Recent Articles

I bought Transmit for iOS when it came out, setup my servers and then left it. I never used it and never saw where it was useful. And then I read this post from Gabe and saw that the power is in the iOS extension. Essentially allowing you to send any file to a web server for saving.

Now do that, and then sync that folder you send stuff to over BitTorrent Sync back to your Mac — and well I am a happy camper. Awesome.

To go along with the latest podcast episode, Rich Mogull has a great post up about iOS 8 security changes as well.

RT.com:

In particular, Snowden advised web users to “get rid” of Dropbox. Such services only insist on encrypting user data during transfer and when being stored on the servers. Other services he recommends instead, such as SpiderOak, encrypt information while it’s on your computer as well.

“We’re talking about dropping programs that are hostile to privacy,” Snowden said.

Rob LeFebvre has a great article on the shut down of The Magazine.

I personally think the biggest contributor to the failed subscriptions can be directly attributed to the lack of focus. You never knew what you would get and that is annoying as shit. The best long-existing publication that does this is The New Yorker, which is a pretty high bar.

I think they would have been better off picking any topic and sticking to that.

Dr. Drang:

What I wasn’t expecting was for the phones to act like freshly caught fish. As I tried them out in the store, I nearly dropped both of them on the table. Now it’s true that I was manipulating them in ways that I probably wouldn’t in normal use—testing how far my thumb would reach and using the Siracusa grip, for example—but even so, both phones felt precarious no matter how I was holding them. I’d never trust myself with a bare iPhone 6.

Shawn Blanc:

Our home is now filled with images that I’ve taken over the years. In my office I have photos of my wife up by my desk. In our living are photos of our boys. Upstairs we have some cool “artsy” photos hanging in the bathrooms. On the fridge are other snapshots from the summer. We love having these great images all around our home.

I am cleaning out a room in our house right now and have a pile of 20-30 images that are printed, but have no frame to call home. The best part about photography for me, is printing out the pictures to display them in my home.

Craig Mod:

We could have added a bit of thickness to the body — evening it out, for example, with the camera — giving you an additional hour or two of battery life. But, no, we wanted to keep it as thin as possible since we knew you’d veil our electronic surrogate baby in infertile silicon.

Mod has run into the same problem I am guessing most iPhone 6 owners have run into: this phone is fucking slippery. The rolled edges, the metal, the glass — save the camera bump — the entire phone is slick to hold. And big. Big and slippery. ((Sounds like XXX feature film.))

I bought a red silicon case for my iPhone 6 and I use it on the weekends when I am most likely to have it out near the kids (who constantly bump me). But I hate the case.

As Mod notes, you lose the best feature of the iPhone 6 when you add a case: the smooth feeling of swiping from side to side on the phone. That’s never felt better, but the case adds a lip, and so you lose that with a case.

It’s a tough call, and I doubt I ever put the case back on mine (and so I bought the AppleCare plan for it).

Alfie Kohn:

But if you read the results rather than just the authors’ spin on them — which you really need to do with the work of others working in this field as well[7] — you’ll find that there’s not much to prop up the belief that students must be made to work a second shift after they get home from school. The assumption that teachers are just assigning homework badly, that we’d start to see meaningful results if only it were improved, is harder and harder to justify with each study that’s published.

One of my favorite apps for finding new stories to read is Digg, all the others I have tried don’t do a great job curating things down to the truly good. Next Draft also helps with this, but that’s only a weekday newsletter.

SmartNews is a new (to the U.S.) app that shows the top stories in user selectable categories. I’ve been using it about a day now, and I like it. I don’t love it, as I find the inconsistent content layout between categories odd, but it’s way better than subscribing to “news” type RSS feeds.

Great little plugin from Marcelo Somers. When I switched to this theme I made a big change on the way that posts are displayed, I started to use Post Formats instead of just categories. Previously WordPress would decide how to display a post based on the category, but now that is based on the format. Alas, Editorial and MarsEdit (the two ways I post to this site) don’t support Post Formats so I was left publishing, then logging into the site to change the the format.

With this plugin that is done automatically. This is one reason I love WordPress: the community is so large there is bound to be someone else with the same problems I have, who have also found the solution.

Carolyn O’Hara on working from home:

They discovered that the best workers typically worked intently for around 52 minutes and then took a 17-minute break. And these restorative breaks needn’t take any particular form.

Russell Ivanovic:

On the surface, nothing has changed. The problem is, it feels like everything has changed. In short while Apple’s hardware continues to impress me, their software has gone downhill at a rapid pace.