Blog

Ed Bott, of the Ed Bott Report, reporting on ZDNet that Microsoft is shooting Windows Media Center in the head: That decision shouldn‘t come as a surprise. Media Center, once a signature feature of Windows “premium“ editions, has been on life support for years. The team developing Media Center features was broken up in 2009, […]

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If you follow me on Twitter you can probably tell that for the past 48 hours my brain is swirling around Microsoft’s Build conference and keynote. In a lot of ways my brain is swirling in the same way that it did in 2002 when I saw Steve Jobs debut the 17” iMac. This was […]

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Web people, 

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Aaron Draplin on the reaction of Hillary Clinton’s logo: Knee-jerk reactions. Cheap comparisons. Lazy remixes. Predictable reactions. So it goes. Unfortunately this is how it goes. A woman runs for President of the United States and the biggest news to come out of it is her choice of logo. I think people just like to […]

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Jeffery Zeldman on whether or not Medium is a death knell of the open web: You may think I exaggerate, but I’ve heard more than one respected colleague opine that publishing in Medium invalidates everything we independent content producers care about and represent; that it destroys all our good works with but one stroke of […]

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Chris Messina, inventor of #hashtags, on Medium: The conventional seams between disciplines are fraying, and the set of skills necessary to succeed are broader and more nebulous than they’ve been before. He waxes on about how the lines between nearly every single area inside a company are blurring more and more. His piece reminded me […]

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For the past several years our industry, the tech industry, has been pulling designers that work within it down the stack — so to speak — towards engineering. They’ve drilled into their heads that they need to learn to code or, at the very least, to be able to create functional prototypes of their designs so […]

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iGNANT interviews GIF Artist Kevin Weir. You can find more of his stuff here.

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Marco Arment on DuckDuckGo: In my experience so far, DuckDuckGo’s search is good enough the vast majority of the time. Sometimes, its results are even better than Google’s, and they’re rarely much worse. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine on all of my devices for several months. I’ve had some speed issues with […]

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Photographer Eric Smith in Going Viral on Medium: When I reviewed the pictures two weeks ago I was astounded by the juxtaposition of the young man immersed in his phone while this creature is feet away. Over the course of six shots showing the whale emerging and vanishing, he never looked up, even while the three […]

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Beautiful Maps by Dennys Hess. I love maps. /via Coudal.

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Linus Torvalds, creator of git: You can actually see how it all took shape in the git source code repository, except for the very first day or so. It took about a day to get to be “self-hosting“ so that I could start committing things into git using git itself, so the first day or […]

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In March 2013 I turned off all notifications on my phone, tablet, and computer. In May of that year I went one step further and closed most applications that would keep me distracted and only opened them when I wanted to. To this day the only notifications I get on my devices are for SMS […]

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We have a number of bird nests throughout our 3 acre property. Some I’ve seen, most I haven’t laid eyes on yet. Last year we had a Woodcock (weird bird alert) nest under our spruce trees in the backyard. See blurry photo. Each morning we have turkeys roosting throughout the forest. I love it. Here are […]

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Justin Blanton decides to muddy the waters on the definition of the word blogging even more by using textshots on Twitter to “blog”: With the advent of “textshots”—screenshots of text linked within tweets (and viewed inline on many Twitter clients)—I’ve decided to try something new with Twitter: “blogging”. Blanton is a blogging veteran so we’ll allow […]

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This is a pretty cool use of Code Pen.

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Spring, they say.

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You already read my thoughts on the Meerkat vs. Periscope debate. It is still way too early to tell. Let’s see what the next 12 months give us. Gary Vaynerchuk… a friend and business partner of mine, and investor in Meerkat, wrote on LinkedIn: I do it for my brand over my investments. So my […]

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Earlier this month I was aglow with anticipation as Dawn reached orbit around Ceres. At Coalwork we even had it marked on the public calendar thinking it’d be a historic event. I expected a live stream. There was none. I expected a live audio stream. There was none. There wasn’t so much as a blog […]

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Kaboom! That is the sound of the live video streaming market over the last few weeks. Why? Why has it “suddenly” exploded with interest when live video streaming, even the one-to-many applications like we’re seeing with Meerkat and Periscope, has been around for years? I’m not sure there is a single answer. I believe it is […]

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Charlotte Jackson, experimenting on her own site: I‘ve been super excited to see what all the fuss is about, so I have added flexbox to the simple header on this website. This also gave me a nice introduction to how it all works. If you do anything at all on the web and you do […]

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Bijan Sabet, on his personal blog: My favorite blogs are the simple ones. The ones that are honest, direct and authentic. The ones that allow for self expression and vulnerability. There sure seems to be a lot of chatter about blogging lately. We are seeing the format, medium, style, definition, layout, and tools all change […]

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Joe Cieplinski, on his blog, writing about the press surrounding the launch of Fantastical 2 for Mac — which I recommend you grab a copy of: It’s brilliant. And it obviously works. But only because it’s genuine. And only because he’s willing to put in that time. That incredible amount of time. Not coding. Not […]

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I worked with Mike Rundle for a few years on 9rules and a few client projects. One of the best designers I ever worked with as he bridged the gap between design and engineering really, really well. Today he released Filters, an app for iPhone that boasts 800+ photo filters for $0.99. The app is […]

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So Facebook may be talking to news outlets about (and this is how the tech press has explained it) “hosting” their content on Facebook. I’ll wait until I see exactly what this might be before I cast any judgement but I think John Gruber may be on the right track: I can see why these news […]

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I took a few photos at Seneca Lake this weekend and posted a few of them on Instagram. I also put them into an album on Flickr.

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I’m still meditating on Gemmell’s piece On blogs a few days after reading it. Instead of a blog, let your site be a site. Or a journal. An online anthology. Your collected works. Your essays, to date. Your body of writing. A blog is a non-thing; it’s the refusal to categorise what you produce, and […]

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Shubhro Saha: Software engineers should write because it promotes many of the same skills required in programming. A core skill in both disciplines is an ability to think clearly. The best software engineers are great writers because their prose is as logical and elegant as their code. Saha is right. But I’ll extend his premise […]

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Shawn Blanc, again, in a piece about stepping out of your echo chamber: When we look to the echo chamber as our sole source of inspiration, it’s like looking to a bag of chips for our sole source of nourishment. The constant barrage of our timelines and inboxes — those “little updates” — are like […]

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Real photographs put into real photographs to create Surreal Houses. /via David Kick on Twitter.

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Ben Thompson, in a posted entitled Blogging’s Bright Future which I saved in Unmark for over a month… says sites like TechCrunch added to the confusion over the word blog: A big problem with this entire discussion is that there really isn’t a widely agreed-upon definition of what a blog is, thanks in part to […]

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Shawn Blanc on Procrastination: Surely the most common reason to procrastinate is a lack of motivation. If we were motivated (or, instead of “motivated”, use the word “excited”) to accomplish a task, then we’d be doing it. I procrastinate as bad as anyone. Great read. He’s also writing a guide.

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I just published a small album of photos on Flickr from Designal Tap 1 which Kyle Ruane hosted at Coalwork last week. Be sure to read Kyle’s recap of the event. At the end of the ‘long’ evening I threw out a discussion topic that has been whirling around my head for a while. It was […]

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I’m doing a bit of support for Barley today and a customer is having an issue sorting some dates in JavaScript. They’d like to compare a few dates on the page and return the date nearest today’s date. The issue I’m seeing (and I’m no JavaScript guru or anything) is that the dates they are […]

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Matt Gammell goes long on Windows Phone: This isn’t a review, or even a comparison. You can think of it as a sort of traveller’s guide for iPhone users, who find themselves in the land of Windows Phone. It’s also about the platform itself, rather than any specific handset. This is an excellent and incredibly […]

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Mandy Brown, on her blog, on the origin of blogs and how platforms for writing have to find a way to solve the “where will the money come from” problem. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that our core discomfort with Medium—with most of online publishing—is we can’t quite see how the money […]

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Artist Natalie McComas was recently inducted into VSCO’s Artist Initiative to take photos of people with rare skin defects: When Natalie first met Patience Hodgson (of the Australian indie-rock band, The Grates), who later became the inaugural subject of her “In This Skin” project, she saw Patience’s port-wine birthmark as something really beautiful. “Her perspective […]

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I’m going to follow MacSparky’s lead here and provide a laundry list of thoughts now that what happened yesterday has sunk in a little. While reading this keep the following things in mind; I own a 2012-era 13” MBPr, an iPhone 6, and an iPad Air 2. I love all of these devices and the […]

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Ernesto Van Der Sar of TorrentFreak: The case is mostly a symbolic win, but an important one. It should serve as a clear signal to other copyright holders that false DMCA takedown requests are not always left unpunished. DMCA takedown notices are an enormous amount of work for any company offering a service that allows the […]

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Dave Winer, creator of the open-source myword.io: Last Monday I decided to spend three days taking myword.io to the next step. To add an editor that publishes stories to their own static pages. I have a very good back-end, written in Node.js, that‘s all set up to do this. I started with the MacWrite demo […]

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Or, gravitational lensing. It is when a distant object in space has so much gravity that it bends light around it allowing for us to observe what is behind the object. Blackholes, quasars and galaxies being the primary sources of gravitational lensing. Sometimes this effect helps us to see distant objects even clearer because it […]

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New Mac and iOS “app” that adds RSS feeds directly to your Today tab. Not for me. I prefer Feedly. But I’ll help link to anything that uses RSS without people knowing they are using RSS. Long live RSS!

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Superb sculptures in crayon by Hoang Tran. Ackbar is fantastic. /via iGNANT.

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