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
Me, on Twitter early this morning from bed: Startup culture is such that the word unicorn is used to describe a successful business. Imagine if the culture fostered success more often. Then, Fred Wilson on his blog this morning: I hate the word unicorn. It’s using fantasy to describe something very much reality. But I don’t want to…
Casey Liss on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code: All told, Code may or may not be for you, but it’s working out really nicely for me so far. I definitely suggest giving it a shot. I too have been using Code as my primary editor since it debuted at Build. I’m enjoying it. It seems much nicer than Atom…
Cade Metz for Wired on Microsoft’s vision for Windows 10 to be on a billion devices and for applications from Android, iOS, and Windows all running on them “easily”: But this kind of thing is never as easy as it seems. “I’m skeptical of anything that pretends to be the magic bullet,” says one coder, who requested anonymity because…
Ed Bott, of the Ed Bott Report, reporting on ZDNet that Microsoft is shooting Windows Media Center in the head: That decision shouldn‘t come as a surprise. Media Center, once a signature feature of Windows “premium“ editions, has been on life support for years. The team developing Media Center features was broken up in 2009, shortly after delivering…
Brent Simmons on his blog: But those aren’t my reasons for deleting my tweets. Instead, it’s because Twitter is a blogging (or micro-blogging, really) service that doesn’t meet my requirements […] Follow the link to read the rest of the post. This is very tempting. Ever since Jeremy Keith went Indie Web with his “notes” (read: tweets) I’ve been…
If you follow me on Twitter you can probably tell that for the past 48 hours my brain is swirling around Microsoft’s Build conference and keynote. In a lot of ways my brain is swirling in the same way that it did in 2002 when I saw Steve Jobs debut the 17” iMac. This was the moment I…
I just finished watching Microsoft’s Build Keynote from yesterday. If you haven’t seen it, and understand developer jargon, I recommend you watch it. My takeaways: Windows is about to get a lot more applications Office is now as big a platform for MSFT as Windows is Visual Studio Code is very good (I’ve been using it all day)…
Web people,
Jeffery Zeldman on whether or not Medium is a death knell of the open web: You may think I exaggerate, but I’ve heard more than one respected colleague opine that publishing in Medium invalidates everything we independent content producers care about and represent; that it destroys all our good works with but one stroke of the Enter button….
Aaron Draplin on the reaction of Hillary Clinton’s logo: Knee-jerk reactions. Cheap comparisons. Lazy remixes. Predictable reactions. So it goes. Unfortunately this is how it goes. A woman runs for President of the United States and the biggest news to come out of it is her choice of logo. I think people just like to tee off on…
What are Deep Links? Scott Rosenberg recently wrote a piece on Backchannel on Medium about Deep Links. He wrote: Deep linking means to bore a wormhole-tunnel that hops you directly from a specific spot in one app to a spot in another, no side trip to a browser or a home screen needed. You get it. If you…
For the past several years our industry, the tech industry, has been pulling designers that work within it down the stack — so to speak — towards engineering. They’ve drilled into their heads that they need to learn to code or, at the very least, to be able to create functional prototypes of their designs so that they can…
Chris Messina, inventor of #hashtags, on Medium: The conventional seams between disciplines are fraying, and the set of skills necessary to succeed are broader and more nebulous than they’ve been before. He waxes on about how the lines between nearly every single area inside a company are blurring more and more. His piece reminded me of what I…
iGNANT interviews GIF Artist Kevin Weir. You can find more of his stuff here.
Marco Arment on DuckDuckGo: In my experience so far, DuckDuckGo’s search is good enough the vast majority of the time. Sometimes, its results are even better than Google’s, and they’re rarely much worse. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine on all of my devices for several months. I’ve had some speed issues with it (and still…
Linus Torvalds, creator of git: You can actually see how it all took shape in the git source code repository, except for the very first day or so. It took about a day to get to be “self-hosting“ so that I could start committing things into git using git itself, so the first day or so is hidden,…
Noah Read on music: When I became a teenager this music fell by the wayside as my tastes followed those of most teenagers trying to be cool while not popular. Some of what I liked then has stood the test of time, but much of it has proven itself culturally and emotionally bankrupt. In recent months I have…
Beautiful Maps by Dennys Hess. I love maps. /via Coudal.
Photographer Eric Smith in Going Viral on Medium: When I reviewed the pictures two weeks ago I was astounded by the juxtaposition of the young man immersed in his phone while this creature is feet away. Over the course of six shots showing the whale emerging and vanishing, he never looked up, even while the three other people on…
In March 2013 I turned off all notifications on my phone, tablet, and computer. In May of that year I went one step further and closed most applications that would keep me distracted and only opened them when I wanted to. To this day the only notifications I get on my devices are for SMS and calendar events….
This is a pretty cool use of Code Pen.
Justin Blanton decides to muddy the waters on the definition of the word blogging even more by using textshots on Twitter to “blog”: With the advent of “textshots”—screenshots of text linked within tweets (and viewed inline on many Twitter clients)—I’ve decided to try something new with Twitter: “blogging”. Blanton is a blogging veteran so we’ll allow him his experimentation….
We have a number of bird nests throughout our 3 acre property. Some I’ve seen, most I haven’t laid eyes on yet. Last year we had a Woodcock (weird bird alert) nest under our spruce trees in the backyard. See blurry photo. Each morning we have turkeys roosting throughout the forest. I love it. Here are a few related…
Earlier this month I was aglow with anticipation as Dawn reached orbit around Ceres. At Coalwork we even had it marked on the public calendar thinking it’d be a historic event. I expected a live stream. There was none. I expected a live audio stream. There was none. There wasn’t so much as a blog post on the…