The Brooks Review

Month: April 2015

  • The New MacBook Review

    Really interesting thoughts on the MacBook, especially his take on the keyboard. I can’t wait to get mine.

  • The first batch of USB-C adapters and cables, tested

    Nice rundown of what you have out there right now. But I’ll remind you that one does not buy the new MacBook to plug shit into it. If that is your plan, get a different computer. I, for one, am looking forward to not having shit plugged into my laptop.

  • Put on a Watch

    This isn’t about the Apple Watch, so don’t start sighing just yet.

    When I started at MartianCraft I did so figuring that working from home wouldn’t be a big shift for me. Most of the time I worked one day a week from home already and I felt confident it would be similar. As it turns out — working from home full-time has a lot of little quirks I didn’t know about.

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  • Apple Watch and Hands Free Computing

    Ben Bajarin:

    I can let my eyes and hands be free to do other things, yet still yield value from the digital world. This, in my opinion, will be the area where wrist-worn computers of all shapes, types, and sizes, will compete and move computing another step forward.

  • Confirmation Bias

    I quipped about this on Twitter earlier today, but wanted to mention it here as well: there’s an asinine amount of Apple Watch posts going around, ranging from X minutes with the Apple Watch, to three days with the Apple Watch.

    I haven’t read most, and probably never will — I don’t think you should either. Outside of the handful of journalists which received the Apple Watch before the launch, there isn’t much stock to be put into what people are saying.

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  • QuickSwitch

    My new favorite app. The default Belkin WeMo app is shit, and really slow. QuickSwitch isn’t just a watch app, it’s a far better WeMo controller (works with just the WeMo switches for now). Really great work.

  • Face management in Photos.app version 1.0

    Matt Henderson goes over the woes of Face management in Photos.app. I’ll admit that the feature is very cumbersome — overly cumbersome actually.

  • Losing my religion for equality

    Jimmy Carter:

    The same discriminatory thinking lies behind the continuing gender gap in pay and why there are still so few women in office in the West. The root of this prejudice lies deep in our histories, but its impact is felt every day. It is not women and girls alone who suffer. It damages all of us. The evidence shows that investing in women and girls delivers major benefits for society. An educated woman has healthier children. She is more likely to send them to school. She earns more and invests what she earns in her family.

  • Project Fi

    Google’s long rumored wireless network has been announced. The most interesting part is the pricing. I would really love to see this succeed to pressure the likes of Verizon and AT&T on plan pricing and international data rates.

  • I’m Shooting JPG Only Now

    I’ve long been staunchly in the camp of RAW shooting. As long as your camera could shoot RAW, I couldn’t see a reason not to shoot with it. Storage is cheap, and a shitty reason to not shoot RAW.

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  • SwiftKey Report on Emoji Usage

    This should be all the information you need to delete this keylogger.

  • Managing Across Time

    Over on The Syndicate, I wrote up how we work across a bunch of time zones at MartianCraft.

  • The Wirecutter Travel Guide

    Rare day that I don’t have any quobbles with what The Wirecutter publishes, but their bag choices look very good, and overall I agree with most things on this guide. Well done.

  • Quote of the Day: Matt Gemmell

    “There’s no finer substance than single malt whisky.”

  • Define Watch

    John Gruber:

    If you think of a “watch” as purely a device for telling the time of day, then Apple Watch is not just a watch. But if you think of a “watch” as a wrist-worn glance-able display of status information (including, perhaps prominently, perhaps not, the time of day), and as a signifier of your personal taste and style, then Apple Watch is very much a watch.

    Sometimes, perhaps not often, perhaps often, I like to think of my lawnmower not as a machine for cutting the lawn, but as a machine for exercise.

  • Yard Maintenance

    I’m glad someone took the time to write this, because I wasn’t about to research it.

  • The GORUCK 15L Shoulder Bag

    I keep saying that I’ve found the one and only bag that I need, but then I keep talking myself into trying a new bag. I guess I have a problem there, but that’s not something to tackle today.

    Instead we need to talk about the GORUCK 15L Shoulder Bag. It’s not new, as it has been around for quite some time. However, the price recently dropped down ($155, currently) to a level where I felt it was worth checking this bag out, as I have always had a keen interest in it.

    Could it be a good shoulder bag? Something better than my current top pick, the Tom Bihn Founder’s Briefcase…

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  • The Bag Struggle

    Mike Bates has a great post responding to my calls for bag setups. Interesting use of a sleeve as his lightest carry option.

  • Quote of the Day: Brittany Tarvin

    “Self assurance doesn’t just materialize like a super power that I can summon when I need it. I have to work through some vulnerable feelings like fear, embarassment, inferiority, doubt, or anxiety to get there.”

  • Apple’s new laptop is the future

    Christina Warren:

    This is the notebook for people who love their iPad but want something with a real keyboard and a bigger screen. It's a great second computer to complement an iMac or a larger MacBook Pro.

    I read all the MacBook reviews today, Christina's is the best of the lot. The design of the page is stunning too.