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My friend Shane Robinson, who hails from the windward side of Oahu, Hawai’i, has a brand-new Etsy shop where he showcases some of his photographic work in abstract fine art. His photos are simply gorgeous and would make excellent decorations for an office (which I’m picking up for Viddler HQ), your home or as gifts […]

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In The origins of abc John Boardley of I Love Typography tells a short, though rather thorough and enjoyable, history of the alphabet as we know it today. Boardley does an excellent job summing up and visually demonstrating what many of us may have learned in High School – though I personally found it much […]

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John Gruber has been referencing polls and articles about why people prefer Blackberrys rather than an iPhone. I love my iPhone but I can think of a few reasons I’d like to use a Blackberry. Here they are. The red light that is referred to in the polls/articles, presumably telling you that you have a […]

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Liz Danzico has a list of the types of *bows. Fascinating. Especially, Alexander’s dark band. Kickin’ it late-second-century style. No, I will not link to nor mention Double Rainbow simply because it is pertinent. Crap.

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The utility of the iPhone only increased with the iPhone 4. Taking photos on the go was always possible with the iPhone. Remember, I used the first gen iPhone with its 2.1MP digital camera for over 3 years.However, the iPhone 4’s camera quality and speed nearly makes it a digital camera replacement for my use. […]

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Eliza and I spent the day yesterday with some family and friends at the Adventure Aquarium in Camden, New Jersey. I’ve uploaded a few select shots from the iPhone onto Flickr but Eliza has got the goods.

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Over 1,000 people found my post on playing Oregon Trail online yesterday. Yes, yesterday alone. Since I linked to it 18 months ago nearly 100,000 people have found that post via Google, Bing and other places and the day-to-day visitors to that post is growing faster than any other page on this site. It seems […]

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My friend Andrew’s mother Rita recently broke her ankle while hiking. Andrew wrote about it on his blog. The post is both touching and honest. It reminds me of the better days of blogging when people wrote journal entries rather than gadget reviews. When people wrote about how much their day sucked rather than how […]

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I’ll admit it, when I saw 10K Apart‘s challenge I first thought it meant to build a web app for less than $10K. In reality, the challenge is to build a web app that weighs in at less than 10K – or kilobytes. The challenge is simple. Build something that inspires the Web and keep […]

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I’ve been subscribed to the Livejournal of Alexander Safonov, or pats0n, for a long time. This is one of the first shots of him actually at work taking the images from an outsider’s perspective. Fantastic job you have there Alexander. That being said… I do think you’re a little crazy. Nerves of steel.

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I saw this quote from Joe Keohane on Matt Mullenweg’s blog. I’m sure Matt had his own reasons for publishing this quote to his blog and I’m fairly certain they are totally different than mine. He kept his to himself and I will too. "In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which […]

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Ran across this post via WordPress.com on how to antique (and distress) furniture with paint. I like how simple the steps are and how it doesn’t permanently damage the furniture – as I have seen suggested elsewhere. [ad#Adsense: Horiz 468]

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Hello dear readers of my personal Web site (all 3 or 4 of you lovely, lovely people)! I have a problem. My voicemail greeting – you know, the thing you hear when you call my phone and I don’t pick up – needs to be updated. I’ve had the same greeting for over three years. […]

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That does it. I’m creating letterhead for myself and it is going to include a Bantha.

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For those that haven’t already heard or read the transcript of Chris Pearson’s arguments against using the GPL I’ll sum it up for you. Chris has three main problems with the GPL. He didn’t itemize them very well on the podcast but this is what I was able to extract myself. Chris feels… as though […]

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Harvey Pekar, comic book writer and much much more, recently died. Anthony Bourdain has a rather lovely blog post about Pekar and Cleveland. "His continuing compulsion to wonder what’s wrong with everybody else was both source of entertainment and the only position of conscience a man could take." Also be sure to check out Bourdain’s […]

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Drew Strojny, former NFL player for the Eagles, Giants and Rams, had been moonlighting as a designer and open-source WordPress theme developer for years. The theme business, which is supported via support-membership-subscriptions (great business plan) is really taking off.  So much so that he and his wife are doing that full time via The Theme […]

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A quick and very, very dirty panoramic image of our garden so far (as of last week). Watch for a short video from Eliza in the near future. See also: Video: Our backyard, so far.

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London’s White Fang – a story about a wolf whose mother was part dog and father full-on wolf, told mostly from the wolf’s perspective – is full of detail. I don’t know what inspired London to write White Fang but whatever it was it must have driven him to climb into caves, chase small animals […]

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As you may have noticed this website has been unavailable or erring for over 36 hours. This isn’t the first time that Dreamhost has had issues and it has effected my site. Over the years of my using Dreamhost there has been a lot of problems, a lot of downtime, a lot of headaches. Any […]

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Eliza and I have been hard at work on our backyard since spring. Whenever we get the chance, and energy, we work on our backyard to spruce it up and make it a nice place to get outside. So far we’ve put in a stone patio, planted grass, put in a fire pit, planted a […]

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An instant classic in NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series is with Weird Al Yankovic. He covers three songs. I recommend the entire series of Tiny Desk Concerts. NPR music is pretty much the best place on the Web right now.

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Photos by Seed Morphologist Wolfgang Stuppy of seeds from angiosperms.* /via NPR. *Flash is required but the photos are still boner-worthy.

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Three years ago at the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania Eliza and I were nearly at the front of what became a very, very long line at the Apple Retail Store ready to buy two first generation iPhones. For six years prior to that day Eliza and I hadn’t owned mobile phones. We were rebels […]

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I’ve been subscribed to NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day for years. I’ve linked to both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial shots that have been featured from this very blog many times though nearly all of them are fantastic. It is sort of like an art blog where the featured painter everyday is God.

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After using the iPad exclusively for 10 days (that’s right, I haven’t used my Macbook Pro yet) I am getting a pretty good feel for the iPad. I figured I’d jot down some notes in no particular order. The great The utility of the iPad exceeds a laptop in so many ways. And I believe […]

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From the "coolest thing you’ll see all day" department – these bees in Turkey make their nests out of carefully folded flower pedals. Striking. /via Jason Kottke. On NPR, of course.

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I’m typing this on my brand new iPad courtesy of my lovely wife Eliza. If this isn’t the future of computing, I don’t know what is. When Steve Jobs said, at the D8 conference, that the next era of the personal computer was just around the corner (whether it was the iPad or not) and […]

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The unread count in Google Reader went from a relatively low number to an incredibly high number yesterday evening because Steve Jobs got on stage at D8. You can either read the transcript or watch the videos if you want to catch up. My favorite bits are the real story behind the iPhone’s inception (which […]

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Earlier this year my friends and I took a short trip to Gloucester, Massachusetts to do some cod fishing on the Atlantic. I took some random video clips during the trip and have finally stitched them together. (Watch in HD by clicking on HD on the player.) We all had a great time and ended […]

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This is a must link because there is cast iron, bacon, butter, duck eggs and cheese in this video. And, although I use chicken eggs, is pretty much exactly how I make my breakfast sandwiches. Warning: The video is a bit long and may lead to extreme hunger and jealousy.

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Fun list. I love the "yeah, OK" tone of it.

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For those of you that follow me on Twitter or have read my post on the Viddler blog you’ll already know that I was a guest on Wine Library TV on Friday. This episode was a long time coming. Gary and I had tried to align our schedules for a pretty long time but never […]

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They love them some clover.

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Lead Designer at Viddler, Andrew Smith, has released Pack via the Viddler blog – which is what he uses to compress Viddler’s CSS and Javascript for deployment. Pack is written in Ruby and runs from the command-line. However, you could easily daisy chain it to Capistrano when doing deploys, like Andrew has done for Viddler, […]

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Not two days ago I told Eliza that I eat too fast. Five years ago I said the same thing. Another habit that needs to die. So, how am I going to slow myself down? I’m going to count my chews. I know, that sounds a bit crazy but if I do it I can […]

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Sometimes you wonder if the habits you have today will simply always be your habits. I’m here to tell you that old habits die easy. Five years ago I was going to sleep at 5am and waking up mid-afternoon. In a very short period of time the opposite is now true. I like to be in […]

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Last night I spent some time on my patio working and reading.

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As I sit in our local Panera Bread, belly full of warm soup, after a day of traveling, meetings and recording an episode of Wine Library TV with my friend Gary – I’m reminded of this post about Panera and how it fills a void in our area. As I read the post I began […]

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Not the best syntax in that title but you get the point. Someone’s copy machines are working pretty hard. AppleTV = Google TV. App Store = Chrome Web Store. Amazon S3 = Google Storage. There are a few other examples coming out of Google I/O this week too. Granted, though, that some of these products are […]

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Five years ago I said that I had never been more anxious to watch a show each week. That anxiousness has lasted ever since. By Monday it will be all over. Or, The End.

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In 2005 Tommy Maddox was the starting quarterback for my NFL team of choice the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was horrible. At least in my opinion. I really, really disliked him. A few choice posts from that time period make this glaringly obvious: My prediction that the Steelers will run the ball in November 2005. And, […]

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Wow. This is sobering. Five years ago, while I was still working at 9rules, I mentioned how much I enjoyed waking up in the morning, having a cup of coffee, checking my feeds and getting the day rolling. That ritual didn’t start five years ago. It started at least five years before that (somewhere around […]

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OK, maybe not the world. But, this is simply a friendly housekeeping / reminder post to let you know how easy it is to keep up with the latest posts from this here site. In order of my recommendation: The RSS feed. – This gives you everything. Notes, links, photos, videos, etc. I suggest Google […]

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Spoiler: The Watchtower published by Jehovah’s Witnesses. The New York Review of Magazines has an excellent article about The Watchtower, its history, publication and distribution. I recommend giving it a read. Disclaimer: For those of you that do not know, I’m one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

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Google has open sourced VP8 and is using it as a basis for an entire open web media project. We at Viddler believe in our customers having choice. That’s why, hot on the heels of our support for HTML5 playback using H.264 on the iPad/iPhone, we’re announcing support for encoding into VP8 also. I’m really […]

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I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend Dropbox to all of you. It has been a rather silent, but dare I say deadly, tool that I’ve come to rely on much more than I thought I would. And, it is practically invisible. So far I’ve used it to share files to and from my iPhone, […]

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