Blog

If you know a student, or a faculty member, you may want to point them to the GitHub Student Developer Pack: There‘s no substitute for hands-on experience, but for most students, real world tools can be cost prohibitive. That‘s why we created the GitHub Student Developer Pack with some of our partners and friends: to […]

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Simon Willis, reporting that new, refreshed downloads are now available for the Sea Kayak with Gordon Brown videos: Firstly, I went back to the source file and used improved compression software to produce higher quality downloads at a faster bit-rate. Secondly, each film is now an .mp4 file (rather than .mov) and, at customers‘ request, […]

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Great nugget from Paul Graham’s latest piece “Before the Startup”: The way to succeed in a startup is not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users and the problem you‘re solving for them. I see so many “entrepreneurs” that are caught up in the startup culture. That are more concerned […]

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Google Street View is pretty amazing. Here is the corner of Adams and Spruce in Scranton — the same corner Coalwork is on today and from where I’m writing this post. But something got me thinking this morning… I love looking at old photos of cities (example) from 10, 20, 50 or 100 years ago. […]

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Lockhard Steele (how does someone have a name that awesome?), on daily blogging: Harder than it looks. Fell off the wagon hard last week in the depths of Eater bug-crushing. Still trying to find a rhythm to this practice. Typing this while on a conference call (suboptimal). Agreed. I’ve been super, super busy at work […]

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Brandon Page on Storehouse: This last trip, I put my pro camera down, and ran around the city with my iPhone. This is the first time I have shown this collection outside of Instagram. Content exclusive to Instagram. I know a few photographers raised their eyebrows at this… however, it appears that the vast majority […]

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Tom Hickey, of Cork Ireland, on his personal blog in a post titled Stop feeling sorry and start living: I write a blog that’s mainly about my life coming to terms with facial disfigurement. I wanted to share my pain, hopes and dreams, and show you that despite so many setbacks I managed to come […]

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Holy cow, a Space Bit! Gorgeous photos of Mars coming in from ISRO’s recent mission on the cheap.

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Over the years I’ve been in the paper a few times for various reasons. Mostly good. However, something that I’ve learned is that you never really know how you’re going to be portrayed, what information you provide the writer will use or not use, or how the article will come across to the general public. […]

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As if I needed more fodder to convince myself as to why I shut off all notifications on my phone, tablet, and computer. Clay Shirky wrote an excellent piece on Medium about why he has changed his mind and now asks his students to close their laptops and put away their phones. Here is a […]

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I went from bullish to puzzled, back to bullish, and now downright miffed by the messaging roller coaster that Ello is on. I think we all want to see someone, anyone, make great things. You know my stance on these things. I say, applaud people that make things. Making things is hard and people won’t […]

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I agree so hard on this. Brent Simmons: I’ve often had the thought that our social networks are the same thing every day, with just slightly different details. When I skip them for a few days, I find that I have absolutely no feeling of missing anything. Here are some things that don’t give me […]

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Jason Snell, on his still smells-like-a-new-car blog Six Colors regarding whether or not the iPhone 6 Plus is like a small iPad: When Apple announced the iPhone 6 Plus on Sept. 9, I entertained the idea that it might be a replacement for my iPad mini. At last, the promise of a single device small enough […]

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It was nice to be included in Founders Grid’s list of productivity hacks. When they asked me what productivity hacks I had for other founders this is what I wrote: Productivity hacks are a myth. Not that none of the proposed productivity hacks we see every day do not work, just that any of them […]

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Can you hear it? I can. Read this, as reported on the very great GigaOm: Twitter’s timeline is organized in reverse chronological order… but this “isn’t the most relevant experience for a user,” Noto said. Timely tweets can get buried at the bottom of the feed if the user doesn’t have the app open, for […]

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Jess Brown on taking the challenge to write on his blog: Hopefully my writing will bring an audience and an audience will bring opportunities. It does and will Jess.

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Marco Arment’s comment on his blog a few days ago got me thinking… we should be doing a better job to promote RSS. So here is one way to try doing it. My RSS feed is http://cdevroe.com/feed To subscribe to my RSS feed you need an RSS reader. There a tons of these for every […]

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Never take for granted the fact that everyone you meet can teach you something. Here are just a few recent examples of things that I’ve learned in the last few days: Last night, while visiting an older friend (I believe she is 88), I had what was easily the best rice pudding I’ve ever had […]

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There is so much awesome going on in the resurgence of personal blogging. I can’t stop reading and linking and smiling. Brent Simmons: My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it’ll […]

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Adam Kuban, who was behind the original New York pizza blog Slice, in an interview by Ben Leventhal: I miss the early days when you could just get up a post about whatever and just kind of express yourself without really thinking about page views, thinking about SEO, thinking about how it will play on […]

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Elizabeth Spiers, one of the founders of Gawker, on her newly revitalized personal blog: So in the interest of rejecting later and discriminating less severely, here is my contract with you, the reader: I will write mostly badly and more often. Not so much that either of us want to slit our wrists, but more […]

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Kyle and I spent the weekend setting up the first coworking space in Scranton, PA — Coalwork. We’ve been working on this for over a year. Not just us two but other members of the coworking community such as Nick Semon, Bruno Galvao, Michael O’Boyle, and Joe Casabona. I’m very glad to finally be seeing all […]

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Update from yesterday. She was surprised. 😉 We’re in! Coalwork, the coworking group, podcast, blog, and community that Kyle and I founded over a year ago finally has a place to call home in downtown Scranton. This is Scranton’s first official coworking spot. I am totally stoked. Not only to see this finally happening but […]

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Today is my 15th Anniversary. My wife Eliza and I have known each other our entire lives — in fact, her mother was pregnant with her when she visited my mother in the hospital after giving birth to me. So, really, this is like our 33rd or 34th anniversary. For the first time in many […]

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My favorite kayaking podcast at SeaKayakPodcast.com is coming back on September 1st. Host Simon Willis: We have recorded quite a few fascinating chats and the first will be an absolute cracker. The new podcasts start on Monday 1st September. We‘ll hear from Scott Donaldson who spent almost three months in a kayak, paddling 1300 miles […]

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From a piece in Wired about Instagram’s new app Hyperlapse: Once you start using the app, you quickly see that replay speed itself becomes a novel, alluring tool: For pets and people, replaying at about 1x gives you the sense that you’re creating a tracking shot like that Copacabana scene in Goodfellas. The higher replay […]

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I said that this morning to Kyle. That the golden age of Twitter is over. I couldn’t think of a more eloquent way to put it. The Twitter we fell in love with is actually gone already. It no longer exists at all. In fact, it is tough to even see the remnants of that Twitter […]

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Shawn Blanc, on making a decision on how to get fit: Something I’ve learned over time is that when you’re facing a decision and you know you need to act, it’s often best to just do something — anything — and then figure it out as you go. I can recommend, from vast experience in […]

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Marco Arment: I picked on the iPad earlier because its problem is deeper and more visible than on the iPhone today: while the iPad has most of the pricing and competitive pressure of the iPhone, the iPhone’s immense installed base can hide the problems for longer. The iPad has a much smaller installed base, so […]

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On Sunday I was able to get out early for my first morning paddle ever. Paddling in the morning is completely different than the afternoon or evening. I wasn’t prepared for the subtle differences, namely; the air is cool, crisp

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For reference: App Constellations. First, William Shatner has a Tumblog. I’m cool with this. Second, he wrote about Facebook Mentions — yet another app from Facebook specifically created to help “celebrities” with managing their Facebook accounts. He writes: I’m not quite sure why Facebook released this app for “celebrities”. It seems to be ill conceived. I […]

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Bank Towers Building, Wyoming Avenue, Scranton.

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It turns out, it was bigger than that. I’ve seen a few tweets and heard a few comments this weekend along the lines of “Rap Genius raised $40M? I quit.” Funny. But pretty far off the mark. Surely you think that while Silicon Valley is willing to be a bit nutty about apps that do little […]

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I managed to get away from work on Friday and do some paddling. Then, on Saturday, things happened to align where I could meet my friend Andrew for a second paddle. Very happy Colin indeed. Here are some photos I snapped on the gram.

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Simon Willis, someone who has been a huge inspiration to my kayaking endeavors with his Sea Kayak Podcasts series, recently went for a hike. I love this bit: Show me an horizon, an overlapping series of ridge lines or a valley stretching into the distance and I yearn to discover what lies behind those hills, […]

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Our friends at Appek, a company just a few miles south from Plain in Scranton, recently hit 1,000,000 installs for their selfie-drawing app FrenchGirls. The concept is pretty simple; take a selfie, submit it, the community sketches something in return. What you get in return isn’t always a sketch of your selfie. Sometimes it is a message, […]

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Pinboard, the excellent bookmarking service, recently turned five. Here is Maciej Cegłowski on the Pinboard blog: Now back to some beard-stroking:  I see my role much like a small-town praire banker in the 1880‘s. My job is to project an aura of calm, solvency, and permanence in an industry where none of those adjectives applies. People […]

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In April Stripe announced an Open-Source Retreat. A little over a month later they had chosen three grantees. Though unannounced on the company blog, Andrey Petrov wrote about his experience working on Urllib3 at Stripe for two weeks over on Medium: Last week completes my two week grant from Stripe to work on urllib3 full […]

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Last night there was a thunderstorm warning for our county. I desperately wanted to get out kayaking since I hadn’t all weekend. So, I opened up Dark Sky and found a slot of around an hour in between storms and I went for it. I’m glad I did. Easily the best paddle I’ve had so far. […]

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Matt Krizan paddled the California coast in a 36-day expedition. Dave Shivley wrote about what Krizan learned for Canoe & Kayak. Here is what happened on day two: Four miles offshore, the zip-tie linking his left steering pedal to the rudder snaps. Krizan must act. He spots a channel through 8-foot faces breaking on what […]

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I’ve been following Guillaume Kurkdjian’s Tumblr for awhile. He posts “weekly animated gifs”. But, what’s better than a gif? An animation with sound. Vehicle #4 – Food Truck from Guillaume Kurkdjian on Vimeo. Check out his recent videos on Vimeo.

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Richard Banfield, on Medium, in a piece titled The Myth of the Design Studio Turned Product Company relates how he feels it got started by 37Signals: In the process of doing that they unknowingly started the mythology that every design or development studio should become a product company. I’ll just state, flat out, that not […]

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Jim Dalrymple, on The Loop: Apple introduced a new Photos app during its Worldwide Developers Conference that will become the new platform for the company. As part of the transition, Apple told me today that they will no longer be developing its professional photography application, Aperture. I have a hard time caring anymore. Photo storage, […]

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Speaking of Wolfram Alpha (I mentioned them yesterday). Wolfram Alpha was used to try to predict the outcome of the World Cup. Again, Brazil is the favorite, but with a 32% chance to win now. After its impressive victory against Spain, the Netherlands’ odds jumped to 23.5%: it is now the second favorite. Germany (21.6%) […]

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