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
I’ve been going through my older tweets lately and reposting and commenting on a few of them on Twitter. In May 2007 I tweeted about a service called Launch Feed. Using Archive.org’s Way Back Machine we can see what it would have looked like at that time. I thought I’d pull it up today and see if it…
Fred Wilson recently published a post that I can wholeheartedly agree with him on. Regarding employees leaving your organization he gives the following advice: The thing I caution against is the tendency to get upset at departures and departing employees. I’ve seen leaders take the mob boss approach of “your are dead to me now” with departing employees….
Bijan Sabet, on his Tumblr: I deactivated my Facebook account this morning. The slide continues. Ironically, today is the day I decided to cut my #60daybreak short and I jumped back on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. I have my reasons. More soon.
Anne Wheaton, wife of Wil Wheaton, on her personal blog: I deleted my Twitter account last night and immediately felt relieved. I will miss the tweety buddies who were awesome that I don’t know in real life. I will continue to stay in touch with my friends around the world by phone or by my private Facebook account….
Dave Winer recently wrote that if you have something you want to publish that you should publish it anywhere but Medium. His argument is that Medium could shut down or change course at any moment and your content and your URLs would then be in jeopardy of disappearing. He’s right. That could happen. But that could also happen…
Brent Simmons on his personal blog: Here’s what I found: being off Twitter, that squeaky treadmill, gave me back some time, and it made me happier and calmer than I would have been. And: I’m not deleting my account, but I’ve turned off all notifications and uninstalled the app from all computers and devices. I just won’t be…
I’m concerned about Flickr. I’m concerned about Flickr because Yahoo! is going through a tumultuous time as a company. Last year it was speculated that Yahoo! would sell off its share in Alibaba to earn some dough while they continued to attempt to turn the company around. That quickly turned into rumors about Yahoo! splitting up its company…
I gave Peach a try for 10 minutes (even though I’m on a break). Here are my thoughts: I don’t know if text-based commands will triumph over buttons. Path had buttons for many of the ‘shortcuts’ that are built into Peach, such as sharing your location, and that never “took off” relatively speaking. Will people type them in instead? Peach…
I saw that Bijan Sabet wrote a short post enumerating a few things he’d like to see in some of the applications that he uses. I thought that was cool so I’m doing to do it too. git, the command-line source control tool that I use, has every conceivable feature you could imagine. Except undo. While I can…
I’m now on day 35 of my 60-day break from social media. I wanted to write a post on the 7th, since that would have been a calendar month since the start, but I didn’t. So, today I thought I’d jot down how this experiment has been going. To do so, I’ll answer the same questions I have in…
I don’t know Mike Vial. I found his site through the /now page movement. Have you seen my /now page? A few months ago I linked to his blog and shortly thereafter I got a nice email from him thanking me for the link. It felt like it was 2004. Back when the blogosphere was alive and well and…
Looking for a browser on iOS with a ton of features? Try iCab. Gabe Weatherhead has a great post on iCab. Great apps like this, which are updated far more often than the official apps, are still crippled by the fact that iOS does not allow for choice of default browser or mail client. I just don’t get…
In Gruber’s link to The Verge’s review of the Lumia 950XL and the Continuum feature (the feature that allows mobile apps to run like desktop apps when the phone is connected to an external display): I’ve seen Continuum demoed, and technically it is impressive. I’m not sure though that it’s something anyone wants or needs. […] Why bother plugging…
I really liked this comparison by Michael D. Shear for the New York Times and I think it is spot on. My wife has an Apple Watch. I’d call her a “light user” of the Watch. She wears it every day but mainly uses it for glancing at text messages. There are a myriad of other uses but,…
Fred Wilson going over his predictions from last year: The Apple Watch was a flop. This is the one I took the most heat on. So I feel a bit vindicated on this point. No sources cited here. I have read many “the Apple Watch is a flop” pieces but none of them have convinced me of that using…
Today is day 21 or about one-third of the way through my most recent break from social media. This morning I read my post from the end of the first week and I can say that not much has changed since then. But, as a matter of exercise I’d like to answer the questions again. How has these…
In June of 2014 I mentioned that my search engine of choice, DuckDuckGo, was being added as a search option to my then browser of choice Safari. At the time DDG was getting roughly 5M daily search queries. Today? 12M daily search queries. If you haven’t switched your browser, tablet, and phone to using DDG yet what are…
“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” # Today marks the first week of my social break. This has been a complete break from Twitter, RSS, Instagram, Facebook, any Slack channels that aren’t work related, Ello, Flickr, VSCO, Google+, etc. and most recently Swarm got the axe. To be certain that I didn’t slip…
In mid-2014 I took a two week break from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. In October 2014 I took a 30-day social break and wrote about why I was doing it when I had hit the midway point*. I feel like it is time to take another break and this time I think it will be for 60 days. Each time…
David Barnes for Packt Publishing on Medium: It’s easy to mock Ballmer. You see videos. The Windows TV ad. The “developers developers developers”. What a loser. What a goofball. But that’s the point. Here’s somebody who’ll wear their mediocrity with such energy, with such boundless enthusiasm and unbridled passion, that nobody else even tries to compete. Funny.
Me, on our company blog at Plain: Every site is different but as a whole they make up the general feeling of the Internet. Like a neighborhood of homes with well manicured lawns feels different than a neighborhood with old, dilapidated, unkempt homes with decommissioned vehicles in their front yards. I suppose I just wish I was seeing…
Kyle Slattery on the 3e8 journal on why every mobile app should have a way to “kill” it remotely: The tricky thing about setting up your kill switch is you need to do it before any problems pop up. The good thing is, it’s not that difficult to do (and you should always be thinking about the future,…
VTech: Our customer database contains user profile information including name, email address, password, secret question and answer for password retrieval, IP address, mailing address and download history. In addition the database also stores kids information including name, genders and birthdates. In total about 5 million customer accounts and related kids profiles worldwide are affected. Over the last few…
I had the privilege of interviewing James Gurney, creator of the illustrated book series Dinotopia, over on my other “blog” The Watercolor Gallery. Gurney also runs a daily blog called The Gurney Journey. During our interview I asked him about his experience with running the blog: Doing a blog is a lot of work, and it doesn’t pay directly….