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Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
Amazon has this new tube-thing you can talk to called Echo. You can ask it questions by simply talking out loud. Similar to Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, or Google’s OK Google features. I find the entire thing odd – though, perhaps as a first step beta thing it’ll be OK – but I found it most odd that…
Kevin Roose for New York Magazine: According to Edison Research, 39 million people listened to a podcast in the last month, the highest number on record. See.
Marco Arment: Too much of my writing in the last few years has gone exclusively into Twitter. I need to find a better balance. And… By knocking down a few walls and moving some furniture around, blogging is preparing for a comeback, and we’ll all be better off for it. Related: this, this, and this. Yes!
Seven out of 365 days of #travelfeet have passed. It has been an interesting week. The small group of friends that have joined in the fun have added over 125 travelfeet photos. I’ll be interested to see if they continue or if some people drop off and others join, etc. Here are my first 7 days of travelfeet:…
Fred Wilson: As is often the case, a simple little thing turns out to be the big thing. That little thing is that almost every car that has been sold in the past five years has had bluetooth connectivity to the car audio system. These days your phone is connected wirelessly to your car the minute you open…
Sebastian de With: Part of a continuing effort to make some nice replacement icons for applications for usage in the OS X Yosemite Dock. This time around, mostly requests from Twitter. In Volume I he covered the Creative Suite from Adobe. In Volume II he covers some of the apps I’m more likely to use.
Speaking of packaging albums in all-new and innovative ways… P. Morris releases an album that you can only listen to with someone else who also has their webcam on. Think Chatroulette. Brilliant. /via Andy Baio.
Matt Haughey writing on this #tildeclub space: One long-standing pet peeve with Gmail (and all similar email apps) is that they don’t offer a “slow” reading option. Email is a fast, efficient, intensive sort of activity, so the UI is as practical as possible, but if I ever need to write more than four paragraphs, I find myself…
Yesterday Orbital Sciences had a bad day. One of their rockets exploded during a mission to deliver goods to the International Space Station. Rockets are hard. Elon Musk in Wired in 2012: The results are pretty crazy. One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like…
Hugh McIntyre for Forbes: In 2014, not a single artist’s album has gone platinum. Not one has managed to cross that million sales mark. Streaming/internet radio is eating digital downloads for lunch. And I think this trend is going to continue until things hit some sort of basement. But then, and I honestly believe this, something new will…
This was slated for 2022 at one point. I’m very happy to see things leveling off with this recommendation by the W3C. As Jeremy Keith said in his comments about this event on HTML5 Doctor: On the one hand, it doesn’t really matter whether HTML5 is W3C recommendation or not. After all, what really matters to developers is…
Kirk Lennon: One of the objections I’ve seen to Apple Pay is “How is it faster/easier than just sliding my card?” The truth is, it isn’t always. It’s rarely going to take longer than sliding a card, but it’s not always going to be radically faster either. However, it is much, much more secure. Merchants simply can’t be…
Today I used Twitter’s Find Friends feature that connects to Gmail to get a list of your contacts and subsequently searches Twitter for them. I have just over 2,550 contacts in my address book. Many are duplicates, due to how Gmail handles adding these addresses to your contact list. But, a cursory glance at the recordset shows me…
Powerpoint is pretty terrible. The reason why many of us think so is because it is misused by so many. You can’t blame the tool, says Wayne Barz: Many have wished for and striven for the death of the powerpoint presentation. I have always disagreed with this point of view. There is no doubt that most power point…
This is a bookmarklet that I wish I had written. But Michael Wheeler has beat me to it: For those who find themselves wanting to pop a YouTube video out into its own window, this is the tool for you. Using the bookmarklet below, you can pop a YouTube video out into a resizable window so you can…
#travelfeet 1: After being in business for two years, we now have Plain business cards. We get asked all the time for business cards and we simply kept putting it off. Probably due to our relative distaste for business card culture. Oh, and all new plainmade.com coming very soon.
I should have tagged Bijan in my list of podcasts but he posted a few suggestions anyway. His are both photography related: I’m really enjoying Marco’s latest creation, Overcast and as a result I’m listening to more podcasts these days. I too am enjoying Overcast.
Om Malik: The blogging challenge, however has brought a rigor and discipline that was missing for most of the year. Almost three weeks into the challenge, I feel like a slugger in the middle of slump who is finally starting to recover his swing — connecting, but still missing the power. The desire to blog is back, writing…
Ma.tt: On Sunday at 11AM I will deliver my State of the Word address, our annual look at where we’ve been and the road ahead, and even if you can’t make it you can livestream the SoTW and the entire weekend for just $10 from the comfort of your own home. I wish getting to San Francisco didn’t…
Digg has a roundup of beer glass types and which brews to drink with them. Notice, 8 out of 10 glasses are recommended for IPA. IPA tastes great in anything.
In case you went all o_0 when you saw #tildeclub in my last post. Here is the story of its origin.
Kathy Sierra: I now believe the most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening, “following”, “liking”, “favoriting”, retweeting. In other words, the point at which her readers have (in the troll’s mind) “drunk the Koolaid”. Apparently, that just can’t be allowed. Such a sad retelling of…
Matthew Haughey waxing nostalgic on the incredibly retro tilde.club: That made me think back to posting 4–5 times a day on my own blog, and RSS (and The Time Before Google Reader Was Killed), and even back before that. I tried to think of the ultimate time for the indie web, when I was experiencing my favorite setup…
Last night, also, I read this post on Ello by @jk. I like the way he’s using Ello.