Blog
-
My Great Grandfather’s pocket-watch
This is my Great Grandfather’s pocket-watch. A few weeks ago my father gave it to me and I wore it for the first time yesterday. I have a lot to say about it, but for now due to time I will just say this… this watch is at least 70 years old, has never been […]
-
RunPee
Have you ever wondered when would be a good time to go pee during a movie? Or, whether or not you should wait through the end credits? RunPee will tell you these things. The design of the app leaves much to be desired but if it works it is an excellent idea for an application.
-
The great unbundling continues
Dave Morin, CEO of Path, recently did a small AMA on Product Hunt. He pointed out this article on Wired about Path breaking apart its mobile apps into other applications. Something I wrote about recently as well. Here is some interesting bits from the article. All this “unbundling” is a response to multiple market forces […]
-
Frank Chimero AMA
Frank Chimero did a wonderful “Ask Me Anything” session on Designer News earlier this week. I loved this bit about the window of approval on your own work: Writing and publishing a book is hard. Here‘s the tough part: you have a window of approval on your own work. For me, I typically only like the […]
-
Magic Hour from Oru Kayak
I paddled for about an hour last night on the way home from work. I think I’m starting to get used to this routine. Of course, there is a square crop.
-
PaperLater
Tom Taylor, the maker of Satellite Eyes (among other things), has been working on a way for people to receive print versions of the things they’d like to read online. It is called PaperLater. He writes: PaperLater lets you save the good bits of the web to print, so you can enjoy them away from […]
-
A small herb garden
Eliza and I planted a few herbs this past weekend.
-
Slingshot
In an effort to further confuse us as to which of their apps to use for what purpose… Facebook introduces Slingshot. The app isn’t yet available but there is more detail on TechCrunch. The “reply to receive” is interesting and has been sort of present in other apps like Rando.
-
Evening at Mountain Mud Pond
Friday, after work, I went for a short paddle on Mountain Mud Pond. This pond is on my way home from work.
-
Great World Cup Goals by Richard Swarbrick
So cool. You can see more great stuff from Swarbrick on his site. /via Devour.
-
Tesla sort of opens up its patents
Tony Stark, I mean, Elon Musk on the Tesla company blog: At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. He also writes that “Tesla […]
-
Yaron Schoen in Net Magazine
My good friend, and co-writer of Space Bits, Yaron Schoen was recently interviewed in Net Magazine — which takes the name Creative Bloq online for inexplicable reasons: I honestly am not so sure that the tech community fully embraced the role of the designer as much as it likes to claim it did. I have […]
-
Adam Magyar
Joshua Hammer on Matter/Medium in Einstein’s Camera: Adam Magyar is a computer geek, a college dropout, a self-taught photographer, a high-tech Rube Goldberg, a world traveler, and a conceptual artist of growing global acclaim. Good piece. What an amazing talent Magyar is. I suggest you check out his site.
-
Jurassic World
Jurassic World, the fourth installment in the Jurassic Park franchise, is coming next June. E! Online has a few preview images and says this about the synopsis: Jurassic World takes place 22 years after the original blockbuster Jurassic Park. In director Colin Trevorrow‘s upcoming sequel, Pratt plays a scientist who conducts behavioral research on raptors. […]
-
Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces
Bret Victor designs tools. Tools that help you see, or measure and analyze, what you’re working on while you’re working on them. I’ve mentioned him before. This latest presentation by Victor describes a space that can help people who make things do the same things in the real world as Victor’s tools have helped people […]
-
The Pirates of Pangea
Last night I stumbled across this tweet from Neill Cameron on Twitter. Which I favorited. Which automatically syncs with my Unmark account. Which led me to his new site this morning. Which led me to discover his Pirates of Pangea gallery. A wooden ship, on top of a Brachiosaurus, with a girl riding a T-Rex […]
-
How Jurassic Park went digital
The special effects in Jurassic Park were originally planned to use animatronics, stop-motion animation, and other traditional effects of the time. But, contrary to the opinions of some, a few “mavericks” at ILM thought they could pull it all off digitally. If I listened to “You will never”, T-Rex would have never have been built. Great video. […]
-
It is that time of year again
On average I save the lives of three or four of these each time I mow my lawn.
-
Just Down The Street
Also, an Instagram crop.
-
Learn Swift dot tips
Want to learn Swift, the new programming language from Apple? I’d say start by watching the WWDC Session videos. Then, hit up this curated list of Swift resources. /via Marc Edwards on Twitter.
-
The greatest show on earth
Horace Dediu: For them WWDC had a great deal of meat. Indeed, for them, it was probably the most significant event Apple ever staged. Again, agreed. It took all my strength not to capitalize Earth. Perhaps Dediu meant dirt. So I’ll leave it.
-
Why we write
Mandy Brown: You cannot know what you know until you’ve written it. As you write, you learn what you know—or, more likely, what you don’t know, which, let’s face it, is most everything. I have hundreds of unpublished drafts for this blog, yet, I’m so happy that I wrote them because I was able to […]
-
Back to Apple
There are hundreds of thousands of third-party apps that you can use on your computer, phone, and tablet. Some of them are amazingly good and far better in a number of ways than what ships with these devices by default. By using third-party apps, however, you sometimes give up a level of seamless integration between […]
-
h2ocolor: Fisherman III by Paula Visnoski in Middletown, Rhode Island
Paula recently submitted her work to the gallery and I immediately fell in love with this piece from her watercolor archive.
-
#portraitswithoutpeople
#portraitswithoutpeople
-
Space Bit: Top 3 Public Observatories on Earth
Me, on Space Bits… Did You Know? The Griffith Observatory was used as a shooting location for none other than MacGyver’s home in episode 1 of the now iconic TV series. Later on in the series he moved to a much more modest houseboat. This is the sort of information you can only get from […]
-
Mercator projection — Africa vs Greenland
This is why I do not like the Mercator projection.
-
A Tribute to Discomfort: Cory Richards
A Tribute to Discomfort: Cory Richards from Blue Chalk on Vimeo. Time to get the DSLR out. /via Jeff Sheldon on Twitter.
-
Let’s force Mozilla to change how passwords are shown in Firefox
Mid-summer last year Elliot Kember discovered that Chrome saves passwords in plain text on your computer and, with a few clicks, anyone sitting at your desk can see them. This made some waves in the community and, as you can see from the bottom of Kember’s post, had the likes of Chrome’s Head of Security, […]
-
Dandy Sunset
-
I’m a kayaker
Last weekend, for the first time in my life, I went kayaking! I loved it so much, I went again the next day. For the last few months I’ve spent a lot of time reading, watching videos, listening to podcasts — all about paddling. And I have to say that so much of that information […]
-
DuckDuckGo Safari
Huge news for DuckDuckGo. Safari in Yosemite will now have DDG as an option for a search engine. Remember Fred Wilson’s graph from a few days ago? You can expect that spike to continue. /via Daring Fireball.
-
How not to install OS X Yosemite
Dan Eden lets us know how not to install OS X Yosemite: The moral of the story; don‘t install 10.10 just yet. And if you do, make sure you‘re not an impatient idiot like me. I was this close to installing Yosemite this morning. I backed up my work Macbook to a Time Capsule, downloaded […]
-
Living up to your (business) ideals
My friend Geoff DiMasi, of the great P’unk Ave, on A List Apart: We always cared about our work and had good relationships with our clients before, but intentionally pursuing projects that align with our business values has brought a higher level of investment and internal motivation from all members of our team. We have […]
-
The 3 biggest takeaways from WWDC keynote
Ted Landau: Make no mistake: this was a historic keynote. It’s hard to overstate what Apple did today. If you’ve ever written and released any amount of software in your life it is pretty easy to see how much work went into what Apple announced yesterday. I don’t know for sure, but I’d be willing […]
-
The best WWDC Keynote ever
Yesterday’s WWDC Keynote was, in my opinion, the best WWDC Keynote ever. In fact, it was their best presentation since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it right here. Craig Federighi: I’ll tell you, you just have not had chili by the campfire until you’ve […]
-
Thoughts on the WWDC keynote
Jim Dalrymple, of The Loop: There are a few things that struck me during the WWDC keynote presentation this morning. The first, and perhaps most important, is how much fun the Apple executives were having on stage. I’m not talking about the normal smiles and jokes, I mean they genuinely looked like they were having […]
-
You’re Using Instagram Wrong
Jeffrey Kalmikoff on Medium: I effectively stopped looking at my Instagram feed, but did continue to use it to take, filter, and post photos (to Facebook). Early this year, in an effort to reduce overall social media noise from all accounts, I decided to unfollow everyone on Instagram and start over. As you may, or […]
-
I say, it’s OK to use HTML
Jonas Downey, of Basecamp, on Signal vs. Noise: It would surely be easier to do that with 8 simple, straightforward HTML files than with some custom WordPress installation that’s several versions out of date. So what if I have to repeat the navigation markup 8 separate times? It’s not that hard. We used to do […]
-
More thoughts on the future of WordPress themes
Chris Lema, on how things have changed in the WordPress theme industry: Today people treat themes like IKEA furniture – easily replaced and never intended to last for years or decades. He makes some excellent points. In case you missed it, Lema’s piece is in response to this.
-
Google’s New Self-Driving Car
Google recently introduced a new self-driving car at Code Conference. This was slightly different than their previous self-driving cars in that they manufactured the entire car as well as the system that drives it. Liz Gannes, at Re/Code: The car — which was conceived and designed by Google, unlike the ones it previously modified — […]
-
Kayaking with my nephew
Last Friday I was able to take my nephew out in my Oru Kayak for an hour or so. It was a blast.
-
The State of the WordPress Theme Industry
David Perel, of Obox Themes and SalesGenius, on The State of the WordPress Theme Industry: These days there is very little to choose from between theme companies. Themes look the same, have very similar features and all offer decent support. If you look at the industry’s biggest market — business themes — you will be hard-pressed to know who […]
-
App Constellations
Fred Wilson on the growing trend of companies producing more than one mobile application, each that expose different sets of features from the same service: I have been calling this trend App Constellations. Facebook now has a collection of mobile apps that share a single login and have app to app linking built in. Google […]
-
Marco Arment on Good Portable Headphones That Aren’t Beats
Marco Arment: I haven’t tried every headphone on the market — far from it (much to my chagrin). But among those I’ve tried, there are some clear winners, and a handful of models I haven’t tried seem worth consideration since they’ve gotten so much acclaim. He mentions more models in his blog post than I’ve […]
-
Seventeen People
Jon White: Unironically yapping about my love for this in 2014 is tricky, because my love for the series it belonged to has become so uncomfortably, uh, asterisk-laden lately. Back in those halcyon early-00’s days, I loved The West Wing. We all did! And now that it’s streaming to boot, freeing me from fiddling with […]
-
Litely
Cole Rise, whom I mentioned in What I saw this week #7, and Sam Soffes have collaborated on a great app called Litely. Litely is an app for editing photos using Rise’s Litely photo presets. I’ve been using it for a bit and I’m really digging some of the interactions and, obviously, the presets are […]
-
Take time to focus on long term goals
In Caddy Shack II Randy Quaid’s character is famous for saying “Don‘t hit it long … No, no, wait. Don‘t hit it short … Wait, hit it long but let it go short” So, which should you focus on? The long term or the short term? The somewhat obvious answer is that it is good […]
-
Make unread counts optional. Or, Brent Simmons ruined me and I’m OK with that.
There’s some conversation about whether or not applications such as Twitter, email, or RSS clients should have unread counts on their icons. I seem to think yes, but perhaps Brent Simmons ruined me years ago. When he built NetNewsWire he never intended for people to think they had to keep up with every post from […]
-
Let’s start talking again
For the past several years the trend has been swaying away from open, real, face-to-face communication — especially in tech culture. No meetings, remote work, less email, more chat. Over the last few months our team has been working hard to create a coworking community in Scranton, PA. We’ve been reaching out to freelancers, creative […]
Writing helps me think more clearly. I write about what interests me such as blogging, photography, technology, social media, and my personal creative projects.
Series: Diversions, WIS, typicalday
Topics: blogging, photography, programming