Search results for: “blog”

I said that this morning to Kyle. That the golden age of Twitter is over. I couldn’t think of a more eloquent way to put it. The Twitter we fell in love with is actually gone already. It no longer exists at all. In fact, it is tough to even see the remnants of that Twitter…

For reference: App Constellations. First, William Shatner has a Tumblog. I’m cool with this. Second, he wrote about Facebook Mentions — yet another app from Facebook specifically created to help “celebrities” with managing their Facebook accounts. He writes: I’m not quite sure why Facebook released this app for “celebrities”. It seems to be ill conceived. I…

Simon Willis, someone who has been a huge inspiration to my kayaking endeavors with his Sea Kayak Podcasts series, recently went for a hike. I love this bit: Show me an horizon, an overlapping series of ridge lines or a valley stretching into the distance and I yearn to discover what lies behind those hills,…

It turns out, it was bigger than that. I’ve seen a few tweets and heard a few comments this weekend along the lines of “Rap Genius raised $40M? I quit.” Funny. But pretty far off the mark. Surely you think that while Silicon Valley is willing to be a bit nutty about apps that do little…

Pinboard, the excellent bookmarking service, recently turned five. Here is Maciej Cegłowski on the Pinboard blog: Now back to some beard-stroking:  I see my role much like a small-town praire banker in the 1880‘s. My job is to project an aura of calm, solvency, and permanence in an industry where none of those adjectives applies. People…

In April Stripe announced an Open-Source Retreat. A little over a month later they had chosen three grantees. Though unannounced on the company blog, Andrey Petrov wrote about his experience working on Urllib3 at Stripe for two weeks over on Medium: Last week completes my two week grant from Stripe to work on urllib3 full…

Speaking of Wolfram Alpha (I mentioned them yesterday). Wolfram Alpha was used to try to predict the outcome of the World Cup. Again, Brazil is the favorite, but with a 32% chance to win now. After its impressive victory against Spain, the Netherlands’ odds jumped to 23.5%: it is now the second favorite. Germany (21.6%)…

Tony Stark, I mean, Elon Musk on the Tesla company blog: At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. He also writes that “Tesla…

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,…

Jonas Downey, of Basecamp, on Signal vs. Noise: It would surely be easier to do that with 8 simple, straightforward HTML files than with some custom WordPress installation that’s several versions out of date. So what if I have to repeat the navigation markup 8 separate times? It’s not that hard. We used to do…

Marco Arment: I haven’t tried every headphone on the market — far from it (much to my chagrin). But among those I’ve tried, there are some clear winners, and a handful of models I haven’t tried seem worth consideration since they’ve gotten so much acclaim. He mentions more models in his blog post than I’ve…

For the past several years the trend has been swaying away from open, real, face-to-face communication — especially in tech culture. No meetings, remote work, less email, more chat. Over the last few months our team has been working hard to create a coworking community in Scranton, PA. We’ve been reaching out to freelancers, creative…

You may have read how I use Unmark, but here also is how Chris does, how Tim does, and how Kyle does.

I was very happy to be a guest on Systematic #89. Brett Terpstra and I discussed building things behind closed doors and in the open (which I’ve recently covered a little on our company blog), about our favorite services shutting down, about watercolor painting, kayaking, and our three picks of the week. For those wondering,…

There are a lot of CMSes out there now. So what should you use? Should you use just one CMS and live with it for every project? Should you choose different CMSes based on the project your working on? My recommendations for CMSes vary and are biased (since I’m one of the team behind Barley…

Some have asked how I use Unmark, our to-do application for bookmarks. We only just recently redesigned, rebuilt, and released Unmark so I waited a few weeks to write this post until my habits formed more clearly. Every link I see goes into Unmark On average I will see between 2 and 50 links per…

In October of last year I mentioned Ron Husband’s blog in one of my “What I saw this week” posts. Man I miss composing those. With Unmark out, I really should get back to doing them. Ron Husband was a Disney animator and is blogging his experiences through the years. Just recently he published a post…

Chris Poole, founder of 4chan, remarks (on his personal blog) on the debate for and against anonymity on the web: The combination of anonymity and ephemerality has fostered experimentation and creativity rarely seen elsewhere. It’s incredible what people can make when they’re able to fail publicly without fear, since not only will those failures not…

Fresh URL is a JavaScript library that strips away all of the extra cruft at the end of URLs but does so only after each service that uses that cruft gets the data they need. Brendan Schwartz, CTO of Wistia, writing on their company blog on how it works: Here‘s how it works. Fresh URL…

David Sparks, on his blog MacSparky: I‘ve been sloppy about cleaning out my camera roll. I could do this on the phone but it isn‘t very fast. So I fired up my favorite Mac app for managing/copying/deleting lots of images at once, Image Capture. I‘m often surprised by how many Mac owners don‘t even know…

Conor McClure, on his personal blog: What is an RSS feed? I thought you’d never ask. No, really; the non-geek community is seriously missing out by not taking advantage of RSS in this online-media-dominated world we live in. I agree. And sometimes, on Twitter, I pretend to know the way out. Sometimes I think that…

The people behind 1910 Design & Company took at stab at redesigning Wikipedia: While big parts of the internet have gone through an amazing journey in terms of typography these last years, Wikipedia’s reading experience is still stuck in the 90’s. We wanted to take a few days and propose a direction through which Wikipedia…

Chris Poole, on his personal blog: Not every idea represents a venture-backed opportunity though. That isn’t to say the idea or opportunity lacks merit—it’s just that another vehicle may be more appropriate for pursuing it. Bootstrapping, borrowing from close friends and family, a traditional bank loan, et cetera can also help bring an idea to…

Jared Sinclair, on his personal blog, on the new Dark Sky: The raw idea for the redesign is good; the three-panel view with a side panel for the globe is an interesting riff on two established navigation patterns. But the execution is sloppy. It lacks clarity. It fails to shape the data into visually coherent…

The official ADN blog: The fourth #adnhackation was this past Saturday, and, as always, developers worked on some extremely creative and inventive projects, which open up new uses for an App.net account. Really hard to believe this was the fourth hackathon already. As in the past, some great projects seemed to have come from this…

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…

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…

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?”…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Jared Sinclair, on his personal blog, on the potential for indie devs to up their game. My finger-to-the-wind says that apps and services aiming for mainstream consumer appeal, which were already impossibly hard, are only going to get harder in the coming years. There’s too much noise, and attention is fleeting. Any company that hasn’t…

If you’re even remotely geeky you’ll have noticed countless instances of code showing up in television shows and movies. And, usually, you can see that the code is total junk. In comes this tumblog which showcases code in TV and films and goes the extra mile to detail what the code is actually designed to…