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
Reddit continues to be the best place to find public interviews with interesting people. Elon Musk did an AMA yesterday — fascinating stuff. Here is part of his answer to how he has managed to learn so much so quickly. One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make…
For good reason! Bill Gates shows us an amazing machine that turns feces into drinkable water. And that is not all. The by-products of this process, in addition to the water, are power and ash that can be used. Here’s Bill: I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyer belt and drop into a large bin….
You can put this app in the “I’ll likely never, ever use it” category but man does this look very well done. /via Mark Christian/Mike Davidson on Twitter.
Fred Wilson uses 2014 as a lens to see not only what happened but what is happening: the “sharing economy” was outed as the “rental economy.” nobody is sharing anything. people are making money, plain and simple. technology has made renting things (even in real time) as simple as it made buying things a decade ago. Most of…
In a world where every new e-mail client must support Gmail or die, this is a breath of fresh air. JMAP, from FastMail, is an API that improves upon IMAP. It is open. And free. JMAP does everything. Instead of separate protocols with different syntax for sending email than for receiving it (and separate protocols again for contacts…
See Scrapple 1. I’m begrudgingly using Evernote. It is working. But I wish the sync capabilities were equal to Simplenote’s. Tip: Close your inbox. Only open it when you’re reading and/or writing email. Do not leave it open in between. I would like to have a Russian dash cam installed in my car. My drive into work has…
Over the last few weeks Aaron Draplin’s video for Lynda.com made the rounds. However, over on the great Metafilter there is a post by filthy light thief chocked full of Draplin stuff.
Over on the Barley blog we wrote: today we’re very excited to let you know that a brand-new media uploading and management experience is now available This was a lot of fun to work on. But it is even more fun to use. It will make my life a hundred times easier curating The Watercolor Gallery.
Stephen Thomas goes long on Metafilter: So: Nominally, MetaFilter is a venue for people to talk about things other people have done, intelligently and with respect for each other (if not necessarily for the thing being discussed), and a small number of people are paid well to ensure this is what happens. All of this, it seems, adds…
James Somers: If you’ve ever typed anything into a Google Doc, you can now play it back as if it were a movie — like traveling through time to look over your own shoulder as you write. For a while now Google Docs, or Drive, or Docs Drive, or whatever they are calling it today, has recorded every…
It has been 14 days since I said I’d be committing for 30 weekdays straight. I’ve committed code 12 out of those 14 days. (This weekend Eliza and I painted our living room so you’ll have to forgive me for not pulling out my computer.) What have I accomplished? What have I learned? These last 14 days have…
Simon (simurai): Flick Scrolling in short: An idea of a new gesture that extends scrolling content on a touch-screen. Instead of letting momentum stop the scrolling, you can decide exactly where it should stop. Pretty cool. I’d really like this on my iPad.
Matt Gemmell on what has changed for him in 2014 — mainly, that he no longer worries about things like stats, follower counts, and numbers. He now writes for him. But he used to. I’d second-guess tweets and even articles, based on what I thought would appeal to my readers – who were mostly programmers. My online presence…
There are a lot of choices for pocket notebooks so which pocket notebook is the best value? /toby on blogspot: SOooo, that then leads us to… WHICH ONE do I buy? If you write often enough, you start to fill them up, and you have to buy more of them. So which one shakes out as the best…
Jeffrey Ventrella: Any coder who claims that fast programming is the same as slow programming (except that it’s fast), doesn’t understand Design Process. For the same reason that many neuroscientists now believe that the fluid-like flow of neuronal firing throughout the brain has a temporal reverberation which has everything to do with thought and consciousness, good design takes…
This is just me shooting from the hip here, but follow me through the last few days of Instagram news to see if, perhaps, they might have done all of this on purpose. On December 10th Instagram announces they hit 300M accounts and also said this: We’ve been deactivating spammy accounts from Instagram on an ongoing basis to…
Inspired by local blogger and reporter Andy Palumbo’s scrapple posts — I’ve decided to try my hand at it. Today’s scrapple: There are about 3 people in the entire world that know exactly what they are doing and we’re all just copying off of them. Best thing I‘ve found in the last few weeks. http://php-osx.liip.ch I don‘t use…
Similar to the 30 weekday blog challenge… I’m going to challenge myself, and you dear reader, to 30 weekdays of committing code to one of your projects. Any project. The projects I’m challenging myself to commit to, for 30 weekdays straight, are Barley CMS, Barley for WordPress, or Unmark. What does this mean? I will commit code to…
This was fun to work on. Since I did 30 weekdays of blogging I think now I’ll aim for 30 weekdays of committing code to Barley CMS.
Update Fixed! With this tweet Jim Lind has saved my day. So, I’m working on issue #52 for Unmark and I’m having what is quickly becoming the oddest issue I’ve ever had in my professional career. As with most programming oddities, I’m willing to bet that when the issue is found it will be something completely obvious and…
Marco Arment: What’s apparent from most of the recent podcast stories is that most of their reporters have talked to very few sources and either don’t listen to podcasts themselves or have just started. Most podcast listeners and producers know that the truth is much less interesting: podcasts started out as a niche interest almost a decade ago…
VSCO Cam is now available for iPad. Good catch by Shawn Blanc: With this update, your VSCO Cam Library now syncs across devices. You can tell if a photo is synced by the double-circle icon in an image’s top right corner. And, not only do the images themselves sync, so too do the edits you’ve made. But! Not…
Josh Ginter for Tools and Toys: Overall, the thinness of the new iPad Air 2 makes it the best iPad to hold, use, and carry with you on a daily basis. The image of Steve Jobs using the original iPad on the couch during the famous 2010 keynote has come into full fruition with the iPad Air 2….
David Mark writing for The Loop: I think Amazon will sell a ton of these. I’m going to pull a Dalrymple and say “Nope”.