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
Chad Fowler, CTO of 6Wunderkinder, has written a post on his personal blog about how our industry glorifies working long hours and how it is ironically counterproductive. I agree and in general Chad is spot on. I’ve helped lead and develop software products for 15 years of my career and this is the lesson that takes the longest time…
Not everyone understood Van Gogh’s work at first. Frances Spalding for The Gaurdian: The artist Henry de Groux threatened to remove his own work from the 1890 exhibition if he found it in the same room as “the laughable pot of sunflowers by Mr Vincent“. A recent trip to MoMA in New York City has opened my eyes…
I’m not going to even pretend to fully grasp this, however, I simply had so link to it. Stephen Hawking has published a paper on arXiv.org titled Information preservation and weather forecasting for black holes. He postulates, and somewhat contradicts his own theories from decades past, that black holes aren’t exactly as we think they are. The absence of…
Well, not yesterday. Since the Cigar Galaxy, or M82, is roughly 12 million lightyears from our little hometown planet this supernova likely occurred some, well, 12 million years ago. Mike Hankey, quoting Star Wars: A New Hope, on his personal blog: Was yesterday one of those days when you felt a disturbance in the Force, as if millions of…
I do. MG Siegler does. But, as he writes, on his personal blog: Instagram is a service with hundreds of millions of users. And it seems that a large percentage of them are not aware of a key feature of the service. I frequently get the same question as MG does: “where was this photo taken?” I geotag almost…
Jason Del Ray & Mike Isaac, reporting for re/code, say Twitter and Stripe are near a deal to allow Twitter to accept credit cards in some fashion. I think they hit the nail on the head with their last paragraph: Or another likely scenario: Twitter could integrate Stripe’s payment processing into its “Cards” technology, allowing retailers to accept…
Chris Gonzales has started an excellent Artifacts series on his personal blog Unretrofied. His first in the series is with Ben Brooks and, well, I suppose you learn something new every day. There‘s only like a two-month span of the year where my nose isn‘t runny. These little packs of tissues are crucial. I only buy Kleenex brand…
Fred Wilson, on his personal blog, on the doomsday scenario that is likely being created by the ruling on Net Neutrality: Telcos will pick their preferred partners, subsidize the data costs for those apps, and make it much harder for new entrants to compete with the incumbents. I hope not. Oy.
Brian Otis and Babak Parvis on the Official Google Blog: We’re now testing a smart contact lens that’s built to measure glucose levels in tears using a tiny wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor that are embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material. Whatever we think about Google these days this sort of thing is amazing….
Dara Skolnick, who has a beautiful personal blog, writes a tip on Tuesdays for developers. She has a two-part series on developing locally. As you’ve probably already figured out, WordPress is written in PHP, which is a server-side language. This means that the website has to communicate with a server in order to display the pages, unlike a…
Fun, neat thing Spark did. They built an open source Nest thermostat in a day: All in, we spent about $70 on components to put this together (including $39 for the Spark Core); the wood and acrylic were free. We started working at 10am and finished at 3am, with 3.5 engineers involved (one went to bed early), and…
Derek Sivers, on his newly rejuvenated personal blog, on Quality, quoting Benjamin Joffe: In Japan, if I ask almost anyone what quality means, they’ll say, ‘it’s perfect – zero defects’. Japanese culture emphasizes the importance of striving for perfection. Fascinating yet strangely unsurprising yet still a great reminder of a read.
I had written a much longer draft of this post called “Greed and ignorance in the stock market” but after writing what became a very long, whiny post about how I used to work at a stock brokerage and have thus learned how completely broken and stupid the entire system is — I realized it sounded a bit like…
Jason Santa Maria, on The Pastry Box Project: We talk all the time on our personal and periodical sites about the latest techniques for design, but how often do we break down new designs? I mean really discuss them, not just add them to a gallery of notable sites. Jason was moved to rethink about this topic of…
John Siracusa, on his personal blog, The Road to Geekdom: You don’t have to be a geek about everything in your life—or anything, for that matter. But if geekdom is your goal, don’t let anyone tell you it’s unattainable. You don’t have to be there “from the beginning” (whatever that means). You don’t have to start when you’re…
Sally Kerrigan, on A List Apart: When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you—because it forces you to go beyond the polite cocktail-party line you use to describe what you do and really think about the impact your work has. Totally agree. I also find speaking in front of…
Timeline: In March 2012 I decided to hack away on a side project called Nilai.
Tonight I had the privilege of presenting at our local NEPA WordPress Meetup. We were also privileged to host the event at our space in Carbondale, PA.  My presentation was entitled The History & Future of Inline Editing. I’m sure there will be a video posted online as soon as it is ready.
Shadoe Huard, on his personal blog: I‘m officially coming out in favour of iPads as cameras. Brave man. Loosely related: Craig Mod’s piece in The New Yorker, and Apple’s new iPad ad.
No one can say his name correctly, but Brett Terpstra has pumped out a slew of amazing projects over the years — most of which were offered for free. Brett has decided to part ways with Aol Tech and strike out on his own. Now is the time to open your wallet and show your appreciation for any…
Yahoo News Digest is a new app from Yahoo in collaboration with the team behind Summly, which Yahoo purchased last year, to show you a digest of the day’s news stories twice a day. It is excellent. Summarization is only one part. Tweets, graphs, videos, etc. round out a great way to look at a news story. The…
Brian Doll, on his personal blog: Today, while technology has seeped into every cranny of our personal and professional lives, when a thought comes to me, when I want to remember something now, when I need to draw that sketch of an idea, or make yet another list of lists, writing it down in a Field Notes notebook…
Me, last night on Twitter: I know @jkottke said blogs were dead. I know I said they were “just sleeping”. It might be Jason’s fault, but I think they’re on the upswing. Jeremy Keith has noticed too: I’m not saying that this is a trend (the sample size is far too small to draw any general conclusions), but…
Cory Doctorow, on his personal blog, is worried we’ll lose the web this year: Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. It is worrisome. “They” have always ruined everything. We know we can’t have anything nice. And for the last several decades we’ve had the Internet all to…