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
Last night I stumbled across this tweet from Neill Cameron on Twitter. Which I favorited. Which automatically syncs with my Unmark account. Which led me to his new site this morning. Which led me to discover his Pirates of Pangea gallery. A wooden ship, on top of a Brachiosaurus, with a girl riding a T-Rex straight at it.
Bret Victor designs tools. Tools that help you see, or measure and analyze, what you’re working on while you’re working on them. I’ve mentioned him before. This latest presentation by Victor describes a space that can help people who make things do the same things in the real world as Victor’s tools have helped people do in the…
Mandy Brown: You cannot know what you know until you’ve written it. As you write, you learn what you know—or, more likely, what you don’t know, which, let’s face it, is most everything. I have hundreds of unpublished drafts for this blog, yet, I’m so happy that I wrote them because I was able to come to a…
Horace Dediu: For them WWDC had a great deal of meat. Indeed, for them, it was probably the most significant event Apple ever staged. Again, agreed. It took all my strength not to capitalize Earth. Perhaps Dediu meant dirt. So I’ll leave it.
Want to learn Swift, the new programming language from Apple? I’d say start by watching the WWDC Session videos. Then, hit up this curated list of Swift resources. /via Marc Edwards on Twitter.
Also, an Instagram crop.
On average I save the lives of three or four of these each time I mow my lawn.
The special effects in Jurassic Park were originally planned to use animatronics, stop-motion animation, and other traditional effects of the time. But, contrary to the opinions of some, a few “mavericks” at ILM thought they could pull it all off digitally. If I listened to “You will never”, T-Rex would have never have been built. Great video. I love Jurassic…
Me, on Space Bits… Did You Know? The Griffith Observatory was used as a shooting location for none other than MacGyver’s home in episode 1 of the now iconic TV series. Later on in the series he moved to a much more modest houseboat. This is the sort of information you can only get from Space Bits.
#portraitswithoutpeople
Paula recently submitted her work to the gallery and I immediately fell in love with this piece from her watercolor archive.
There are hundreds of thousands of third-party apps that you can use on your computer, phone, and tablet. Some of them are amazingly good and far better in a number of ways than what ships with these devices by default. By using third-party apps, however, you sometimes give up a level of seamless integration between all of your…
This is why I do not like the Mercator projection.
A Tribute to Discomfort: Cory Richards from Blue Chalk on Vimeo. Time to get the DSLR out. /via Jeff Sheldon on Twitter.
Mid-summer last year Elliot Kember discovered that Chrome saves passwords in plain text on your computer and, with a few clicks, anyone sitting at your desk can see them. This made some waves in the community and, as you can see from the bottom of Kember’s post, had the likes of Chrome’s Head of Security, many press outlets,…
Last weekend, for the first time in my life, I went kayaking! I loved it so much, I went again the next day. For the last few months I’ve spent a lot of time reading, watching videos, listening to podcasts — all about paddling. And I have to say that so much of that information came in very…
Jeffrey Kalmikoff on Medium: I effectively stopped looking at my Instagram feed, but did continue to use it to take, filter, and post photos (to Facebook). Early this year, in an effort to reduce overall social media noise from all accounts, I decided to unfollow everyone on Instagram and start over. As you may, or may not know,…
Jim Dalrymple, of The Loop: There are a few things that struck me during the WWDC keynote presentation this morning. The first, and perhaps most important, is how much fun the Apple executives were having on stage. I’m not talking about the normal smiles and jokes, I mean they genuinely looked like they were having a good time….
Yesterday’s WWDC Keynote was, in my opinion, the best WWDC Keynote ever. In fact, it was their best presentation since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it right here. Craig Federighi: I’ll tell you, you just have not had chili by the campfire until you’ve eaten it with…
Ted Landau: Make no mistake: this was a historic keynote. It’s hard to overstate what Apple did today. If you’ve ever written and released any amount of software in your life it is pretty easy to see how much work went into what Apple announced yesterday. I don’t know for sure, but I’d be willing to bet it…
My friend Geoff DiMasi, of the great P’unk Ave, on A List Apart: We always cared about our work and had good relationships with our clients before, but intentionally pursuing projects that align with our business values has brought a higher level of investment and internal motivation from all members of our team. We have become true partners…
Dan Eden lets us know how not to install OS X Yosemite: The moral of the story; don‘t install 10.10 just yet. And if you do, make sure you‘re not an impatient idiot like me. I was this close to installing Yosemite this morning. I backed up my work Macbook to a Time Capsule, downloaded Yosemite, and almost…
Huge news for DuckDuckGo. Safari in Yosemite will now have DDG as an option for a search engine. Remember Fred Wilson’s graph from a few days ago? You can expect that spike to continue. /via Daring Fireball.