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
Alternate title: My hopes are low for object detection in the new Photos but I still have hope Reddit user vista980622 dig some digital sleuthing and may have come up with the list of over 4,000 objects, memories, and facial expressions that Photos for iOS and OS X will be able to mine all on its own with Apple's Advanced…
Jersey Cattle at Stone Mountain Wine Cellars – June 2016
I began posting to my own site in earnest on March 6th of this year. I wrote: So, starting tonight that is what I’m going to try again to do with a goal of sticking with it in perpetuity. This doesn’t mean that I won’t be posting to Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, but that everything that I post…
Update December 2025: At the very kind request of Stripe, Stripe Transfer has been renamed to Good Migrations. The process on this page is out of date.Please reach out to Good Migrations to learn the updated process. One of my recent client programming projects (hire me here) was to help a company migrate all customers, cards, plans, and…
Great piece from Lea Alcantara on her company blog on how originality and style have fallen to practicality and everything looking the same in web design: The result usually ends up being less creative or original due to drowning with these constraints. It’s understandable. It might even be laudable. I'm still soaking all of it in. I'm not…
what3words describes itself as "the simplest way to communicate location". Essentially, the service creates a three word phrase for every 9-square-meter point on the earth. I came across this via Joon Ian Wong's Quartz piece regarding Mongolia's upcoming adoption of this system since many of its people do not have a mailing address: Mongol Post is switching to…
Merli-Sarnoski County Park Kayakers – May 2016
In a good way. Yesterday I scrawled a few comments during the WWDC Keynote, and did 1 second reviews of the announcements on Snapchat, but I thought I'd jot down the tally of things I had hoped for against what was actually announced. First, however, let me just say that the amount of work Apple showcased yesterday is just staggering….
Apple could not possibly cover every update to iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS in their Keynote. So as the nerds have been picking through the trash in and around San Francisco they've been able to dig up several subtle changes that are worth noting. Here are a few of them that I've found via Twitter and scouring the…
Wish lists have been swirling around these last few days and many of them are quite good. But none of them are mine. So here is my wish list, not my predictions, for what will be announced today at WWDC. I hope Siri can do a lot more – I think we're overdue on being able to say…
Yesterday the news hit of Apple's changes to App Store policies and features including allowing developers to leverage Subscriptions for their applications so that they can better make a living making great apps. This, from John Gruber's coverage at Daring Fireball: Now, subscription-based pricing will be an option for _any_sort of app, including productivity apps and games. This is an…
It is always a pleasure to be linked to from The Loop. Yesterday, one of my posts about Photos for OS X and what I think can be done to improve it, was linked to (at my behest) by Dave Mark. My link is in good company there. Be sure to check out the other links too. This,…
Foggy Apple Orchard – June 2016
The Wall Street Journal on a Texas A&M study on standing desks and their impact on productivity: The researchers attributed much of the productivity gains to the greater physical comfort reported by the workers at the higher desks. Nearly three-quarters of those workers said that they felt less discomfort after using the desks for the six-month study. The…
I've been kayaking for two years and one month. My first post about kayaking is a sprawling post about my first two paddles but one that I'm really happy I wrote and published. In it I show exactly the types of things a new paddler worries about; falling in, being cold, getting in and out of the boat,…
Today I decided to go through the list of accounts that I follow on Twitter and cherry-pick those I think others should consider following and why. I've tweeted all of the suggestions but I also wanted to catalog them here on my blog. @jensimmons – Jen is writing tons of CSS tests so you don’t have to. Follow the coder….
Frozen Lackawanna Lake, Lackawanna State Park, February 2016
Follow me on Twitter. And be sure to subscribe to my blog. (Skip to the bottom of this post if you just want to know how to connect to your GoPro using an internet browser.) As I mentioned my GoPro Hero3+ Silver Edition has been giving me issues lately. It started 6 months ago as an iOS app connectivity…
Milanville Bridge, New York, March 2016
Julien Genestoux, founder of Superfeedr, on his company's blog regarding his company being acquired by Medium and how Medium is supporting open protocols already: At Superfeedr, we’ve promoted the open web by embracing open formats and protocols, such as RSS, Atom, XMPP and PubSubHubbub. Over the years, we’ve also learned that these protocols are only as powerful as…
Seth Godin, on his blog: Other than writing a daily blog (a practice that's free, and priceless), reading more blogs is one of the best ways to become smarter, more effective and more engaged in what's going on. The last great online bargain. I obviously agree with Seth. Everyone should blog. And should read blogs. Also, this bit…
I've been following Thomasz Furmanek on Instagram for a few years already (right around the time I got my first kayak, the Oru Kayak, which is the same one Furmanek uses). I liked this bit in his photographic interview with Daily Mail: The kayak enables me to travel to remote places and show people these places from a different…
When choosing a location to go for a paddle, don't be fooled by the size of the body of water. Enormous lakes aren't necessarily any more fun than the small ponds. Merli-Sarnoski's Mountain Mud Pond is an excellent example of this. The entire shoreline of the pond could be paddled in under an hour yet it offers a…
Andy Baio has resurrected a massive amount of Upcoming.org's first 10 years of event data: This is a static historical archive more than 7 million events saved from Upcoming's first ten years. The vast majority of events were saved, and the original URLs for nearly all of them are active again — along with the original venue, watchlist,…