Blog
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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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An abandoned mini golf course in Scranton
On our way back to Coalwork after walking all the way across town for yummy Indian food last week Kyle and I saw an abandoned mini golf course.
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Tsunami stones
Martin Fackler for the NY Times in 2011: While some are so old that the characters are worn away, most were erected about a century ago after two deadly tsunamis here, including one in 1896 that killed 22,000 people. Many carry simple warnings to drop everything and seek higher ground after a strong earthquake. Others […]
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Coworking turns 10
Cat Johnson marks the 10th anniversary of coworking over on the Shareable blog: Ten years ago this month, coworking was born in San Francisco when Brad Neuberg set up some card tables and invited people to work alongside him. There are now over 3,000 coworking spaces worldwide. I’m happy to be part of coworking in […]
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Acorn 5
Gus Mueller, on his blog, about taking the time to squash bugs that weren’t even reported in Acorn: It took months and months of work, it was super boring and mind numbing and it was really hard to justify, and it made Acorn 5 super late. But we did it anyway, because something in us […]
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Disney’s steal of a deal
MG Siegler on (bleh!) 500ish/Medium: As we saw a couple days ago at Disney’s D23 Expo, the last deal is the focal point for the company for the foreseeable future. And it’s looking like it may be the steal of the bunch. He goes on to write why he thinks the Lucas/Disney deal was such […]
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Kayaking Quaker Lake and Lake Carey
Last weekend my friend Eric and I went paddling around Quaker Lake and Lake Carey; each in northeastern PA pretty close to the New York border and each equally different. Quaker Lake is a beautifully clear glacial lake that does not allow speed boats or jet skis and has some really well kept and manicure homes […]
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Getting off the treadmill
Speaking of jwz, last night he weighed-in on the continuing trend of companies pushing the culture that to succeed in tech you must never sleep. He did so by pointing to a bunch of his older blog posts on the subject. I recommend you read them. Ultimately, though, this is his message: Instead of that, […]
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HTML email
jwz: It’s possible that HTML email is my fault. Thanks Jamie. :’(
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Floating down the Delaware
Eliza and a few friends floated down the Delaware River in tubes so I joined them by paddling around with the yak.
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The value of a great Project Manager
John Ellison, who is blogging about each day that he interns at Clear Left in Brighton, UK writes about the value of a great project manager after 16 days on the job: We had so many different threads working in different directions and as soon as Clare jumped on the project the threads were working […]
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.
Series archives: Diversions, WIS, typicalday