Blog

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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Today NASA’s Dawn Mission reaches dwarf planet Ceres.

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Last night I quipped, on Twitter (I know, I know):  Office for Mac 2016 Preview. AKA Toolbars McGee. The screenshots of this Office for Mac 2016 preview that have been floating around are laughable. But David Sparks (MacSparky) brings me back to Earth: I think complaining about the menus in office and the massive number […]

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Looks like a pretty stellar group of women coming out of Twitter to form an investment group called #Angels. Excellent reasoning too: Technology is no longer an industry category. As has been well-chronicled, it has become a foundation to every business, ranging from healthcare to transportation to finance to education and beyond. Every company will […]

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On Kyle’s suggestion I’m using a private Flickr Group for Eliza and I to share our entire photo collection with one another. (related) Pretty simple. This is all we need to do: Upload every photo we’ve ever taken with the Mac uploadr

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Luke James Taylor has made an Apple Watch “container” in CSS that can be used to create mock ups for how things will look on the Apple Watch. Nice.

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Justin Jackson: As creators, there’s a temptation to seek out our heroes and ask them how they achieved their success. We think if we follow their instructions, we’ll be able to reproduce their winning magic. But it doesn’t work that way. Tips, tricks, advice… these should all be used to help you mold your own […]

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It is settled. I’m going with Flickr. (related) Why? Flickr has been around for a decade. It is owned by a public company that hasn’t shown signs it wants to kill Flickr (on the contrary they’ve given people more space than ever). And, I believe Flickr may just be too big to fail at this […]

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I am going all-in on Flickr. However, I haven’t logged into Flickr in, oh, forever? If you’re in the same boat you may want to check out which applications you’ve given access to read/write to your Flickr account. You can do so right here. Also, I recommend doing the same for Twitter here and Facebook […]

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Another instant classic from Frank Chimero where in he describes the essence of designing for the web: an edgeless surface of unknown proportions comprised of small, individual, and variable elements from multiple vantages assembled into a readable whole that documents a moment Fascinating read and I’m sure it was even better as a presentation in […]

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Matt Cutts does 30 day challenges. He’s famous for it. And I’ve done small things before like #travelfeet, 30 days of blogging, and other things. Similar to things I’ve tried to do in the past, for the rest of March — not quite 30 days left in it but who cares — I’ll be posting only to […]

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New music podcast from Jon Hicks. The first episode is ready for your earlobes: This first edition of Troika is about ambient music. Not the bleepy,beaty, dancy kind, but the more soothing ‘neo-classical’ or drone style of Ambient. Music for watching the stars (amongst other things). Music for watching the stars. Or, perhaps reading a […]

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Scrapple 1, Scrapple 2, Scrapple 3, Scrapple 4. Writing Space Bits isn’t easy but incredibly rewarding for me personally. I’d love to write more. This has been an incredibly cold February. With March right around the corner I know the cold weather is about to break and I’m sort of thinking that Spring is going to […]

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My boy Kyle Ruane, who cofounded Plain and Coalwork with me, is putting together his own reoccurring design critique meetup for people in and near Scranton, PA. Designal Tap is an informal meetup of local designers, sharing what we‘re working on. A lot of people in the area work on small teams or by themselves, […]

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Recently I read Charlotte Spencer’s blog post about being a new developer. The entire post is worth a read but this bit jumped out at me: As a new developer, I don’t care what you are programming in, I just want to know what you’re building. A programming language is just a programming language to […]

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I wrote a Spacebit about the Fomalhaut system: Imagine a bulbous ball of ice, rock, and metal that stretches at least 6 miles across moving at 85,000 miles an hour smashing into another bulbous ball of ice, rock and metal traveling at similar speeds. It would create an explosion that, if it were to happen […]

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The Verge: For the month of February, Bill Gates will be guest-editing The Verge. Over the course of four weeks, Gates will be guiding us as we explore how technology will transform the lives of those in the developing world through advancements in banking, healthcare, farming, and education technology. Bill Gates and his work the […]

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Scrapple 3. A shorter scrapple post today. Not sure why but perhaps I’m too busy to be thinking of little nuggets of scrapple lately. I find myself using the default Twitter clients. Partly because they’ve put a chokehold on what developers are able to do with their APIs. You win Twitter. For now. Things work […]

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