Shawn was kind enough to provide me an early look at this course and it’s really well done, and I mean it’s about the best task manager you can get — what’s not to like?
Oh, and in case you’ve been longing for a podcast like think featuring me and Shawn, he recorded an interview with me about all my nerdy task management ways.
This is a great write up about a new insulation that seems pretty amazing. Yeah it’s got NASA marketing hype around it, but if what all Steve’s research says is true, it’ll change the way “warm” jackets look.
And in case you want more thoughts from me on Outlier, I recently wrote another Outlier shirt review.
Spring is the time of year when many are expecting new iPads to emerge from Apple — likely new revisions to the iPad Pro lineup. Last year we saw the introduction of a new size: the 10.5” iPad Pro, as well as other nice to have features. The big question this year, though, is what Apple might introduce because no matter what Apple does it has to solve a bigger problem: device orientation.
Is the iPad a portrait, or landscape device? It’s clear with the iPhone: portrait. And with the Mac: landscape.
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Amit Gawande:
Dumb and powerful, now there’s the super villain from any sane person’s nightmare.
The power is in the data, not the devices. Right now some of that data is mostly noise, but it won’t be long before machine learning makes that “noise” into a billion dollar industry.
Om Malik:
I for one, refuse to use Alexa and Google Home in my apartment. I don’t trust them, much like I don’t trust Facebook. Apple seems to be doing a good job of keeping its nose clean, but who knows when they come under pressure from “activist” investors.
So much promise, but without any regulation by the government, we are asking for trouble.
Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu:
I’m going to warn you against a smart home because living in it is annoying as hell.
I have shockingly few smart gadgets. And what I do have, switches, are not great. They all lack “just works” factor, and that’s crucial for these devices.
John Herrman on his five year old iPad:
It was, in contrast to the iPhone from which it descended, understood by its users as simply good enough — not life-changing, but handy. It was to be used until its users started noticing it, at which point it was to be replaced. It was, like the iPhone, immune to attachment. But unlike the iPhones, which might be reclaimed by a cellular carrier as part of a scheduled trade-in or just shoved aside by a two-year upgrade, iPads tend to linger. They have time to reveal their tragic thingness.
This is a pretty good read. I understand why older devices don’t move up to newer version of iOS, but it does suck that they eventually get put in device purgatory.
When I last talked about pens, I talked about my Machine Era pen, which is brass and heavy. Today it’s about the Namisu X-01 in brass, which is amazingly heavier than the last.
I’ve been writing this site for long enough now that I’ve seen a few shifts in the blogging community itself. When I started writing here, people were starting to jump on the band wagon of blogging in force. I read a plethora of sites, all publishing nearly daily (like this one), written by people trying to make *it*. Trying to strike out full time with their writing in some way. And all of these sites had the same model: small advertisement from something like Carbon, The Deck, or Fusion and weekly RSS feed sponsorships. This is the ‘Daring Fireball Model’ of monetizing a blog. Hell, even some of them sold t-shirts every year, same as John Gruber.
I used this model too. I made roughly between $400-600 a month from the small ad (I think $600 was the highest I ever got to on that) and charged from $250-$550 per week for RSS Sponsors (near the end I just started cranking up the price to see what the fuck would happen). It took me at least one full day per week to manage all of this. It took away from my writing and my focus. And then in 2012 it started becoming a race to the bottom, because while my site was still seeing large growth, the advertisers were unwilling to pay more, and in fact wanted to pay me *less* for the same.
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Jessica Guynn reporting:
“In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day,” Zuckerberg said, in announcing the social media company’s fourth-quarter results. “By focusing on meaningful connections, our community and business will be stronger over the long term.”
Unless my math is wrong (and I don’t rule that out), given that Facebook has 1.4 billion daily active users, that’s only a reduction of 2.1 minutes per person, on average. Right? No wonder he used the larger number.
Then again, the average Facebook user spends 20 minutes on the site per day. So there is hope for humanity, is I guess the lesson.
Brent Simmons:
Micro.blog is not an alternative silo: instead, it’s what you build when you believe that the web itself is the great social network.
I really want to get a pair of these for work travel.
Lindy West:
Being on Twitter felt like being in a nonconsensual BDSM relationship with the apocalypse. So, I left.
Miranda Katz:
Those numbers tend to be steady regardless of the length of the show—and according to Panoply, the few listeners who do skip ads continue to remain engaged with the episode, rather than dropping off at the first sign of an interruption.
I’m fairly shocked by this, but I don’t think it’s far off before we get podcast ad blockers. Take something like the “deepfakes” ML that places people’s faces on another persons body (usually to make porn right now, or add Nicholas Cage into movies) — that’s a much computationally harder task than learning when a podcaster is starting a stopping an ad read. It will be interesting to see which company jumps on making such an app “click play on your favorite podcast, never hear an ad”.
Zeynep Tufekci:
Part of the problem with the ideal of individualized informed consent is that it assumes companies have the ability to inform us about the risks we are consenting to. They don’t. Strava surely did not intend to reveal the GPS coordinates of a possible Central Intelligence Agency annex in Mogadishu, Somalia — but it may have done just that. Even if all technology companies meant well and acted in good faith, they would not be in a position to let you know what exactly you were signing up for.
Our laws are dangerously lagging behind.
Pretty neat trick, it’s too bad you have to use really shitty keyboards to make it work well.
But if you find yourself grazing through social media with the same vacant appetite you might use to slowly work your way through a stack of Pringles — not enjoying it, not hating it, just sorta doing it — then give my solution a shot. You can always reinstall.
Hell of an analogy.
Great post. I also see a parallel here between blogs, vlogs, and podcasts.
Some great thoughts from Joe Cieplinski around using an iPad for writing. I still hold that an iPad plus a keyboard you like with Ulysses running — there’s no better setup for writing.
When Triple Aught Design previewed the [Context Organizer](https://tripleaughtdesign.com/shop/context-organizer/) on Instagram, I was sold on the fact that I needed to try it. The Context Organizer is part Admin Organizer (a term for those military inspired, MOLLE laden, pouches you see strapped to bags) and part DOPP Kit. What appealed to me was a few things:
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