Year: 2014

Joshua Brustein:

Cory Tschogl, the Airbnb host who rented out the condo, told Business Insider that she was surprised to learn that, legally, she has gone from being an Airbnb host to a normal old landlord. She says she hired a lawyer to try to get the reluctant guest to move along but was told that because he had already stayed in the place for 30 days, his term had aged into all sort of tenant protections granted under California law.

There’s all sorts of laws that protect tenants, and laws that make “guests” tenants after certain time periods. That’s why many motels will hire people to do everything just short of dragging people out if they stay too long.

As a landlord myself, I can tell you that removing a tenant from a property is a long and expensive process — even if they owe you thousands of dollars. It can take 60-90 days of legal proceedings and paying lawyers to get them out, and then you have to store their stuff (usually) for a period of time.

I’d never use AirBNB, either as a host or guest.

From the FiftyThree announcement:

The FiftyThree SDK lets you take advantage of industry leading features such as palm rejection, advanced touch classification, and effortless Bluetooth pairing.

They’ve thus far announced that Procreate, Noteshelf, and Squiggle are initial SDK partners and I am actually really pumped about this. The Paper app has always been good, but I recently got the Pencil to go with it and it takes the app to the next level. These features, like palm rejection, actually work.

I cannot wait to see this integrated into more apps.

New European Commission ruling:

These include not using the word “free” at all when games contain in-app purchases, developing targeted guidelines for its app developers to prevent direct exhortation to children as defined under EU law and time-framed measures to help monitor apparent breaches of EU consumer laws. It has also adapted its default settings, so that payments are authorised prior to every in-app purchase, unless the consumer actively chooses to modify these settings.

Essentially you can’t say a game is free if there are in-app purchases. This is smart, and I hope to see this make it’s way to the U.S. for both Google and Apple. I don’t think any app should be able to be called free if there are things you can pay for in the app — of course that has pretty wide reaching implications for apps like Amazon.

Jude Webber:

Attending a business conference in Paraguay, Mr Slim said it was time for a “radical overhaul” of people’s working lives. Instead of being able to retire at 50 or 60, he says, we should work until we are older – but take more time off as we do so.

He thinks we should be working three days a week, but 11 hour days. Fascinating considering the aforelinked post on the true motivations of a 40-hour work week.

I personally think that something has to give. There’s too many people working and not spending money because they are always working, and too many people not working and thus having no money to spend for the system not to change. I’ve always hated working on Friday because nothing ever seems to get done as no one seems focused. I usually only work a few hours on Fridays because of this, but I may just eliminate them altogether.

A must read for anyone who uses words and a means of communication. Fantastic post about creating a great reading experience for your readers. I learned some tips that I will apply here over the coming weeks.

Mike Johnston:

But why is that? I can’t quite put my finger on it. I don’t quite get why a Fuji X-T1 is “more fun” than a full-frame DSLR. Yet somehow…it is. The Panasonic GX7 is even more fun than that. Why?

Is it possible that a premium fixed-lens compact—Sony RX1, Ricoh GR, Nikon Coolpix A, or Fuji X100s—is even more fun? Somehow, it seems so.

David Cain:

The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of this sort is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce.

Fascinating read, looking at how our lack of free time leads us to spend more freely.

Brian S Hall:

Last week, I praised Nadella for his bold, borderline revolutionary statements. A few days later he morphs into a parody of his predecessor.

The Editors at The New Yorker:

On a desktop, on a tablet, on a phone, the site has become, we believe, much easier to navigate and read, much richer in its offerings, and a great deal more attractive. For months, our editorial and tech teams have been sardined into a boiler room, subsisting only on stale cheese sandwiches and a rationed supply of tap water, working without complaint on intricate questions of design, functionality, access, and what is so clinically called “the user experience.”

What you notice is that they are aware of what is key to their business success: the content. So when you scroll down into the story a bit your eye just sees the story. It’s lovely in that there are very few bullshit distractions.

Kuba Baran has a nice post on his Speedtest.net Keyboard Maestro macro and he uses sed to strip out some of the unneeded crap that my macro spits out. Nice work.

Smart work from Second Gear, as Glassboard is a really fantastic service.

If you do even one presentation in your life, you owe it to those you are presenting to read this book. I have immense respect and trust for David Sparks, and this book is fantastic.

As I write this he is already topping the iBooks charts — so you don’t have to just take my word for it.

Just remember that a presentation isn’t just something conference speakers do, most of us have to present information all time, this will make you better. And maybe that lands you a better job. Maybe

Lee Hutchinson:

Nadella’s e-mail stretches to almost 600 words in six paragraphs—too long by at least half considering the content. It’s bloated by stock corporate phrases totally devoid of meaning—Microsoft will “drive greater accountability” and will have “more productive, impactful teams.” The company will “accelerate the flow of information.” The e-mail even manages to drop in hyper-double-super buzzwords like “agile” and “lean.” I heard and read the same words at Boeing, and the same phrases show up in every big company's layoff notices. They're the corporate version of the “Oh, it's not you, it's me” break-up response.

This is a great analysis of why Nadellas Microsoft is the same Microsoft it always has been. In other words another out of touch CEO.

Mark Taylor:

Verizon has confirmed that everything between that router in their network and their subscribers is uncongested – in fact has plenty of capacity sitting there waiting to be used. Above, I confirmed exactly the same thing for the Level 3 network. So in fact, we could fix this congestion in about five minutes simply by connecting up more 10Gbps ports on those routers. Simple. Something we’ve been asking Verizon to do for many, many months, and something other providers regularly do in similar circumstances. But Verizon has refused. So Verizon, not Level 3 or Netflix, causes the congestion. Why is that? Maybe they can’t afford a new port card because they’ve run out – even though these cards are very cheap, just a few thousand dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5,000 streams or more. If that’s the case, we’ll buy one for them. Maybe they can’t afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that’s the case, we’ll provide it. Heck, we’ll even install it.

The only people shocked by this are Verizon PR reps.

Stefan Constantinescu:

Here’s the Amazon Fire Phone’s first 30 second television commercial. It’s frankly terrible, but interestingly enough, none of the phone’s key features (Firefly and BS 3D) are demoed.

That’s an understatement.