Recent Articles

Jeff John Roberts:

On paper, the order looks like stern stuff but, in practice, it’s hard to see how this amounts to real punishment. Even though Geidl did something deeply unethical, compromising the privacy of tens of millions of people, he will not pay a cent for his misdeeds.

Bullshit. And:

The FTC said earlier that it didn’t seek financial restitution because the app was free. The agency’s justification is unsatisfying, however, because it doesn’t acknowledge that Geidl must have earned earned income by selling users’ geolocation. A better approach would have been to strip him of any profits he made through the app, and also name-and-shame the advertisers who bought the information from him.

Agreed. I hate this shit where hands are barely even slapped for major privacy violations.

I like this denial, in that it is pretty solid and clear that the NSA did not know about Heartbleed and therefore did not exploit it. I tend to believe the statement too, for two reasons:

1. It passes my smell test, as I do believe the NSA thinks it would be more of a threat than an asset to leave the security hole open.
2. The statement doesn't leave room for weaseling out of legal repercussions for the agency. The winds are shifting and “national security” is no longer a statement that is reason enough alone.

Great story.

And now everyone gets it.

Great photos from Joshua Trujillo which document the devastation in Oso, Washington. Also a good use of Exposure.

Walter Somerville on Begin:

It’s not a system that will appeal to everyone, but I have found it very helpful, if only to slow down and think through the day before I start working.

John Moltz on Condoleeza Rice joining the very small board of directors for Dropbox:

Here’s a cynical take on this. Clearly in this era of NSA revelations this is a terrible message to be sending to your customers.

Moltz linked to a BoingBoing post by Rob Beschizza which concludes:

Rice joining Dropbox is the insult, not the injury, which is in the firm’s DNA: customer privacy as a feature, not a principle.

Features come and go, but principles are what your company is built around. I love everything about Dropbox from the perspective of tools and how it works. Dropbox is a fine example of building a great product, but I left Dropbox because they inspires absolutely no confidence on the privacy font — all the while asking me to store every file I have with them.

Yikes.

Josh Dickey:

CBS confirmed that Stephen Colbert will take over David Letterman’s slot on the Late Show.

When I was in high school I started watching Leno, I never liked it but it always served as the opening act for Conan which was on after. Once college started I ignored all these shows, and it wasn’t until after college that I started watching this type of program again. However this time I started to watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and I loved those shows for a good while.

When NBC finally let Leno go this year, and Fallon took over, I watched closely to see what Fallon would do. To my surprise I really love the new Tonight Show — it feels fun to watch again, and often funny to watch.

Adding Colbert into the late night mix feels like a smart move, and I know I will be torn now about who to watch — then again I watch the shows the next day anyways.

This is an interesting ‘passing of the torch’ moment in late night comedy.

Fun new weather app with a great little bit of “trivia” to it. As the name implies it looks at the current temperature for your location and tells you a couple extra things:

1. When weather like this normally occurs for your area.
2. What other city/area this weather is more like.

For instance today (in Tacoma, WA) is more like mid-March or mid-November — but mostly it is like Detroit today.

Like I said, fun app.

Stephen Hackett:

The nitty-gritty of this set of rumors is interesting to me. I’ve long complained that the 13-inch MacBook Air still takes up a sizable amount of desk/lap space. I have owned the 11.6-inch MacBook Air, and found after a while that the size was just too small for me. I think 12 inches could be a nice sweet spot.

It seems crazy to think that just an inch or less bigger/smaller could make that much difference, but I’m with Stephen here. Something in between the two models seems ideal, but I wonder if it wouldn’t replace both sizes of the Air.

Elle Luna:

When we choose Should the journey is smooth, the risk is small.
Must is different—there aren’t options and we don’t have a choice.

I love this little bit from Dave of ShootTokyo:

Cameras are part of my lifestyle so I want something that I think is a cool camera.  Either I like the way it looks, sounds, the story behind it, whatever.  It doesn’t have to be the best, the fastest camera, with the most features.  It needs to be something that I want to carry around.   Something that I am so interested in, that has a neat story to it or something that I am proud to own that it is always with me and inspiring me to take photos.

I also like his thoughts on showing up with a dSLR at a business dinner (in this same post).

Chris Eidhof on the making of Deckset:

Whenever I make slides, I want them to be beautiful and consistent. In Deckset, this is done by default. Because our input is Markdown, which is only structure, I can’t spend my time changing fonts, adjusting colors and moving images around. Each theme is very carefully designed, and we iterated many times to make sure they are all great for giving a presentation.

That is what makes Deckset so powerful. Just before this he also mentioned something I forgot to in my “review” — which is that you can flip the themes around at any time and that is really freeing.

Buried in the Camera Profile section of Lightroom 5.4 is the ability to use Fujifilm film simulation profiles for Fujifilm cameras. Pretty neat, though only four options are available. I’d rather have sharper images like from Iridient.

Still, nice to see some collaboration between the two companies.

Summarized nicely in this passage from Claire Cain Miller’s post:

After the Titstare presentation, a commenter calling himself White_N_Nerdy wrote on Reddit, “I’m honestly trying to understand why anyone says that females are ‘needed’ in the tech industry.” He continued: “The tech community works fine without females, just like any other mostly male industry. Feminists probably just want women making more money.”

“Females”? What a fucking asshole.