Blog

  • Mayer: Yahoo won’t bother unless a product can ship within 6 months, reach 100 million people, and add $100m to the company’s top line

    This was eluded to in Kara Swisher’s aforelinked piece but it wasn’t spelled out quite as well as this, by Nicolas Carlson at Business Insider: Mayer’s rule: If a new product can’t be shipped in six months, and if it doesn’t have a realistic shot of reaching 100 million users or generate $100 million toward […]

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  • Tapbots on App.net

    Tapbots is on App.net. If Tweetbot worked with ADN it’d, quite simply, change everything for ADN. /via Steve Streza on Twitter (which says something, I think).

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  • Tim Cook’s letter about Apple Maps

    Tim Cook: We launched Maps initially with the first version of iOS. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better Maps including features such as turn-by-turn directions, voice integration, Flyover and vector-based maps. In order to do this, we had to create a new version of Maps from the ground up. […]

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  • About switching to Verizon

    Ben Brooks: I haven’t noticed the lack of simultaneous data, as I figured I would rarely notice it. I have yet to not have LTE coverage in the areas I have roamed around in. The family plan thing was a piece of cake. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto.

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  • Are rare steaks really better?

    Tom Mylan for Gilt Taste: In the game of food dork one-upsmanship, the rarer you order your steak, the more of a real gastronome you are—it means you like your meat good and a little dangerous, like it was meant to be. That is why I like to order my steak "still mooing with the […]

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  • Some people just don’t like ads

    Giancarlo Ditrapano in an interview with Casey Neistat (aforementioned) regarding advertising on his very popular YouTube channel: In April, YouTube began allowing all of its the users the option of earning ad revenue from their uploads, a seemingly ideal situation for a guy like Neistat, who self-finances the vast majority of his films and has […]

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  • Instagram updated for iOS 6 and iPhone 5

    If you use Instagram and you updated to iOS 6 or bought an iPhone 5; you may now update. Seeing the first few comments in addition to the likes on a photo in Instagram is actually a palpable upgrade in experience. Addendum: Something I didn’t notice, because I literally have never used this feature, is […]

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  • Make an app, game, movie, music budget

    People make budgets for everything. Vacations, new cars, gas, a new home, gym memberships, etc. Some even budget in a morning coffee from their favorite barista everyday before work. Why is it, then, that some still have an issue with paying for an album on iTunes? Most applications on the App Store are only a […]

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  • Marissa Mayer’s plans to turn Yahoo around

    Marissa Mayer held a company-wide meeting today at Yahoo. The purpose of the meeting was stated, in a memo to the company, as being "radically transparent" about the plans to turn Yahoo around. It turns out much of the meeting was rather nebulous and more broad than specific or transparent. Perhaps that is because Yahoo […]

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  • Mushrooms

    From the backyard. I’m looking forward to shooting a lot more this fall with the iPhone 5.

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  • The rise of enterprise marketing

    Chris Dixon has a good post about the shift from sales-driven software efforts to product-driven software efforts. Thus enterprise software went from being about sales (one-to-one) to being about marketing (one-to-many). Marketing requires crafting a compelling message, figuring out the right channels and then optimizing. But the most effective marketing isa compelling product that can […]

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  • Apple Maps: The FAQ

    Kontra: Mapping is indeed one of the hardest of mobile services, involving physical terrestrial and aerial surveying, data acquisition, correction, tile making and layer upon layer of contextual info married to underlying data, all optimized to serve often under trying network conditions. Unfortunately, like dialect recognition or speech synthesis (think Siri), mapping is one of […]

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  • Brandice on the iPhone 5

    You’ll have to forgive me for wanting to quote Brandice’s entire post about the iPhone 5 since I totally agree with everything she says but I’ll do my best to take out a few key snippets: I read comments online about how it’s so light it almost feels too insubstantial or breakable. I think it […]

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  • Chad Williams on iOS 6 features you may not know about

    Chad Williams has a great list of features in iOS 6 that are new that you may not have heard about: The auto-dim feature got significantly improved in iOS 6. The best improvement is brightness adjustment in the lock screen. Before, in a dark room, I would be blasted with the iPad or iPhone’s default […]

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  • Enable Messages to accept iMessages for your phone number

    Glenn Fleishman for TidBITS on how to turn on Messages for your phone number on your Mac: The Messages app in Mountain Lion can now send and receive iMessages using an iPhone’s number as the identifier with a combination of iOS 6 and the recent OS X 10.8.2 update. Good tip. /via James Duncan Davidson.

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  • How to put Apple EarPods back in the case

    YouTube user TechisGeek has a video showing how to put Apple EarPods back in the case. You’ll only need to watch the first 45 seconds before you say "I got it." I struggled with this all weekend. Not anymore.

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  • iPhone 5 vs. Canon 5D Mark III

    Dustin Curtis: The results are pretty amazing – the iPhone takes worse photos but it certainly stacks up against a $4,000 professional camera. And, although the photos from the iPhone are significantly noisier, it has fantastic automatic metering. The best camera is the one you have with you.

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  • James Duncan Davidson on Maps in iOS 6

    Speaking of Duncan… James Duncan Davidson on Maps in iOS 6: I might be in the minority here given the raised pitchforks in many quarters, but I like the new maps in iOS 6. Yes, a lot of people are running into holes in the data set. Others are finding that the queries that they […]

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  • Jean-Louis Gasse on Apple Maps

    Jean-Louis Gasse on Apple Maps: The ridicule that Apple has suffered following the introduction of the Maps application in iOS 6 is largely self-inflicted. The demo was flawless, 2D and 3D maps, turn-by-turn navigation, spectacular flyovers…but not a word from the stage about the app’s limitations, no self-deprecating wink, no admission that iOS Maps is an […]

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  • My guesses about iPhone 5. How did I do?

    In September 2011 I jotted down a few guesses about what an iPhone 5 could be. What we ended up with was the iPhone 4s being announced. Well, I thought I’d look back at this list and see where my thoughts stack up now that we actually have the iPhone 5. How did I do? […]

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  • Notes about the first-run iPhone 5 experience

    Today I’m receiving an iPhone 5 that is Verizon-ready. I’ll be upgrading from an iPhone 4 on AT&T. Below are my live notes, as they happen, during this experience. It should be fun! Notes, in order. (the page will refresh automatically when I publish new notes) [liveblog]

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  • A fork of the Recent Photos widget by Asad Iqbal for WordPress

    I’ve been planning on figuring out a simple way to show the latest photo from my mobile photos category on the sidebar of my site for a while. Today I did a quick search for a plugin that would simply add a widget that I could drag/drop into place to do exactly that. I came […]

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  • Building community before the shrine

    Craig Mod, for Contents Issue No. 4: I received an email from the company sometime in March.We’re a publisher with four million fans on Facebook. We’d like to talk with you. Fascinatingly well-written story about a publisher that started with a Facebook fan page (rather than a website of their own) and quickly grew to […]

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  • iOS 6 review on iMore.com

    Renie Richie’s iOS 6 review on iMore.com is more than thorough.

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  • Last pick of the season?

    Overall a good season in our small garden. We’re trying to keep it small so that it doesn’t get to be too much to maintain. Next year I plan on the garden yielding about double what it did this year without making it any larger than it is.

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  • Manhattan

    I blame my mother for turning Eliza and I onto pre-dinner Manhattans.

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  • Missing iOS 6 features for some devices

    Dan Frakes and Serenity Caldwell at Macworld give a run-through of iOS 6 installation and what this latest release means for each device. Some features won’t be available to all iOS 6 devices. Naturally. Here is one example, though, that I lament. Flyover and turn-by-turn navigation features of the new Maps app are available on […]

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  • Notes on iOS 6 for iPhone 4 and iPad 2

    In case you don’t follow me on Twitter; (really, how can you live with yourself?) earlier today I tweeted a few notes about iOS 6 on my iPhone 4 and iPad 2. I’ve taken those tweets and put them below. iOS 6 note: The new Maps application is pretty fast even on the iPhone 4. […]

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  • The Devour app for iPhone and iPad

    Devour, a site I visit just about every day on my iPad, has an app to match.

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  • The NYC soda ban explained

    Speaking of Devour… Here is a video by filmaker Casey Neistat for The New York Times to help explain NYC’s recent ban on insanely large buckets of soda. /via Devour. PS. To Devour editor Larry Angel (if you’re reading this) – I’d love it if I didn’t have to hunt down the original URLs for […]

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  • Tweetbot filters to silence the junk by Justin Williams

    Three cheers for Justin Williams’s collection of excellent Tweetbot filters to help silence check-ins, hashtag nonsense, old-style retweets, and even anything dealing with Internet Explorer. Some are fun, most are downright vital. You’ll need Tweetbot (you are using Tweetbot on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, right?) /via David Chartier.

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  • Automatic Conditional Retina Images

    A quick way to handle loading retina images on retina-capable devices which degrades rather gracefully from easily one of the biggest contributors to the betterment of the Internet, Shaun Inman: One line of JavaScript and a few mod_rewrite rules and we have no fuss Automatic Conditional Retina Images. /via Chris Glass.

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  • Defaulting to being nice does you no good

    Shep McAllister over on Lifehacker: But you could try voicing a contrary opinion in a meeting, or occasionally saying no when someone asks you for a favor. I go out of my way to be a nice guy but I’ve also never been accused of being quiet or of not voicing my opinion. Being nice […]

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  • Is the iPhone good enough?

    Horace Dediu on the iPhone’s value to the market: Therefore, how to tell whether a product is over-serving a market is one of the most important and frequently asked questions I get asked. […] If you have to add features and drop prices at the same time then it’s likely that the market does not […]

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  • Lackawanna Lake.

    Like and comment on Instagram.

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  • Mating mosquitos

    This happened outside our home-pub this past June. Well, first the boy mosquito gets all dressed up and takes a bouquet of flowers to meet the girl mosquito. She, too, has gotten all dolled up. She wears pearls and lipstick. The happy couple flies away to a nice location to feed off someone who has […]

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  • Use Hazel to save Photo Stream photos to Dropbox

    I haven’t yet had time to implement using Dropbox as a photo management app yet (maybe next week) but I wanted to file this away for when I do; a way to use Hazel to save Photo Stream photos to Dropbox. Or, via AppleScript if you prefer. /via Stephen Hackett.

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  • Facebook’s mission

    What is Facebook’s mission? Mark Zuckerberg, in the company’s founder letter that was included in their S-1 filing with the SEC prior to going public a few weeks ago. There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society […]

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  • Using Dropbox as a photo management app

    This is intriguing. Stephen Hacket took a que from Frederico Viticci on ditching iPhoto/Aperture and just using directories stored on Dropbox as a way to manage photos. After reading it, I started to think about why I continue to suffer with use Aperture. I rarely use it edit my photos, and really prefer it over […]

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  • How many Kindle Fires will Amazon sell?

    Interesting thoughts from Horace Dediu. Amazon will sell as many Kindles as they make, but the number they will make will not be the most they could make. His headline just says "Kindles" but should probably say "Kindle Fires". I think Amazon will sell a lot of Kindles and Kindle Paperwhites.

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  • It’s OK. Some of us just look young.

    David Karp, founder of the one of the most popular services of all time, Tumblr: Takes thirty employees out to dinner. Gets carded while ordering a beer. Happens to me all the time David. All the time. And I’ll be 32 in a few short weeks.

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  • I like Amazon and the Kindle

    I don’t mention Amazon or the Kindle as much as I mention Apple and the iPad on my blog. But don’t let that be any indication of my ignorance of how good the Kindle product line really is. Eliza has had a Kindle for a long time. Loves it. Adores it. Prefers to read on […]

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  • Bourdain on creative control

    Anthony Bourdain, remarking on the last season of my favorite travel show: Seven new episodes of NO RESERVATIONS left—interspersed, I’m afraid, by three (count them, THREE) shows made up of “repurposed” material—aka clip shows. Seven shows seemed like enough to me. Especially since knowing they were to be our last, we put our heart and soul […]

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  • Complexity and control, simplicity and peace of mind

    Justin Blanton, in a piece only a veteran-nerd-blogger-type like myself could enjoy all the way through, is dancing on two directions to take his blogging technology. On the one hand, he’d like to stop worrying about the entire stack and just get down to writing. On the other hand, he wants to be up to […]

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  • How to tear down the walls of your echo chamber

    Everyone has an echo chamber that they’ve unwittingly built up around them. Your interests, friends, environment, and location are all factors in determining what your experiences are, what you know, and what you don’t know. It can be limiting. How can you tell if you’re in an echo chamber? Ask yourself; Is your experience and […]

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  • How I use lists on Twitter

    The way I use lists on Twitter is pretty straight forward. I hand-curate about a dozen lists into categories of things I’m interested in. Over the years I’ve seen people complain that they don’t want to do the heavy-lifting of managing these Lists. But I’ve found that lists is a feature that has kept Twitter […]

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  • Something I wish George Lucas had said

    Steven Spielberg: I’ve resigned myself to accepting that what the film was at the time of its creation is what it always should be for future generations. I think Steven learned a little something from his friend George’s mistakes. Steven is, however, all for restoring his older films into higher quality formats as he’s currently […]

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  • What an iPad Mini, or Air, could weigh

    MG Seigler compares the weights of some leading e-readers, phones, and tablets to visualize where the iPad Mini, or Air, may stack up: As you can see, this new iPad would be closest to the Kindle with a keyboard in weight. It would weigh noticeably less than a Nexus 7. It would weigh less than […]

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  • Push passed your comfort zone

    Derek Sivers: I love that when we push push push, we expand our comfort zone. Things that used to feel intimidating now are as comfortable as home. My MO is to do, try, and eat anything that makes me uncomfortable. Especially if logic says that it shouldn’t. If I don’t, I fear I’ll create walls […]

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  • Shawn Blanc on backing up your computer files

    Shawn Blanc: For $10 month and very little energy I have a system that backs up my data redundantly, securely, and thoroughly. And I don’t have to initiate anything to make it happen. He uses local external storage, Dropbox, Backblaze, and a few utilities to make sure he has a very reliable back up. All […]

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Writing helps me think more clearly and to form or transform my opinions. I write about what interests me such as blogging, photography, technology, social media, and my personal creative projects.


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