Hyperrealistic pastel drawings of icebergs by Zaria Forman
These works by Zaria Forman are simply amazing. /via Marco Suarez on Twitter.
Blog
Longer-form posts and essays.
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
How to turn off Google‘s new Gmail option that allows strangers to send you emails
Yesterday The Verge revealed that Google “made it really easy for strangers to email you”. Google being Google. No one can out-Google Google. Anyway, TUAW shows how to turn it off.
Comments are not dead
Tina Roth Eisenberg on Twitter: Comments are not dead. She’s right, of course. However, I don’t have comments on my blog for the following reasons. I do not want to manage them I’d much rather people respond via their own blog, Twitter or email I do not want to manage them This topic will simply never go away…
Blogging matters
Dave Winer, on why comments on a blog post turned bad: What bloggers are guilty of — always — is telling their story imperfectly. It's the imperfections that make it interesting, and human — and worth it. I have an opinion on many things. Typically I have a rather strong opinion on many things. And I've tried to…
Jelly
Biz Stone and Ben Finkel have launched Jelly. Jelly changes how we find answers because it uses pictures and people in our social networks. In short, if you're wondering about something and have a question you can use Jelly to ask those in your extended social network to find the answer rather than searching for it yourself via…
iOS 7 restarts
MG Siegler laments in I Got Bugs: At least two times a day now, my devices running iOS 7 will simply cease to function and restart themselves. Ditto. iOS 7 and Mavericks, although huge steps in what I feel will ultimately be the right direction for both platforms, are the buggiest versions of Apple software I've used in…
\”Write for two people\”
Speaking of blogging, Matt Mullenweg (who knows a thing or two about blogging), gives his tips for writing on your blog and not worrying about stats and click-throughs and sensational headlines. The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will be clarified by…
Changes to Evernote, spurred by a blog post
Jason Kincaid wrote, on his personal blog, Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant. The post met with some very encouraging responses… Two days ago I published Evernote, the bug-ridden elephant, recounting the ongoing issues I’ve had with the service (and, more recently, serious incidents of data loss). The response has been staggering: over a hundred comments on my post, hundreds more on Hacker News,…
re/code
The team behind AllThingsD, a property of the Wall Street Journal, has just launched "a new tech and media news, reviews and analysis site" re/code. And it seems that it will just be the beginning of much more to come. We are thrilled to announce that we are forming our own new and independent media company, Revere Digital,…
The anatomy of Smaug
Great post going over the anatomy of Smaug. It seems Smaug changed from one release to another. Keen eyes. /via Michael Heilemann on Twitter.
Inspecting view hierarchies of iOS apps
This is far too geeky and cool not to link to. Peter Steinberger has cleverly used an iOS 7 jailbreak loophole to see the view hierarchies of other iOS applications. He explains why: Why? Because it’s fun, and it can inspire you to solve things differently. Studying the view hierarchy of complex apps can be quite revealing and…
Wil Shipley describes John Carmack’s source code
Wil Shipley, in a story about porting Doom to NeXT, describes John Carmack's code: Don't take this to mean his code was spaghetti—it was actually some of the easiest-to-understand code I've ever worked with. It has an almost indescribable quality of "obviousness." Like, you know when a really good teacher explains something, it seems obvious? That's what his…
Tech journalists have no enthusiasm
Or, at least according to John Gruber many don't. There’s a nihilistic streak in tech journalism that I just don’t see in other fields. Sports, movies, cars, wristwatches, cameras, food — writers who cover these fields tend to celebrate, to relish, the best their fields have to offer. Technology, on the other hand, seems to attract enthusiasts with…
In dependence
Jeremy Keith has chimed in on the conversation started by Jason Kottke's "The blog is dead" piece from a few weeks ago with In dependence. Many of us are feeling an increasing unease, even disgust, with the sanitised, shrink-wrapped, handholding platforms that make it oh-so-easy to get your thoughts out there …on their terms …for their profit. I've…
Research Publications at Facebook
What does it take to build a social network of 1B+ people sharing billions of statuses, photos, videos, links, events and more? Earlier this year Facebook has opened up their research publications. Fascinating stuff for nerds.
Jack Dorsey to join Walt Disney’s board
Interesting, the way this stuff works. According to the BBC Jack Dorsey merely has an opportunity to join the board of The Walt Disney company. Shareholders will be able to vote on his selection at the company's annual meeting on 18 March. However, he's already listed on the company's web site as being on the board. Weird. Either way, congratulations…
Homesteading
In March 2008 I began to regret using so many different services to store and share different types of content like photos, tweets, videos, links. And so I began to plan bringing all of those services together on to my personal site. I'm going to begin working on one service at a time, slowly bringing it all together,…
The Science of the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies
J. Kenji López-Alt exhausted 32 pounds of flour in 100 tests to make 1,536 chocolate chip cookies until he got it just right: For the past few months, I've had chocolate chip cookies on the brain. I wake up in the middle of the night with a fresh idea, a new test to run, only to discover that…
The Death of the Blog, Again, Again
I love that this topic is being discussed on blogs. John Scalzi wrote a really, really great post in response to Jason Kottke's "The blog is dead" piece. He makes a particularly great point that one doesn't only have a blog now but that we all have some combination of other platforms that we meet the people on….
Suggestions for tech podcasts
Nick Heer has a few thoughts regarding the hoopla around tech podcasts of late. He also has a few suggestions for how a tech podcast, that he'd enjoy, should be structured: By having a structure in place, rambling is reduced. A good editor can remove most off-topic talk and lag time, but having some sort of format creates…
Katie cancelled
I've never seen a single episode of Katie Couric's daytime show Katie. And I don't know why I'm posting about this at all. But I found it intriguing that less than a month ago Yahoo! CEO Marisa Mayer wrote: In addition to being the face of Yahoo News and shooting features for our homepage, Katie will continue to…
Buffer opens up on their salaries
Recently the Buffer team opened up on how they structure their employee compensation. Recently, we also made the decision to apply our ideas around transparency to compensation. We hope this might help other companies think about how to decide salaries, and will open us up to feedback from the community. This isn't anything new, mind you, and even…
A quick look at IA Writer Pro
Writer Pro took the web by storm the last few days. One thing that bothered me was how "reviews" I was reading from people that A) had never used it, and B) weren't writers. This isn't to say you absolutely have to be a writer to use Writer Pro but from the videos it sure seems as though…
The blog isn’t dead. It is just sleeping.
Jason Kottke, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab: The design metaphor at the heart of the blog format is on the wane as well. Ina piece at The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal says that the reverse-chronological stream (a.k.a. The Stream, a.k.a. The River of News) is on its way out. Snapchat, with its ephemeral media, is an obvious non-stream app; Madrigal…