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Michael Gartenberg on three smaller, but I think fantastic, features of the new Macbook Pros released today by Apple: "Better battery life. An automatic way to switch between discrete and integrated graphics and momentum scrolling." My now 9 month old 15" unibody Macbook Pro has fantastic battery life. However, switching between the discrete and integrated […]

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Twitter has rolled out its advertising platform called Promoted Tweets. It takes actual tweets from participating brands and pushes them onto the top of relevant search results and shoves them into the stream within third party applications. Inclusion of this ad system into third party applications is not mandatory but is certainly welcomed by developers […]

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[ad#Adsense: Horiz 468] I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers. Until this latest release the Top Sites page in Safari was too slow for me to find useful. Now, however, it […]

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Just adding Steve & Irene’s, a simple hoagie shop in Childs, PA, to my favorite places within two hours of home list. Eliza and I ordered two hoagies for lunch today and they were both fantastic. I’d recommend the Pittsburgh or the Child’s. Both come with spicy ranch and either french fries or onion rings […]

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Taken yesterday going south on Broad St. It was a hot but beautiful day in Philadelphia. Wish I could have stayed longer. At least I got a Pat’s Steak & Cheese.

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At the end of a link from John Gruber’s most-excellent Daring Fireball to Engadget’s review of the Joojoo he wrote: "(Ironically, Engadget’s video demos are only available in Flash. Why would a website devoted to leading-edge gadgetry continue to embed video in a format that can’t be played on the best web-reading gadget? If your […]

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Just a quick link to the site because I’ve switched to a different template from The Theme Foundry. I was itching to do a theme from scratch myself but thought better of it considering how busy I am currently. I’ll leave designing to designers for now. I also changed the way that ads are displayed […]

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Yesterday we had the opportunity to go fishing for the first time this year. I didn’t catch a thing and only had a single bite but it is early in the season and that isn’t really why I went. My main objective was to get my new pole and reel set up and to test […]

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Every developer’s bane is a problem that seemingly has no cause or solution. Most times, after wasting hours and hours and hours trying to solve the issue, I will discover that there was a cause and there is a solution – but it is the time wasted, the sweat, the tears and the fist pounding […]

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Make no mistake, Crichton’s posthumously published Pirate Latitudes is an adventure book. This book has everything you’d expect in a pirate adventure; pirates, warships, KRAKEN!, cannons, lewd women, drunken brawls, and hurricanes. However it still manages to lack a certain sense of wonder or tension. This may perhaps be because of popularity of Pirates of […]

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Special guest Nick Ogozaly and I ponder whether or not people should expand their horizons by learning to play an instrument in this episode of Random 60. What do you think? Sound off in the comments. Originally recorded in December 2009. First-frame photo credit: Eliza Devroe.

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Warning: This post may have a slight taste of jealousy when you bite into it at first but I tried my best to only use a teaspoon. iPhone was, as Scott Forstall recently put it, a gold rush for developers. Simple, relatively inexpensive applications for iPhone that hit the top paid, popular or featured lists […]

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[ad#Adsense: Horiz 468] Many of the third-party iPad applications I’ve seen so far have me wishing that I wasn’t so sure that I’m not getting one. Game Table for iPad is no exception. It includes Checkers, Chess and a deck of cards (and some chips) for only $.99. I love this bit. "Game Table is not […]

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Several years ago I turned off Growl. I found it to be far too distracting. The little blobs of horribly designed text popping up above my work every few moments reminded me far too much of the Windows’ pop up bubble thing. You know, that incredibly annoying yellow bubble that pops up to tell you […]

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This is how I found my seedlings this morning. I’m fairly certain they will not recover so I lost about two weeks of growth. The culprit? My cat Pickles. The blame? Me. I put these little guys in a position that he could easily access and I knew that he would eat them if he […]

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Wildlife photography isn’t an easy venture. It takes patience, a lot of time and a bit of luck. Unless of course you create your own environment for the shot you want. That is exactly what Alan Murphy has done in his "Fun with a Home Made Nest Box" [sic] wherein he captures some bluebirds in […]

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Apple has just released guided video tours of using iPad. There are guided tours for just about every application that will ship with the device.

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In this week’s Monday By Noon article Jonathan Christopher covers establishing style guides in code to make collaboration between multiple developers easier. Although it may seem like an anal attempt at control style guides can go along way in making a lot things easier in the project workflow. Reading through and fixing bugs in someone […]

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Took this while jogging yesterday before the rain. This is a very big evergreen tree.

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Yesterday I said that I’d share the many ways in which I use Smart Albums in iPhoto. Instead of sharing all of the ways in one post I figured I’d break them up. One of my Smart Albums helps me to locate possible duplicate photos. Here is why and how this works. I stress possible […]

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He’s a good lookin’ dude. Hard to believe this was four years ago and that, next month, he’ll be 8.

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When the iPad was announced I said I was surprised at its name. In a list entitled ‘Surprises’ I wrote: "The name. I’ve tried to let iPad sink in and I still think it will (it will have to) but I am still surprised." Then, I few days later Neven Mrgan changed my perspective on the […]

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Mike Matas, the designer behind things like Delicious Library, many of the iPhone’s interfaces, Photo Booth, and most recently the iPad’s Maps and Photos applications, has a brand new Web site. Stunning and cool.

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Tumblr has announced that there are now premium themes available for Tumblr. Premium meaning that they cost money and are generally much more refined then the over 350 free themes already available for Tumblr. Two things: First, I love that Tumblr is doing things to monetize their platform for both themselves and their design-savvy community. […]

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Apple vs. Microsoft was a tech war for the ages. The two companies battled each other vigorously. Who won? Some would say Microsoft clearly won based on marketshare while others think they simply sold out and made an inferior product to Apple. However, the clear winner was neither company – it was us, the consumers, […]

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[ad#Adsense: Horiz 468] Marco Arment has now confirmed and previewed Instapaper for the iPad. In the post he says "an iPad without native Instapaper Pro is not a device I want to own." I agree. Instapaper on the iPad is like the drugs . However, having purchased a new Macbook Pro just a little over […]

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I’ve said it before, I believe the NFL’s overtime rules suck. Harsh words, I know. But I’m not alone. That post just-so-happens to be one of the more popular pages on this blog – it being the page people click on when searching for "NFL overtime rules suck" on Google. Today there was a vote […]

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In West Virginia, last spring, we happened upon this small book store/library that was completely open with no one on staff at all. Just a building along a road with the door open, actually open not just unlocked, where you could go in grab a book or two. Totally awesome.

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From the department of ‘I never knew I’d really need that’ comes the latest Google Chrome update that makes it dead simple to translate a Web page from many different languages into your native one. I hadn’t realized how many Web sites I’d been missing out on until this update rolled through. Then I found […]

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Many young companies will leverage their founder’s or team’s personal brands to catapult the company’s brand. They’ll attempt to "get the word out" about the company’s product using the networks of their own team. They’ll try to mold the message of the company using their own voices rather than the company’s collective one. If you […]

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This should come as no surprise to those of you that follow me on Twitter but I’ve switched from Tweetie for Mac, which hasn’t seen an update for months, to the oft updated Echofon. Tweetie for Mac still has a few standout features that draw me to using it – but any software that runs […]

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Last night while watching the Oscars I saw this iPad commercial, which Engadget has shared, and I immediately thought it was too fast. I have seen the Keynote announcing the iPad and have poured over its features on the Web site – so I’m pretty familiar with what the iPad will do out of the […]

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[ad#Adsense: Horiz 468] Recently Eliza and I signed up for Netflix. Ever since moving into our new apartment I haven’t had the Xbox 360 connected to the Internet because of the location of my cable modem/router and because the Xbox 360 does not come Wifi-enabled by default. This hasn’t been too much of an issue […]

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Roxanne Darling of Barefeet Studios and personal friend recaps the way Social Media had an impact on how information flowed around the globe about the tsunami created by the earthquake off the coast of Chile. When I awoke Saturday morning to the news of the quake, which I first saw via Twitter, I immediately sent […]

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[ad#Adsense: Horiz 468] The earthquake, which had an epicenter just offshore in Maule, Chile, has sent tsunami warnings across the entire Pacific region including Hawai’i, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and many other countries. Additional resources CNN.com has a lot information but no single URL. USGS map of South America. Tons of aftershocks. The Pacific Tsunami […]

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[ad#Adsense: Horiz 468] One of the best places to track the tsunami that will be hitting Hawai’i in a few hours is the #hitsunami tag on In Hawaii Now.

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Kids Snow = Generally an awesome time (and soreness).

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Five years ago today: We were at a hockey game.

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Cape Lookout off the coast of Beaufort, North Carolina in October, 2008.

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I was digging through this interview of GitHub developer Scott Chacon trying to find the most quoatable portion to paste here in hopes that you’d follow the link to the interview to read it. The fact is, though, the entire interview is dripping with awesome. Read it. /via Simon Willison.

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This has been passed around a bit lately but it is just too awesome not to share. Here is an image showing the Mariana Trench to scale showing a human being, a Blue Whale, and some various depths as you work you way down 36,000ft. of water. Amazing. /via John Gruber (who called it "Spooky".)

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Tumblr is rolling out updates to its API. I’m liking the updates that I’m seeing so far and I think Tumblr could really benefit from having a stronger API offering.

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Eliza, my mother-in-law Carla and I took a drive last week to visit a few wineries along the Lehigh Valley Wine Trail. Due to winter hours, a long lunch, and some shopping – we only got to two wineries along the trail. The first winery was Amoré in Nazareth, Pa. Although having recently been through a […]

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A few years ago, and I have the video to prove it, I said that I wanted to try to eat 100 chicken McNuggets from McDonald’s. Those whom I asked to try the challenge with me refused (looking back this was a wise choice) and so it never happened. Since then, however, I’ve always wanted […]

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Yesterday Google began to release Google Buzz to its Gmail users. Buzz appears to be a compelling service – especially since it plugs right into something many of us use already. For more information about what Buzz is and does visit the Google Buzz site for a nice demo. I can’t have much more of […]

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A few more hands before our friend Burke goes away for two months.

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Saw this at 12:30 on Sunday afternoon at the intersection of Routes 106 and 247. Everyone seemed to get out OK though.

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Last August I complained about Tumblarity and I wasn’t alone. Many people didn’t like how Tumblarity motivated the Tumblr community to post and repost drivel and I’m very happy to see that the Tumblr team has, as far as I can tell from my desk, decided to do away with it. But I also said […]

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