The Brooks Review

Author: Ben Brooks

  • Going All GORUCK

    I’ve been experimenting going with all GORUCK gear and nothing else. The kit I have to work with is:

    Is that enough for all my bag needs? I’ve been trying to see if it was, but after a couple months I can tell you that it is not enough. The Field Pockets are too small for how I pack, the GR1 is too big for daily carry of my iPad Pro, while the Bullet Ruck is too small to carry the iPad Pro (despite being perfect for my MacBook).

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  • The GORUCK GR2

    If you can’t tell, I’ve recently become obsessed with finding the perfect travel bag for me. Something that fits my style — both visual style and my packing and traveling style. This search has brought me across a wide array of bags, the latest of which is the GORUCK GR2.

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  • Two Ulysses “Problems” People Have

    Manton Reece on Ulysses Mobile:

    Ulysses for iOS falls into this trap. Its use of iCloud is private to the app, unlike iCloud Drive or Dropbox which are accessible from other apps.

    Manton is frustrated about the lack of Dropbox support in Ulysses Mobile and he is expressing a common complaint and concern I hear from people about the app. The question I am asked is how I handle this, how I am ok with it, how I use my text in other apps…

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  • Ulysses Mobile

    I was upset when I got my iPad Pro and Ulysses didn’t scale correctly on it, as that was the thing holding me back from a great iPad Pro experience. But then I got my hands on a beta of Ulysses Mobile, and since then it’s easily become my favorite app on iOS.

    I’m in love with this app.

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  • How to Really Port Your Mac App to iPhone

    Marcus Fehn on porting Ulysses to the iPhone:

    If you look at the finished product, you may very well think it all looks so self-evident. “How could it ever have been different”, you may ask. And that’s great, because then we’ve done our job right. But again — this is work, people. Hard work.

    They have truly done a fantastic job and I can’t wait for everyone to see it.

  • Power of Medium

    Medium the most important service operating right now.

    I know that, for most people, this will be a rather hard thing to swallow, however Medium is very important right now. This doesn’t mean that it will always be, or that I have any want to move to Medium in any significant way, but you can’t deny what is going on with Medium.

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  • How The Navy SEALs Prepare For Extreme Cold Weather Survival, And How You Can Too

    This seems a lot better than the Bear Grylls “run around naked and do push ups” routine.

  • Mr. Fart’s Favorite Colors

    Great explanation of security in the light of the FBI v. Apple battle.

  • The Evolution of Linkblogging

    Manton Reece on link blogging:

    If you’re an RSS client developer, the difference between link posts and full posts should be exposed in the UI.

    Man I would love to see some of his proposed changes. I’ve long struggled with this myself.

  • This Documentary Will Make You Proud to Be Part of the Instagram Community

    Last summer my wife was interviewed for documentary about the community of Instagram. She shared a very personal story of hers, and I could not be more proud of her.

  • The James Brand County Pocket Knife Review

    I wrote a little pocket knife review for Tools and Toys on the James Brand County knife. It’s is simply gorgeous.

  • 43 Words You Should Cut From Your Writing Immediately

    Great post and advice.

  • Android Encryption

    Jose Pagliery:

    Although 97% of Android phones have encryption as an option, less than 35% of them actually got prompted to turn it on when they first activated the phone. Even then, not everybody chooses that extra layer of security.

    This is entirely a messaging and opt-in problem. Encryption should be on by default and a user should have to active search to turn it off. There is very little reason not to have it on. Hopefully this starts to change. I’d love to see Apple have FileVault on by default for new users.

    The message to users should be clear: secure your phone by keeping this option on.

  • Dumbshit got hacked mid-air while writing an Apple-FBI story

    Steven Petrow:

    That was last week, when the standoff between the FBI and Apple seemed much more about principle than practice to me. That’s when I thought I’d write a column on whether this legal fight matters to regular folk — people like my mother, a retired social worker; my best friend, who works in retail; or even my 20-year-old niece in college. That was before I found out — in a chillingly personal way — just why it does matter. To all of us.

    This story would be funny if it wasn’t so disturbing. Not because he was hacked — that’s what you get for not protecting yourself on a public WiFi network — but rather because Petrow was going to write about a complex topic without even coming close to understanding it. He is just one journalist, but I suspect it is far more common for those writing about this Apple-FBI fight to not truly understand what is at stake, and instead just pretend that they know right from wrong here.

    It should be up to each of us to decide what to make public, and what to keep private, he continued. For me, I felt as though the stranger on the plane had robbed me of my privacy—as was explicitly his intent. He took the decision of what to share out of my hands. He went in through the back door of the Gogo connection.

    So much for the oft touted “but I have nothing to hide” line. I’d like to buy this so called “hacker” a drink for his public service.

  • The $500 Freewrite Word Processor Is Pretentious Hipster Nonsense

    Christina Warren on the Freewrite(the entire post is a must read if you ask me):

    Yup. You know why I think this product really upsets me? I buy everything. Like, seriously. I buy everything. I’m every horrible stereotype you can think of of an early adopter crossed with a label whore. I’m actually the worst type of consumer. But even me — someone who once backed an Instagram digital photo frame — is like, “you know what, I’m good.” Like this is too pretentious, even for me.

    The Freewrite is a mechanical keyboard paired with a tiny e-ink screen for “focused” writing. It’s absurd. Even more than the price, $500, is the look of this thing. It is fucking ugly. It’s like what would happen if I decided to take all the toys my kids have and the gadgets I have, and tried to then go into my garage and make this. Actually, I could probably make it a little better.

    This is fugly.

    I am also getting damned tired of this need by people to have tools made to help them “focus”. Tools which turn of social media sites, or the Internet, or whatever.

    Focus is a discipline, not a feature.

  • The Upside of Changing the Way an Apple Pencil Works

    Federico Viticci on the changed behavior of the Apple Pencil in 9.3’s beta:

    Using a Pencil to scroll lists and interact with menus has serious benefits for people with RSI problems, and, I have to say, it’s just convenient if you don’t want to switch back and forth between touch and Pencil all the time.

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  • iPad Arm Fatigue

    Stephen Hackett on the iPad Pro Smart Keyboard Cover:

    All that said, if you can get used to reaching up and tapping the screen a good bit, using the Smart Keyboard is a much better experience than I first thought it would be.

    I’ve seen this repeated a fair bit recently. The idea that using the Smart Keyboard with an iPad Pro means you are reaching up to the screen a lot. It is, frankly, bullshit.

    I’ve been using only an iPad Pro since mid-November 2015 and have not seen this in practice. If you are just casually flipping to the iPad Pro, then yes you will find yourself reaching up a lot and thinking people are crazy.

    In reality though, living with the device daily, you don’t tend to reach up much at all. If I’m scrolling, I am doing so with my wrist on the desk and my thumb flicking at the screen. Almost all the tasks I do on my iPad rarely require me to have my arm hovering in the air like a scene from Minority Report.

    I was worried that my arms would tire, but it was unfounded. Add in some keyboard shortcuts, and adjusting for the device through time and use, and I find it far less tedious than contorting my hand to work on a trackpad all day long.

  • Reign of the Algorithm

    James Shelley:

    Writers, remember: the more we play the algorithmic game, the more the algorithmic game plays us.

  • We Are Now at Peak TED

    Steven Levy on TED:

    Like Obama in his last term, TED seems to have run out of fucks to give. It’s doubling down on its TED-ness.

    🙄

  • Instagram Ads: Too Much?

    Om Malik on Instagram ads:

    Great ads are actually great fun. I mean, the best parts of the Super Bowl are the ads and talking about them on Twitter and Facebook. But bad ads are just bad. They distract and they disappoint. And a lot of advertising on the internet is dumb and boring and punishes us for using services.

    He’s spot on. My negative feelings about advertising on the web is with the tracking associated with it. Most good ads don’t need that tracking to be effective. All of the tracking and analytics just make for lazier ads.