Recent Articles

In a post from Chris Bowler responding to my posts about email newsletters, he captures a very interesting argument in favor of them. An argument I think is best summarized by emotion. He feels email newsletters are better and that’s basically that.

His post is really worth a read if this topic is interesting to you — I think he encapsulates “the other side” well in his article. I did chuckle at this bit though:

Much of our email is junk, but I greatly enjoy some of the newsletters I’m subscribed to. This is likely the point that makes all the difference for our opinions: if someone dislikes receiving email newsletters, they’re not likely to find value in creating one.

Only some of the newsletters? Made me smile.

Jordan Merrick created a way to generate a static blog on your iOS device using Workflow:

After running the workflow, a ZIP file is generated containing all of the HTML files and can be opened in an app like Transmit, the extracted contents of which can be uploaded to your web server.

This isn’t anything I want or need, but this is still fucking awesome. iOS is just beginning to see its potential as a replacement to OS X and I can’t wait to see what more comes.

J.R. Hennessy:

This is the final frontier for privacy. It is no longer a matter of our control over exactly how much of our personal life we deign to share with the public — it is a matter of precisely how much of our internal existence is taken from us. If someone can manipulate our thought and emotion based on a stratum of data we willingly and unwillingly contributed to, then there is no real sense of public and private any longer — only an escalating series of intrusions.

Very interesting post.

Ex-NSA chief Hayden:

Hayden told a cybersecurity conference in Florida this week that breaking encryption would not make Americans safer even if encrypted communications do pose new challenges for intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

No shit.

Jenna McLaughlin:

But the intelligence community’s top lawyer was quoted in an email saying that that the administration should be “keeping our options open…in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.

Jackasses.

Bruce Schneier on the failing of most systems:

People believe they know better and deliberately ignore procedure, and invariably forget things.

Emma Brockes on our smartphone addiction:

Even the least neurotic among us is never more than a few moments away from looking up and asking, suspiciously, of the person we’re with, “what are you doing?

And:

If you insist that someone put down their phone to talk to you, you’d better be ready with something to say.”

It’s like she studied me.

Ben Bajarin:

As we embrace the post-mobile era, it is time to shift our attention from the smartphone hardware itself to all the new things the smartphone will enable as the most pervasive form of personal computing in the history of our industry.

That’s the most succinct answer to the question of “why are mobile applications such a big deal” that I have ever read.

Manton Reece in response to the Twitter Notes feature:

For all of Twitter’s problems, at least right now most of the good writing we see on Twitter is actually linked out to external blogs (and yes, increasingly Medium posts). To shift that to be stored more on Twitter itself would be a setback for the open web. It would slowly train a new generation of timeline surfers to prefer Twitter-hosted content instead of blogs.

I see this feature being a lot like email newsletters. Some are going to swear by it, and business built around it. Which is a shame because when (and it is always when) Twitter falls to the wayside all these posts will be lost to time.

All new X-Pro2 from Fujifilm.I can’t wait for that sensor to trickle down to the X-T and X100 models.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Robinson Meyer:

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.