Month: October 2014

Shawn Blanc:

Our home is now filled with images that I’ve taken over the years. In my office I have photos of my wife up by my desk. In our living are photos of our boys. Upstairs we have some cool “artsy” photos hanging in the bathrooms. On the fridge are other snapshots from the summer. We love having these great images all around our home.

I am cleaning out a room in our house right now and have a pile of 20-30 images that are printed, but have no frame to call home. The best part about photography for me, is printing out the pictures to display them in my home.

Craig Mod:

We could have added a bit of thickness to the body — evening it out, for example, with the camera — giving you an additional hour or two of battery life. But, no, we wanted to keep it as thin as possible since we knew you’d veil our electronic surrogate baby in infertile silicon.

Mod has run into the same problem I am guessing most iPhone 6 owners have run into: this phone is fucking slippery. The rolled edges, the metal, the glass — save the camera bump — the entire phone is slick to hold. And big. Big and slippery. ((Sounds like XXX feature film.))

I bought a red silicon case for my iPhone 6 and I use it on the weekends when I am most likely to have it out near the kids (who constantly bump me). But I hate the case.

As Mod notes, you lose the best feature of the iPhone 6 when you add a case: the smooth feeling of swiping from side to side on the phone. That’s never felt better, but the case adds a lip, and so you lose that with a case.

It’s a tough call, and I doubt I ever put the case back on mine (and so I bought the AppleCare plan for it).

Alfie Kohn:

But if you read the results rather than just the authors’ spin on them — which you really need to do with the work of others working in this field as well[7] — you’ll find that there’s not much to prop up the belief that students must be made to work a second shift after they get home from school. The assumption that teachers are just assigning homework badly, that we’d start to see meaningful results if only it were improved, is harder and harder to justify with each study that’s published.

One of my favorite apps for finding new stories to read is Digg, all the others I have tried don’t do a great job curating things down to the truly good. Next Draft also helps with this, but that’s only a weekday newsletter.

SmartNews is a new (to the U.S.) app that shows the top stories in user selectable categories. I’ve been using it about a day now, and I like it. I don’t love it, as I find the inconsistent content layout between categories odd, but it’s way better than subscribing to “news” type RSS feeds.

Great little plugin from Marcelo Somers. When I switched to this theme I made a big change on the way that posts are displayed, I started to use Post Formats instead of just categories. Previously WordPress would decide how to display a post based on the category, but now that is based on the format. Alas, Editorial and MarsEdit (the two ways I post to this site) don’t support Post Formats so I was left publishing, then logging into the site to change the the format.

With this plugin that is done automatically. This is one reason I love WordPress: the community is so large there is bound to be someone else with the same problems I have, who have also found the solution.

Carolyn O’Hara on working from home:

They discovered that the best workers typically worked intently for around 52 minutes and then took a 17-minute break. And these restorative breaks needn’t take any particular form.

Russell Ivanovic:

On the surface, nothing has changed. The problem is, it feels like everything has changed. In short while Apple’s hardware continues to impress me, their software has gone downhill at a rapid pace.

Del Quentin Wilber:

U.S. law enforcement officials are urging Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Google Inc. (GOOG) to give authorities access to smartphone data that the companies have decided to block, and are weighing whether to appeal to executives or seek congressional legislation.

Good luck with that. While they are at it, they should also require that the government gets the keys/codes to all safes — that’s basically what they want.

Peter Sims:

At that point, it all just started to feel weird, until finally she revealed that she was in Chicago at the launch of Uber Chicago, and that the party featured a screen that showed where in NYC certain “known people” (whatever that means) were currently riding in Uber cabs. After learning this, I expressed my outrage to her that the company would use my information and identity to promote its services without my permission. She told me to calm down, and that it was all a “cool” event and as if I should be honored to have been one of the chosen.

Welp, add Uber to the list of things I won’t ever be using again.