May 2012
2 posts
The Talk Show Leaves 5by5 →
Kyle Baxter:
Dan Benjamin, obviously, will no longer be a part of it. There are things that you would never expect to happen, and this is one of them.
I don’t want to comment on the circumstances of this, because I don’t know anything about them and I am sure it’s very personal to Dan and John, but I will say this: I’m sad to see that the show is finished in this form. The Talk Show was...
Linux User Syndrome
Recently, I’ve had some discussions with a friend of mine about the graphic user interface. It started with a comment by him that he thought we should abolish the GUI. This made me really, really angry. I didn’t understand what could possibly make him think this, so I talked with him some more, and suddenly it clicked. He has something very common on the internet, which I suggest we...
April 2012
1 post
How the National Security Agency has gone rogue →
Amy Goodman:
I asked Binney if he felt that the NSA has copies of every email sent in the US. He replied, “I believe they have most of them, yes.” Binney said two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have expressed concern, but have not spoken out, as, Binney says, they would lose their seats on the Senate select committee on intelligence.
March 2012
6 posts
Google's Self-Driving Car →
Incredible. Via Dustin Curtis.
In Defense of Ugliness →
Moonstruck Timberwolf:
At long last, I have been inspired for topic with which to kick off this blog. No, I’m not talking about ugliness in people. I’m talking about ugliness in art.
Specifically, I mean art that displays ugliness without celebrating ugliness. That description is a bit vague, so let me give an example. I recently read Stephen Greydanus’ review of the film adaptation...
How Frictionless Sharing Could Undermine Your... →
Oh boy.
Stop Calling it Curation →
Matt Langer on the insanity of “curation”.
ᔥMarco Arment
The Fluke Charade →
Mark Steyn:
No, the most basic issue here is not religious morality, individual liberty, or fiscal responsibility. It’s that a society in which middle-aged children of privilege testify before the most powerful figures in the land to demand state-enforced funding for their sex lives at a time when their government owes more money than anyone has ever owed in the history of the planet is quite...
Shame on Limbaugh
Everyone’s talking about Rush Limbaugh right now. Regardless of where you stand on the actual issue (whether religious organizations should be mandated to pay for treatments they believe to be immoral), and BTW, I agree with the Catholic Church on this, it should be obvious to anyone that what Rush did was inexcusable and that his joke of an apology made it worse. Fluke’s testimony had...
February 2012
3 posts
Kubrick →
A new project of mine.
John Gruber’s Review of ‘Steve Jobs’ →
Gruber at his best.
→ All or something →
DHH:
The world is full of ideas that can be executed with 10 to 20 hours per week, let alone 40. The number of projects that are truly impossible unless you put in 80 or 120 hours per week are vanishingly small by comparison.
January 2012
5 posts
Punishing Google
Mat Honan wrote an article calling Google’s new “privacy” (or lack thereof) policy evil. I concur. But writing blog posts is not going to be enough to get them to change. So today I deleted my Google account, and I’d advise you to do the same. Really. It’s all gone (if Google really deleted it). Even the Gmail account. I even blocked access to Google’s website...
White House joins SOPA, PIPA opposition →
Looks like the Obama administration doesn’t mess everything up. Via John Gruber.
Android Doubles Down on Design →
Khoi Vinh:
All in all Android Design is a well-executed package, and it’s significant in that it’s the first — or at least the most cogent — articulation of what designing for Android is all about. It puts forward clearly delineated concepts that Android developers should hold in their heads when they set out to create a product on this platform, and backs those up by identifying the specific,...
Should Vanity Fair Be a Spelling Vigilante? →
Via John Gruber.
November 2011
1 post
Protect The Internet →
minimalmac:
Congress is considering two well-intentioned but deeply flawed bills, the PROTECT-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). As written, they would betray more than a decade of US policy and advocacy of Internet freedom by establishing a censorship system using the same domain blacklisting technologies pioneered by China and Iran.
Not what we believe in.
Call your...
May 2011
8 posts
The question Quora deserves, but not the one it... →
Given our current technology and with the proper training, would it be possible for someone to become Batman?
Read and find out.
User Experience™ →
Matt Haughey tweets:
This is a first-launch experience of a popular highly-rated camera app on Android.
Windows Phone Mango →
Great work from Microsoft. Seriously.
A new mobile phone market index →
Brilliant work from Horace Dediu. Essentially, he added up all the market indexes for the phone companies and averaged them. The resulting chart is fascinating. Also, this is most likely the best overall measurement of a company’s performance in the market.
Speaking of Horace Dediu, this is also great.
Apple's got teen spirit for iPhone, iPad →
Scott Martin:
Piper Jaffray surveyed 4,500 students, finding 37% plan to buy an iPhone in the next six months. Already 17% of those asked own an iPhone, compared with 14% in a similar study a year ago. The average age of those surveyed was 16.6 years.
The survey said 22% of students own a tablet computer, and 20% plan on buying one in the next six months. “This is a positive for Apple given...
Talking To Strangers →
James Shelley:
Multiply the potential cost of our uncommunicative nature by the sum total of people on the bus or the number of people standing in the coffee shop line. The question stares us in the face: is the cost of fostering this culture of rabid individualism really worth it? What do we honestly think we gain by choosing to not interact with strangers?
This is fantastic. One of the...
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg eats only what he kills →
Patricia Sellers (I think):
When he’s not too busy connecting people across the universe, Mark Zuckerberg is pursuing a new “personal challenge,” as he calls it. “The only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself,” says the Facebook founder and CEO.
This is extremely weird. Seems like a publicity stunt to me.
1 tag
Doing it right →
Amanda Pires:
Spending time in courtrooms is generally not our thing. We prefer to compete and innovate, serving our customers by offering the best way to pay and be paid. That’s how you really win. But sometimes the behaviors of people and competitors make legal action the only meaningful way for a company to protect one of its most valuable assets – its trade secrets.
We spend a lot of...
April 2011
1 post
Deadbolt, simple users in MongoMapper →
Working on my first Rails app, I can tell that I’m going to use the same, simple user model as the base for almost any project I do that needs authentication. So, I wrapped it into a gem and pushed it out. Here’s the GitHub page. Enjoy.
March 2011
50 posts
Take notes, Tumblr →
Downtime explanations done right, as demonstrated by the fine folks at Forrst.
As a sidenote, Forrst is without question the best “social network” out there.
Dear Twitter →
David Humphrey:
I would pay cash money to have a “pro” (or even “always working”) account with Twitter.
Stop worrying about how to integrate ads into Twitter, and let your users support you. We already pay for Flickr, Dropbox, Vimeo, etc, and those of us that value your service will be willing to do it with Twitter, too.
This sounds like what we’ve been telling Tumblr as well....
Apple Sues Amazon.com, Seeks Order to Stop Use of... →
One of the stupidest things Apple has ever done. This makes it look as if they think they can’t compete and have to just resort to trademark abuse, and we all know they can.
UPDATE: To be clear, I’m talking about trademarking “App Store” in the first place. I have no issue with them defending the trademark; on the contrary, I think they can and should defend their...
Truly, it is made of unicorns →
Jon Hicks:
The Air is leaps and bounds faster than my Pro, despite having a less powerful processor and graphics card. The speed gains must therefore come from the SSD drive. All computers (especially Macs) feel fast when they’re fresh out of the box. Over the months things start to slow down though, so it’ll be interesting to see if that happens with SSD. At the moment, restarts are matter of...
iPad followup post
First off, I’m kind of blown away by the response to this post. Mr. Patrick Rhone posted it on Minimal Mac, an honor itself, but a reader sent it to John Gruber and he actually linked to it. I’m kind of amazed. A few updates, clarifications, or interesting things:
1) This has taught me something interesting and rather sad: The vast majority of people on Hacker News are cruel and...
The iPad is 99% more open than any other computer
As you may or may not know, this is my 8th grade year. My school goes to 8th grade, so this is my gaduation year. It would be worth mentioning that I don’t have any nerdy friends at school. I’m the only nerd in the whole 8th grade. I have an iPad. I’m the only person in my class who has one (at the moment). Today, I had this conversation with a friend of mine named Sophie:
...
1 tag
Impostor 0.2 now available
I rewrote all the features to make them either work better, or, er, actually work (cough cough). Full review of changes here. Please, please, please upgrade.
1 tag
Impostor →
UPDATE: This code has been moved to BitBucket. It was previously on GitHub. The link has been updated accordingly.
My first “real” open source project has just launched! It’s a way of turning MySQL into NoSQL (basically it’s MongoDB). It works as a CodeIgniter library. It’s currently missing a lot of features, but I figure open-sourcing it might help others and help...
The billion dollar Smart Cover →
Ha!
Why Twitter Should Think Twice About Bulldozing... →
Mathew Ingram:
As MG Siegler has pointed out, what Twitter is doing is just business and not personal — but there is a reason that most businesses don’t operate the way the Mob does (other than the fact that killing people is illegal, of course). Acting that way, by routinely kneecapping people or setting their businesses on fire, is a risky proposition. Even if you can do it, it’s not clear...
You Are All in Publishing →
Jeffrey Zeldman:
So I asked, “Who here is in publishing?”
A few hands were gently raised.
Uh-huh. “And how many of you work on the web?”
Every right hand in the room shot up.
“You are all in publishing,” I explained.
Meanness →
Brent Simmons:
Some people are mean because they’re low-class, unimaginative sadists. Maybe that describes most mean people — but set them aside, because we don’t listen to them.
There’s another type, though, that is mean because they care deeply about something. They’re judgmental because they care about something important and good. They’re critical because the thing they’re criticizing...
Confessions of an Apple Store Employee →
Surprising. </sarcasm>
Please, Let Me Pay →
Garrett Murray:
About 1% of the feedback to my ridiculous Tumblr Error Page post has been that I’m a stupid jackass for complaining about a free service (the other 99% is likes and agreeing reblogs). But here’s the thing, folks: I’ve been complaining for years that Tumblr is free. I don’t want it to be free. I want to pay for it. Tumblr is one of the few services on earth that refuses to take...
NetQuakes →
Fascinating project to put little blue seismographs in people’s homes all over the place that send data over wi-fi to the USGS.
Alternative to Twitter? →
Brent Simmons:
It’s self-evident, I hope, that the best alternative to Twitter would be, like the web itself, not owned by a vendor.
I agree. And, like him, I would like to just make it clear that:
(This is not a critique of capitalism, by the way. I’m a big fan.)
Open Source Ampersands →
This is too fantastic. Awesome, awesome, awesome.
I’m a little excited.
Marco Arment On Notifications →
Marco Arment, in response to Ben Brooks’s very good article on notifications:
I’ve never received a push notification.
Really. It’s great. Every time that box comes up from a new app asking permission to send me push notifications, I’ve said no, because none of them have ever been important enough to interrupt me at any time of day.
My phone will only vibrate in my pocket if I...
"Get a Little Bloody" →
Kyle Baxter:
Democratic Congressman Michael Capuano said this about the Wisconsin protests:
I’m proud to be here with people who understand that it’s more than just sending an email to get you going. Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary.
Wait. I thought only right-wingers who suggested violence might be necessary to...
Canon to Include Thunderbolt on Their Newest... →
Apple adopts it, Canon announces they’re using it all of 2 weeks or so later. This is gonna be huge. Mark my words.
Three-Week Stopgap in the Works →
I’m not one of the bi-partisan blah blah blah crazies, but quite frankly, this is getting ridiculous. But, it looks like it will eventually come to an end:
Eventually, they’re going to run out of cuts that Democrats support, and when that happens we’re going to be stuck in a stalemate between the Republican House and the Democratic Senate. Some kind of grand bargain is going to have...