All new X-Pro2 from Fujifilm.I can’t wait for that sensor to trickle down to the X-T and X100 models.
Month: January 2016
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Centerstage
This is a nice little Mac App from my pal Cory — it is a menubar controller for iTunes. It looks nice, works well, and allows you to heart things on Apple Music. Go check it out.
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Lodinatt Backpack and Shoulder Bag
Note: This bag was provided to me by Lodinatt for the purposes of this review.
Whenever I open a box containing a new bag, the most immediate response I have is not what I see, but what I feel in the materials used to build the bag. I had not heard of Lodinatt before they contacted me, and I am betting you haven’t either, so I had no clue what to expect when I opened that box.
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A Month With Two iPads
Karan Varindani on buying an iPad mini to compliment his iPad Pro:
If I had to sum up my thoughts on having two iPads after a month, I would say that nobody with an iPad Pro and an iPhone needs an iPad mini, but it’s so damn convenient having one.
I could certainly see that convenience. When I read the post I kept having this thought “maybe he just needs a Mac”. But what I realized by the end of it, is that this isn’t a struggle with the OS, it’s a struggle of screen real estate.
Mac users solve this by buying a second monitor. The only way iPad users can currently solve this is with another iPad. Sounds like I am talking myself into that iPad mini more and more.
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I Don’t Miss My Apple Watch
Justin Blanton on selling his Apple Watch:
I had just a few on the watch, but rarely if ever jumped into them. They were just slow as shit across the board (even after watchOS 2.0), and I otherwise just couldn’t find much utility in them. I found myself using the watch almost exclusively as a notification-delivery system…and nothing else.
That’s exactly how I use my Apple Watch, and I couldn’t be happier.
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Tool Pen Mini by Mininch
I got one of these for Christmas (thanks Dad) and it is perfect. Often I only need a few small driver sizes and so my large kit is overkill. Most of it is for opening battery compartments on toys for my kids. This is great. All in the size of a pen I can store the five most common driver bits I need. Solid tool too.
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Why No One Blogs Anymore
But is there a place in the web ecosystem for this kind of writing anymore? And is the cost of using Medium, which will centralize writing and create a kind of publisher/publishee power inequality, worth the ease? What will happen when widespread abuse comes to Medium, the way it’s come to Twitter? And social media companies have proven tremendously malleable, product-wise, to the desires of other companies — will Medium be the same? What does a piece of advertising look like on Medium anyway, when the line between journalism and PR on it is already so thin?
Love the concern about Medium becoming corrupted like Twitter, since the leadership is effectively the same as the one that led Twitter down the wrong path.
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Why Ulysses Is My App for Notes and Writing
When I upgraded to iOS 9, I finally consolidated my convoluted note taking setup. Moving from Simplenote, Vesper, OmniOutliner, and a couple other notes apps to just Notes.app for everything. And I really like Notes.app, as it has come a long ways — but the UI leaves a lot to be desired and I often can’t get to what I need fast enough. Still, it synced perfectly, added a lot of features and generally worked well.
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GQ and Forbes Go After Ad Blocker Users
The war against ad blockers didn’t start when users began using the software. It started when online outlets refused to understand that content is advertising and advertising is content, and if any part of that equation is bad, the whole thing falls apart.
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Incase City Compact Backpack
One of the things I love about the GORUCK Bullet Ruck is how small it is — for a daily carry bag, where your kit is very small, you really don’t want to have a large bag as your carry bag. The problem with a large bag is it will allow your stuff to swim around in the bag, and ultimately your gear will be out of sorts when you get to where you are going. The bag itself will also be heavier and take up more space than you need — both when you take the bag off, and on your back — which can get annoying when you realize just how little you are carrying with it.
The problem I ran into, which lead to this bag is the Bullet Ruck is too small for my iPad Pro, and with that being my main computer, I really needed something to replace the Bullet Ruck. As I dug through my pile of bags to see what would work, I began to realize the smallest backpack I had which would fit the iPad Pro is the GORUCK GR1. While I love that bag dearly, it’s a very large bag for runs to the coffee shop with just an iPad Pro. Luckily, Incase was running a massive sale over the holidays and I picked up the Incase City Compact Backpack.
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Some Follow Up on Newsletters
I was a bit surprised at the feedback from my last post on Newsletters, not at the amount of feedback, as much as how black and white the issue seems to be. People were either in agreement with me, or were baffled by my conclusions. I asked those who responded in disbelief that newsletters could be bad, to provide me with longer thoughts, and there’s one article I think encapsulates the position in favor of newsletters well.
First, a point of clarification though: I used the term newsletter without specifying what the hell I meant. An error on my part. I simply mean an email newsletter that is filled with original content. What I don’t mean is emails, like this site’s daily email, alerting readers to new posts — in other words automated newsletters aren’t what I am talking about.
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Looking Back to NaNoWrimo
A month has passed now since I undertook my own version of the NaNoWriMo challenge — writing and publishing over 50,000 words to this very site for the month of November. At the end of it I wrote a bit about the experience, but I don’t think it is until just now that I fully am able to realize the impact it had on me in a more long term sense. It hasn’t made me a better, or worse, writer — that’s all status quo. It has, however, helped my writing come far easier.