Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
Next Wednesday I'll be hosting the first Scranton-based Homebrew Website Club at Condron Media's headquarters on Penn Avenue. There are other locations HWC will be happening on that day too. If you have your own site and I you care to work on it in anyway at all please do stop by. Homebrew Website Club is not a typical meetup,…
Chris Aldrich: While in some sense I do miss the beautiful Instagram feeds of yore when it was mostly professionals, it's more interesting now with friends who use it to capture small snippets of their lives. It seems he has had the opposite experience to the one I mentioned in my previous post; that it started out with…
Maria Langer, professional helicopter pilot, blogger and Twitter friend, got her DJI Mavic Pro on nearly the same day as I got my DJI Phantom 4 Pro. She's taken the time to write down her thoughts on the experience and so I thought I'd quote her post since she and I agree on our first few flight missions….
Since I shared my hiking checklist I thought I'd also share my always-a-work-in-progress drone pre-flight checklist. Not every question on this applies to every single situation and some of these rules you may be willing to bend or break depending on the circumstances. But, having a checklist may help to reduce the number of mistakes you may make….
Kevin Weil, Instagram's head of product, within a piece by Kurt Wagner for Recode regarding Instagram: “It became a place where people kept raising the bar on themselves in terms of the quality of what they had to achieve to post,” explained Kevin Weil, Instagram’s head of product, who has been working to fix this problem since joining…
Flexbugs – Described as "A community-curated list of flexbox issues and cross-browser workarounds for them." Video: Hovering a helicopter is hard – I've been going back through Smarter Everyday's archive. An inverted aquarium – Mindblown fish. Tips for new drone owners – I re-read my own piece since I just picked up a Phantom 4 Pro. (more on this…
Jonathan LaCour, SVP, Product & Technology at Dreamhost: We’d like to make it as easy as possible to launch a WordPress-powered microblog on DreamHost that integrates well with Manton’s upcoming Micro.blog service. In order to support that mission, DreamHost is kicking in a $5,000 pledge to the Kickstarter. Nice move Dreamhost.
Brian Jepson writing about the Windows Subsystem for Linux: But there's a lot more going on. First, WSL is really a new infrastructure for Windows that implements a Linux kernel-compatible ABI (Application Binary Interface). It allows Windows to run unmodified ELF-64 binaries, and is distribution-agnostic. When you configure it, WSL downloads and runs an (unmodified!) Ubuntu cloud image,…
David Mead: This year all of my posts, replies, and retweets on Twitter will be coming from this blog and not using the Twitter app (#OwnYourData). That probably means doing it at the end of the day. I’m hoping that will make them more considered (something we may all want to be in the coming years). I have…
Lauren Pittenger: Inspired by Colin Devroe’s What I Saw This Week series and Elise Blaha‘s newsletters come my own series of posts of links I find worth sharing. Excellent. You can follow along via her bookmarked tag.
Jeremy Keith regarding Clearleft's upcoming rebrand: I think it’s good to remember that this is the web. I keep telling myself that we’re not unveiling something carved in stone. Even after the launch we can keep making the site better. In fact, if we wait until everything is perfect before we launch, we’ll probably never launch at all….
With my What I saw this week series of posts hitting #29 this week I thought I'd take a second to share how these posts do on my site, how I create them, how I choose what I will link to outside of these posts. These posts are some of my most popular week-to-week. My active subscriber numbers…
Two years ago I wrote about DuckDuckGo, my search engine of choice on all devices, reaching 12M daily active searches. They are still growing. Gabriel Weinberg: We are proud to say that at the end of last year, we surpassed a cumulative count of 10 billion anonymous searches served, with over 4 billion in 2016! We are growing…
Be sure to peruse the archive of this series of posts. Best selfie ever? – Definitely in the running. Joe Robinet – I've been digging Joe's stuff on YouTube. Behind-the-scenes of Rogue One – Photos by Alex Benetel. Zuckerberg's team – A team of a dozen people help Mark Zuckerberg capture his day for his Facebook page. Believe me,…
I see huge opportunity in digital marketing over the next decade. We're now reaching the point where billions of people are using social platforms to share information every single day, where the vast majority of a person's attention is on an internet-based platform rather than a broadcast one, and, where the tools are in-place to allow businesses to…
Manton Reece has added a thoughtful stretch goal to Micro.blog's Kickstarter campaign: If the Kickstarter reaches $80,000, I will use some of the money to make my very first part-time hire for Micro.blog: a community manager. The community manager will help set the tone for the service, work on documentation and best practices, and be responsible for curation…
Lauren Pittenger: Reminds me of all of the times I’ve been told I’m too quiet, or “you haven’t moved from this spot this entire party.” Or feeling bad about hanging out with (only) my cat all the time or that weird thing where I can write better than I speak. Or sitting as far away from everyone at…
Manton Reece recently published an update to Micro.blog's Kickstarter showing a video demonstration of the iPhone app he's creating for the service. He mentions a really important point that I think many are missing (as I mentioned just a few moments ago). He says (at 53 seconds into the video): Now, you can have Micro.blog host a microblog…
Dalton Caldwell: We envisioned a pool of differentiated, fast-growing third-party applications would sustain the numbers needed to make the business work. Our initial developer adoption exceeded expectations, but that initial excitement didn’t ultimately translate into a big enough pool of customers for those developers. I've been a paying subscriber to App.net for the entire life of the platform (that is, until they cancelled my…
Video: What Comes Next is the Future – A documentary-style look back at the evolution of the web, and its underlying technologies that make it up, using interviews with those who have crafted and curated those technologies. Advanced Symbols in Sketch – A great tutorial by Matt D. Smith. Atom Dash – Via Lauren Pittenger on Twitter comes…
_DavidSmith has a new side project called PodSearch. He explains: The concept was simple. Take a few of my favorite podcasts and run them through automated speech-to-text and make the result searchable. It works. I'm still waiting for Google to add real contextual search to video and audio. They've got images working well. And Pinterest has even taken…
Justin O'Beirne: In this series of essays, we’ll compare and contrast the cartographic designs of Google Maps and Apple Maps. We’ll take a look at what’s on each map and how each map is styled, and we’ll try to uncover the biggest differences between the two. The intro and parts 1 and 2 are already published. More to come.
Photo: Aaron Rosenberg presenting an intro to Node.js. January's NEPA.js meet up, the second monthly meet up for this group, was held on Tuesday evening at the Scranton Enterprise Center. This group, though only a few months old, is starting to get its legs underneath it and it is really great to see the community building. The meet up's…
On Saturday I braved the frigid temperatures and attended a Wilkes-Barre Programming meetup at the Osterhout Free Library in downtown Wilkes-Barre. I arrived a few minutes late – it was Saturday so of course I had to make myself some breakfast, enjoy my coffee, watch a little YouTube prior to getting out in the elements – and then…