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
In 2008 seven investors were approached to buy 10% of Airbnb for $150,000. Five of them turned them down flat, two never responded. Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, on Medium: Next time you have an idea and it gets rejected, I want you to think of these emails. Airbnb is currently valued at a $25.5 billion dollars.
Luca G, from the Netherlands, on Medium: I’ve compared the two and came to the conclusion that Evernote is the best option for me. I always carry my phone around, and it’s always charged. I’m much the same. I’ve defaulted to Evernote for almost everything. I say almost because I find that having a notebook on hand for…
Tal F commutes to NYC on a bicycle and has done so for years. He decided to shake things up and use a kayak to commute into work — and not just any kayak, an Oru Kayak. Tal F, on his excellent blog: Predictably, the process of setting up and dismantling the boat in Manhattan always attracts a…
Jared Sinclair: Here’s a little secret for newbie app developers out there: a fun app has nothing to do with clean code. You can replace “fun” with anything here. Shipping is better than not shipping. Manton Reece: Most programmers try to improve their code a little from one project to the next. But obsessing about how the code looks…
Carl T. Holscher on growing up at a slower pace: I wasn’t ignorant. I read voraciously. I wrote and thought. I shared my thoughts in that fledgling collection of wires and computers. I talked to classmates and spent hours on the phone with a friend talking to the wee hours of the morning. No matter where or how…
Since we’re on the subject of hitting milestones around things done daily and the number 100… this one is a doozy. Casey Neistat just hit 100 episodes of daily video blog episodes. A huge accomplishment given the quality of Casey’s videos. I watch an episode every single day at lunch and catch up on the weekend’s episodes on…
Marisa is excited: Oh friends. Canning season is on so hard right now. I have 25 pounds of apricots spread out on baking sheets on my living room floor, and I have four pounds of super ripe peaches on my kitchen counter. There are dilly beans fermenting on the dining room table, and I put a finished half…
What an amazing feat by Jeremy Keith: I missed the daily deadline once. I could make the excuse that it was a really late night of carousing, but I knew in advance that I was going to be out so I could’ve written my 100 words ahead of time—I didn’t. I didn’t go twelve days before missing my…
It has been a whirlwind this last week or so. I'm writing this while 35,000 feet in the air as Kyle and I are off to San Francisco on a business trip. A trip we didn't know we were taking until late last week. Isn't flying amazing? The process of flying, however, is about as terrible as possible….
We’ve been doing some walking in the afternoons lately.
Noah Read, on his blog, on why he is posting “snippets” to his site which then get distributed to the social networks of his choice. Some of the content is so great that it seems a shame to be dumping it into 3rd party services, which may be gone within a few years. Microblogging and social sharing will survive,…
Today was a beatiful day. After lunch I went for a 2.5 mile walk around the city. Each time I venture out, either alone or with a Coalwork member or two, I try a new route. I'm surprised by the number of routes that can be made in such a short distance from our space. I try not…
Dave Winer is at it again. This time with an open source “browser” that can read a “river” called riverBrowser. riverBrowser is, at its core, a set of HTML, JavaScript, CSS that can read JSONP files and output them as HTML. What can this be used for? Well, it could — potentially — replace RSS for a number of applications….
Monkey Keyboard: Monkey is a free keyboard for iOS and Android that allows you to drop stickers while you're chatting in WhatsApp, snatch a file from DropBox while you're writing email, or send your lover a Spotify song right in iMessage. Looks very interesting. But free makes me leery.
Manton Reece, writing on his blog, about quick blogging workflows: I believe there are two important facets to microblogging. The first is the timeline experience: a reverse-chronological list of posts from your friends, like you see on Twitter. The second is that posting should be effortless: if there’s less friction between your idea and publishing it, you’ll write…
Yesterday a young chap walked into the doors of Coalwork wanting to see “what we were up to”. He moved away from Scranton but would like to see Scranton improve. After talking for awhile about start ups, failures, successes, our respective backgrounds, whether or not there was money to be raised in this area, it came down to…
DuckDuckGo: DuckDuckGo just crossed ten million searches a day for the first time ever! We’re proud to be helping so many people take back their privacy. In celebration, we’re giving away ten thousand DuckDuckGo t-shirts to enthusiasts who help their friends and family take back their privacy as well. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo on every one of my…
WordCamp is a big deal in the WordPress community and I’m very pleased that Joe Casabona, fellow Coalworker, is organizing one for Scranton, PA. There are only 88 seats left so run and get your ticket. Side note: I’ve been to WordCamp’s in Hawaii, California, Texas, Arizona, New York, Philadelphia etc. I’m looking forward to finally attending one…
Manton Reece, on his blog, about the fact that he’s using WordPress to “tweet”: I’m very excited about the potential for microblogging. For the last year I’ve been working on a new platform around this stuff. By adopting some of these tips for WordPress, your microblog will be ready for my platform, but more importantly your blog will be…
43North “Behold the world’s largest business idea competition.” Five million dollars in cash awarded to the winners (plural) of this competition happening in Buffalo, New York. If you’re into investing this is a model to watch as it goes into its second year. I’m watching closely.
Yes, I skipped the weekend. I’m going to skip all weekends likely. Here is why. And you may just have to live with that. Speaking of the weekend, this one was pretty good. On Friday, I was able to play full court basketball for the first time since I was injured. It was painful but fulfilling. On Saturday,…
Gestimer is “for those little reminders during the day” and has a pretty cool gesture-based UI for setting short-term reminders. I think I’d like an interface like this if Gestimer plugged into Reminders. Neat idea. /via Matt Gemmell on Twitter.
Speaking of losing weight; an interesting piece in the New York Times by Aaron E. Carroll about how eating less is more important than exercise as a determining factor in weight loss. In the adult population, interventional studies have difficulty showing that a physically active person is less likely to gain excess weight than a sedentary person. Further,…
Jim Dalrymple, one of the nicest people on the planet, is down 40 pounds — in part, due to the Apple Watch’s constant nagging to move. He wrote a follow-up to his excellent review of the product specifically about his weight loss. While I’ll do my best to answer the questions, I have to say that I don’t know…