I’ve completely left Evernote. What started out as a simple “delete notes that are not longer needed” project, ended with me completely exporting everything out. Evernote hasn’t added a feature in a long time that I cared about. Keep in mind that Bradley literally wrote the book on Evernote. Evernote […]

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  • Paper by Dropbox

    New note writing thingy from Dropbox named something completely original; Paper. Remember this?

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  • Paddelfahrrad

    Paddelfahrrad is German for “paddle bike”. Kai Eggemann and Michael Meyer-Coors created a prototype paddle bike and it works pretty well. Supposedly they are moving forward on making these through start-up funding and crowd funding. Good for those two. Fun thing to work on. /via Paddling.net

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  • Evernote or Notes?

    Brett Kelly ponders the switch from Evernote to Notes and the differences between the two services. While listing the main differences he remarks: Evernote works on platforms beside OS X; if you’re all hot to trot with Notes.app and you have a Windows computer at work, Notes becomes a whole lot less usable. This isn’t […]

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  • A Simple Secret to Better Street Photography

    DL Cade writing for 500px: Motion. Simple as that. In my experience scrolling through thousands of photos every single day, the street photos that make me stop and stare, the ones that captivate my imagination, imply a before and after to the frame they captured, and they do this through the use of motion. Yup.

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  • DuckDuckGo News Search

    Searching for a term which results in news stories is getting better and better over on DDG, my search engine of choice on all of my devices: With better coverage, you can expect to see news show up more often and in more relevant situations. The visuals were updated to improve readability and make the […]

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  • Overcast 2 is free

    Overcast, the podcast player I use on my iPhone every single day, just got a rather nice update. Marco Arment: After a year of work, Overcast 2 is now available as a free update for everyone. It’s mostly a major under-the-hood improvement, with relatively few user-facing changes. But they’re pretty good, I think. I think […]

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  • WeWork valued at $10B

    Nitasha Tiku for BuzzFeed on WeWork’s recent round of financing: The company has raised $1 billion in less than half a decade, and its valuation has grown commensurately. In February 2014, WeWork’s financiers said it was worth $1.5 billion. In December 2014, a new set of financiers pumped that number up to $5 billion. Half […]

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  • Ad control

    Something else to consider during this ad blocking and ad serving conversation is that if you publish your words, photos, sounds, videos on your own web site you can control the ads that are shown on it. In fact you can choose to show none at all. If you share these things on sites, services, or […]

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  • Kayaking Dunn Pond in September

    I shared a few photos from my paddle in August and I plan on sharing some from paddles in October, November, and December. Hold me to it. I don’t mind getting cold to catalog how the pond changes over the next few months this fall. Here are a few photos from last Friday, September 11th. […]

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  • Sleep++

    From _David Smith, the creator of Pedometer++ (which I highly recommend) comes Sleep++ — an app for Apple Watch that monitors how you sleep at night based on your movement. This obviously creates an issue since most people would charge their Apple Watch while they sleep. He offers this solution: The TL/DR is to charge […]

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  • Unblocking The Deck

    I run Ghostery in Safari on my Mac. Currently I’m allowing Google Analytics (stats), Adobe TypeKit (fonts), and The Deck (ads). Here is why The Deck is the only ad network I’m currently allowing through. Some may block TypeKit for speed but I don’t mind a small amount of load time to read the current […]

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  • A little bit on ads

    I am not all that eager to jump into the recent discussion on ads and ad blocking. Over the last near decade, however, I’ve mentioned advertising a few times here on my blog so I decided to go back and curate a few pull-quotes that help to show my opinion on the subject. Here are the […]

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  • Ditched the Tracking

    Nick Wynja writing on his personal blog about completely ditching any analytics: I’m interested in seeing if anything will change with what I publish since I no longer have analytics telling me what people are clicking on. I’ve never paid too much attention to this site’s (admittedly small) traffic numbers, nor experimented much with topic […]

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  • Using Reminders to create travel maps

    Gabe Weatherhead at MacDrifter on using Reminders to create lists of map locations: Reminders is also great for vacation planning. I keep a list of map locations for New England breweries in Reminders. When I recently took a trip to Portland Maine, it was a simple task to put the map list in the order […]

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  • Photos from NEPA BlogCon 2015

    To date I’ve been typing NEPA BlogCon as NEPABlogcon — the organizers of the event can please accept my deepest apologies. I’ve gone back and fixed my mistake. This past weekend’s event was very well attended, executed, staffed, and organized. Kudos to all that volunteers to make the event go smoothly. Here are a few […]

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  • The future of TV

    I strongly dislike the TV model. The always-on, million channel, ad ridden model. But I love watching things on my TV. So, for many years Eliza and I have had both a DVR and Apple TV connected to our living room, pub, and bedroom TVs. This has allowed us to control the TV model to […]

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  • At NEPA BlogCon on Saturday

    As I said in early August, Kyle and I are going to NEPA BlogCon again this year. Both of our businesses; Coalwork and Plain, are sponsors and we each purchased a personal ticket. I’ll be the guy with the GoPro camera clicking away. Will we see you there?

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  • Neocities and the distributed web

    The discussion started by the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle that I linked too earlier this month is starting to ripple out over the web. Neocities, a free web site hosting service, has implemented IPFS — which is shorthand for a peer-to-peer filesystem. Starting today, all Neocities web sites are available for viewing, archiving, and hosting […]

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  • Photos that will make you want to go kayaking

    If the kayking photos that I publish to my blog or Instagram aren’t enough to get you into the water perhaps 500px’s latest post will help.

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  • The unfollow Q&A

    Since I’ve covered this topic in several sprawling posts here on my blog I wanted a single place to link to about why I unsubscribe from all feeds and unfollow nearly all Twitter accounts a few times a year. Here are some questions I’ve gotten about it. Why go through all of the trouble? Doesn’t it […]

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  • Fire with friends

    A few times a year a few of our friends get together, start a fire in a field, set off a few fireworks, and enjoy each other’s company. Here are a few photos from the last two fires.

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  • Ben Brooks’ iPhone home screen

    Ben Brooks on The Brooks Review writing about removing mental overhead on his iPhone’s home screen: The most immediate change that you notice: there is a lot less mental overhead involved in using your phone. If you take a look at my current home screen you can see that I have only 16 visible app […]

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  • Clearing Safari’s cache without deleting your history or cookies

    I like to keep my browsing history and cookies intact for as long as possible. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve searched my browser’s history to find a site I viewed months ago. And, cookies keep me logged into the services I use most. The latest version of Safari keeps a single year of […]

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  • Distributed web

    Fascinating read on Brewster Kahle’s blog (he founded the Internet Archive) about restructuring the fabric of the web to be distributed like the Internet is. Contrast the current Web to the Internet—the network of pipes on top of which the World Wide Web sits. The Internet was designed so that if any one piece goes […]

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  • Paddling White Oak Pond in July

    Last paddling season I managed to squeeze a paddle in a few times per week. Perhaps I did this because it was new to me (last year was my first time kayaking) and I didn’t mind folding and unfolding the Oru 8 times a week. This season I’ve gotten out a little less so as […]

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  • The new NetNewsWire

    The app that keeps on ticking… NetNewsWire 4 for Mac and iOS has been released by the folks at Black Pixel. Syncing is free. Nice.

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  • You can buy BB-8

    Given my site’s new theme (which purposefully looks as if I coded it when I was 16 in celebration of the new Star Wars film this December) I’d be remiss not to link to this story on The Verge about BB-8. What a great toy.

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  • Countr

    Super simple yet incredibly great iOS application from Josh Hrach, Countr helps you count things without needing to write down a bunch of numbers. The app is quick and small. I can think of a few good reasons to have this app and I can’t think of any reasons not to.

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  • Flash-free clipboard

    For years and years the only way to create a button on a web site that would copy something to the visitor’s clipboard was to use a Flash shim of sorts since Flash had an API that could access the clipboard. It looks like Mozilla is going to step in and change that requirement where JavaScript […]

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  • Developers helping designers

    Kylie Timpani writing on the Humaan blog: The tricky thing, however, is that people are now finding themselves in unknown territory unsure of how exactly they should contribute. While I’m not a developer I have had conversations with developers where they have specifically pointed out that they don’t think it is their place to offer […]

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  • Picking up a second kayak

    A few weeks ago a friend told us he was willing to part with his kayak. I knew I wanted it immediately because I knew it was only a year old, I knew how much it was worth, and he was parting with it for a very fair price. However, I hadn’t yet gotten cross […]

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  • Issues with iOS 8.4.1

    Until recently iOS 8 has been a fairly solid release. I had issues with iCloud syncing — as everyone has — since the beginning but overall iOS 8 – 8.4 gave me little trouble. I do not know if updating my iOS devices (iPhone 6, iPad Air 2) to iOS 8.4.1 is the culprit but […]

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  • Sandbridge Virginia 2014

    In less than a month we’ll be heading back to Sandbridge, VA for a little getaway. We don’t normally go to the same location back-to-back for vacations but we had a great time last year and we hope to repeat it. Here are a few photos from the GoPro from last year. I know, I […]

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Writing helps me think more clearly and to form or transform my opinions. I write about what interests me such as blogging, photography, technology, social media, and my personal creative projects.


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