Author: Ben Brooks

There has been a lot said over the years about publishers trying to make money in the changing landscape that is their online world. It is also no secret that I loathe advertising. Where advertising was once an exciting art form, it has now devolved into a creepy data driven model which is unapologetic for its invasive nature. But that is not what we are hear to talk about today.

We are here to talk about the fact that publishers never really took the Internet seriously, and so they made bad decisions which ultimately cornered them into using a foundation which was unstable at best for building their business on. And now publishers only focus on making advertising better, instead of tearing everything back down to its very foundation and starting over.

Which is why they continually struggle.

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If there is one thing I absolutely cannot stand, it is wires dangling from my head. They get in the way, they are visible, and they are a terrible annoyance to me. It’s not even so much that they are pulling on your head, it’s that no matter what I do, my arm touches the cord. I cannot stand my arm touching wires on my desk.

You can also see that damned wire running out of the headphone jack and to your head — who wants that?

The thing is, I never got around to buying bluetooth headphones. Each time I looked at some I gravitated towards $500+ headphones and then I would always decide I had better places for that money to go. One day I was fed up enough and decided to order something to get rid of that damned wire.

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In college I never had a backup for any of my computers. I knew about backups. I knew I should have one — especially given I was on Windows for the first couple of years. But I never had one. I did constantly reformat my computer (Windows), so I had backups of my working files and pictures, but that was about it.

Which really sucked, because a couple years into college my computer was stolen. Amazingly I didn’t really lose much. I lost some images, and some files, but not a whole ton of stuff.

And yet, when I got a new computer a few days later, I again didn’t backup. It wasn’t until I was out of college and getting heavier into photography when I started to back up. And then I started to get really into the nerdy side of backing things up.

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I’ve had my iPad Pro for just over twenty-four hours now, as the title implies, and to stem my emails I wanted to share a few early and rough thoughts about the device.

I set the iPad Pro up from scratch, which took much longer than I expected, and put my laptop away after that. I’ve only been using the iPad Pro as my computer since then, but it’s also only been a day so that’s nothing new or revolutionary. At this point there is no judgments I can make about the iPad Pro as a work device, I can only make guesses, so it’s not worth talking about.

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What’s my most used app on my iPhone? Slack. On my iPad? Slack. On my Mac? Slack. Yet this isn’t an article about how good Slack is, or how revolutionary it is. Because for as good as Slack is, there are some really rough spots.

No, This is an article about the fact that a large part of my world exists only in Slack. If you stop and think about this for a moment — wow.

My entire office and most of the work I do is in Slack. I also have a large group of friends from around the world, whom I only communicate with in Slack. I have an entire professional network of people I hardly know (like any good professional network) which is only in Slack. I have Slacks with people I am working on hobby projects with and on and on.

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Years ago, when Shawn and I were still podcasting together, we had a few shows where we talked about my insane RSS feed subscriptions. At one point I remember the subscribed count reaching close to 700 feeds for me. Thousands of posts came through every day and I went through them all. Shawn would tell me it was nuts to have that many. He would tell me he had less than 200 or maybe 100 feeds. I would think he was nuts — and that was basically the gist of every episode we recorded.

Recently, I was in a chat with Justin Blanton when he said that he was “completionist” meaning he didn’t want to miss a single thing in whatever thing it was that he did. Whether that was RSS or Twitter, and I chimed in agreeing that this is very much how I work and how I feel.

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Back in late May I took delivery of a new 12” Retina MacBook and proceeded to move everything to it — making it the only computer I use outside of my iOS devices. It has been a very long time since I have lived with such a small screen as my only screen, and I know many people think it is just too small of a screen to work with for a daily driver.

Since I’ve had the machine for just over five months I can tell you that there is no turning back for me. Sure, I’ll get an iPad Pro when they launch, but as far as Macs go, this 12” Retina MacBook is all I need. It is my perfect machine.

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Let me first start by saying that this post is not about the quality or accuracy of Siri. For everything I have used Siri for, it has been more than accurate and I have no issues with Siri as a service.

My problem is the interface itself.

What’s the easiest way to look up a sports score? Siri. What’s the fastest way to set a timer? Siri.

How do I typically look up sports scores? Safari. How do I typically set timers? Control Center.

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Years ago I helped my older sister move from Washington to Arizona. I was young at the time, and still in that phase of life where even if you kept everything you had ever owned — it wouldn’t have amounted to much. So I really didn’t get what someone with an established life would have to move — and it was a ton of stuff as it turned out.

At one point while helping her, I saw a tiny box of clothes they were getting rid of, and I made some bad joke about how it must have been hard to decide to get rid of such a large amount of clothes. That’s when my sister told me about the system she uses to keep their clothes thinned out all the time.

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You walk onto your flight, and the first thing you instinctually do is to scan the seats around you for kids. Little bastards can and will prolong the hell that is flying and you really don’t think it is fair if they are next to you. Yeah, we all do it — even parents.

This past summer I found myself on two separate trips, non-stop, from Seattle to Florida. Both times with my wife and kids. My kids are 3 years old, and 21 months old. I was terrified each time of what the flight may hold for us. Our youngest was a lap infant too, so she didn’t even get her own seat. (Because that makes sense for safety, FAA.)

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One thing I have always thought to be an important part of a good office and desk setup is the lighting. It need not be bright, but it needs to set the right mood and feel for your work.

To that end, I’ve always loved backlighting my computer. Not only does it look cool, I think it helps me focus better on my work. Because of this preference most desk lamps simply won’t work for me. They typically don’t backlight well, and the space they take up on the desk drives me insane.

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